Why should anyone involved retain any anonymity?

I’m asking in good faith because naively it seems like this should not even exist. All of it should be exposed.

EDIT: I did not think about the innocent folks that might be caught in the crossfire. That checks out. Thanks everyone!

David Leigh then published the decryption key in his 2011 book about Wikileaks (for some reason) and the info became publicly available. Everyone pinned the blame on Assange.

Moral of the story: journalists can and will disclose ridiculously sensitive info you give them for a bit of fame and you should be extremely careful about covering your tracks.

It generally prohibits other redactions, and expressly prohibits redactions for embarassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.

Of course, there is considerable concern that the actual reactions do not appear to comply with the legal requirements.

Specifically, a number of Epstein victims have complained that the release was unacceptable because it was incomplete, illegally redacted material other than victim names which was not excepted from release under the law mandating release, and because it failed to redact victim identities required to be protected under the law mandating release.

What would be the fallout? The Democrats are complicit, the regime all but controls the judiciary (at least the Supreme Court.) And a lot of these guys are billionaires and untouchable anyway unless someone does a Luigi on them. They have the ability to just brute force past the controversy and yet they've chosen to attempt the most ridiculously inept coverup possible.

On the one the sheer stupidity of this administration and its incompetence at implementing fascism means that as bad as things are they could be much worse. On the other hand I fear that once JD Vance or someone just as evil but without Trump's instability takes power we're going to wish we'd done something more when we had the chance.

This case is so important and such a clusterfuck that the files need to be opened anyway.

So yes this is best explanation. Revealing everything might bring great harm to innocent people just because they were somehow mentioned in the documents.

Just add all the experience we already have with “internet investigators” that ruin people lives for petty reasons.

So until it manages to do that, I’ll keep being bullish on what works.

Thank you, whoever added the setting to revert back to the terminal experience.

But no, what I meant to get at is that DHH's ego is radioactive. RailsConf tried to open their keynote to having Maybe Perhaps Someone Else Talk Sometime and DHH's response was, as it were, [off the rails](https://world.hey.com/dhh/no-railsconf-faa7935e). RailsWorld started the next year and, happy to have DHH keynote, took off. RailsConf swiftly died.

If you're running an ecosystem with a vocal community, is that a fire you want to play with?

For some reason there’s a large swath of people who really don’t like people saying that.

That’s not really a thing anymore.

Just because you don’t agree with his views doesn’t make it “not a good look”.

In fact, the ability to think outside of his cultural bubble and go against the grain is something that makes him great.

But having DHH as a face of your programming language, a language that's supposed to have a "warm community", doesn't really make any sense, and it will obviously drive people away.

And yes. odds are that those who are going to church already have the "simple life" covered. So be careful of selection bias.

At no point in this post did the author assert they knew how your brain worked.

It is unfortunate that the ADA is designed so that the only mechanism of enforcement of disability rights is lawsuits. :-\

Maybe there should be some exceptions around things provided on a "best-effort" basis, if they can be very carefully crafted.

But I would never expect someone giving out a free service to spend extra money to make accommodations for me.

And you should not expect all disabled people in the country to waive their rights just because you do.

> So how did that work out for the hypothetical “disabled person”?

He didn't have access before, and he doesn't have access now. Nothing is worse for him.

It's not his responsibility to provide the service to others. It is the library's, and they clearly failed and are rightfully blamed for no one having access. If I were a normal person in the town, I would blame them, not the person filing the lawsuit.

If the library shut down because they had clear mold issues they refused to pay to fix, would you blame the immunocompromised, at risk person who filed the lawsuit? Or would you say the library should get its act together and provide a safe/healthy environment?

Imagine a school shutting down because they cannot afford all these new colored students that they could exclude before. Are you going to blame the colored students for insisting on their rights?

This is basic Civil Rights 101. You can't use the excuse of "we don't have money" to discriminate, which UCBerkeley was clearly doing.

> Now they nor anyone else has access to the free content.

Nothing is free. The library patron paid for it via taxes, as did everyone else. Just as everyone pays federal taxes, as did the person in another state who sued UC Berkeley. He's paying, and not getting what he is owed.

If you don't like it, just don't take federal funds. Many organizations' web sites are inaccessible, and that's totally OK and legal.

If the student had been blind and deaf should they hace flown someone out to personally communicate with them like was done with Helen Keller?

All federal funds that go to universities have strings attached. One of them is the requirement that all services to the public must be accessible. Not "try to be" or "make a good effort". It's up to the university to budget appropriately.

As a faculty member, a big percentage of any research grant I get goes straight to the department - I cannot use it for my research. It's up to the department to use the money appropriately, and if they're not budgeting for accessibility, it's on them.

> Was the person suing a student or prospective student of UC Berkeley who couldn’t get in because of accessibility?

For someone arguing so passionately, perhaps you should actually go learn something about the case?

> If the student had been blind and deaf should they hace flown someone out to personally communicate with them like was done with Helen Keller?

Great question. What does the law require for such a person?

There are even more mercenary groups, whose business model is basically extorting organizations for donations, threatening with expensive lawsuits and bad publicity.

It seems pretty likely to me that NAD's lawsuits are more about this, and less about actually caring about deaf access. There are a lot of them, and they seem to go for big pockets. Probably the efforts Berkeley went to to offer accessibility would have been deemed good enough to not sue over (for now) if they had donated.

It doesn't mean the causes such orgs ostensibly fight for aren't good. It's just that when enforcement is by lawsuit, it's inevitably selective enforcement, and that just creates a huge business opportunity for unscrupulous lawyers (which there is no shortage of).

It's a convenient narrative. Here's another one: Senior administrator at the university doesn't like the project. It costs money to provide as it is, and money is always tight at a public university. They should be more focused on income generating patents (which, BTW, UC Berkeley is/was good at). And now they want us to spend even more money? Let's kill the project.

I spent a long time at universities, and I also worked for 1.5 years in the university's disability division, so I somewhat know the needs of the disabled. Part of that division's role was "policing" professors' course pages (albeit only when a student complained), so I'm familiar with the territory. Our position was clear: It's the law.

I also know how university administrator's think - they rarely like initiatives meant for the public good for free.

Finally: How much money did they make suing UC Berkeley? Did anyone (other than the lawyers) make money out of it? Why are people so certain this was a money grabbing lawsuit?

The difference is that they won't win in court. There's no law requiring you to make your open source work accessible - unless that open source work was part of a project for which you got federal grants.

Sorry, but it's clear that many commenters to this thread no almost nothing about what happened, and are merely engaging in outrage mania.

In the real world, though, when people ask for grant money, they justify how the money will be used. If you didn't put a line item for accessibility, and didn't budget for it, it's on you.

Entirely irrelevant.

If a city has a public library, but refuses to build a wheelchair ramp, and an elevator to upper floors, and doesn't provide reasonable alternatives to these deficiencies, they can (and should) get sued. If the city then throws up their hand and says "Too expensive" and shuts down the library (everyone suffers), I will not be siding with the library.

But in this case, the complaint was that the transcription wasn’t perfect. Should they also be forced to take down the website if the speaker didn’t speak perfect English?

This is a falsehood. The complaint was that some videos had no transcription at all.

There were other complaints, BTW - it wasn't just subtitles. There were complaints about blind people not being able to read the docs.

Edit: I think one of the (multiple) complaints was poor transcription. What I meant by "falsehood" was actually referring to an earlier comment that said something to the effect of "they provided subtitles". In some cases they did not provide subtitles.

But the overall question, is the world a better place now that the information isn’t available to anyone?

Sorry, but the question is: Is the world a better place if organizations feel they need not comply with this law?

If the answer is yes, then go fix the law. Stop picking on the little guys.

By this logic, because helen keller cant see or hear, we should eliminate all educational materials using written text and spoken word.

This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.

I'll reiterate my comment earlier: Most people in this thread don't seem to have any idea how any of this works.

No - if someone cannot see, the law doesn't say eliminate visual material. It's more like "Provide alternative means for them to understand the same concepts (while keeping the same material)."

There are standards on what accommodations to provide for which disabilities. This isn't something everyone has to figure out on their own. If the standards dictate something for people who are both blind and deaf, it's because it is not technically onerous to provide for them.

I don't know if the standards do for this case, though.

> This is simply an insane, bad-faith take.

What I find to be bad faith is people skirting around the issue that the problem (if any), is not those who complained, but the law. This isn't an isolated case. Both Harvard and MIT were also sued. And just like Berkeley, both ultimately settled. If 3 of the top universities can't fight this, it means that if you want change, lobby to change the law. Start looking into how these universities are pushing to change the law. If they aren't, you'll get a good sense of why these laws exist.

Free education provided at zero profit to Berkeley, to great benefit to the public, and it was just the wholesome desire for subtitles that made the case?

Bullshit.

Tell us - how much money did they make?

While I think fixing it or even having a fundraiser would have been a much better response, I do put a good share of blame on the person that filed the lawsuit against a free side project.

To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.

As I said - if this is such an obvious wrong, fix the damn law. As it is written, Berkeley didn't have a leg to stand on.