Author of curl and libcurl denied entry to U.S. with no explanation | Hacker News Reader

Author of curl and libcurl denied entry to U.S. with no explanation

gizmodo.com

Previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643467

Are we taking bets? I'd put a $5 on "somebody saw his domain name (haxx.se) on screen, and overreacted."

so he is 4chan

What workflow ends up with a Customs and Border Patrol officer connecting that domain name to Stenberg's ESTA application?

Here's a guess: some blacklisted piece of software uses curl and credited "daniel@haxx.se" as required by its licence[1]. Daniel was then mistaken as a creator of that software, and his email address flagged for any ESTA applications that use it.

edit: apparently I'm not the first to think this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643525

[1]https://curl.haxx.se/docs/copyright.html

People have been getting wrongly denied entry to the U.S. for bad/factually-incorrect reasons for decades, probably ever since we had an immigration system.

Obviously immigration should do a better job on their false positive rates, and not just their false negative rates, but these are never going to go to zero. Someone probably made a clear mistake in this particular case, but without details who knows. For all we know there's some social media or blog post of his with something like a joke about harming he-who-shall-not-be-named.

The problem isn't the mistakes, the problem is the kafkaesque process. Decisions are made that affect an individual, but the individual has no chance to correct mistaken assumptions about them in the decision making process.

…wait, their last name doesn't contain an “i”?

I've been reading it as “Steinberg” all this time. Oops.

Steinberg is German spelling, while Stenberg is Scandinavian.

Of course. I think the problem is I've just not seen the latter before outside of this person's surname… I think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com