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@jollygoodthen:
--- Quote from: sources ---In 2016, Anthony Novak created a parody Facebook page of the Parma, Ohio police deptartment which was live for all of 12 hours. It copied the police department's name and profile picture. But the account was listed under "community" pages rather than the designation for government agencies. For readers who might have overlooked that distinction, there were plenty of other clues that the page was an elaborate joke. Novak changed the department's motto from "We know crime" to "We no crime," for example, and his six posts were flagrantly farcical.
Police later arrested him, and a Cuyahoga County grand jury charged him with disrupting public service, a fourth-degree felony. A jury acquitted Novak at trial.
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The Onion to the rescue:
--- Quote from: friend-of-the-court ---The Onion laid out why it believes the authorities in Ohio had acted unconstitutionally, sprinkling in sincere arguments in defense of parody while riddling the rest of the text with moments of jest and hubris — claiming, for example, a readership of 4.3 trillion, and also boasting that it “owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes.”
Chapter headings included: “Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real” and “It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face.”
In page 15 of its 18-page filing, the brief accepted that “the reader’s attention is almost certainly wandering.”
“So here is a paragraph of gripping legal analysis to ensure that every jurist who reads this brief is appropriately impressed by the logic of its argument and the lucidity of its prose,” it says, before dishing out a series of phrases it said was for the “Latin dorks” in the federal judiciary: “Bona vacantia. De bonis asportatis. Writ of certiorari.”
--- End quote ---
@jollygoodthen:
Canary in the internet coal mine?
--- Quote from: NecessaryScene ---I think I need to fill in the technical details of the latest Internet horror.
One of the key backbone providers has decided to start throwing away traffic headed to Josh's network. This fundamentally breaks every design principle of the Internet.
They're basically advertising that they can carry traffic anywhere, and listing out what routes they have available, so that all the intermediate hops can choose a route.
So they're saying something like "sure, I can deliver stuff to Josh, in 5 hops" (alongside the info for squillions of other networks). And all the other systems around them who decide that's the best route, then send their traffic to them.
They then throw it away. They're not refusing traffic, they're accepting it and dropping it.
At this point, this generates a technical fault, and ISPs all over the world are being contacted by customers to complain that their routes aren't working ("my packets are getting 7 hops, but then vanish", as determined by a "traceroute" tool). So they're going to figure out where in the chain it's happening, and if this network won't fix it, they are going to have to route around the damage - this backbone provider is malfunctioning, so neighbours are going have to route around it with a rule "don't send packets to X to that network, even if they say they can handle it". Or maybe just "don't send packets to that network at all".
In the short term, this can be patched around, and if it happens rarely, network managers can deal with it. But if they keep doing it, and the practice spreads, the whole network management falls to pieces.
The Internet can't work smoothly when administrators let their machines lie about where they can route traffic to, and everyone else has to have a huge perpetual continually-updated manual list of "where to not send data" that overrides the automatic "where to send data" protocols that computers auto-negotiate.
So, anyway, what has Josh done now? I'm not sure. If I had to guess, something fundamental to send route advertisements that rewrite the Internet backbone's routing tables to basically set a load of his distributed data centres around the world to be the optimum route to his network. Automatically overriding any automated choice to go through the bad "black hole" people, by winning on "cost". If he's saying he's got the best direct route to his network from each data centre, all the automated machines will believe him. It automates the route-around.
Arguably he may be falsely advertising too low a cost, so the data takes a longer route than it should, but it's a much less bad lie than their lie. It's a clear workaround, and he wouldn't have to do it if they weren't lying.
They of course could start lying more to try to override his routes.
This could rapidly get out of hand - how far are they prepared to break the entire Internet?
The whole thing works on the assumption of good faith and co-operation, and people not sending false advertisements. If tolerated, it's hard to see how the Internet survives.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: ApocalipstickNow ---I didn’t understand any of that, I’m just picturing very determined bunnies hopping on journeys with boxes of newspaper cuttings about people doing stupid things.
--- End quote ---
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