Top all-time · #215
Matthew Skala
Personal blog · ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entryprogrammingsystemsphilosophy
Matthew Skala writes Ansuz, a personal blog at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca about programming, systems and philosophy. Since 2007, 217 different Hacker News readers have linked it 319 times, most often “What Colour are your bits? (2004)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 17 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matthew Skala's essay "What colour are your bits?" to argue that copyright law looks at where bits came from, not the bits themselves. It is cited in copyright and DRM threads.
- Recommended for · 17 comments
- Called a classic, mandatory, canonical and a good overview; one commenter says it opened their eyes
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- What Colour are your bits? (2004)102 people · 142 mentions · first linked 2019-01-02
- What colour are your bits? (2004)89 people · 114 mentions · first linked 2010-06-02
- What Colour are your bits?21 people · 24 mentions · first linked 2007-05-02
- Mastodon WTF timeline (2017)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-24
- Colour, social beings, and undecidability 3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-02-09
- /entry/23/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-15
- The Terrible Secret of OpenType Glyph Substitution (2010)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-26
- Alden: Detachable terminal sessions without breaking scrollback2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-23
What Hacker News says?
Legally correct isn't a more (or less) pedantic version of technically correct. Legally correct means primarily correct with respect to the colour[0] of a thing. Technical correctness disregards colour entirely. Absence of "Download" button on a site, or in a context menu, is not technically a technical measure, particularly when you can press F12 and poke around the Network tab to get to the same resource, all enti…
Comment linking /entry/23
on “YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA”Submitted Mastodon WTF timeline (2017) as a story · 124 points
HN discussionJust noticed the Terry Davis cameo in the comments with one of his random generated god quotes - http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23#terry-a-davis-1274100060 This article got even better.
Comment linking /entry/23
on “W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns”Submitted Some Thoughts on the Cost Disease as a story · 81 points
HN discussionI think he's referring to this classic article (or one of its follow-ups): http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Comment linking /entry/23
on “W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns”Submitted What colour are your bits? (2004) as a story · 75 points
HN discussionI believe it's a reference to http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Comment linking /entry/23
on “W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns”Submitted What Colour are your bits? (2004) as a story · 70 points
HN discussionThis may be completely true in a technical sense, but that's not how the law works (see https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 ). And while the same bits pass through your connection, this equivalence already breaks down right away: There is clearly a difference between persisting a media file to disk vs having it ephemeral in browser memory.
Comment linking /entry/23
on “YouTube-dl's repository has been restored”Submitted What colour are your bits? (2004) as a story · 69 points
HN discussionSee https://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/waldman:tangler... and https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Comment linking /entry/23
on “BitTorrent v2”Submitted What Colour are your bits? (2004) as a story · 51 points
HN discussionThe always-classic "what color are your bits?" https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Comment linking /entry/23
on “A Facebook crawler was making 7M requests per day to my stupid website”Submitted What Colour are your bits? as a story · 48 points
HN discussionIndeed, however remember the mandatory "What colour are your bits ?" : https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Comment linking /entry/23
on “QOI: Lossless Image Compression in O(n) Time”Submitted The fundamental attribution error (2013) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionAs far as law is concerned, data is not just data -- bits have colour: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Comment linking /entry/23
on “Congrats! Web scraping is legal! (US precedent)”Submitted Mountain-climbing addresses for code lines as a story · 16 points
HN discussion> Bang! you have a non-gpl copy of the program! Moreover, it is 100% yours and you can re-license it as you want. This will be a boon for copyleft-allergic developers! Thinking that this would conveniently bypass the fact that your goal was to copy the code seems to be the most common legal fallacy amongst software developers. The law will see straight through you, and you will be found to have infringed copyright.…
Comment linking /entry/23
on “GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?”Submitted What Colour are your bits? as a story · 12 points
HN discussionAKA "colored bits": https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 The example used in this article uses one-time pad to produce random noise and an appropriate key that, when XORed together, produces a copyrighted work. No worky in the eyes of the law.
Comment linking /entry/23
on “Police playing music while being filmed, seemingly to trigger copyright filters”Submitted Alden: Detachable terminal sessions without breaking scrollback as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThis classic essay is ever relevant http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Comment linking /entry/23
on ““My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims””Submitted What color are your bits? An interesting perspective on copyright and IP law as a story · 7 points
HN discussionBits can’t be colored... http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Comment linking /entry/23
on “Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation”Submitted The Terrible Secret of OpenType Glyph Substitution (2010) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionDoesn't matter what you signed and how it relates to civil law, you cannot sign away your statutory rights. What matters is how criminal law views this particular data collection in the context of Facebook's working relationship with this particular client, within all of the various jurisdictions that Facebook operates. The article "What Colour Are Your Bits", is a pretty good look at this - http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca…
Comment linking /entry/23
on “Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation”Submitted What Colour are your bits? Why XOR can't circumvent copyright [2004 classic] as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> But they need not be functional or even intelligible as anything other than as part of instructions, e.g., short strings of octal values representing characters, with wildcard characters interspersed. I think you're misunderstanding how copyright law views works. A "work" in the sense of copyright law isn't a pattern of bits: it's a creative expression of an idea (a binding between a pattern of bits and some conce…
Comment linking /entry/23
on “A federal court has denied a pre-trial motion to dismiss a GPL enforcement case”Submitted What Colour are your bits? (2004) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
