344: 1337: Part 4 - Revision history

172.68.35.162: /* Transcript */ Fix typo

2025-05-12T19:28:40Z

‎Transcript: Fix typo

Kynde at 21:10, 10 February 2025

2025-02-10T21:10:58Z

172.69.194.151: /* Explanation */ Better flow

2024-10-24T11:46:09Z

‎Explanation: Better flow

CalibansCreations: /* Explanation */

2024-10-24T07:27:24Z

‎Explanation

172.71.178.218: /* Explanation */ punc, if you must

2024-05-13T10:35:50Z

‎Explanation: punc, if you must

172.71.154.104: /* Explanation */

2024-05-13T04:10:02Z

‎Explanation

Firestar233: more grammar

2023-10-23T02:23:35Z

more grammar

FaviFake at 08:38, 29 August 2023

2023-08-29T08:38:41Z

FaviFake at 16:29, 28 August 2023

2023-08-28T16:29:23Z

FaviFake: Fixed link (it was a redirect page)

2023-07-05T14:39:42Z

Fixed link (it was a redirect page)

@@ Line 67: / Line 67: @@
 :Mrs. Roberts: Don't let them provoke you, dear.
 :Man (off-panel): We don't want to hurt you, Ma'am.
-:Mrs. Roberts: Don't by silly. Record company employees can't just go into houses and slice people up.
+:Mrs. Roberts: Don't be silly. Record company employees can't just go into houses and slice people up.
 :[Pan back right to the two men who hold up the katana swords having left their briefcases closed on the floor. The closest RIAA man is holding a hand up, the other MPAA man is holding his sword in two hands and pointing it threateningly forward.]

@@ Line 17: / Line 17: @@
 * [[345: 1337: Part 5]]
-In this part, [[Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory Elaine Roberts]] returns to the second-best hacker in the world (she is the best, according to [[342: 1337: Part 2]]): her mom [[Mrs. Roberts]]. Together, they are an unstoppable force, and they help out a guy called Jon with a CSS decryptor ({{w|Content Scramble System}}, not to be confused with Cascading Style Sheets).
+In this part, [[Elaine Roberts]] returns to the second-best hacker in the world (she is the best, according to [[342: 1337: Part 2]]): her mom [[Mrs. Roberts]]. Together, they are an unstoppable force, and they help out a guy called Jon with a CSS decryptor ({{w|Content Scramble System}}, not to be confused with Cascading Style Sheets).
 This implies that {{w|Jon Lech Johansen}}'s DeCSS was written by Elaine. Jon Lech Johansen, also known as DVD Jon, is famous for {{w|DeCSS}}, a DVD decryption program that removes the copy obstruction from commercial DVDs. The {{w|Motion Picture Association of America}}, also known as the MPAA, was not amused.
@@ Line 86: / Line 86: @@
 [[Category:Comics sharing name|1337]]
 [[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] <!--Cueball is the one narrating as seen from part 2-->
-[[Category:Comics featuring Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory Elaine Roberts]]
+[[Category:Comics featuring Elaine Roberts]]
 [[Category:Comics featuring Mrs. Roberts]]
 [[Category:Comics featuring Richard Stallman]]

@@ Line 27: / Line 27: @@
 While Elaine is not ready to let them arrest her, she draws her knife, and they draw their {{w|katana}} swords out of their (way too short) briefcases. Mrs. Roberts says to her daughter that she should calm down, because it is illegal to slice people up in their own houses.
-However, the two men disagree and refer to the (non-existent, as Title IV ends with Section 407) DMCA Title IV, Section 408: Authorization of Deadly Force. So now the two women are in lethal danger.
+However, the two men disagree and refer to the DMCA Title IV, Section 408: Authorization of Deadly Force (non-existent, as Title IV ends with Section 407). So now the two women are in lethal danger.
 But of course, [[Richard Stallman]], founder of the {{w|GNU Project}} and stalwart defender of freedom and {{w|copyleft}}, cannot stand for this kind of repression of freedom. (In the real world, Stallman is not a swordsman, but he is always depicted with two katana swords in xkcd, first time was in [[225: Open Source]].) In keeping with the "{{w|Kill Bill}}" themes from earlier in the series, [[Randall]] imagines the conflict between Elaine/Stallman/Mrs. Roberts vs MPAA/RIAA agents as an action-packed katana battle, rather than the legal battle it would likely have been in real life.

@@ Line 27: / Line 27: @@
 While Elaine is not ready to let them arrest her, she draws her knife, and they draw their {{w|katana}} swords out of their (way too short) briefcases. Mrs. Roberts says to her daughter that she should calm down, because it is illegal to slice people up in their own houses.
-However, the two men disagree and refer to the DMCA Title IV, Section 408: Authorization of Deadly Force. (There is actually no Title IV, Section 408 of the DMCA; Title IV ends with Section 407.) So now the two women are in lethal danger.
+However, the two men disagree and refer to the (non-existent, as Title IV ends with Section 407) DMCA Title IV, Section 408: Authorization of Deadly Force. So now the two women are in lethal danger.
 But of course, [[Richard Stallman]], founder of the {{w|GNU Project}} and stalwart defender of freedom and {{w|copyleft}}, cannot stand for this kind of repression of freedom. (In the real world, Stallman is not a swordsman, but he is always depicted with two katana swords in xkcd, first time was in [[225: Open Source]].) In keeping with the "{{w|Kill Bill}}" themes from earlier in the series, [[Randall]] imagines the conflict between Elaine/Stallman/Mrs. Roberts vs MPAA/RIAA agents as an action-packed katana battle, rather than the legal battle it would likely have been in real life.

@@ Line 23: / Line 23: @@
 Both the MPAA and the {{w|Recording Industry Association of America}} (RIAA) use the {{w|Digital Millennium Copyright Act}}, shortened to DMCA, as a kind of brute club to silence "infringements" on their copyright. In a perfect world, the DMCA provides safe harbor protection to websites and consumers to make fair use of copyrighted content, while also affording copyright owners the ability to protect their works from being pirated. In this world, this means that any content restriction system, no matter how weak and poorly executed, cannot be circumvented, and discussion of circumvention is illegal as well.
-This is not a perfect world{{cn}}, and in the end, the Roberts team is noticed. Two men with black bowler hats and briefcases with the abbreviations MPAA and RIAA show up at their house to arrest them. The two men look very much like {{w|Thomson and Thompson}} from {{w|The Adventures of Tintin}}, who are (bumbling) policemen/detectives who do not usually attempt violence or wield weapons more dangerous than a standard furled umbrella, but here it more likely depicts the {{tvtropes|NebulousEvilOrganization|Nebulous Evil Organization}}'s corporate variation upon the Men In Black.
+This is not a perfect world,{{cn}} and in the end, the Roberts team is noticed. Two men with black bowler hats and briefcases with the abbreviations MPAA and RIAA show up at their house to arrest them. The two men look very much like {{w|Thomson and Thompson}} from {{w|The Adventures of Tintin}}, who are (bumbling) policemen/detectives who do not usually attempt violence or wield weapons more dangerous than a standard furled umbrella, but here it more likely depicts the {{tvtropes|NebulousEvilOrganization|Nebulous Evil Organization}}'s corporate variation upon the Men In Black.
 While Elaine is not ready to let them arrest her, she draws her knife, and they draw their {{w|katana}} swords out of their (way too short) briefcases. Mrs. Roberts says to her daughter that she should calm down, because it is illegal to slice people up in their own houses.

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 ==Explanation==
-This is the fourth part of five in the "[[:Category:1337|1337]]" series. The title 1337 is "L-eet," or "elite," using the {{w|Leet}} alphabet, a coding system used primarily on the internet (and on early text messaging system), meant to provide a bit of {{w|obfuscation}} to plain text both to make it harder to read and to show off in a creative way using in-group jargon. The comic is narrated by [[Cueball]] as seen in part 2, but that Cueball is not shown here, but still, he is part of this comic series, and thus also this comic.
+This is the fourth part of five in the "[[:Category:1337|1337]]" series. The title 1337 is "L-eet," or "elite," using the {{w|Leet}} alphabet, a coding system used primarily on the internet (and on early text messaging systems), meant to provide a bit of {{w|obfuscation}} to plain text both to make it harder to read and to show off in a creative way using in-group jargon. The comic is narrated by [[Cueball]] as seen in part 2, but that Cueball is not shown here, but still, he is part of this comic series, and thus also this comic.
 This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday to Friday) and not over the usual schedule of three comics a week. These are all the comics in [[:Category:1337|1337 series]]:

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 ==Explanation==
-This is the fourth part of five in the "[[:Category:1337|1337]]" series. The title 1337 is "L-eet," or "elite," using the {{w|Leet}} alphabet, a coding system used primarily on the internet (and on early text messaging system), meant to provide a bit of {{w|obfuscation}} to plain text both to make it harder to read and to show off in a creative way using in-group jargon.
+This is the fourth part of five in the "[[:Category:1337|1337]]" series. The title 1337 is "L-eet," or "elite," using the {{w|Leet}} alphabet, a coding system used primarily on the internet (and on early text messaging system), meant to provide a bit of {{w|obfuscation}} to plain text both to make it harder to read and to show off in a creative way using in-group jargon. The comic is narrated by [[Cueball]] as seen in part 2, but that Cueball is not shown here, but still, he is part of this comic series, and thus also this comic.
-All comics in the series:
+This series was released on five consecutive days (Monday to Friday) and not over the usual schedule of three comics a week. These are all the comics in [[:Category:1337|1337 series]]:
-*[[341: 1337: Part 1]]
+* [[341: 1337: Part 1]]
-*[[342: 1337: Part 2]]
+* [[342: 1337: Part 2]]
-*[[343: 1337: Part 3]]
+* [[343: 1337: Part 3]]
-*[[344: 1337: Part 4]]
+* [[344: 1337: Part 4]]
-*[[345: 1337: Part 5]]
+* [[345: 1337: Part 5]]
 In this part, [[Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory Elaine Roberts]] returns to the second-best hacker in the world (she is the best, according to [[342: 1337: Part 2]]): her mom [[Mrs. Roberts]]. Together, they are an unstoppable force, and they help out a guy called Jon with a CSS decryptor ({{w|Content Scramble System}}, not to be confused with Cascading Style Sheets).

@@ Line 31: / Line 31: @@
 However, the two men disagree and refer to the DMCA Title IV, Section 408: Authorization of Deadly Force. (There is actually no Title IV, Section 408 of the DMCA; Title IV ends with Section 407.) So now the two women are in lethal danger.
-But of course, {{w|Richard Stallman}}, founder of the {{w|GNU Project}} and stalwart defender of freedom and {{w|copyleft}}, cannot stand for this kind of repression of freedom. (In the real world, Stallman is not a swordsman, but he is always depicted with two katana swords in xkcd, first time was in [[225: Open Source]].) In keeping with the "{{w|Kill Bill}}" themes from earlier in the series, [[Randall]] imagines the conflict between Elaine/Stallman/Mrs. Roberts vs MPAA/RIAA agents as an action-packed katana battle, rather than the legal battle it would likely have been in real life.
+But of course, [[Richard Stallman]], founder of the {{w|GNU Project}} and stalwart defender of freedom and {{w|copyleft}}, cannot stand for this kind of repression of freedom. (In the real world, Stallman is not a swordsman, but he is always depicted with two katana swords in xkcd, first time was in [[225: Open Source]].) In keeping with the "{{w|Kill Bill}}" themes from earlier in the series, [[Randall]] imagines the conflict between Elaine/Stallman/Mrs. Roberts vs MPAA/RIAA agents as an action-packed katana battle, rather than the legal battle it would likely have been in real life.
 The title text is talking about a {{w|Linux}}-ism. In GNU/Linux (and all Unix derivatives), ~ is a symbol for a user's home directory (usually <code>/home/<username></code>). Presumably, "nomad" is Elaine's username. <code>find</code> is an application that recursively walks a filesystem, listing all files, and <code>xargs shred</code> takes those files and securely erases each one with pseudo-random data. This is different from simply deleting a file, which merely removes the pointer in the filesystem's record tables to the file's location on the hard disk. The latter can usually be recovered from. Secure delete, however, requires physically taking apart a disk and reading individual bits for remaining magnetic charge to attempt to reconstruct what was there. This means she was trying to permanently delete her and Elaine's files, presumably so the agents wouldn't have any proof of their hacking.
@@ Line 77: / Line 77: @@
 :[A wide panel showing the whole scene with even Mrs. Robert now standing having just pushed her chair back, the computer inert. Elaine is bending in the knees, knife at the ready. Both bowler hat men, still holding their swords as before, but no hands up, have turned to look right back over their shoulder to see who speaks, as a voice comes from off-panel right.]
 :Richard Stallman (off-panel): <big>Hark!</big>
 :[The scene pans further right, so the two women are no longer in the panel, but Richard Stallman can now be seen with his wild beard and long hair and holding two katana swords, one in front of him and one over his head also pointing towards the two bowler hat med. They are standing normally, looking back at Stallman. The MPAA man nearest him holds a hand to his mouth as he speaks.]