lawtalkinghuman

Refusing to cooperate or exercising one's right to silence is absolutely NOT the best strategy in the UK. Whether you should or not will depend heavily on a variety of factors. If you plan to offer an affirmative defence at trial, you can't just spring it on prosecutors.

In addition, England (dunno about Scotland) does NOT have the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine regarding illegally or improperly collected evidence as is seen in a lot of US legal dramas.

The best strategy if arrested in England is to seek legal advice, either from your own solicitor or from the duty solicitor.

That'd explain it. The science reporters at the BBC almost always link to original studies, but I guess the sport team haven't faced that issue.

Board of directors, not an employee.

"FSF board members are not compensated for their board service, and are not permitted to receive any personal financial benefit from FSF funds or other assets."

https://www.fsf.org/about/the-role-of-the-fsfs-board-of-dire...

It is completely reasonable for a member of a board of directors (or advisors or trustees) of a non-profit to resign if they think the non-profit is going in the wrong direction.

She. And she did explain her opposition to the reinstement of RMS on Tuesday:

"For whatever it's worth, I did not support the decision to reinstate RMS. I made my arguments and placed my opposing vote; while I was glad I was able to do that I regret not being able to turn the decision the other way."

https://twitter.com/mindspillage/status/1374448587388588037

Instead of checking the TLS certificate or the domain, you are depending on fak3b00k.com not implementing the same title tag as Facebook?

If you can come up with a function that can determine whether or not someone's behaviour is "reasonable" or not, you might be on to something.

Oh yeah, that someone might be a person, a corporation, or a government, and the standard of reasonableness will depend on what exactly it is they're doing.

There's evidence that the availability of the means of going through with suicide affects how many people do it.

> Suicide in the United Kingdom declined after coal stoves were phased out, removing a means of suicide by carbon monoxide that had been available in many homes. Tylenol (or acetaminophen) overdoses in England and Wales fell by 43 percent after legislation passed requiring that the medication be sold in “blister packs” where you have to pop out each individual pill; that simple switch from big bottles was enough to save lives. When the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18095174/pesti...

And if someone does decide to try to kill themselves, guns are more likely to be fatal:

> About 85 percent of suicide attempts with a firearm end in death. (Drug overdose, the most widely used method in suicide attempts, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.) Moreover, guns are an irreversible solution to what is often a passing crisis. Suicidal individuals who take pills or inhale car exhaust or use razors have time to reconsider their actions or summon help. With a firearm, once the trigger is pulled, there’s no turning back.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/guns-...

Why not?

Selling an $8 ebook is a financial conflict of interest, but having tens of thousands of dollars riding on the fluctations of cryptoassets is having "skin in the game", which is totally different.

Determining how well a school did at teaching people subjects like literature, foreign languages, science, mathematics and history now depends on how many of their graduates became stockbrokers and business executives, not on whether the school actually did a good job at educating their students.

Assessing the quality of education by economic output means the engineer who declines a job at Google or Facebook to take a job at a human rights non-profit is a "worse" engineer, and their education must be considered substandard compared to one who goes and takes a Big Tech job. Same with doctors who volunteer to run free HIV clinics in sub-Saharan Africa when they could get a job doing buttlifts for movie stars in Los Angeles, or lawyers who become public defenders or represent asylum seekers and other public interest clients rather than doing extremely well-compensated corporate work.

In as much as it reduces all of human life and values to numbers on a spreadsheet, yes, there is almost certainly something wrong with it.

That is a somewhat remarkable reading of recent events.

The UK government has been on something of an anti-judicial kick for the last year or so since the decision in Miller II/Cherry, the prorogations case (and a few other cases that haven't had as much press attention such as the Privacy International case on ouster clauses).

They've been talking about "reforming" or "scaling back" the Supreme Court—perhaps simply by renaming it—and talking about how judges have too much power, and are too "political", which somehow they propose to fix by replacing the independent appointment process with a more explicitly political one.

Also, if Johnson and the Conservatives wished to bring about the same result, they don't need a Supreme Court decision to do so—they have an 80 seat majority, a large chunk of which come from disaffected Labour voters in the so-called "Northern heartlands" who are perfectly happy to have employment rights improved. The Conservatives could, if they wished, quite easily pass primary legislation to specifically make gig economy or app-based workers have the status of workers under employment law - they'd probably get cross-party support for it.

See:

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/nov/15/supreme-court-pl...

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/law/government-urged-to-rename-...

> The killer app is decentralized, permissionless, open source, and censorship resistant network.

That’s like saying the killer app of the internet is the internet.

The web gives me access to information quicker and easier than going to a library or bookshop. Email and IM means I can communicate with people in other countries quicker and easier than I could by post. Crypto doesn’t change anything.

A few drug dealers and some people living in countries with hyperinflation may care about “permissionlessness” and “censorship* resistance”, but for most people, actual money is far, far more convenient.

* That’s some Orwellian newspeak, btw. If someone defrauds me and a court of law ensures that I am restituted, the reversal of that fraudulent transaction isn’t “censorship” because stealing money isn’t “speech” or “expression”.

If all else fails, you just outsource spying on your own citizens to a friendly ally (the Five Eyes).

This is correct, though I suspect the UK government aren't going to try and disobey the ruling just in Scotland.

> It's just bizarre that the terms of the extradition treaty, which explicitly bars extradition for political offenses, would be irrelevant.

Basic UK constitutional law: judges apply the law as written by Parliament, not the law as it ought to be written if the treaty had been properly implemented. If this leads to the UK not following their obligations, the remedy for this is Parliament need to modify primary legislation to satisfy their international obligations. All treaties need ratification by Parliament.

(There are two major exceptions to this: the European Convention of Human Rights which was "domesticated" by the Human Rights Act 1998, and EU law which, pre-Brexit, was brought into UK law by the European Communities Act, and has now been integrated into UK law through the EU Withdrawal Act.)

Appointment to senior judicial roles in the UK is done through a process that's kept at quite some distance from politics precisely because people aren't keen on having SCOTUS-style politicking. It isn't perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better.

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

(The JAC handles judicial appointments for England and Wales. There are JAC equivalents for Scotland and Northern Ireland. When there's a Supreme Court vacancy, a process starts up where members of the three JACs appoint people to a committee to recommend new SC justices.)

There are Supreme Court justices in the UK who have discernible political views (the retired Lady Hale was left of the average, and the retired Lord Sumption is more to the right) but their political affiliation has a comparatively small role in deciding whether they get a senior judicial appointment.

Nobody talks about justices having been appointed by a particular prime minister, for instance, because it is irrelevant. Nor does their political affiliation give you much of a clue how they are going to decide cases. This is also because in most cases, the Supreme Court sits as panels—unlike in the US, most cases are decided by a panel of five of the twelve judges, usually picked based on subject matter expertise (those with, say, family law experience will get picked for family cases, while those with more commercial experience are likely to be picked for commercial or financial disputes).

Not really. s91 of the Extradition Act requires that "the physical or mental condition of the person is such that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him", the judge must "order the person’s discharge".

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/41/section/91

There have been extraditions of other people charged with computer hacking offences like Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon where there was a similar concern. In both Love and McKinnon's cases, both were on the autistic spectrum.

Either side can appeal in an extradition hearing. There's no guarantee that the High Court will grant leave to appeal.

If the US seeks to appeal, it'd be under s105 of the Extradition Act.

If the appeal is filed and accepted, Assange can be kept in remand pending appeal under s107.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/41

For clarity: European Convention (and Court) of Human Rights law, not EU.

There's post-Brexit significance since the UK continues to be a signatory to the ECHR even though they've now left the EU. Being an ECHR signatory is a requirement of being in the EU, not vice versa. (Countries like Turkey and Russia are also ECHR signatories.)

Deciding whether under s91 of the Extradition Act, "the physical or mental condition of the person is such that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him", is a very fact-specific issue rather than a legal question though.

The appellate courts are generally there to resolve legal questions not factual ones—I'd question the Assange case, or other similar cases would raise a similar legal rather than factual question.

There has been a trend towards applying s91 cases for defendants with autism spectrum disorders: the courts didn't in Gary McKinnon's case, but the Home Secretary (Theresa May, before she became PM) justified her denial of the extradition order on that basis. In Lauri Love's case, the magistrates' court allowed the extradition order but it was overturned on appeal in the High Court on the basis of Love's not being able to cope in US custody with Asperger's syndrome. In the Assange case, the magistrates' court followed this established and rather persuasive precedent.

Assange supporting bloggers/writers including Murray have been alleging extreme bias on the part of the judge for the entirety of the extradition trial.

Pretty standard things that happen in a criminal trial in England (putting defendants in the dock etc.) have been interpreted as unique forms of victimisation reserved solely for Assange.

I won't hold my breath for a mea culpa.

> I'm happy and content with my life, and my only desire is to chase consumer goods

Seems a pretty good summary of the whole wellness/"gratitude"/mindfulness culture that now exists and seems to think that an epidemic of mental ill-health can be fixed through breathing exercises and meditation apps for one's smartphone.

The trollish Bitcoiner answer to every criticism: "you just jelly of my internet money".

It only applies to criminals and others whose biometrics has been collected by the police. The point of the section of the agreement to which this excerpt is attached is to:

"establish reciprocal cooperation between the competent law enforcement authorities of the United Kingdom [...] and the Member States [...] on the automated transfer of DNA profiles, dactyloscopic data and certain domestic vehicle registration data"

This already happens under existing arrangements between EU Member States, and all this does is continue those mutual arrangements with the UK.

One of those things is a text editor and the other involves extremely risky unregulated investments that some people have lost enormous amounts of money through.

"DO NOT TALK TO COPS" is very much US specific advice.

There are some countries like the UK where not talking to the cops can potentially land you in trouble too. (In England and Wales, juries are permitted to draw adverse inferences from a defendant not raising information with the police that they later rely on at trial.)

If you are arrested, exercise your right to counsel. This is guaranteed in both the US, the UK and most of Europe (under the European Convention of Human Rights), as well as lots of countries elsewhere.

Yes, it might mean you have to wait an hour or so for the lawyer to get there. Yes, the police will try to convince you that only guilty people need lawyers (not true) or that it'll make things worse for you (also not true).

The counterpoint to this is: if the cops are following procedures correctly and have legitimately collected evidence, they have nothing to fear from you exercising your right to free and independent legal advice.

Right, and despite all the fury and word salad, it still exists and will continue to do so.

On NLP, in the UK there has been one miscarriage of justice (a wrongfully convicted man spent four years in prison) due to mishandling of text messages by police and prosecutors, and some close misses. Because of the time pressures on police and prosecutors, they were just looking for a bunch of keywords unsystematically rather than reading the material fully, and failing to disclose relevant material to defence lawyers.

See: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rape-conviction-...

Getting text automation software wrong can have pretty horrible consequences. AI/ML tools should be an aid to proper review of documents, not a replacement for it.

Programmer turned law student here.

Some potential areas of exploration you can think about:

- Natural Language Processing (nltk and SpaCy) - there are a lot of people trying to build tools to parse contracts, judgments, legislation and much else besides. You got a big pile of documents and you want to find every single mention of a company name in a stack of thousands of documents: time for named entity recognition. Similarly, in policing and in private sector fraud detection, natural language processing is being used to parse through the hundreds of pages of emails/texts collected from the average person's phone or laptop.

- automate work around office files - openpyxl lets you open Excel files, python-docx for Word files

- Simple web applications with Django. Django was built initially for making small projects to support journalists to enter data using an admin panel, then display it on a website. If you need a simple data collection tool, a small Django app may just do the job.

- If you're doing contract review or transactional work, DocuSign has an API. Automating workflows around that could allow you to be more efficient.

- I've ended up writing code to automate some of my email handling. Accessing your email using imaplib means you can write scripts that'll process email in ways that go beyond the simple email filters in Gmail/Outlook.

- If you're dealing with governments or regulators in pretty much any capacity, you'll probably end up wanting to do screen scraping eventually to automate the processing of data published on the web. Requests, BeautifulSoup and Scrapy are your friends for this.

- Notifications: if something is running in the background and takes more than a few minutes, I don't want to waste my time sitting and waiting for it or remembering to check it. On Mac, Linux and Windows there are tools to let you send yourself notifications... or you can use APIs to send yourself notifications via messaging apps like Telegram/Facebook Messenger, or (for a cent or two per pop) by SMS. There's APIs like Pushbullet and Pushover to plumb together mobile notifications for iOS/Android too.

- Time tracking: if I find myself having to account for my activities in, uh, small billable chunks at some point in the near future, you can bet I'm doing what I can to automate the hell out of that.

Before "life hack" meant "a silly thing you learned on BuzzFeed that you'll never actually do", it was used to refer to the often rather hacky set of tools and scripts used by software developers to be productive, and to glue together and make sense of their information dense lives. There are non-tech professionals who are using coding skills to automate their professional practice - like accountants building their own homemade document processing systems by cobbling together Dropbox/Google Drive/etc. with little scripts and cron jobs (etc.), and if you can get good at that, you've basically got a superpower that many of your colleagues won't have, and you've also got domain knowledge software developers don't have.

Can't get any more ambitious than Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

If only ambition correlated with competence.