I bought ISO 8601-1:2019 and 8601-2:2019 | Hacker News Reader

I bought ISO 8601-1:2019 and 8601-2:2019

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Public.Resource.Org has been leading a (mostly?) one-man crusade that holds that any standard that is referenced by a U.S. law can no longer be copyrighted. They have had mixed success in court.

Here's an example (with signature cover sheet): https://law.resource.org/pub/us/cfr/ibr/004/iso.6406.2005.pd...

So I'm not gonna disagree with that, but playing devils advocate here for a moment...

Doesn't that mean that by virtue of referencing a standard in a US law, congress unilaterally voids the copyright holder's claims?

I wonder how that would go down if the Belgian government decided to reference a song text by a US artist in a law and then claimed that copyright no longer applies to this song in Belgium.

In a republic, law must be public. If a law references a document that cannot be accessed with the same ease as the law itself, it creates barries for heeding it correctly. I must be able to go to a library or an online platform and look it up with the same ease as the law itself. Everything else would result in a Kafkaesque system where the true version is only known to the elites, and probably doesn't even exist as such.

> In a republic, law must be public

Let’s say you’re a volunteer firefighter and you want to buy a copy of the California fire code and copy it for your fellow volunteers.

By doing so, you’re breaking the law, according to the state; each of them would have to buy it separately from a national fire safety organization, for a couple of hundred dollars a shot.

[...]

When Malamud asked the Office of Administrative Law to provide an up-to-date electronic version of almost the entire Code of Regulations, it responded that it didn’t have such a version in its possession.

The office said it could provide Malamud with a paper copy of the code’s 38 volumes, at 20 cents a page. There are 29,000 pages. If he required a digital version, the office would scan its own paper copy into a digital file for a much higher, albeit unspecified, price, payable in advance.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-03-18/state-laws...

> The office said it could provide Malamud with a paper copy of the code’s 38 volumes, at 20 cents a page. There are 29,000 pages. If he required a digital version, the office would scan its own paper copy into a digital file for a much higher, albeit unspecified, price, payable in advance.

TBF that one requesting information would bear the costs of that request does make sense, for instance FOIA requesters may get charged the costs of searching, collecting, and copying the records they're asking for. One could debate the price of 20c a page, but if they are bound books to be copied page by page, the price is if anything low: at 10s a page it's 2 weeks, full time, for an employee.

If it's a bunch of binder and there's a copy machine which can be fed piles of loose pages then it's bullshit. Such an administration would have access to relatively large-scale copier, the CPP of which can't be above 10c, and likely is below 5c.

> TBF that one requesting information would bear the costs of that request does make sense, for instance FOIA requesters may get charged the costs of searching, collecting, and copying the records they're asking for.

After paying the $5800 requested, would it then be legal to scan and distribute the lot online for free? If not, then the "bear the costs of that request" claim would not be legitimate. I don't know the answer, but I think this is central to the issue.

> After paying the $5800 requested, would it then be legal to scan and distribute the lot online for free?

According to the original article no, and that I completely agree is a problem.

> If not, then the "bear the costs of that request" claim would not be legitimate.

Of course it would, this and that are unrelated issues.

The requestor should not bear the burden for scanning in the documents. The state needs a digital copy no matter what. They should bear the cost of obtaining that. The requester should bear the burden of making a copy of the digital document. 29000 pages--even at 2MB/page--would require < 64GB of storage. So, about 15USD for a thumb drive.

Or put the document on the website where it belongs, and eat the cost of storage and data transfer just like you do with all your other state-run websites.

> The requestor should not bear the burden for scanning in the documents.

There’s no mention of scanning here, only copying.

Furthermore even if they did scan it and kept the digital data around, if they only did it because of the request and would not otherwise that’s still a cost of fulfilling the request.

> The state needs a digital copy no matter what.

That obviously is not the case since they do not have one.

At 29000 pages it means determining compliance is a profession anyway. (It should be an interactive system availabe to anyone.)

Yeah, I am a bit baffled by the size, how complex is fire fighting really?

And should all the complexity reside in a single document? Like do the home smoke alarm stuff and airplane ballet stuff belong to the same document? (Just guessing at content here)

All of US federal regulations are "one document" (the CFR). To navigate a body of law, you use the table of context or index to find the section you need, and follow the cross-references if necessary, like any reference text.

What do they use to control it? The state of California is not permitted to hold copyright (in general).

I think you're thinking of the Federal government -- states are treated differently under the U.S. copyright system and often do hold copyright in their original works. (The Regents of the University of California will be a familiar copyright holder for many people here...)

Huh, I must be misremembering then. I thought it was CA too. Ah well, so much for that then.

It seems to me that the most straightforward remedy is that whenever a law references standards that aren't publicly available, then noncompliance with that standard cannot be punished. Or at least, the portion of the standard that matters must be communicated to either the noncomplying party or the public at large before anyone can be held responsible for noncompliance.

The problem with relying on that remedy is you're never going to get a test case to demonstrate it. You'll run up against inspectors arbitrarily denying approval, insurance companies enforcing the codes as "private" companies, local courts that care more about the status quo than the injustice of privatized law, etc. Even the tradespeople that would seemingly save the most from such a change actually benefit by keeping their field's knowledge obscure.

A better way of looking at this is these standards bodies have deliberately worked to get their codes incorporated into law. By being willful participants in the lawmaking process, they've accepted their work entering the public domain. This is analogous to other private organizations drafting legal codes (eg the Uniform Law Commission) and even legislators themselves.

I agree, but it's the law that should refrain itself from referencing closed standards, not the standard that should open itself because the law references it.

Either way is fine in my book. But obeying the law should not incur costs to actually know what the law is.

> In a republic, law must be public.

Apparently in the United States, an avowed republic, you are subject to classified laws which cannot be discussed in open court.

See, for example, Gilmore v. Gonzales

Meh, neither airline policy nor executive policy is law, even if the CSR at the check-in desk confuses policy with law.

The courts have been very clear that US administrative law is law, and that subject was not in question in that case. The dismissal was on the basis that the law could not be discussed in open court thus the law stands.

The individual policies of the airlines was not in question.

You're right, which is why the only sane way for this to work is for any law referencing a copyrighted work needs to be considered unconstitutional. Lawmakers need to either get the copyright holder to release it to the public domain, explicitly void the copyright of the work in the new law themselves, or have their law rejected by the supreme court.

Case law is often as important as written law, and is often heavily paywalled.

Building codes seems to be one such example where this is pretty uniformly NOT true... sadly.

my friend garrett owns a startup called up.codes that is working to change that.

some recent breakthroughs in copyright law litigation mean that people can actually publish the text of these codes online.

Maybe it should simply be affordably accessible. Nothing in life is really free.

> by virtue of referencing a standard in a US law, congress unilaterally voids the copyright holder's claims

Well, that's not the only option. They could also buy the copyright or a perpetual license for the public or remove the references from the law. I would think that ideally getting perpetual free access for the public should have been done before referencing the standard.

Another option is that the law isn't valid.

What, like make a law that says that laws that make reference to works that aren't freely available to the public aren't valid?

I'm no lawyer, so I don't know if there's a way to make a law invalidate another, other than by putting it in the constitution as an amendment.

No. Make the argument in court. The law really should be struck down if you can't have a copy of it. The court could hold that the law is unenforceable until the copyright expires.

That creates the weird situation where a law goes into effect on some seemingly random date in the future.

That already happens when laws are challenged

Ooh, I know - how about having a law refer to a standard copyrighted by Disney, that would be fun

> I'm no lawyer, so I don't know if there's a way to make a law invalidate another, other than by putting it in the constitution as an amendment.

Congress needs exemptions to not be affected by the laws they pass e.g. OSHA specifically exempts the US (and thus congress). Which means congress could pass a law preventing themselves from passing certain laws.

Though of course they could always repeal it first, I wouldn't think "unrepealable" laws would be constitutional.

> Which means congress could pass a law preventing themselves from passing certain laws.

So what happens in court when legislation didn't notice and passed the law regardless? Can a codified law that may even have already been used in previous cases be rendered null because another law says it shouldn't exist?

Yes. Happens often. Politically speaking, the Government is well known for dropping cases that may lead to unsatisfactory judgement or precedent rather than following through and putting up with the flurry of resulting appeals to vacate convictions based on a nullified law since judicial nullification is retroactive.

The trick to keeping something unchallenged is to only enforce it against people they are fairly certain they don't have to worry about challenging it in a substantial way. Only people with standing can challenge it, and once you're in a position to challenge it, your defense is unlikely to go down a route to nullify. Nevermind that there is a prevailing ethos of minimizing the impact of a decision on the body of case law, so it is extremely difficult to make a compelling argument to get a law nullified unless it is extremely and obviously egriegious in nature.

Congress cannot pass a law that binds future Congresses, the supreme court decided in Winstar (https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-865.ZO.html)

A later congress can always legislate whatever it wants, even if it contradicts previous legislation.

Winstar is with respect to damage to a nongovernmental entity. Congress can affect Congress in other ways, such as changing its rules of session or changing the pay of its members, that do bind future Congresses. I'd say a rule against referencing nonpublic standards would be closer to the second than the first. (A future congress, of course, could change it back...)

Any government can decide to make some work public domain. Other governments may not agree, and it may be a breach of international treaty, but it's their choice to make.

What is a completely separated issue from all laws needing to be public in a democracy. Once it's a law, there's no going back. So if the government is serious about intellectual property, what remains is only the option of saying "well, somebody fucked up somewhere here" and paying damages to the copyright owner.

It's an interesting question, a standard is factual - the owner can retain the rights to the rendering, but the content is not covered by copyright anyway. If it's technical, it's not covered by copyright. Copyright is for artistic works, according to international treaty, the standard owners get to keep the artistic aspects of their rendering; anything factual -- such as technical details of a standard -- is fair game ... of course you have to convince the court of that purposive construction rather than the more popular [with some] financial construction of copyright law.

> reference a song text by a US artist //

Somewhat aside: the artist probably doesn't own the copyright and in any case a text of the lyrics is not the song. It's very likely that different people own the lyrics and the performance by an artist (and probably not the artist if it's a mass-media released track/song). So the artist would still get their copyright in the performance and could still collect on that; the songwriter might be aggrieved though ... it seems super unlikely to ever be an issue.

There are already USC that allow reporting on court cases, presumably if a copyright work is played in court then that rendering can be duplicated without infringement. New Zealand courts played Eminem's "Lose Yourself" (https://scroll.in/video/836700/watch-what-happens-or-doesnt-...; linked from this story, direct link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPcB5IlIILc).

> If it's technical, it's not covered by copyright

There is a distinction between factual and technical. The technical parts of standards are ultimately judgement calls, not straight facts.

By your standard, software copyrights couldn't exist. Not that this would be a bad thing...

I’ve heard that large amount of secrect Scientology texts where mailed to some part of the Swedish government anonymously. And, as anything handled by the government is public, those documents where then public for all Swedish citizen. Not sure if it is just a random myth or if it is true.

It’s true. Happened more than once, even.

Some references here: https://www.allmanhandling.se/tag/scientologbibeln/

The first and most famous one: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenon_Panoussis

Essentially in Sweden, the principle of public access to government communication trumped copyright. The church of Scientology eventually successfully lobbied for a law change and it was classified as secret.

But for a good while there, the Scientologists had people go to the institution where the documents where held, requested to get access to read it, and stay there hogging it in their reading room every day just to prevent others from accessing it.

This is obviously a myth. If somebody mails a DVD of "Godzilla vs King Kong" to a government employee, it doesn't place the movie into the public domain.

Not a myth, in Sweden at the time it was the law, Scientology's "all your problems are caused because you are haunted by murdered space aliens" secret was put in the public domain this way

You’re just armchair guessing based on your hunch and this time you were wrong.

It is not a myth. That doesn’t mean sending a DVD to a government employee puts the movie in the public domain. It’s more nuanced than that.

Not public domain, but 1 copy available for reference like in a library.

That is an interesting take. If somebody robbed a bank and gave the money to the state, the state would obviously need to return it to its rightful owner.

But copyright is not so straight forward. The church could contest that the physical copy belonged to them and was on loan. Thus it could not be gifted legally. The church could claim that the physical document was licensed non-transferably. They could claim that the copy itself was against copyright. There could be lots of arguments they could make to suppress the document. But none seem so straight forward as the bank robbery example.

Actually in general, you can ask for a copy of any document, for a somewhat reasonable copying/handling fee, and have it sent to you.

If somebody’s hogging the book all day it can’t be copied as much, though...

For Belgium (maybe even Europe), yes, the Belgian government can and has decided to void international copyright law in specific instances. Source: https://thebelgianscientist.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/belgian...

In short: For a scientific article and after a waiting period of 6 to 12 months, copyright is voided and the article can be published in open access REGARDLESS of previous copyright agreements.

Maybe not a Ctrl+F interpretation of "mentioned in a law", but yes, definitely - if something is required by legislation, all copyright, patents, etc. should be void.

If the government requires product category X to be developed to the spec of standard Y and standard Y is a closed standard, that law should either be invalidated or the standard should be opened. If a hypothetical government required all citizens to read a specific book, that book better be royalty-free to distribute.

And look at the other side. If this wasn't true, a law can reference a copyrighted material sold to a ridiculous price.

And what if the copyright holder lobbied for the inclusion by reference of the copyrighted work into the law?

Does this change the calculus at all?

If the song contains statutory requirements, that's probably fair. The Belgians would have to pay the artist, maybe.

If they would pay the copyright holder some defensible amount, then it could be the IP version of eminent domain.

This is interesting. I think the way this should work is that that the government should have to license the standard from the creator. This makes sense because they have to have the standard to know to reference it and should only have obtained it legally, for one.

Then the creator is free to charge the government what they like.

The laws protecting copyright are made by Congress in the first place, that's where they come from. Of course Congress has the power to take away copyright too, so there's nothing odd about the fact that an act of Congress (the same entity that created the right) can void a copyright.

(OK, ok, some of copyright law, at least originally, is common law, but Congress always has the power to override that too).

That's not quite true. Copyright is in the Constitution, controlled by the States.

Copyright law is definitely definitely federal. There are no state-by-state differences to copyright in the USA, it is exclusively federal. You are right the constitution gives the federal government (not the states) the authority to create it.

Article 1 Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power… To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

In this case only the lyrics would be open not the song itself. That sounds fair.

Surely the Belgian government is free to decide how to enforce copyright law within Belgium? It's not like copyright is the same the world over. I'm from Canada for instance, and we have very different fair use (fair dealing) laws from the US, different copyright terms, etc.

> Surely the Belgian government is free to decide how to enforce copyright law within Belgium?

Only to the extent that it doesn't conflict with their international obligation pertaining to the subject: in the hierachy of law, international treaties generally stand above national laws.

It's a bit more complicated when it comes to the US, because internally the country has 3 different concepts corresponding to international treaties: treaties in the constitutional sense (covered by the treaty clause), congressional agreements, and executive agreements. The differences are:

* executive agreements (a treaty agreed to by the executive alone) stands below federal law, and can not contradict it (to say nothing of the constitution)

* congressional agreements are essentially regular laws, and thus restricted to the enumerated powers of Congress and the Executive

* "constitutional" treaties can expand beyond the enumerated powers

A treaty is national law, that by convention, matches other nation's laws.

There is no world government, only peer government's guns and bombs.

>> So you paid approx $5* per content page for one of the most boring readings in your entire life, just for the lulz?

> I paid approximately five U. S. dollars per content page for one of the most boring readings in my entire life, just for the lulz.

> Recall that I did not claim to have made a reasonable financial decision. I did not, in fact, make a reasonable (or even defensible) financial decision. This is my way of coping with buyer's regret.

Hahahaha this was my favorite part.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/comments/mikuj1/i_bought_is...

edit:

> From what I can tell, they were written with Microsoft Word going by the line breaking and the use of Cambria as font. I don't think I could call it aesthetically pleasing without being insincere, however. Too much is wrong in terms of what I consider to be good typography (which mostly aligns with Butterick's Practical Typography).

At least it's not Arial?

What's wrong with Arial?

I should be more aware of typography stuff, but which font (and why) would you use instead of Arial for, say, the Headings and normal paragraph in a technical report?

Essentially, the argument made by Butterick and others is that choosing Arial as a font is not a choice but indicates the absence of a choice, since it is a system font. [1] At the very end of that page he writes a few paragraphs exactly why he dislikes Arial.

Regarding alternatives: "[...] Arial is permanently associated with the work of people who will never care about typography. You’re not one of those people. So use Avenir. Use Franklin Gothic. Use Gill Sans. Use one of the fonts listed in Helvetica and Arial alternatives [2]. Or use something completely different. But don’t use Arial. It’s the sans serif of last resort."

[1] https://practicaltypography.com/system-fonts.html

[2] https://practicaltypography.com/helvetica-and-arial-alternat...

Arial IS Helvetica, just made for the screen by Microsoft. It is not optimized for print.

Arial is a knock-off of Helvetica with some minor design changes that are not related to screen vs print. If it isn’t “optimized for print”, then Helvetica isn’t either.

You’re right, my memory was wrong. It is a clone with the same metrics so layout wouldn’t change if you picked one versus the other. Microsoft paid monotype to port it to TrueType in 1990 which I believe was optimized for the screen. My memory of that is from the Helvetica documentary I watched maybe 10 years ago, so the specifics are hazy.

COMIC SANS FOREVER!!!

I am selling an NFT of this comment in comic sans. Interested buyers, my email is in bio

Shut up and take my money

I do not know much about typography but when I wrote my first LaTeX document, I found d it awful.

And then I realised that it is much easier to my eyes than other documents and I cold not unsee it.

I still think that the default font is ugly, but when you have a longer document you cannot go wrong with LaTeX.

When you compare the result with the same doc, but written in Arial, it is painful. The Arial document is really more difficult to read.

I think that this is Knuth who said that a document is meant to be read, and not as an art display.

I find it interesting how far back you can trace back the dislike of Computer Modern and typefaces like it. Its appearance has been considered outdated for nearly a century: Times New Roman replaced the Times of London's 'Modern' typeface in 1932. Typefaces made in the 1700s (Baskerville, for instance) look more modern to our eyes than Computer Modern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman#/media/File:Ti...

Had to google what is the default font for LaTeX. Ah, this one? Right that does look familiar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern

And the font itself was created by Knuth? Did Knuth invent like everything?

Not just the font, the typesetting system behind it. All for his book!

Honestly I think it's a matter of personal preference. I would write a technical report in a serifed font. I'm used to reading (La)TeX typeset reports like in academia so that's what I would use to write one. Sans serifed fonts look too casual (for lack of a better term?) for me in a technical report, not to mention the potential for ambiguity (l or I?) in sans serifed fonts.

By the way: If you are looking for relatives of typical LaTeX serif fonts such as Latin Modern, Computer Modern and friends, the keyword is "Century", e.g. Century Schoolbook. The latter is associated with documents produced by the US Supreme Court.

PS: Since I'm already citing Butterick in a sibling comment, I'm going to add another link here: https://practicaltypography.com/century-schoolbook-alternati...

> (l or I?)

I should point out that at least on my machine (latest macOS Safari), HN is rendered in a sans-serif font and shows them differently—the capital I has bars on the top and bottom. But, obviously, there are absolutely sans-serif fonts that do have this problem, Helveticarial among them.

Arial is basically a ripoff of Helvetica, except pretty much everything it changes to separate itself makes the font worse. Using it screams “I used Google Docs to make this and I don’t care about typography”.

Helvetica's terminal strokes are either horizontally or vertically cut, while those of Arial are slightly angled.

Yes, that’s a big part of it, but in general it’s just a bunch of tweaks that make it look sloppier (the changes to R and G particularly annoy me). It really is an off-brand Helvetica in pretty much every sense.

Checking a few recent ISO standards on my local machine they use Cambria too.

I can't believe that this is actually copyrighted. How can such a foundational standard not be public domain?

What's next? Copyrighting latitude and longitude?

(China for the record, doesn't want you to know the lat/lon of anything in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...)

Latitude and longitude are in the public domain, being inventions of the US military.

The idea of latitude and longitude was invented in Greece couple of millennia ago and the first accurate instrument to measure them was invented by the John Harrison, a Brit, before the USA was founded.

Such US-centric thinking reminds me of one of my favourite terms: the USS Titanic.

Hahaha, no.

Why would the 0deg longitude be at the Greenwhich Observatory if the US military invented it???

Is this comment perhaps referring to the WGS84 datum?

Better link: https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/comments/mikuj1/i_bought_is...

even more betterer https://teddit.net/r/ISO8601/comments/mikuj1/i_bought_iso_86...

ISO 8601 is nice

From ISO 8601 Third edition 2004-12-01

---8<----

The following are examples of complete representations of date and time of day representations:

Basic format:

  YYYYMMDDThhmmss
  YYYYMMDDThhmmssZ
  YYYYMMDDThhmmss±hhmm
  YYYYMMDDThhmmss±hh

Example:

  19850412T101530
  19850412T101530Z
  19850412T101530+0400
  19850412T101530+04

Extended format: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss

  YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ
  YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss±hh:mm
  YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss±hh

Example: 1985-04-12T10:15:30

  1985-04-12T10:15:30Z
  1985-04-12T10:15:30+04:00
  1985-04-12T10:15:30+04

---8<----

4.5.3 Complete representations (recurring time intervals)

When the application identifies the need for a complete representation of a recurring time interval, it shall use an expression in accordance with 4.5.2, combining any complete time interval representation as defined in 4.4.4 with the number of recurrences.

Basic format:

  Rn/YYYYMMDDThhmmss/YYYYMMDDThhmmss
  Rn/PnnYnnMnnDTnnHnnMnnS
  Rn/YYYYMMDDThhmmss/PnnYnnMnnDTnnHnnMnnS
  RnPnnYnnMnnDTnnHnnMnnS/YYYYMMDDThhmmss

Example:

  R12/19850412T232050/19850625T103000
  R12/P2Y10M15DT10H30M20S
  R12/19850412T232050/P1Y2M15DT12H30M0S
  R12/P1Y2M15DT12H30M0S/19850412T232050

Extended format:

  Rn/YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss/YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss
  Rn/YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss/PnYnMnDTnHnMnS
  Rn/PnnYnnMnnDTnnHnnMnnS/YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss

Example:

  R12/l985-04-12T23:20:50/1985-06-25T10:30:00
  R12/1985-04-12T23:20:50/P1Y2M15DT12H30M0S
  R12/P1Y2M15DT12H30M0S/1985-04-12T23:20:50

ISO 8601 recurring intervals are very nice and well thought out. Sadly, they are a corner of the standard that almost no one supports completely.

What's their use? I can't figure it out.

At first, I thought it was going to be something that would allow one to express, e.g. I start work from this date, from this hour to this hour, these days of the week.

But the format seems to only express contiguous intervals. What's the point of recurring intervals if they're limited to be contiguous? You could just join them into one interval.

EDIT: Or am I wrongly assuming that they're contiguous and rather they just don't specify when they repeat?

It's probably more useful to think of recurring intervals as specifying an instant plus a period until the recurring instant. Cron jobs, for example, use such a concept. If you want to specify how long some event starting at that instant should be, you can use a separate non-recurring interval to show that. In this frame, "how often should we start the budget meeting" and "how long should the budget meeting be" are separate questions and not discoverable with a single answer.

It seems obvious now that you've clarified it. :P Thanks. Though the name is a bit misleading. Maybe it should be called "recurring instants" instead.

I can now agree that it seems to be nicely thought out, flexible without being overly complicated. However, just like how the duration of the event can be a separate question, so too can the duration between instants and the number of repeats. I think this would be the main reason why it's not widely adopted. There just doesn't seem to be much of a need for a standard representation of durations or recurring intervals/instants.

I have seen them show up in iCal / .ics calendars.

I was asking OP there if he could provide me with a list of edge cases of formatted strings to help me test my parser implementation.

This alone pushed me probably weeks ahead...I think that's what I dislike the most about it: missing reference implementations of ISO standards that also contain testsuites. I mean, without that it's just yet another paper.

A standard is useless when it's not public. But it's even more useless when there's no unified testsuite to test your implementation against. Looking at you too, IETF and everything related to the Web.

Context: https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/comments/mikuj1/i_bought_is...

Also - heh, I just thought of the idea that standards organizations should be required by law (or maybe all-but-law policy) to receive testcases, formatted to a reasonable* standard, execute them, and provide run reports.

You know, how SQLite3 runs the closed-source $$$$$ TH3 against every release.

But then I realized the current method is much cheaper (all things considered), and thus more efficient. :'(

(* Reasonable = a peer-reviewed agency (or some such) is given access to the specification and told to write a submission standard (specifying programming language(s), submission format, etc) and an associated automated implementation that receives submissions formatted according to the established standard; and then anybody else who also owns the spec is allowed to raise issues about the submission standard. Yup, the whole thing would cost millions of dollars.)

An example of a collaborative effort that achieves this is TC39's test262 [0], which is a full test suite for JavaScript conformance across engines and vendors.

[0] https://github.com/tc39/test262

Cryptography people tend to be good about providing test vectors, especially in the IETF CFRG. Unfortunately, it's not as a common a practice as one would like.

I was thinking more about the lack of testsuites for everything related to network protocols, such as DNS, HTTP or WebSockets and WebRTC.

The RFCs related to DNS are an endless list of deprecations that you have to "merge" in your head until you actually know what is allowed, what is deprecated, and what was extended. Especially with EDNS and all its options that are somewhat somewhere on the IANA website.

Before that, I realized that not a single server implementation implements HTTP's 206 Partial Content and/or Transfer-Encodings as specified; and lots of servers even reply with wrong buffer sizes when requesting multiple Content Ranges.

When reading through the Chromium and Firefox codebases, there's always dirty hacks that are implementation specific, so there isn't any end-to-end networked-only testsuite that verifies the network states and behaviours.

For my own Browser Stealth [1] I had to create a testsuite because I couldn't find anyone that's not related to known SSL attack vectors. Due to the peer-to-peer concept I decided to test network behaviours wherever possible.

The network protocols themselves (when speaking of RFCs) are just not tested, and freely interpreted at will - even in older projects like apache, caddy, curl, libaria and others. When reading the curl codebase you'll soon realize that it is a huge collection of hacks he had to implement just to make things work when the servers were behaving incompliant to the specifications.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

Anybody know why the account was deleted. Did the poster fear for copyright violations?

I suspect it was a temporary throwaway account

It wasn't apparent to me what "buying a standard" mean. I thought the OP owned the standard for a period of time as in domain name. Turns out the OP owns a printout of the standard

It's analogue to buying a book or movie. Of course you only get a copy of the material.

Not necessarily. For example, for about $4,000,000,000, Disney bought Star Wars: the Complete Collection, including all rights and trademarks. Not just copies of the movies, but actual ownership of the concept of "Star Wars", in exchange for nothing more than (a whole lot of) money.

Well, 4e9 + 7e10, since they had to get both Lucasfilm and Fox to get all the rights for Star Wars.

It's ambiguous. It could refer to buying [a copy of], or buying [the rights to].

I would ordinarily say I bought a copy of The Hobbit, but I guess if I said "Hey I bought The Hobbit the other day", people would assume I meant the book.

I'd normally say "I bought a copy of ISO 8601". In this case I think the author thought it was a little funny to say "I bought iso 8601".

I am both surprised and not surprised that a /r/ISO8601 exists.

I’m surprised it isn’t marked NSFW and catering to a very niche form of expression

A bunch of detailed stories of people talking about former dates?

Not just former dates, future ones, too?

It seems increasing insane to have standards related to software interoperability that are not in the public domain, doesn't it?

I know (or assume) that the purchase money pays for activities that need to be done. But this doesn't seem like a good way to do it.

On the other hand, maybe nobody pays attention to software interoperability standards anymore anyway.

There are a few documents available on the US Library of Congress site.

https://www.google.fi/search?q=site%3Aloc.gov+iso+8601

The midnight (end of day) 24:00 notation is a curious case. The copy I have of a draft of ISO 8601:2019 removed it, which I thought was a shame. But the end of this comment https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/comments/mikuj1/i_bought_is... suggests that this change didn’t survive into the final standard, so 24:00 is still allowed, as in older editions of ISO 8601.

This relates to how I learnt about ISO8601 as a teenager (c. 2005)

My parents had an oven manufactured by Neff (part of the BSH group including Bosch and Siemens). This oven displayed midnight as 24:00. I was rarely in the kitchen at midnight, so it was years until I just happened to walk into the kitchen at the right time to 24:00 on the display. It was so weird I think I continued to stare at it for the remainder of the minute until it ticked over to 0:01.

I wrote directly to Neff to ask them about it. I speculated that it was a design decision to reduce ambiguity between the clock and the timer countdown, which shared the same display, and asked them if this was the case.

I can't remember what email address I used, but after a bit of bouncing around and piquing people's curiosity it ended up with someone in their engineering department. They looked into it and actually quoted ISO8601 to me. They said, while they agree it is a bit strange, it's not actually out of spec and therefore not technically a bug. They didn't agree with my theory about ambiguity since many other times would still be ambiguous (e.g. 0:01). But since the clock circuit is a sourced component they could only speculate on why 24:00 was chosen over 0:00. They also confirmed that Bosch and Siemens ovens both display 0:00 and only Neff displays 24:00.

I've since noticed that 24:00 is used on train timetables when the time of arrival is midnight.

For anyone wondering, 8601 is the time and date format one.

Interestingly I immediately recognized it. I love the format since it's sortable alphabetically going from highest to lowest "denominations" (for lack of a better word).

Edit: I was actually working with `.toISOString()` today and was slightly disappointed to realize that it doesn't work as filenames (due to the colons) so I ended up doing `.replace(':', '-')`.

Once I wanted to have the colons in my filenames so my eyes didn't have to parse all the dashes, so I used Unicode U+A789 MODIFIER LETTER COLON.

Windows didn't complain, and since it was for my own use only, I was sure it wasn't going to confuse others.

Only sortable for the next 8,000 years :)

Only sortable when using a consistent ISO 8601 format.

The answer to this is the same as the answer for eliminating tracking pixels in email. Requiring inline content.

If a law is referencing something, it needs to be inclined in the public text of the law. If it can’t for copyright reasons, then get a license for such or design a different law.

Exercise your civil disobedience:

http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=3A72C1636EFF4111F923AC1E...

Open standards or bust. Accept no substitutes.

This is the 2004 version.

"iso 8601 2019" doesn't return any results.

ISO watermarks their standards, so uploading it is pointless risk since you don't know if there are invisible watermarks as well.

Oooh, interesting. How does this work?

Generally, you can consider this an application of Steganography, so searching for that should turn up a number of references showing off how it can be done. Most file formats have attributes where arbitrary data can be inserted without affecting the user’s interaction with the file (for example, making tweaks to the Least Significant Bits for the colors in a JPEG or similar image file).

While in the general case, steganography is discussed in the context of passing secret messages from A to B, watermarking uses steganography to hide a unique identifier that the document’s author can use later to identify whose copy of the document they’re looking at. So in a very basic scenario, the vendor might just shove “exikyut” into a non-visible object on the document, and then when they find the document published online, they check that object and see the username of the person who leaked it. Obviously in the real world, watermarking attempts to obscure the unique identifier’s placement and contents, such that it cannot be easily identified/removed, and so that only the vendor can match a document to its originating user.

Really late reply so you'll probably never see this but thanks for taking the time to explain.

I was actually wondering a) what, exactly, the ISO was specifically doing, which is kind of a stupid question :) and b) how to, uhh, "un" the "exactly", I'll word it that way.

Hiding things in invisible objects would be fairly easy to detect. I was wondering if maybe the document might for example embed two spaces every X characters by way of identifier, or use a seeded RNG to pick from multiple visually-identical layout methodologies, or even maybe reencode the images with a uniquely-seeded JPEG scan script, oh oh or maybe adjust individual control points and Bezier curves in the glyph tables, or...

I'd probably just do an outline-to-shape or similar type of pass on it. But then I'd start wondering about the statistical probability of recovering glyph offset micro-adjustments, or hinting settings... eep.

Okay, import the whole PDF into a layout engine then re-export it. Hmm, what if... oh you know they might be reordering the paragraphs in the text... hmm, with 100 discrete text permutations, you could tell 10,000 output documents apart if all 100 permutations were left undisturbed and were recoverable. That's... quite a lot of work. They're probably not doing that.

Or are they?

I know there's a little personal identifier printed vertically on the bottom left of every page. Whether there are additional, steganographic watermarks, I don't know. It'd be interesting, but that'd require for at least two people to throw enough money at ISO to get a diff between the PDF outputs.

Has anyone here ever consider buying or have bought an ISO standard? Which one?

C, C++, Prolog. The ANSI versions because it is cheaper. ISO standards are expensive. Standards could be very precise and effective in providing information but the experience varies wildly. I like RFCs which I find quite readable.

Not personally, but I worked in manufacturing and the company bought them.

The company is required to adhere to ISO and other certifications specified by the customer. In order to adhere to the standards, you need to have the current revision of the standards. If in your annual audit it's determined that you don't have the current revision, that's a non-conformance. Correct it by purchasing the new version.

Also, you need to pay for the "official training" before you start to get certified. And you need to pay for "internal auditor training" as part of the requirements.

ISO 9000 series, IATF 16949 series, ISO 14000 series, some welding ones, painting ones, ASME standards for drawings, Y14, IIRC.

And the Automotive Industry Action Group's (AIAG) "Core Tools" series of books. I don't think they are standards, but they are "customer requirements", which means you can't be certified without them. They are used for new product introduction, so you can't pass new part submission without following the rules in them.

I have been given bound paper copies of ones that I wrote.

Can also download PDFs of any that would be useful in developing new standards, I don't need to buy them.

Wow. Which ones did you write?

I wanted a copy a couple of times per year, but never considered buying. With some exceptions, they are available elsewhere as a gratis download. All hail https://enwp.org/Libgen https://enwp.org/Z-Library

Most recent one was ISO 9, just to satisfy curiosity.

Can’t think of any ISO standard off the top of my head, but there’s a few standards I’ve looked at purchasing before. Particularly IEEE, but some of those can be very expensive.

A lot of the standards I look at are ITU or from some independent vendor available for free or at a low cost.

I have a copy of ISO 27002 from my employer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_27002

It is kinda nice to be able to literally throw the book (or at least screenshots of the book) at management when they don't want to take security seriously.

25237, Health informatics — Pseudonymization

AMA

Is there any technique that's worth keeping in mind for other areas (thinking about GDPR in particular)? If so, what are they?

> I've got a copy of the two most useful(?) standards of our time.

I wonder if the pun was intended.

EDIT: According to the comments over there, it was.

The surprises never cease:

> Further below, in § 4.2.2, it's noted that the ordinal day number of the week starts at 1, which is Monday. 2000-01-01 is defined to be Saturday and the week calendar continues as a series of contiguous calendar weeks. This leads to e.g. the first day of 2019-W1 (a Monday) being 2018-12-31.

Monday is considered the first day of the week in many countries[1].

Week years are based on the year in which most of the week occurs / whichever year contains the Thursday.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#...

I assume you are american?

That's the definition of the ISO week, which is very much the standard and in common use throughout europe. Monday being the first day of the week is also standard in europe.

The concept of Monday being the first day of the week isn't what surprises me. It was interesting to see the first day of the first week of 2019 is a date in 2018. EDIT: And I'm not in any way rendering judgment, merely uttering surprise.

(The country that claims me as its citizen is irrelevant, and obviously we are indeed discussing ISO's definition of a "week". )

> (The country that claims me as its citizen is irrelevant)

The country is indeed irrelevant. The culture however is not: as I noted, this week ordinal definition is standard in europe, and the only people I've seen 1. not know about this definition of the week (and the concept of week-year) and 2. care enough to express any sort of surprise, have been american.

> we are indeed discussing ISO's definition of a "week".

The information in my comment was that this is the standard week in europe, any time somebody talks in weeks (which is common in many, many businesses, people'll tell you they'll do a job W23, or will ship your order W36), that's the one they're talking about.

If weeks are to be considered as a unit that exists "in" a year, then there is no non-surprising solution to this notion of the first and last week of the year.

Depends on your threshold of surprise. I would say that the end of a week going into the next year is much less surprising or even non-surprising.

It's surprising that a day in 2019 is not part of a week in 2019.

Out of context yes. In context the direction matters.

If I say that 3am on Saturday is part of "Friday night", that's not very surprising.

If I say that 10pm on Monday is part of "Tuesday morning", that's quite surprising.

I think there was some bug in a big service (Twitter? very unsure) a few years ago related to this conflict of ISO and 'real' year

Well, there are I think only two reasonable definitions. One leads to the first day of the week being in the previous year; the other to the first day of the first week being six days into the year.

Each is independently 'surprising' in that it seems 'obviously wrong' without thinking about it.

A common date formatting error is to accidentally use the “iso week year” instead of “calendar year”, which is the same 99% of the time except sometimes at the end of the year, as your example shows.

https://ericasadun.com/2018/12/25/iso-8601-yyyy-yyyy-and-why...

Somewhat related discussion from 25 days ago: ISO obstructs adoption of standards by paywalling them (about the Tim Sweeney tweet).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390040

Tim Sweeney is still wrong. Standards are paywalled by their national standards bodies, not the ISO.

And final draft standards are available for free anyway.

Furthermore, a multi-billionaire, who made his money ripping off children, complaining about paywalls is a farce.

> Standards are paywalled by their national standards bodies, not the ISO.

That doesn't sound right. If I want access to the C++ standard document, I am required to pay ISO for the privilege. ISO hold the copyrights to the document. There are no national standards bodies in sight.

> And final draft standards are available for free anyway.

People don't want an approximation of the standard, they want the standard itself. If that weren't true, ISO wouldn't be taking this approach.

> Furthermore, a multi-billionaire, who made his money ripping off children, complaining about paywalls is a farce.

Epic Games was founded 25 years before Fortnite was released, and it was already a big company when Fortnite arrived.

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