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Comment by zootar | Hacker News Reader

Your comment on yesterday's submission "Byron Sonne's G20 Focus Cost Him Dearly" indicates that your politics detector is over-sensitive. The article (and the HN discussion) isn't political in any meaningful way. It's about the law and the legal limits of freedom, subjects that seem (to me) to interest a significant fraction of programmers. The article's protagonist doesn't even claim a political motive. He was just performing an experiment to determine what the law is, while satisfying a programmer-like curiosity about a system's vulnerabilities.

The comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2574877

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Dissect this comment to study a perfect example of how politics attaches itself to HN. "It's not about politics. It's about law and the legal limits of freedom."

Of course that's interesting to programmers! In the same sense as Eric S. Raymond's statement that real programmers are all cap-L libertarians who believe in concealed carry laws.

I'm a security professional and friends of multiple friends of Byron Sonne, for whom this was an important story. Heck, I think it's an important story. What I think is important for us to understand is that not every important story needs to be covered here. There is nothing HN can do about this story other than kvetch and speculate about Sonne's ex-wife. (No, really, go look.)

Here's an acid test for "law and limits of freedom" stories: is anyone going to disagree about them in good faith? And, in good faith, is anyone going to make a business or technology decision differently in light of that story? No? Then it doesn't need to be here.

Even your present reply makes me glad that the Sonne article was submitted to HN. To you, the Sonne story is important. To me, it seems important, but I can't be sure what the article's biases might be. I suspect there are some, since I generally have faith in Ontario's justice system. I know of no better place on the internet than HN to have an article's flaws exposed. The absence of significant disagreement in the HN discussion increased the article's credibility for me. Your reply offers some further evidence that Sonne really is a good-standing member of the security profession, and being a friend of a friend of an apparently level-headed HN contributor is to his credit.

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