More than 8,000 ride-share drivers flunked Mass. background checks - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2017/04/more_than_8000_ride_share_drivers_flunked_mass_background_checks <comment><USER2> Background checks are useless when so much bad information is floating around...

Is being caught with a gram of pot a good reason to not have a job? Because in states where it is (or even, was, but is not now) illegal its often a felony. I have friends who live in legal states with MJ posession charges from when it wasnt legal. Still haunting them... seems like bullshit all around...

On top of that, here's a fun little story. There is a guy, born a month after me to the day, in the next closest hospital to where I was born, with the exact same first, middle and last name as me. In 2003, he got in a bar fight that spilled out into a parking lot, during the fight his pants where torn (not taken off) in a way that exposed his genitals. He was charged with a sexual crime and is now a sex offender.

You wanna know how often that comes up on low level background checks for me? You know how much it sucks having to preempt a BGC with a future employer with "you might see a thing that says im a sex offender, here's a nice PDF i've made explaining the issue..."

The thing about this that makes it suck so hard, is not only are background checks bleeding other people's information into mine... but the guy is a sex offender for no reason at all... I feel bad for the dude.

Thats why this system sucks, regardless...

</comment><comment><USER3> I will take this with a grain of salt given the excessive criminalisation of ordinary behaviour. Even for horrible terms like "sex offender" we can not be sure if the guy was a rapist or someone getting a happy ending in massage parlour.

<comment><USER4> The sex-offenders are just a minuscule part of the rejected (less than 1%). How is a history of violent crime ordinary behaviour? How are multiple serious driving offenses ordinary?

<comment><USER5> Due to the nature of how they must be enforced these crimes are defined vaguely and arbitrarily in relation to actual risk to safety.

Assault, a common violent crime, doesn't actually require the person charged to have caused harm - no intent to cause physical injury needs to exist, and no physical injury needs to result - simply proving that one caused "apprehension of imminent contact" in the victim satisfies the legal definition of assault. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/assault](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/assault)

Driving offenses are also arbitrarily coded for easy enforcement - speed isn't as closely related to risk as following distance. If you exceed 80 mph in VA then that's considered reckless driving (a jailable offense), while no minimum following distance is enforced. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reckless_driving#Virginia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reckless_driving#Virginia)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Indefinite look back periods deprive people with decades-old convictions from doing honest work for honest pay. This is counterproductive to society.

<comment><USER7> The indefinite look back is only for certain disqualifying offenses. Most (many of which are still rather serious) are 7 years. [http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/dpu/transportation-network- comp...](http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/dpu/transportation-network- company/disqualifying-conditions.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Counterpoint: plenty of non-violent offecences there with unlimited lookback as well.

G.L. c. 272, §7 (Support From, or Sharing, Earnings of Prostitute)

G.L. c. 272, §12 (Procuring Person to Practice, or Enter a Place for Prostitution; Employment Office Procuring Person)

G.L. c. 272, § 16 (Open and Gross Lewdness and Lascivious Behavior)

G.L. c. 272, §53 (Indecent Exposure)

G.L. c. 272, §53 (Accosting or Annoying a Person of the Opposite Sex)

G.L. c. 272, §53A (Engaging in Sexual Conduct for a Fee)

G.L. c. 272, §105 (Upskirting)

<comment><USER9> Sexual assault is non-violent? These all sound like things that would reasonably disqualify drivers.

<comment><USER10> I disagree completely. Just what do you think the people you interact with every day are like when you don't see them? This is puritanism, nothing else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not really that big of a fan of Uber, I think they've done plenty of wrong. But I just don't see it here.

If these people have a record, then presumably they've _already been punished_ for whatever crime they committed. I don't see why Uber should be expected to punish them further beyond the requirements of law. Yet, FTA:

> The law did not call for state-run background checks to begin until next > year, but in November, Uber and Lyft agreed to let the state conduct the > checks beginning in January. That agreement did not include other ride-hail > companies that operate in Massachusetts, including Fasten and Safr.

So, Uber and Lyft are going above and beyond the requirements of the law, and Uber is still getting blasted. It's almost like a Taxi company wrote the article.

Also see tn135's comment about the excessive criminalisation of ordinary behavior: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14045065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14045065)

</comment><comment><USER12> > _"Thousands of people in Massachusetts have lost access to economic > opportunities as a result of a screening that includes an unfair and unjust > indefinite look-back period," an Uber spokeswoman said today. "We have an > opportunity to repair the current system in the rules process so that people > who deserve to work are not denied the opportunity."_

Given all of the negative press about Uber lately, you'd think they'd give some more thought before publicly defending the right of sex offenders, people with suspended licenses, and people with multiple serious driving offenses to work as taxi drivers.

<comment><USER13> I will defend the right of sex offenders, people with suspended licenses etc. unless I know the specific crime for which they were convicted. A person pissing in a bush can become a sexual offender, an 18 year old kid having sex with 16 year old girlfriend can become sex offender. People might get their license suspended because of economic hardship.

Putting all these people in same bracket as a brazen criminal is a bad idea.

<comment><USER12> What you're describing are really rare edge cases. Nearly all people on the sex offender registry actually did something that justifies being on there. And those people should _not_ be put into a position of power over strangers at night.

As for economic hardship, I don't see how that justifies getting a job as a driver when your license is suspended. It's literally illegal for them to drive at all like that. It doesn't matter why it's suspended, people for whom it is illegal to be driving should not be given a job as a driver.

<comment><USER14> Those `rare edge cases` you're marginalizing represent real people's lives.

[http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article41364675.html](http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article41364675.html)

I gotta say, It's a struggle for me to read these threads and see people who share your callous comfort with the status quo.

<comment><USER9> They are in fact rare cases, and the cases where those people are denied the desired opportunity to drive for Uber are even rarer. More people are raped --- set aside sexually assaulted --- in taxi cabs every year than are denied this opportunity.

It is obviously a real problem that people are placed on sex offender registries for peeing in bushed. But the commenter above isn't required to address every real problem in pointing out that there's a good public policy reason to avoid having people convicted of real sexual assault offenses driving cabs.

<comment><USER13> I think it is upto the ridesharing company to set the standards and not an arbitrary bureaucrat. In fact I believe people like you and me might be able to invent better methods of detecting people of dubious characters and can deny them job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _> The most common reason for rejecting a potential driver was a suspended license [on their record]_

A previously suspended license flunks the background check? I've had mine suspended for failing to pay a parking ticket that was never mailed to me. Kind of a lame reason to never be able to drive for lyft or uber.

<comment><USER7> No, they were rejected because they don't currently have an active license.

<comment><USER16> [http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/dpu/transportation-network- comp...](http://www.mass.gov/eea/docs/dpu/transportation-network- company/disqualifying-conditions.pdf) Last page. License suspended in the past 7 years.

I just finished dealing with threatening letters from the DMV telling me that my license was suspended because I cancelled my insurance 6 months ago. It turned out to be a race condition with my insurance company's software miscommunicating the dates of a policy change. If I had been out of town or received the notice three days later, I'd have this on my record, and I never did a damn thing wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's crazy that Uber would make such a fuss about this and characterize it as merely a matter of depriving putative drivers of income. Yes, there will almost certainly be instances in which the indefinite look-back period or criminal history criteria would lead to an arguably unfair outcome for a particular driver. However, surely that would be an issue for only a very small proportion of people. Even if it isn't, I can't help but take the utilitarian approach and err on the side of caution.

<comment><USER18> that isn't a utilitarian approach but a conservative one.

i'd argue that nearly all drivers who failed massachusetts's background check would likely provide very similar quality rides as current uber/lyft drivers. the utility to all of those now-working people certainly wouldn't be outweighed by the disutility of a potentially small (and probably statistically insignificant) rise in bad rides.

people make mistakes, but people change constantly. we should encourage positive change in people, not discourage it. allow people to do legitimate work despite past mistakes, rather than compounding the punitive effects of their mistakes and thus encouraging more bad behavior (often out of despair or desperation).

uber has made many mistakes, but i agree with them here. let these people work.

<comment><USER19> Checking each single applicant's offenses and determining wether it's relevant or not for their driver position takes a lot more time/money. If you want an automated process that guarantees the security of your customer aka the passengers as much as possible for the lowest cost possible you just eliminate anyone with "qualifying" offense. This is not more conservative than it is efficient.

<comment><USER18> no, if efficiency were your primary concern, then you would work to lower the adverse action rate of 11%, because typically you need to manually review each potential adverse action to avoid violating the FRCA when you reject the candidate. "clear" records require no manual review (obviously) so are more efficient than finding adverse records.

by contrast, uber & lyft are able to do background checks with less than a ~2% adverse action rate.

it's debatable that background checks make passengers safer, so getting rid of background checks altogether would be the most efficient of course.

checkr ([https://checkr.com/](https://checkr.com/)) has built a nice little business doing background checks despite the inefficiencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> great, we've successfully defended the status quo where people who commit crimes in the United States can't get jobs, and are therefore incentivized to become recidivists.

</comment><comment><USER21> What is Mass.?

<comment><USER22> The state of Massachusetts in USA. MA is the official abbreviation, but locally people use Mass. pretty frequently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Look, until the next Marilyn Manson is driving in ride sharing programs and randomly killing people that were otherwise contributing to society, I'm not going to care and will be perfectly content not caring about the illegitimate dragnet of sex offender status.

I care WAYYYY more about the driver masquerading as a local but doesn't know the roads for my daily commute.

They're going to be replaced by machines waay before a more comprehensive and relevant background check framework is established anyway, so stop trying to marginalize people trying to make a buck.

<comment><USER24> You know Marilyn Manson is a rock musician and not a spree killer right?

Edit: also what you describe has happened: [https://www.google.com/amp/www.gq.com/story/the-uber- killer/...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.gq.com/story/the-uber-killer/amp)

<comment><USER23> Meant charles i think, the serial killer, and my point stands</comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla platform to use separate processes for UI and web content  - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Content_Processes

<comment> old-gregg _Improve performance, especially on multi-core machines_

This is scary. I'm not ready to see the comeback of time when a single app would lock up the entire system for 5-10 seconds. I hope the next generation of OSes will have an option for how many cores each process is allowed to use.

Multiple cores aren't the answer to bloated software. Hey, my iPhone renders animation much smoother than Linux version of Firefox on Core 2 Duo - <USER2> there is plenty of room for improvement, but don't touch my cores, I need them to run other apps/sites!

<comment><USER3> You can set which cores a process runs on in Windows. In task manager, right click on a task and click 'set affinity'. I'm sure there's a way to do it in linux too, but my linux box only has one core.

<comment> old-gregg Yeah, I know. On Linux one can use nice/renice, but they deal with priorities, not CPU/core affinity.

<comment><USER4> In Linux, you use taskset to set CPU affinity. Not sure why you'd think to suggest nice/renice, since nothing related to them was mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The rendering engine in linux is already a separate library/process, but it still locks up when loading javascript-heavy sites.

Still, I hope this will improve performance.

<comment><USER6> Library (all code still runs in the same process) != process (code runs concurrently)</comment></comment>


The 3D Craze Is In Full Effect; Still Can't Find A Way In People's Homes - <AUTHOR> http://www.techi.com/2010/08/the-3d-craze-is-in-full-effect-still-cant-find-a-way-in-peoples-homes/ Been to the movie theaters lately? Well then you probably have heard about Avatar, Piranha 3-D, Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D, Despicable Me, Saw 3D, Titanic 3D (yeah, they are bringing back Titanic  in 3D), and so on. It's pretty clear that 3D is the movie industry's selling point right now, and people are actually buying into it. But are these people buying into the 3D experience at home? Not so much. <comment><USER2> I already have 3D. It's called reality.

This article mentions that one thing hampering 3D in the home is the incompatibility of the viewing glasses. Well perhaps that is actually the solution. Glasses that show the wearer 3D content on their own. It could even be synchronized for a group of individuals watching the same thing.</comment>


Stacked Pull Requests: Keeping GitHub Diffs Small (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://unhashable.com/stacked-pull-requests-keeping-github-diffs-small/ <comment><AUTHOR> Also wondering if this flow would be done differently in 2020.</comment>


Y2K: Canada prepared for an apocalypse that never happened - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-y2k-20th-anniversary-how-canada-prepared/ <comment><AUTHOR> No one notices when things go right:

> _"Should we all be feeling a bit silly this morning?" a journalist asked him > shortly after the date change._

> _"Why?" he replied, audibly annoyed. "Because we haven 't seen problems? You > know, I have been doing [interviews] now all day and I keep getting asked > the same questions. And it's a rather silly approach."_

> _From Mr. de Jager's perspective, he hadn't gotten anything wrong. > Businesses and governments had done what he told them to do. Their efforts > were the reason sparks weren't flying out of the global economy. It wasn't > evidence of a hoax, but mission accomplished._

> _Virtually no one was convinced._

Of course some people see things differently:

> _For doubters such as Mr. Loblaw, Jan. 1 felt like a vindication. When there > is a chance to say "I told you so" on an international scale, it is hard to > resist. He had pitched an article to The Globe and Mail, and in his op-ed > published Jan. 6 he outed himself as the creator of the Year 2000 website > and jeered Canadians who got "conned."_

[…]

> _In the past two decades, the millennium bug has become a kind of byword for > fraudulence and hysteria. Conservative politicians across the English- > speaking world have invoked our apparent overreaction to Y2K as a way of > minimizing concerns about climate change and a no-deal Brexit, both > disasters widely predicted by experts._</comment>


Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991 - <AUTHOR> http://dustinkirkland.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/vp-elect-joe-biden-is-responsible-for-open-sourcing-email-encryption/ <comment><USER2> The _whole US government tried to ban encryption wholesale_ in the 1990s; they even attempted to standardize a bespoke algorithm (Skipjack) that provided key escrow for law enforcement. During the same period, they religiously enforced export controls that classified any encryption code, including simple hash functions, as munitions. I remember buying a "this t-shirt is a munition" shirt in '95 by giving a website the numbers off the bottom of a check(!).

The government lost (although export controls still create annoyances today). Nobody in government seriously thinks industry is ever going to adopt a government-controlled encryption algorithm. Also, this isn't part of some secret history of the Internet; the entire cipherpunk movement was a reaction to the attempt to ban crypto.

If you want to keep perspective, it's important to remember that the world of 1993 looked very different from that of 2012. Very few people believed that every teenager in America would be using the Internet as their first line of communication, or that the Internet would steadily consume retail, finance, media, and even industrial controls. Commercial cryptography itself was merely nascent; "cryptography 2.0", a trend of the _late_ 90s, _introduced_ authenticated cryptography to the mainstream (prior to that people just encrypted and added checksums) --- look at SSHv1 and PGP for representative designs. Nobody understood anything in 1993.

Also:

 _Sense of Congress resolutions don't create law_. They're literally just statements of opinion. So the idea that this amendment would have "outlawed SSH" is directly mistaken.

And, the targeting of cryptography in this language is incidental. It was not only the "sense of Congress" but actual law that telco providers create facilities to enable (warranted) wiretaps --- that's CALEA, which passed in 1994. Biden's sense-of-Congress resolution is essentially just a capsule summary of CALEA made to sound slightly smarter with the word "plaintext".

<comment><USER3> Although Biden's amendment by itself wouldn't have outlawed SSH, it was enough to make programmers see the writing on the wall. A bill with domestic restrictions on encryption was approved by a House committee in the 1990s, and Biden's bill was what prompted PRZ to release PGP, as PRZ himself said at the time. See:

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20032910-281.html> In response to lobbying from the FBI, a House committee in 1997 approved a bill that would have banned the manufacture, distribution, or import of any encryption product that did not include a back door for the federal government. The full House never voted on that measure.

<comment><USER2> (a) You appear to be referring to a bill that died in a House committee.

(b) It's not in dispute that the DOJ opposed cryptography in the '90s (that's the lede of the comment you're replying to).

(c) The bill you're referring to had nothing to do with Biden.

(d) The one crypto-relevant bill that does bear Biden's name explicitly forbids the government from demanding that ISPs design networks so as to provide plaintext to law enforcement.

Let's keep the goal-posts clear here. The thread we're commenting on says _Joe Biden_ opposed encryption. That's relevant because Joe Biden is a part of the current administration. I wouldn't want to perpetuate that unfounded idea by pointing out that other people were opposed to encryption in the 1990s; it was a common belief back then.

<comment><USER4> "All right, among us now we that we are all in private just us girls all let our hair down" he didn't had much hair even then but he let it down "We are not going to prosecute your client Mr Zimmermann he said public key encryption will become available we fought a long loosing battle against it but it was just a delaying tactic" and then he looked around the room and he said "But nobody cares about anonymity do they?"

And a cold chilled went up my spine and I thought alright Stuart and now I know you're going to spent the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and let's see how it goes.

And it's going badly.

We didn't built the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake now we are paying for it.

Our network assumes that you can be tracked everywhere.

And we have taken the Web, and we made facebook out of it.

[http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom- of-t...](http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought- requires-free-media)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One little-known fact about Biden is that he authored the [Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995][1]. This bill was a precursor to the PATRIOT Act in several ways, such as by ["allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding FISA and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of 'terrorism' that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review."][2] See the Center for National Security Studies [analysis][3] (written in 1995) for more detailed info.

In his own words: "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill" (his bill was actually introduced before the Oklahoma City bombing).

[1]: <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d104:s.00390>: [2]: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html?tag=newsL...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.0) [3]: [http://w2.eff.org/Legislation/Bills_by_number/s390_hr896_95_...](http://w2.eff.org/Legislation/Bills_by_number/s390_hr896_95_cnss.analysis)

<comment><USER2> The anti-terrorism bill to which you refer does not simply criminalize political beliefs, as you imply; rather, it would have allowed prosecutions to raise federal terrorism charges for violent crimes if they met one 9 tests mostly having to do with deliberate attempts to disrupt commerce, target the US government explicitly, or involved people who were not US nationals. It was in that sense like "hate crimes" legislation.

The indefinite detention provision concerned foreign nationals _who could not be repatriated_ (which is a sticky problem everywhere), and provided for judicial review in the US DC Circuit.

It was a stupid bill, but that doesn't mean we should be imprecise about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the kind of thing one can expect when their leaders are so far removed from the people that they govern. Joe Biden has been in office since 1973. I'd wager that's longer than many of the HN readers have even been alive. When you have politicians who have been running around in the Washington circles that long, some really bad things will come of it.

So, at the time he proposed that, he had been in Washington for nearly 20 years. Shouldn't surprise anyone that he was pushing an agenda for a larger, more powerful federal government.

<comment><USER2> This statement would make sense if you could provide examples of (at the time) younger Senators who actively opposed crypto regulation so we could compare their track records as well.

<comment><USER6> Representative Bob Goodlatte was a proponent of relaxation of encryption controls; pushing for a law in 1999, only 6 years after assuming office. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Goodlatte>

Conrad Burns was a sponsor of the PROTECT Act which was an attempt to overhaul encryption regulations, including prohibiting domestic controls of encrypted software. He did this after being in office for about 8 years. [http://www.techlawjournal.com/cong106/encrypt/19990414burns....](http://www.techlawjournal.com/cong106/encrypt/19990414burns.htm)

edit: Goodlatte was a Rep, not a Senator.

<comment><USER7> John Kerry was anti-export control and pro-encryption rights at that time, and he's been a senator since 1985, so I don't think this is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Feinstein supported this, too. I wrote her a letter; her response was along the lines of "I don't care, and in any event it's good for you."

Haven't voted for her since.

With recent events, even though I don't live in CA any more, I plan to give her opponents money, for any election she's a candidate in.

<comment><USER9> I hope she loses in the next election. She was the one that pretty forcefully pushed the FISA reauthorization with as little debate as possible through Senate. It made me angry just hearing her talk about how the Senate shouldn't waste any time with the amendments and just quickly pass FISA before the year is over.

<comment><USER2> She cosponsored the bill they were renewing back in 2008. What did you expect her to think?

<comment><USER10> presumably learn from her mistakes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On this issue, Biden was clearly on the wrong side of history (and some of the fundamental tenets upon which the US was founded). But I don't think anyone, even ardent Obama supporters, would argue that he's the brightest star in the sky anyway. He is perhaps the strongest protection against an Obama assassination, since no one would want him to take office.

Fortunately, the system worked in this case. A dangerous law introduced by a dimwitted person was not allowed to weave its way into our system. As a result, the Internet flourished and we are able to discuss this issue on Hacker News. While we haven't been so lucky on other such laws, in general, we should all be grateful that the US system is as effective as it is in muzzling these types of people and the changes they try to make.

<comment><USER12> I personally consider myself a Biden fan. I have witnessed him talk sense on a number of issues in ways many politicians do not. (Example: several statements on Iraq, from before it was common in US politics to think that war was a bad idea.) The "Biden is dumb" narrative IMO mainly comes from DC-based press that exaggerates gaffes (real and perceived) and tends to blindly re-state existing DC press narratives.

I think the real story here is that US senator is not a good qualification for understanding crypto or technology as a whole. I don't believe that Biden inserted this language out of maliciousness. So our task then becomes to educate our representatives, or if it gets to that point on a single issue vote them out, though my impression is that Biden's opponents are also unlikely to understand crypto or do anything different about what is honestly something of a fringe issue - my vote this year was certainly not about sound crypto policy, and I doubt yours was either.

<comment><USER13> > I think the real story here is that US senator is not a good qualification > for understanding crypto or technology as a whole.

I think the issue the tendency of the government to constantly chip away at privacy. Terrorism, communism, illegal porn and drugs are all used as reasons.

Trying to find the reason Biden did what he did is not effective. We may never know the reason. We can look at actions -- what bills were supported, by whom and how far they have gotten in the pipeline. Biden's name or track record might not be relevant. This could have also been someone else.

For example the top half of the whole discussion is between chernevik and tptachek whether Biden is in general pro or against encryption. It doesn't really matter what Biden personally believes. But it matters how many and how far and how often such bills make it. Some are passed (like the warrant-less wiretapping), some die quickly.

Also there are countries that make use of encryption illegal. In this country, other laws have passed that chipped away at privacy, so it is understandable why a lot of people feel a little jittery about this topic -- because they can see this kind of bills passing with not too much opposition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As I recall, the 1991 version of me thought a lot of things that the 2012 version of me doesn't. I presume this is true for most humans, including Vice President Biden.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's interesting was that it was a last minute addition to an omnibus crime bill.

The same thing is still happening today where amendments attacking internet freedom get tagged onto existing bills under the guise of targeting "terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles, and organized crime" aka "The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyps...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse)

<comment><USER2> It was the official, overt policy of the Clinton administration through the 1990s.

I'm curious as to which amendments you refer to that "attack Internet freedom" in the guise of catching Internet predators.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm from Canada, last year we had an omnibus crime bill that included an amendment for government to warrantlessly track online activity which they defended as a way to track pedophiles.

[http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1131...](http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1131446 --conservative-bill-c-30-will-let-police-spy-on-canadians-online)

In the USA, this wasn't an amendment but would have affected far more than just predators: "Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Intern...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Children_from_Internet_Pornographers_Act_of_2011)

In the UK, there is the snoopers bill for monitoring online communication, choice quote [3]:

> "Criminals, terrorists and pedophiles will want MPs to vote against this > bill. Victims of crime, police and the public will want them to vote for it. > It's a question of whose side you're on," said Home Secretary Theresa May.

<http://rt.com/news/uk-snoopers-charter-may-276/>

There is certainly a pattern of using the "4 horsemen" to pass bills attacking internet freedom that affect all citizens not just the criminals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wrote about this four years ago when Obama chose Biden as his running mate: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html>

Note one House committee did vote in the 1990s to ban the "manufacture, distribution, or import of any encryption product that did not include a back door for the federal government," but that bill failed to become law: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20032910-281.html>

Excerpts: Biden's bill -- and the threat of encryption being outlawed -- is what spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP, thereby kicking off a historic debate about export controls, national security, and privacy. Zimmermann, who's now busy developing Zfone, says it was Biden's legislation "that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that year, shortly before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by civil libertarians and industry groups." ... After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden's bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it. A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department "to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks." Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits. ... The ACLU also had been at odds with Biden over his efforts to censor bomb-making information on the Internet. One day after a bomb in Saudi Arabia killed several U.S. servicemen and virtually flattened a military base, Biden pushed to make posting bomb- making information on the Internet a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in jail, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. ...

<comment><USER2> You wrote about this incorrectly; you cited Biden's language, which begins "It is the sense of Congress that", and then wrote "Translated, that means turn over your encryption keys", which it plainly does not mean, because sense-of- the-Senate language doesn't create law.

Then, you wrote "Joe Biden made his second attempt to introduce such legislation in the form of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)", although Leahy sponsored CALEA. You also failed to note that the _only mention of encryption in the bill exempts providers from responsibility for providing plaintext_ , instead casting CALEA as attempt to ban encryption, which it was not.

I would at this point like to ask you, as a journalist who claims to have covered this topic in detail, what evidence you can present that Joe Biden is "staunchly anti-cryptography".

<comment><USER3> There are two separate points here: first, whether PRZ released PGP because of what Biden's bill symbolized, and second, whether Biden was anti-crypto.

For the first, see PRZ's contemporaneous statement: <http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html> It was this bill that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that year, shortly before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by civil libertarians and industry groups.

For the second, I'd say Biden was more pro-law enforcement (and law enforcement wanted domestic controls on encryption) rather than anti-crypto. This played out not just in crypto but also Biden's support for CALEA, FISA expansion in the 1990s, the Patriot Act, etc: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html>

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I was needlessly hostile in my preceding comment.

You wrote about the bill as was part of an actual effort to restrict cryptography. But it wasn't. In fact, the bill preceded CALEA, which was a very important bill that established statutory authority for lawful intercept; lawful intercept is the most important concept captured in Biden's (practically meaningless) amendment, and cryptography is only ancillary.

Further, the record over the rest of the '90s supports that interpretation. Most importantly CALEA, which Biden cosponsored, and which forbids the federal government from requiring telcos to adopt any specific equipment (ie, the government could not mandate that MCI use switches with specific lawful intercept features) and which all but demands that telcos stay out of the business of encrypting and decrypting altogether, which is exactly what the cipherpunks wanted.

I'd like to see actual evidence supporting the idea that Biden opposed general-purpose cryptography. It may well exist, but I haven't found it on the record. Phil Zimmerman is many things, but "legal expert" is not one of them; we need to do better than "Phil Zimmerman felt like he was under attack" (all commercial cryptographers felt that way even after CALEA passed) and "Biden thought the director of NSA was competent" (hey, he probably was.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's worth noting that Silicon Valley's lobbying organization is inchoate and ineffective compared to more established causes. I'd love to change this. Why can't we use our strengths in crowd-funding and crowd-activism to flex our muscle a bit in some primaries?

California isn't going to be anything but solid blue anytime soon, but we could easily primary anti-privacy Democrats and replace them with pro-privacy Democrats. This is what the Tea Party has done to get rid of fiscal moderates in the Republican House caucus. There's no need to accept whatever creeps the major parties deign to give us.

</comment><comment><USER16> Read Crypto by Steven Levy. An amazing account of how cryptography was finally opened up for the Internet. Because before the Net, the wording of the law was very, very restrictive in a way that made no sense with how the Internet operated. It really is eye opening to see the role the NSA played and the tactics they used to try to keep things smothered. Not very different than what is still happening right now with the NSA, apparently.

<comment><USER2> What law are you referring to here?

<comment><USER16> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_United_States)

I was thinking of when the limit of crypto for export was 40 bits SSL, which would have made all e-commerce impossible due to the uselessness of 40 bit crypto. Luckily that was changed.

<comment><USER2> Export controls were a pain in the ass, but strong cryptography (or what we considered to be strong crypto at the time) was prevalent during the worst of it. Cryptography itself was never outlawed.

<comment><USER17> Useless semantics. Just because that strong crypto was somewhat de facto while the gears in washinton turned, doesn't negate the fact that the US has and still has a Orwellian slant to technology law, predicated on the desire for control and power over everyday interactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why does it surprise anyone that the US government tried to ban encryption early on? That's the general direction the US government has taken for a long time. The Supreme Court has shaved the "unreasonable search and seizure" protection so thin, that it almost doesn't ever apply. The COINTELPRO (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO>) efforts in the 60s shows that the US government hasn't really respected any kind of privacy for a very long time. Banning encryption is the end point of a couple of trends, copy protection (a.k.a. "Digitial Rights Management") and "The War on Terrorism"/"The War on Drugs". The US government just can't make certain that nobody's "Intellectual Property" isn't being "stolen" if any encrypted information flows. Similarly, encryption only helps "terrorists" and "drug dealers" trying to "launder money" or recruit other terrorists to sell crack or something, I get all confused.

But seriously folks, read the writing on the wall: banning encryption is the end point of some trends with a lot of power behind them.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if Biden is whispering similar ideas into Obama's ears, and if it's why Obama is so keen on trampling on the 4th amendment these days.

<comment><USER2> This statement is profoundly ignorant on many levels, including the relationship between Obama and Biden, Biden's relationship to '90s crypto regulation, and Obama's take on the 4th amendment.

Let's try to catalog the misconceptions here:

* Biden is not a key Obama influencer. The VP rarely is, but this one in particular.

* Obama's tensions with the 4th Amendment stem from counterterrorism and a desire to continue joint NSA/FBI programmatic surveillance systems that they believe are catching terrorists. At the time Biden proposed this language, _we were still subsidizing those same terrorists_.

* Biden was not the point person for '90s anti-crypto legislation.

* Biden was a cosponsor of CALEA, which actually explicitly exempts providers from decrypting encrypted content.

<comment><USER3> I'd add a friendly amendment: CALEA was intended to be a first step, a "beachhead," toward domestic controls on encryption. The fact that the second step was not successful came despite efforts by Biden, the FBI, the NSA, etc. -- not because of them. See below.

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html> "Joe Biden made his second attempt to introduce such legislation" in the form of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was also known as the Digital Telephony law, according to an account in Wired magazine. Biden at the time was chairman of the relevant committee; he co-sponsored the Senate version and dutifully secured a successful floor vote on it less than two months after it was introduced. CALEA became law in October 1994, and is still bedeviling privacy advocates: the FBI recently managed to extend its requirements to Internet service providers. CALEA represented one step in the FBI and NSA's attempts to restrict encryption without backdoors. In a top- secret memo to members of President George H.W. Bush's administration including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and CIA director Robert Gates, one White House official wrote: "Justice should go ahead now to seek a legislative fix to the digital telephony problem, and all parties should prepare to follow through on the encryption problem in about a year. Success with digital telephony will lock in one major objective; we will have a beachhead we can exploit for the encryption fix; and the encryption access options can be developed more thoroughly in the meantime."

<comment><USER2> I'd ask here how a bill can be a "beachhead" against encryption when it forbids the government from even requiring that telcos adopt equipment for which wiretaps are feasible, and when it specifically exempts telcos from being required to facilitate decryption.

<comment><USER19> For clarity, you're talking about 103(b)(3)?

[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act_of_1994)

That doesn't look like a ward against anything, to me. It looks like a compromise stuck into the bill because of push-back from "cypherpunks". If the political winds had changed, or change in the future, that part of CALEA would be removed by a new law.

I think most politicians have no problem banning strong encryption and mandating ISP decryption of it all. Even most citizens have no problem banning strong encryption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To the OP: thanks for the post, but the font is nearly unreadable for older guys like me on smaller devices.

</comment><comment><USER21> Fortunately, Biden stayed up all night last night trying to solve the fiscal cliff. Or maybe unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER22> Joe biden, the titular head of freedom in the Senate.

</comment><comment><USER23> Only the government should have access to encryption and guns. Why would ordinary citizens need these things?

</comment><comment><USER24> I wish he had succeed. Digital, not just email, encryption is a threat to national security.

<comment><USER25> When I read these kind of comments, I am not sure if these commentators are compensated better than China's 50 cent party. Some mturk generated comments would probably provide more qualitative contributions than something like this.

<comment><USER26> > When I read these kind of comments, I am not sure if these commentators are > compensated better than China's 50 cent party. Some mturk generated comments > would probably provide more qualitative contributions than something like > this.

I doubt anyone bothers to pay people to post this stuff to Hacker News. The battle over crypto is essentially over at this point.

As an aside, 'qualitative' is not a synonym for 'quality'; it means 'involving distinctions based on qualities' and contrasts with 'quantitative', which refers to distinctions based on numerical measurements.

<comment><USER25> I have seen repeatedly comments appearing on subjects like these, written by relatively new accounts and supporting some form of surveillance measures. What they have in common is, that they just make a 1-sentence statement "we should be thankful that someone is protecting us", and provide no further arguments for their case. But them being troll baits might be more realistic. After all we are still arguing about it.

If you are trying to nit-pick about word definitions, kindly include the second part of the definition, that clearly supports my use of the word for comparing good/bad quality: "2. qualitative - relating to or involving comparisons based on qualities".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The mysterious 'Planet Nine' might be causing the whole solar system to wobble - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/10/20/the-mysterious-planet-nine-might-be-causing-the-whole-solar-system-to-wobble/ <comment><USER2> There seems to be an unfair amount of giggling in this thread. Brown et al aren't, to my knowledge, simply hoping this hypothetical planet into existence a la Nibiru. Brown discovered Eris and his handle on Twitter is @plutokiller for a reason.

See [https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05712](https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05712) for previous work.

Edit: Adding from the Conclusion

        The existence of a distant massive perturber in the
        outer solar system – Planet Nine – explains several
        hitherto unconnected observations about the outer
        solar system, including the orbital alignment of the
        most distant Kuiper belt objects, the existence and
        alignment of high perihelion objects like Sedna, and
        the presence of perpendicular high semimajor axis
        Centaurs. [...]

i.e. Planet nine may be Occam's razor for a number of whacky observations.

</comment><comment><USER3> " But the history of astronomy is rife with speculation that is never borne out: The same guy who correctly predicted the existence of Neptune also believed that a planet he called Vulcan was responsible for the wobble of Mercury. That "discovery" caused the astronomy world to waste years looking for something that wasn't there. (Mercury's wobble was eventually explained by the theory of general relativity.) " Buying into the theory though and given that there is no sight of it yet - has the possibility of a small black hole been considered?

<comment><USER4> Depending on when exactly you think the black hole was formed, it would likely have grown large enough to swallow the rest of the solar system. Simply swallowing interplanetary particles would cause fairly quick growth, and the black hole would soon be absorbing comets and asteroids; in addition, it would obscure and distort our view of distant stars.

Apart from those issues which would make the black hole apparent, you would have to figure out how one could form in a stable solar system. I am not aware of any theory of black holes which would explain how one could spontaneously form within a stable solar system.

<comment><USER5> Such a black hole would have to be primordial, and then you'd have to explain how it came to be associated with our solar system. Far more likely that a planetary-mass object associated with a solar system _is_ an actual planet.

I don't think it'd be likely to accrete much mass, though; a back-of-the- envelope calculation of a 10 Earth mass black hole in the outer solar system subject to interstellar mass flux gives an accretion rate of 0.1 nanograms/year and a radiative power of 0.1 milliwatts.

Likewise, its Schwarzschild radius would be of the order of 10cm, so gravitational lensing events would be nigh-on unobservable.

<comment><USER6> And how many Howkings radiation would have a black hole of these mass ?

<comment><USER5> I remember the rule of thumb is that a Moon-mass black hole is in equilibrium with the microwave background (in the current era). So such a planetary-mass black hole would be several times colder than the microwave background and would actually absorb energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe it's one of the wandering planets that got caught by Suns gravity. I'd imagine there are plenty of those cold bodies between the stars, it would be strange if solar system didn't encounter any of them. Also the fact that one of them probably even hit the Earth forming Moon makes it even more likely. Maybe Jupiter just "cleaned" our space from them.

</comment><comment><USER8> Couldn't we get an amazing gravity boost out of this planet? How much faster could the voyagers be going if they used it?

<comment><USER9> Depends where it is, but probably not. Repeated gravitational assists from things much closer would probably beat slingshotting around whatever this is, if there's something there.

<comment><USER8> Why would that be? Is t there more orbital energy in things far away?

<comment><USER10> No, the amount of speed you gain (delta-v) is, at an ideal condition, twice the orbital velocity of the planet (or moon) you're flying by.

(Imagine throwing a ping-pong ball at a truck. If the truck is at rest, you get the same speed back. If the truck is running at 60 mph, you may go to jail, but assuming you don't, you get back a 120 mph ping-pong ball.)

A planet that far away from the sun must be moving at a very slow speed (otherwise it will escape the solar system altogether), so you can't gain much speed flying by.

<comment><USER8> That sounds backwards to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't maybe a case for dark matter? Maybe instead of looking for hypothetical planets, can we explain this with dark matter?

Same as we did with the unexplained galaxy rotation of outer regions.

<comment><USER9> Short answer - no.

There is a long answer, but it requires enough knowledge of physics that you wouldn't have asked the question. But suffice to say, there's no chance whatsoever that this is dark matter.

<comment><USER12> Wrong. Short answer - yes. There is a long answer but I too can be an Internet scientist and offer no explanations for my reasoning except "trust me, I know more than you do" as a certain political candidate is known to do (yes I went there).

Also looking forward to an epic beatdown of mounds of scientific evidence that is way above my head. But at least I will have gotten you to say more than "trust me".

<comment><USER9> Pithy answer - dark matter, whatever it might be (WIMPs or otherwise) is most importantly, Weakly Interacting (the WI in WIMP). It appears to clump around gravitational structures, acting like normal matter, but in more of a field way, rather than a matter way (think of it like a fluid filling a container, with uneven density - where the density is higher is where you've got matter pulling at it).

For dark matter to be causing this, you'd need some exotic form of something that's already exotic - it'd have to be able to interact with an intensity we don't associate with it. It'd also be defying what we understand it to normally do (you'd need something to make it pull into a lump from how we think it behaves, which predisposes a physical structure like a planet).

So, is there some massive errant lump of dark matter pulling the solar system around? From what we infer about how dark matter behaves from observation, no.

(The fluid thing is not an entirely accurate model of how dark matter works, but it's a decent enough metaphor. However, this gets very complex and I'd rather not spend the rest of the day getting into ever more detail about theoretical physics.)

<comment><USER13> >"(you'd need something to make it pull into a lump from how we think it behaves, which predisposes a physical structure like a planet).

So, is there some massive errant lump of dark matter pulling the solar system around? From what we infer about how dark matter behaves from observation, no."

Apparently people find it plausible that dark matter consists of primordial black holes:

"An intriguing alternative view is that dark matter is made of black holes formed during the first second of our universe's existence, known as primordial black holes. Now a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, suggests that this interpretation aligns with our knowledge of cosmic infrared and X-ray background glows and may explain the unexpectedly high masses of merging black holes detected last year." [http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-scientist- sugg...](http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-scientist-suggests- possible-link-between-primordial-black-holes-and-dark-matter)

So I don't see how the "clumped/lumped" dark matter explanation can be dismissed, black holes are basically lumps of pure mass right?

<comment><USER9> From what we think atm, you can't get a lump of dark matter, without having something to draw it in. It seems to gather where space-time is already distorted. Although it doesn't seem to need much (some galaxies are "made" mostly of dark matter - i.e., they get most of their gravity from it, rather than from the matter we observe), it does look like dark matter only clumps around spacetime distortions (gravity wells basically), rather than being able to clump on its own.

So yes, you could in theory have a black hole which has dark matter around it, which could do this, but it'd be mostly the black hole, not the dark matter doing the pulling.

Hope that made some sense!

<comment><USER13> >"you could in theory have a black hole which has dark matter around it"

Well, the link I provided gave me the impression it is plausible that the black holes _are_ dark matter. This sounds like a different idea than what you are rejecting as "possible but unlikely".

<comment><USER9> Afraid that's not the case. Black holes are categorically not dark matter.

<comment><USER13> Well, ok. But apparently someone at NASA thinks it is plausible. Argument from authority heuristic tells me to listen to them rather than you in this case. Since you are not coming with any links or specific argument against what was said there, that is pretty much all I have to go on.

<comment><USER9> Primordial black holes are the candidate here as you mentioned (black holes exist, primordial black holes may exist, but we haven't found any yet).

Thanks to LIGO we think we may have the first evidence for them, but there is still a lot of work to do to prove them.

Decent article on that: [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ligo-black-holes- dark-ma...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ligo-black-holes-dark-matter)

The interesting thing will be if we can prove they are around, which would then give some options for showing if they're dark matter or not (looking for gravity waves in areas where there's large dark matter concentrations would be the most likely candidate for now).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Leaving Occam's razor behind for a second, could this not also be explained by multiple objects whos mass and orbits sum up to the expected properties of a proposed Planet 9?

<comment><USER15> It's possible I suppose, but it seems kind of strange that a planet-size group of rocks are floating exactly together in an orbit without colliding, or knocking each other about. What seems simpler? That we have a group of rocks the size of Neptune floating together, or that they actually formed together into a planet? I'm not an astrophysicist, but I'm not sure what else it would be. Looking forward to the proof or refutation.

<comment><USER14> I didn't necessarily mean the object were very near each other. Just wondering if there could be some set of objects out there that would, in sum, have the observed effect on the inclination of the solar system and orbits of far-away objects.

<comment><USER15> Well, in order to have that affect those groups would have to be close together wouldn't that? (serious question)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could this hypothetical planet be responsible for lobbing comets and other projectiles-of-death at us every couple of thousand years?

</comment><comment><USER17> Did I hear someone screaming Nibiru? :)

<comment><USER18> This past summer, during my internship at MIT's Lincoln Lab, Dava Newman (Deputy Administrator of NASA) came to give a talk about NASA's journey to mars. At the end of the talk (during the Q&A), some greybeard conspiracy nut in the back of the room asked her about the existence of Nibiru; suffice it to say, she had no idea what he was talking about..

<comment><USER17> Right on :) Every time when there's discovery for yet another distant object from the sun, there's some speculation that pointing to Nibiru (where does this name come from)?

<comment><USER19> > Nibiru (where does this name come from)?

It's Babylonian, which was then co-opted by conspiracy theorists.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_(Babylonian_astronomy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_\(Babylonian_astronomy\))

<comment><USER20> Actually it's Akkadian, here is some better reading than wikipedia.

As for your comment about conspiracists, I have a feeling thou dost protest too much, if you catch my drift.

[http://www.michaelsheiser.com/nibirupage.htm](http://www.michaelsheiser.com/nibirupage.htm)

<comment><USER19> Ya, I believe in the cataclysm theory and need to hid that on HN, or I'm not

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_cataclysm)

"Although the name "Nibiru" is derived from the works of the ancient astronaut writer Zecharia Sitchin and his interpretations of Babylonian and Sumerian mythology, he denied any connection between his work and various claims of a coming apocalypse."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That explains my mid-section.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can we kick him out?

</comment><comment><USER23> Planet 9 from outer space!</comment>


7 Steps to Selling Vaporware - <AUTHOR> http://yubrew.blogspot.com/2008/02/7-steps-to-selling-vaporware.html

<comment><USER2> Steve Blank advocates this approach in his book ([http://www.amazon.com/Four- Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...](http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps- Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705)), though he doesn't call it "vaporware".</comment>


Nomad SMS – Receive a local SMS anywhere in the world - <AUTHOR> https://nomadsms.com/ <comment><USER2> You should change the way the rates are displayed.

When I saw 5$ (p/m), I thought it was Per Message. And I instantly closed the window. Later on I came back just to check for another country, and noticed on another page that it was per month.

But I highly recommend you change:

Pricing (p/m)

to :

Pricing (per month)

<comment><USER3> Good point, will fix this up!

<comment><USER4> Now the pricing page states "(p/message)". Was this a typo, or is it really $5 per message?

Edit: lower down in the fine print it states "per month", but the table heading states "p/message".

<comment><USER3> Fixed, I'm an idiot. It's per/month.

<comment><USER5> The text should literally read "Price (USD per month)". Then it will be clear, unambiguous, and obviate the need for the snippet at the bottom about "$USD" (which is not a standard notation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Q: Is it secure?

> A: [...] SMS's are impossible to intercept [...].

 _cough_ Are we talking about the same technology?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ0I5tl0YLY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ0I5tl0YLY)

<comment><USER7> I worked for Verint some years ago, still have friends that do and they all laughed at that presentation saying it's about 10 years out of date :)

The "commercial" tracking solutions are hardly as clandestine as people might think, their major consumers are the cell companies themselves. As their systems were never designed to facilitate easy tracking and interception they use those for anything from identifying cloned phones to facilitating court ordered wire taps. For the most part the capabilities of these systems without an active participation from the carrier are minimal.

However plenty of other systems exist which require no support from the phone carrier. e.g. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1l1nRql7JE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1l1nRql7JE)

I love these types of commercials for some reason the cheap acting always makes me chuckle..

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am bit sceptical. I would not trust phone number associated with my bank account to similar service. Also double or even triple sim phones are very cheap and can recieve text globaly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Post on the creation of it if anyone's interested - [http://bryceadams.com/built-nomad-sms-3-days/](http://bryceadams.com/built- nomad-sms-3-days/)

Happy to answer any questions and hear your thoughts!

<comment><USER9> If you change providers, don't change the price. It seems people are willing to pay the current rate and if anything I would experiment with charging more whilst getting your costs down!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I must be missing something. I receive texts from my bank on my Norwegian number where ever I am in the world. The Nomad SMS web page doesn't explain why there is a problem.

<comment><USER3> Hi! If you didn't have your Norwegian sim card in your phone though, you wouldn't be able to receive it. Also some people don't have a local sim card (eg. I travel around Asia, no sim from Australia) and those that do may have to pay global roaming charges to receive SMSes. I should probably explain the need for it a bit better. Thanks for checking it out :)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, might be good to explain the reasoning. Coming from the UK, I've never heard of pricing to _receive_ a message, we just don't have it, and I believe it's actually banned, as the user doesn't have the choice in receiving a message (unlike a call which they can just not answer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 15 countries is not "anywhere" in the world.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, sorry that wasn't clearer. It's just ~15 countries that you can buy a number for, but you receive the SMS anywhere in the world by email / etc.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am really excited for this service. I tend to pack up and move every 6 months to a new country so things like online banking and what not are generally a bit of a pain in the ass and require me to carry around multiple hard tokens. This could well be the end of that which would be a huge help.

</comment><comment><USER14> You can get the same with Google Voice.

<comment><USER3> I've heard that but just US people for a US number. Anyway, the issue was that I (Australian) couldn't get an Australian number :) Thanks for checking it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let me get this straight... I rent a number from you in another country. I can give this number out as my own so that others can send me a text. The text gets forwarded from the rented number to my email. Is this correct?

If so, I can already think of a couple of ways that it could come in handy.

</comment><comment><USER16> If I was you I wouldn't link to the page where you explain how you created the product.

It might turn potential customers off that you created it only in 3 days. Also, when they know you used twillo as a backend, they can check out exactly how much you profit you are making.

</comment><comment><USER17> So I tried a couple of countries and noticed an error at least for Austria: you display the number as +43 0676...

It won't work, it should be without the leading 0 : +43 676 and so on

<comment><USER3> That's just how it auto-formats / displays. The numbers are from Twilio and I've got some customers using Austrian numbers. Sorry for the confusion.

<comment><USER17> I don't know, the number displayed that way is wrong. With Lithuania for example you don't display +370 86 instead of +370 6 although locally the number would be 86 like an austrian local number would be 0676...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> so basically we're talking a store and forward service that lets you spawn local numbers capable of receiving SMS.

<comment><USER3> Exactly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can I use this service with Battle.net? They don't support VoIP based SMS providers.

<comment><USER3> As long as they don't send messages from a shortcode number.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Movie/film post-production tool - thoughts on the Landing/Beta page? - <AUTHOR> http://eastwoodapp.com Hey guys,
After a busy 5 months some friends and I are nearly ready to start alpha/beta testing on our web/mobile app for managing the post-production of movies (plus short films, t.v etc).
We just threw up our landing (and beta signup) page yesterday - and was wondering if anyone had any thoughts/ideas on this?
Any advice or opinions would be great - thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Chris <comment><USER2> Not bad. The app looks great and your page copy is very effectively targeted. However, there isn't enough of it. when I click one of the items in the cycling list of features, then I expect a new page or a significant amount of extra detail 'below the fold' - not a stock photo with a one-line explanation of a concept that is already self-explanatory to anyone working in the industry.

there are other features that I want that I don't see, which are increasingly important to ADs. These are not as critical as the 5 primaries identified already, but which in my view are essential for buy-in. If they're absent or not planned for, then a competitor is going to be able to add duplicate your existing features with little difficulty, add others not available here, and generally leverage their brand to drink your milkshake. The first-mover advantage is very slim, especially in a cutthroat business staffed by technological conservatives who are used to overpaying because they're spending OPM. If an existing provider goes mobile within the next 1-2 years (and they will) their install base will swamp yours. Delays to market will be explained away as 'making sure the product is really ready'.

So what are those missing features?

o screenwriting software integration - Final Draft at a minimum, also Adobe Story and other competitors. FD can generate breakdown lists, and being able to import these will reduce the work needed for breakdown by 80-90%.

o screenplay/breakdown versioning - on large projects, changes in shooting order or rewritten scenes are the norm. Assume they will occur and make sure the process of 'forking' is as easy as possible.

o Storyboards. I can't believe you don't have 2-way integration of location scouting and breakdown with mobile cameras.

o export to media/printing - in a remote location, you cannot safely assume access to the internet, cloud, or universal availability of smartphones or internet-capable devices among the cast and crew. You will still need to be able to produce sides and fall back on more primitive methods. On long nights in the middle of nowhere with terrible weather, paper, pencil and flashlight are going to be around for a while yet. When it comes to charging electronic devices, cameras and sound recorders are going to take priority over ipads and cellphones.

o allow for retroactive changes to be made under the cirucmstances described above; sometimes a weary crew will come back to base camp with a list of necessary changes that are handed to a confused production manager, and which must be entered correctly for the following days' shooting schedule to work.

o contact management - naturally you want to have that information centralized, but nobody likes having to enter everybody's contact details into a yet another database program with yet another set of misspellings, incorrect phone numbers, yadda yadda. Allow contact import from GMail, Facebook, google+ hotmail, and other major providers. Allow the creation of a contact address that automatically harvests email information and builds the mailing list. Provide call sheets that include hyperlinks and/or graphical maps leveraging some popular mapping API. Use email, Twilio, Twitter, checkin and location services to automagically alert and monitor call times, navigation planning, ride-sharing, and general logistics.

o Ensure that the logistical functionality also applies to location/prop management, gear rental, suppliers and so forth.

o Include templates for model, location and service releases and allow for digital signature and post-production hard-copy transmission to reduce presale clearance issues. Releases matter, but to so few people on set that they are frequently overlooked during production, leading to expensive headaches later. The closer to sale or release, the more expensive the headache.

o Pre/post breakdowns - breakdowns are such a hassle that they are often prepared only for production, while project management before and after principal photography is often done on the back of an envelope. Get pro with this from the outset. Which also means...

o input for shooting logs from the AC/Sound team

o digital slating - again, this should be out front - scene/shot # and shot clock on an iPad or Android tablet are a no-brainer, and a key visual sell for your branding. A major missed opportunity in your existing design.

o Not to mention GPS on mobile devices. Don't just do an electronic implementation of what's already on paper or a laptop and then make people manually add information from digital sensors.

o Hell, start planning now for being an input vector for video/audio recording. I have posted audio that was recorded on an iPod because the director suddenly got inspired while he was having coffee with one of the actors and had the means of production in his pocket.

o Platform agnosticism - although Apple dominates in the film world, it is by no means universal. Don't confine yourself to a single platform, especially when 95% of your functionality can be achieved with html, css, and node.js.

o Build marketing in from the getgo. Eastwood should also be the tool of choice for image tagging tagging, media assets, managing a social media, and driving your marketing campaign from pre-production onwards using the most enthusiastic and committed members of your team - your cast and crew, who stand to benefit directly from the film's success. You'll also need to coordinate their availability for post-production, sales, and release phases, from wrap parties to reshoots to private screenings.

o I'm not 100% sure about your branding; the name 'Eastwood' is very clever but might be misinterpreted as implying the authorship or endorsement of a certain Famous Actor...who has more money, fans, and legal experience than your whole team put together. If I were your lawyer, which I am not and which I could not be because I am not a lawyer, then I would advise against infringing on Clint Eastwood's right of publicity because that would basically require you to give him a Large Amount of Money or ownership of the company in lieu. Great name, now pick another. Sorry.

<comment><USER3> Hey guys,

Thanks so much for the feedback. You have some great points anigbrowl, and trust us when I say we have thought of - and wish to include - most of those. Things like FD implementation are a must, I agree. As Brian says, it's really a matter of selecting the minimum required value and using that as our first goalpost with Eastwood. Rest assured that we have our sights set high on how we think Eastwood will affect the industry and how many ways it can be implemented effectively with different forms of technology.

Thank you again for the feedback. I look forward to hearing it all.

Cheers,

Matt Drake

\-- Eastwood

<comment><USER4> Best of luck, it's a field that desperately needs some real software. All the options out there, even (especially) the big standards, just suck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's really not enough of the product on the landing page. Instead of random photos of DPs behind cameras on each feature tab, show us animations of the actual site in use. Even after watching the video I didn't get to see the actual product, unacceptable. What you are showing me here is simply the idea of the product (which is exciting and potentially useful), but I need to see the product to want to actually sign up for the beta.</comment>


Louis CK adds Dwolla as another payment option - <AUTHOR> https://buy.louisck.net/

<comment><USER2> Another nail in paypal's heart. I hadn't seen the new pay via amazon either, that's great!</comment>


Google Docs Down - 404 not found - B-Scan http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/2433/selection003.png

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems to work for me, and problem is not visible on google apps status page: <http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en>

<comment> B-Scan Now it works for me also. It was some glitch which has continued also with saving files later.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Moving balls to the wall on a fantastic idea? - <AUTHOR>

Howdy HN. I've been sucking on an idea for the past few weeks that seems to get exponentially better and better every time I discuss it out loud. Tonight's conversation with my girlfriend is what inspired me to go absolutely batty with it.
All of us have felt this way one time or another. The thing preventing us from executing or going all-out on it always comes down to a handful of things.
1) It's a brilliant idea that we came up with all on our own, but it's been done before, sometimes better, and sometimes worse. 2) We don't have any time. We're too busy with X, Y, or Z gig that is paying the bills and is therefore more important. 3) We don't have the resources to execute on it. 4) A combination of all of the above.
I'm stuck with items 2 and 3 in the list. I'm a freelancer who is working hard right now to support myself. 20 years old, skipping college, writing my own ticket. I've managed to do pretty well.. but my client work consumes me. The third item, the lack of resources bit, is also slightly a problem. Initially my idea would work as an AIR app (it's fairly simple, the value is in the service not the application). Adobe AIR is cross platform and fairly easy to pick-up for (what I would at least consider myself) an advanced JavaScript programmer. After this evening's discussion, the touchscreen interface of the iPad would be a perfect target for this concept. I need to get up to speed on iPhone/iPad development, Obj-C, etc... Also, this idea of mine will ultimately require (simple) custom hardware. I'm not good in those departments. I'm a designer with a good mind for development. This will sound cocky, but I like to think of myself as jack-of-all-trades. However, I know where I am not an expert, and this leads to my next point.
I'm a resourceful individual who is going to go full speed on this no matter what... but where does one begin? I'm going to bootstrap the hell out of this, but I am terrified that someone will come along and scoop it up. I want someone to work with on this, but after being jaded so many times by partners, I'm worried that will never happen. I want investment money to get the right people for the job. I know that the chances of that happening are once in a blue moon. I know that I can do this on my own, but at what time expense? Hiring the right people will make this a synergistic effort, and the ship will sail much quicker. I'm not one to sit on my ass and wait for things to happen, but at the same time (and I think this is true for most smart individuals) I tend to second guess myself a LOT. In the past, trusting my gut and sticking at something even when I was afraid of failure has tended to prevail.
How do you guys cope with this? I know the short answer is: focus, focus, focus, and just start hacking. But... is there any other wisdom out there? Part of me is also seeking individuals who might be interested in collaborating on this. I'm definitely one to share the wealth, but only with trusting individuals (a difficult thing to come by). I live in Honolulu and will be moving back to my homeland of Los Angeles at the end of this month.
I've answered a lot of my own questions in this post, but nothing beats the wisdom of my fellow hackers here on HN. Feel free to contact me via the email in my profile, or <my HN username>.com. But, above all of that, please comment here and let's get a discussion going on this :) <comment><USER2> First: what's the idea? It's kind of important to know in terms of giving feedback on how to proceed. Being terrified that someone will steal your idea is common but counter productive and most likely misinformed. Sharing your idea here might get you a partner or at some good specific feedback. Most people here are too busy with their own ideas they hold in high regard to try and take yours and run with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) Yes, someone has already thought of your idea. It doesn't mean they plan on executing on the idea. It's the execution, not the idea that matters. It's execution that defines success.

2) Having a partner/co-founder or someone you can bounce ideas off of (besides your bias girlfriend) provides impetus and motivation for someone consumed with the day-to-day of living. If you're having a problem prioritizing your idea along with all of the gotta-eat stuff, then bringing someone in to bounce ideas off of is essential because time is literally fleeting and non replenish-able.

3) Engage other people. Most ideas fail in just this way, because the founder is afraid to share the idea with others. Thinking that person will run off with the idea. The odds of this happening are slim. Most people operate more ethically than that.

<comment><USER4> "It's the execution, not the idea that matters"

This oft-cited bromide is a huge pet peeve of mine. The truth is, some ideas are much better than others. If you have a really good idea, often the ship will right itself on its own no matter how badly you execute. Your worst fear in those cases are other competitors beating you to the market, not your inability to draw customers.

<comment><USER5> I think you're not getting why people say the execution is more important. First off, how do you know an idea is so great until it's become a huge success? Secondly, I run into people all the time who have "great ideas" but no technical expertise to pull it off, and they always believe that coming up with the idea is half the battle. Often times, the best ideas are the most obvious ideas, and of course the most obvious ideas are the ones most likely to have been thought of already. What sets people apart is their execution.

A ton of effort on a half baked idea is always worth more than no effort on a great idea, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dude, you got a girlfriend, she likes your ideas and supports you. I wish I had that, because it would be how I coped with all the difficulties. Seriously, it seems to me now, that a girlfriend is more important than a co- founder (pg should include this in the questionnaire).

</comment><comment><USER7> Get some partners – you will need them.

One thing I learned with our startup is that so little of it is about the technology (i.e. "the app") and the idea, but instead it is all about getting your idea to market. To do that, you need people with good business heads, proven experience, relationships and yes, money. This is typically why first timers are so protective of their ideas where those with a bit of experience realize that there is more value in sharing the idea than there is risk in someone else taking it and running with it. (see comment by mkeblx.) Again, because the idea is not the most important thing, execution is what is important.

Take the computer mouse for example. Doug Engelbart came up with the idea 20 years before it ever came into mainstream use. Engineers and technologists like us seem to inherently believe that good ideas will naturally rise to the top, when really what often makes ideas reach the top has to do more with timing, marketing, and the confluence of many other events that are ancillary to the idea. Was VHS better than Beta? Was Windows better than Apple? Was Word better than WordPerfect?

So, as others have recommended, get some partners. Get other people as excited and passionate about the idea as you are, don't worry about who gets the credit, and you will accomplish amazing things.

And, how much start-up capital do you need?

</comment><comment><USER8> No idea give-away. Let's start guessing.

Custom hardware, value of app is in service, Adobe AIR

If the value of the app is in the service, then that almost certainly means a crowd-sourced and/or community-driven service.

The custom hardware makes me immediately think remote IR blaster (e.g. iPad app with TV listings mashed with real-time friend chat, real-time ratings (take that, Nielsen!) and maybe even video streams that can change the channels [and records this attention metadata to a shared global db]) or custom hardware to link to restaurant POS terminals (interactive menus with full-motion video, previous diner recommendations) or hardware to link exercise bikes to a virtual exercise community (imagine peddling up virtual Tour de France with avatar bikers) or...

The point here is ideas are cheap - it's the selling of partners and ultimately customers on it that makes it valuable.

</comment><comment><USER9> Been in the same situation as yourself before ... If you have the necessary skills, depending on the idea, it could just as long to define exactly what you want to build to someone else than actually doing it yourself.

I think its definitely better to get something you can show people, makes its a lot easier to people involved with the project if they can click around and see what you're trying to do. So if time-to-market is not a big factor just do it whenever you can fit it into your schedule.

I'm more of a developer than an designer and find its easier for me to just build out my ideas in a basic skin, and then have a designer (or myself) re- skin later.

If you're more of a designer, it might be better to add the primary functionality and focus on the UI. Then you can have a developer work to add more features later on, or even recode what you've already built if necessary.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you can do all the business planning, hiring, technical work, and fund raising you don't need a partner. Sometimes follow on successful founders pull this off. I suggest a partner for a first go of it, and the only way you'll find that person is if you keep sharing your idea (risky yes, necessary I think so).

<comment><AUTHOR> I honestly think that I can.. but I feel like things would be _so much_ better if I had a partner to help. I tend to work "lone wolf" because I've had _interesting_ experiences in my past with others. I feel like a company (or at least a small team) can be birthed from this. I definitely enjoy sharing the idea and getting feedback. It's a double edged sword. I applied to this past YC with a friend (on his idea, not mine) and made it to the interview stage. I'm kicking myself for not submitting this idea (although, it wasn't even close to this mature, then), because I am convinced that something like YC would be the exact bit of inertia necessary to push this thing straight into a hail mary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I carried a web/mobile app idea around for a year, looking for seed funding before posting about it here on March 30th. The HN community were amazing in their support and motivated me to create a minimum viable product. But while I was out on oDesk trying to find a crew to do that, something amazing happened. I found not one, but two very talented, intelligent people, both of whom are busy with their careers, but interested enough in my project to particpate as co-founders. I encourage you to put your idea out into the world and see where that leads you.

</comment><comment><USER12> So if there's a hardware component you're going to need capital which means at least that you'll need to talk to a few angel investors..

The fact that someone's done your idea is a good thing. You want to make sure you have product/market fit. You should obviously put your own spin on the idea.

BTW, there's a way of telling someone your general idea without giving away the secret sauce. If you can't do that then you might want to refine your idea some more.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Tonight's conversation with my girlfriend". Yes, well, you know what they say about ideas. Most likely, it's ok-ish at best :) Why don't you share the idea here, or better yet, execute a minimal version and then share?

</comment><comment><USER14> Do you really need to hire people just to get it started? Hiring the right people isn't easy, and is time consuming itself.

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe you could 'free up' some time in your schedule by working on it with your girlfriend? Then it could be part and parcel of building the relationship instead of just another time-burden interfering with your relationship.

Also, I have found that sometimes not having adequate time to "work" on something means there is more time for it to simmer on the back burner and develop to more maturity as an idea. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the mean time, work on solving other problems (like the money issues) so someday you _can_ focus more on this.</comment>


HTTPie 0.9.6 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/releases/tag/0.9.6 <comment><USER2> I like how it allows you to abbreviate JSON, but the API I use most frequently puts objects within objects, and the readability rapidly goes down to "curl" level for this case. As far as I know, this is still as concisely as you can write this with httpie. Most of the things that don't involve putting an object in an object in json seem to write out much more cleanly in httpie. In this case, you still mostly end up just writing the json:

      http --json POST https://iad.servers.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2/123456/servers \
          'X-Auth-Token':'authtoken' \
          'Content-Type':'application/json' \
          server:='{
        "metadata": {
          "metadatagoes": "here"
        },
        "imageRef": "b21af3ef-1a1e-46b5-98ef-bb0c81b25292",
        "networks": [
          {
            "uuid": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"
          },
          {
            "uuid": "11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111"
          }
        ],
        "flavorRef": "general1-1",
        "name": "servername",
        "OS-DCF:diskConfig": "MANUAL"
      }'

<comment><USER3> You know, I wonder (and perhaps this is already implemented and I just haven't heard of it) if that could be specified by auto-expanding paths:

server.metadata.metadatagoes+="here" server.imageRef+="..." server.networks+='[...]' ...

Yeah not sure about arrays...

<comment><USER4> Maybe that sort of stuff is best left to jq, and httpie could focus on interoperability with jq.

<comment><USER3> httpie can pipe data from stdin. So stuff like this might work?

       jq -n '.a.b.c = "x"' | http <url>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like HTTPie and I use it from time to time, but I don't actually find the UI all that intuitive. It's probably just me, but having curl not actually care about the order of arguments makes it hard for me to flip back to HTTPie where it does actually matter. When I do, I usually expect headers to come first, since they actually do come first in a typical HTTP flow. But, again, it's probably just me, and maybe I need to force myself to use it more and it will become second nature.

<comment><USER6> Exactly my issue with it. I would make HTTPie my primary tool if its cli syntax was as lenient as curl's. It would save me piping my output to `jq`.

<comment><USER5> Reading the rest of this thread reminded me about piping to jq, which I forget as much as I forget to use HTTPie. Usually I'm checking headers and non-body stuff when I'm using these tools, but when I've got someone over my shoulder who's not as used to reading compressed JSON, or they're looking for something specific, it's nice to get a pretty format. I guess that's the biggest hurdle in just changing habits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great tool & deserves all the credit it gets, but this tool/thread comes up every X months.. what's up HN?

<comment><USER8> Presumably because it's really, really difficult to make old threads trend again, and if you comment on an old thread most people won't see your post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A while back I was trying to craft a curl request and in middle of it i made a mistake and started the command with GET. And it worked! For a moment I thought its a Fish feature.

It turns out libwww-perl has commands named like HTTP methods installed in my /usr/bin.

So `GET [http://foo`](http://foo`) works. Which is super convenient! Give it a try!

edit: There's a high chance its already installed on your machine.

<comment><USER10> Can also be solved with some aliases to curl

alias GET='curl -sk'

alias DELETE='curl -sk -X DELETE'

alias PUT='curl -sk -X PUT --data-binary @-'

alias POST='curl -sk -X POST --data-binary @-'

echo "hello" | POST localhost

<comment><USER11> do not use -X without having read the manual, it can break redirects and other things.

from the curl(1) manpage:

           -X, --request <command>

                  (...)

                  Normally you don't need this option. All sorts of GET, HEAD, POST and PUT requests  are  rather
                  invoked by using dedicated command line options.

                  This  option  only  changes the actual word used in the HTTP request, it does not alter the way
                  curl behaves. So for example if you want to make a proper HEAD request, using -X HEAD will  not
                  suffice. You need to use the -I, --head option.

                  The  method  string you set with -X will be used for all requests, which if you for example use
                  -L, --location may cause unintended  side-effects  when  curl  doesn't  change  request  method
                  according to the HTTP 30x response codes - and similar.

PUT is indicated by using -T / \--upload-file, POST by -d / \--data or any --data- _foo_ option (eg. --data-raw). DELETE is the only HTTP method in the parent list that needs -X to be used.

<comment><USER10> The point is to have the ability to pipe to curl, will -T / \--upload-file allow that? For now I'm happy with how it worked.

<comment><USER11> the manpage is very explicit about that:

           Use the file name "-" (a single dash) to use stdin instead of a given file.
           Alternately, the file name "." (a single period) may be specified instead of
           "-" to use stdin in non-blocking mode to allow reading server output while
           stdin is being uploaded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Been using it for a while now, highly recommended it!

The syntax and various options are super easy to learn, output formatting is great and it is overall a lot less clunky than curl for most stuff.

</comment><comment><USER13> I use httpie a lot. Whenever I'm testing some http headers, an api call etc, it has become my go to tool. Brilliant piece of software.

If you haven't checked it yet, just give it a shot.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really wish curl had a --pretty-json option.

<comment><USER15> curl | json_pp

<comment><USER4> curl | jq .

<comment><USER16> I use:

        curl | python -m json.tool

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> any plans to add support for SNI? seems you don't right now.

<comment><USER18> Needs extra dependencies on many python versions: [https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie#sni-server-name- indication](https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie#sni-server-name-indication)

<comment><USER17> thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> is there a GUI app wrapper for this?

<comment><USER8> Not strictly a 'GUI' wrapper, but there are some interactive HTTP clients, which features like autocomplete:

[1] [https://github.com/eliangcs/http- prompt](https://github.com/eliangcs/http-prompt), built on HTTPie

[2] [https://github.com/cloudhead/http- console](https://github.com/cloudhead/http-console), on Node.js

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Frequently discussed here: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=httpie&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=httpie&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER21> I think this was re-posted a 100th time because the author [1] released version 0.9.6 [2] like three hours ago. And to save you guys a click here is the list of (significant?) changes.

\- Added Python 3 as a dependency for Homebrew installations to ensure some of the newer HTTP features work out of the box for macOS users (starting with HTTPie 0.9.4.).

\- Added the ability to unset a request header with Header:, and send an empty value with Header;.

\- Added --default-scheme <URL_SCHEME> to enable things like $ alias https='http --default-scheme=https.

\- Added -I as a shortcut for --ignore-stdin.

\- Added fish shell completion (located in extras/httpie-completion.fish in the Github repo).

\- Updated requests to 2.10.0 so that SOCKS support can be added via pip install requests[socks].

\- Changed the default JSON Accept header from application/json to application/json, _/_.

\- Changed the pre-processing of request HTTP headers so that any leading and trailing whitespace is removed.

And please Mr. Roztočil stop posting your project here so frequently, there is a limited number of links in this website that get to the front page, and it is annoying to see duplicated content so often. If there is people unaware of your project by now, it is probably people that are not involved in anything related with HTTP debugging, and people that already know the project can easily go to GitHub and see the changelog by themselves, I certainly didn't understand why was this posted again after I started looking for a reason, then found that version 0.9.6 was released :-(

EDIT: Maybe I should blame the +40 accounts who upvoted this.

EDIT2: Re-organized paragraphs to display the changelog before my (irrelevant?) rant about the duplicated submission.

[1] [https://twitter.com/jkbrzt](https://twitter.com/jkbrzt)

[2] [https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/releases/tag/0.9.6](https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/releases/tag/0.9.6)

<comment><USER22> The community obviously thought it was interesting despite being well known. Maybe today's users are not the same as the ones who saw it last week.</comment></comment></comment>


The Pirate Bay down, again. - <AUTHOR> http://thepiratebay.se/

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://baymirror.com/browse/](http://baymirror.com/browse/) \- looks to be working</comment>


Now Apps Can Track You Even After You Uninstall Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-22/now-apps-can-track-you-even-after-you-uninstall-them <comment><USER2> Google sort of bundles this functionality into Firebase.

[https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317485?hl=en](https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317485?hl=en)

Check under the "app_remove" section.

Also, a blog post of how this was used in conjunction with Firebase functions.

[https://medium.com/@tarunkakkar/detecting-app-install- frauds...](https://medium.com/@tarunkakkar/detecting-app-install-frauds-and- refining-app-install-re-install-uninstall-numbers-using-firebase-b9054fa7368)

</comment><comment><USER3> Braze bundles uninstall tracking with marketing push notification campaigns. Frankly, I think it's wonderful to be able to show marketing people how their spam affects our install base.

</comment><comment><USER4> TLDR: If you use regular push notifications (even for legitimate purposes like keeping up-to-date info in the app) then you can tell when someone uninstalls your app. If you wanted, you could then market to that person.

True, but this doesn't bother me much, and I'm usually a privacy maven.

</comment><comment> B-Con Clickbait phrasing.

tl;dr:

1) Services can track you based on the data you've given to the app.

2) Obviously, this doesn't stop when you uninstall an app.

3) It's possible (using push notifications) to determine if users have uninstalled.

4) The service behind the app can then track you with a specific "uninstalled the app" status.

As an aside, I dislike the fact that "app" has become such a catch-all. It introduces confusing language, like in this example. The "app" didn't track you because the "app" was a client-side binary for interacting with a _service_. The service tracked you from the beginning.

<comment><USER5> Install app: tracking begins.

Uninstall app: said tracking continues.

From a user point of view, the technical implementation doesnt change the above equations.

<comment> B-Con The user is too focused on the app, and part of the problem is when we stop using correct phrases and start using "app" for everything.

User installed and app and agreed to use a service. User uninstalled an app.

User needs to understand that installing an app and using a service is _not_ an implementation detail, it is a fundamental part of what they are doing. Dumbing our vocabulary down to use "app" for everything makes this education harder.</comment></comment></comment>


Most Medical Imaging Devices Run Outdated Operating Systems - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/most-medical-imaging-devices-run-outdated-operating-systems/ <comment><USER2> That's mainly because it has been set up, it's been debugged and it works predictably.

The relevant policy there is "If it works, don't fix it."

And that's apart from the fact that updating the OS would cost extra money that probably wouldn't be recovered during the lifetime of the machine.</comment>