Comment by gowld
2 months ago
This is part of what discouraged me from going to law school. So much of litigation is Kabuki theater, grant rhetoric not in any way intended at achieving a just or logical outcomes, but designed only to the person in power an excuse to decide however they had already wanted to decide before the case was tried.
> So much of litigation is Kabuki theater, grant rhetoric not in any way intended at achieving a just or logical outcome
Agreed, that is what this sounds like. What stood out to me is the remark »“only marginal value” is just self-important message-board hedging«: it's also simply correct, but the author concluded that they shouldn't have said it because "marginal" plus a bunch of explanation didn't have the rhetorical value that "no" would have had
Someone could legitimately configure a WAF-like system to scan for various ways of querying the database schema coming in as HTTP requests (keywords like "information_schema", encodings thereof, etc.), which will always be hacking attempts and can be blocked. If you already have the schema, you can craft a query without needing to bypass that restriction first. Is this likely to be a serious barrier at all? No. Is it anything to do with self-importance? I don't see how that's the case, either. It seems simply correct that this is marginal (situated in the margins, not the point, not important to discuss), but by saying nothing but the truth, now the other side blows that up to something much bigger and tries to get the court to agree that, "see, their own expert says it has value!" And so this expert concludes that they shouldn't have said it, that they should have just said "no value" which I would say is wrong, but so marginally wrong that it's hard to prove for the opposing side that it is not fully correct, and thus being less correct helps you in (this) court... so it's about rhetoric as much as being an expert...