Didn’t Sony make a floppy disk camera years ago?
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Jokes and crimes aside, I have been reading that we will soon have a file blackout. We have never taken as many photos as we do today. But today’s little baby may find it difficult to show what it was like to live in our time to his grandchildren.
The other day I found some undeveloped films at my parents’ house. It was an old Kodakchrome from 1982. It was still possible to develop and print the photos. If JPG files can’t be read at the turn of the century, all of this will be lost…
I think the same goes for websites, social media posts and even this BBS. Will historians of the future laugh at the paradoxical irony of we having created and consumed so much content that there is no way to read it?
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Plus:
A woman with a lengthy criminal history
Two of his victims were native women. It doesn’t mention if she was or wasn’t or even her name, but that would be yet another reason to keep clear of the cops.
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Perhaps she sat on it for a week because she was afraid of legal repercussions, or (I think more likely), she just didn’t view the contents for a week. The article isn’t clear about why she waited a week.
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She ought to be awarded free therapy for the rest of her life. I can’t imagine the shock of seeing something like that with no forewarning.
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Mike’s one question privilege test: If you have done nothing wrong, are you still afraid of what will happen if the police show up?
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The blurb on boing boing is a bit misleading. This wasn’t much of a “date” as it was in the guy’s truck. Also, the theft was probably not “whimsical” because the woman had a criminal history including theft, assault, and prostitution… This wasn’t dinner at the Olive Garden.
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Yes, if it was stolen by a private citizen. Google “private search doctrine”. No, if it was stolen by a government agent. Google “exclusionary rule”. The exclusionary rule is designed to protect us from unlawful searches by the government. We have laws against theft to protect us from each other, but discoveries made by a thief can still be used by the government against us, although stolen evidence still isn’t ideal from a prosecution perspective since a defense attorney might challenge its authenticity or integrity (as they are trying to do in this case).
If the thieves are working at the direction of the government then the private search doctrine doesn’t usually apply.
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What, you’ve never heard of a sex work encounter being described as a date? Sex work is work.
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Well as long as we know who the REAL criminal is… not the serial killer, but the petty thief and prostitute… /s
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That’s the wrong question…
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Yep.
And maybe the more pertinent question isn’t about her waiting a week but why the heck the trial is…
set to begin more than four years after a woman turned in a stolen digital memory card that authorities say contained gruesome recordings of one of the killings
4 years?!? With video evidence, a confession, the bodies, and geo-tagging evidence?
Oh, yeah, because the victims got the hat trick of being women, indigenous, and (seemingly) sex workers.
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A part of me assumes he was kept in preliminary custody* while the police finished up wrapping the case. It may take time to reunite all evidence (ie: locating the corpses, performing autopsies, interviewing people) before starting the trial.
Another part of me knows that you’re probably right.
** Don’t know if “preliminary custody” is the proper word. Here if someone is caught doing a crime, and there’s reasonable chance that if freed it will keep commiting the crime, it may be jailed until the trial happens. Time spent in “preliminary custody” is counted against the sentence. As it is used for both violent and POLITICAL crimes, it is sometimes seen as somewhat unjust (and as a way to politically repress ideas).
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While I appreciate the interest in the impermanence of digital memory and changing formats for storage, this is a story about indigenous women being murdered by a man who had been investigated before, yet still their families have had to wait years for even the beginnings of the hope of seeing justice.
Can we please move any future posts on that topic to its own thread? It feels minimizing and disrespectful here.
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Too bad the metadata would clearly show when it was created and added to the card. 
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This happens far too often…
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The brutal reality we face as women in a misogynistic society is unpalatable, so of course tech inclined guys would rather talk about the irrelevant technology rather than the actual topic at hand.
If people think about inhumane problems that don’t personally affect them too much, they might actually start to care…
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So?
Regardless of why the woman was in the truck, regardless of whether she impulsively stole the SD card or planned to steal when she got in the truck, stealing it and handing it over to the police has saved lives. Men like this don’t stop killing unless they are jailed or become to feeble.
This woman risked her own freedom to turn in that card and try to get justice for the victims. Casting aspirations upon her work or character is gross. Given the man’s chosen victims, indigenous women without homes, it could have been decades and dozens of victims before he was caught. Serial killer Samuel Little chose similar victims and wasn’t caught until he’d killed at least 93 victims.
There’s probably also going to be trauma from knowing how close she was to being murdered too and fear he will come after her if he escapes.
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