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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

> To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters...

My reaction to that was "oh boo hoo".

When people my age were kids (get off my lawn) we used to type pages of raw hexadecimal from the back of magazines into a machine prompt. We didn't cry about it, we were just careful.

I can't find a hexadecimal example at the moment, but look at some of these TRS-80 programs (pp. 110-111, 143) which have multiple pages of data/digits to transcribe:

http://archive.org/stream/80-programs-for-the-trs-80-1979jim...

Btw, the originals were often bad photocopies. So maybe not 4 point font, but certainly ambiguity in some bits.

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And also... C64 programs. They were manually typed in by 10 year old kids. The programs were printed in the computer magazines (early 80s) that dealt specifically with C64's. These programs were far more than 2560 characters (in some cases).

If young, interested kids can do it, I'd hope that a nation state could figure it out.

Link: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a5/ComputesGazett...

Yep, I did that when I was a teenager -- entered the machine code for an entire word processor for the C64 called SpeedScript. The good old days ;-)

Yep, I remember doing that with an Apple II back in '79 to get a simple lunar lander game. The process took more than a day, with two friends to help double check the values as we copied everything over. When it ran, and worked, we thought we were gods!

Although to be fair, Compute! magazine at least had a checksum calculator to help you make sure you entered each line properly.

> My reaction to that was "oh boo hoo".

Yeah, in the grand scheme of things it's easier to get a few people to type that in (it's parallelizable, after all) than to wait for another court order. Though I'd still have brought it to the judge's attention as this is like the dictionary definition of "contempt of court". If someone tried to be GPL-compliant in this fashion they'd be laughed off the mailing list.

Keep reading: a couple of days later, he was then forced to send them in digital format under penalty of $5000 per day after the new deadline. So yeah, contempt was clearly detected, if not explicitly mentioned... your justice system works very quickly when it wants to.

Oh, I knew had presented it to the attention of the court, I was agreeing with their course of action in that regard bringing it to the judge's attention. A couple of days later is still too long of a wait though.

Creative Computing magazine once published the entire source code for the game Adventure [1] ... on one page. (I still have that issue.)

[1] Great stuff at the time; precursor to Zork.

I remember them having checksums to ensure line integrity.

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