How do you draw a line between accessing disturbing contents such as child porn vs accessing a leaked document? It seems the former requires some additional moral take - what if the click was accidental and it was an attack? What if the person onlu watched but doesn’t possess the content?
In a court of law, the way we do for all grey areas between legal and illegal in our society. Law is not binary, it’s fuzzy and requires manual intervention. That’s ok.
However: That’s not what this article is about. That we don’t have a perfect solution for whatever weird corner cases (accidentally clicking on child porn?), should not change this very honest, serious and real issue the eff is addressing here. It is a distraction. We can hypothesise about edge cases until the cows come home, but to what end?
I get how a life of working in binary makes us immediately jump to the corner cases. It’s a curse on any legal discussion on HN. But it’s not relevant, and, imo, it dilutes the energy.
Edit : that came out harsh so I’d like to clarify: I get, 100%, where this “looking for the flaws” mentality comes from. It’s what makes a good programmer. A function that only follows the spec for 75% of its possible inputs is wrong. A law, not necessarily. We need to be careful not to keep our engineering hats on when switching to discussing law.
