Netflix urged by EU to slow streaming to save internet - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/tech/netflix-internet-overload-eu/index.html <comment><USER2> This is a non-issue & complete speculation. Netflix already manages stream quality based on network conditions and has likely done so for years. If the government wants to ensure network access they should be talking to the ISPs, IMO.

<comment><USER3> That's a long term solution.

Short term, ISPs can't increase bandwidth availability, and Netflix can reduce bandwidth consumption.

And I'm not sure it's a nonissue. The videos in my online classes are pausing every few seconds lately. And watching those in a lower quality isn't an option because the writing needs to be readable.

On the other hand, Zoom works better than EdX, so it may be the EdX servers that are overwhelmed.

<comment><USER4> Why can't ISPs reduce Netflix data?

<comment><USER5> Some countries still have "Net Neutrality" laws preventing just that.

<comment><USER6> The EU for the most part doesn't, traffic shaping is still legal just a practice that died mainly due to the difficulty of implementing it these days than due to net neutrality.

[https://berec.europa.eu/eng/netneutrality/](https://berec.europa.eu/eng/netneutrality/)

>ISPs are prohibited from blocking or slowing down of Internet traffic, except where necessary. The exceptions are limited to: traffic management to comply with a legal order, to ensure network integrity and security, and to manage congestion, provided that equivalent categories of traffic are treated equally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How ironic. Maybe CNN should stop autoplaying video that I don't even want?

I'm sure that will help bandwidth.

<comment><USER8> Can we get that turned of on ESPN too while we are at it please!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lots of comments in here getting it exactly right. Asking Netflix to change will have almost no effect. Netflix already adjusts stream quality based on "internet weather" and already has most of the stream sources really close to the user. And has for years and is pretty good at it now. (Source: I worked there and worked on a lot of this stuff).

But it also makes sense for the CEO to make the political gesture and appease the EU commissioner.

<comment><USER10> Could it not have a significant impact on the last mile of providers (which is often a shared medium)?

Deprioritizing Netflix would also solve that, but given that this is illegal in several countries, providers there are likely lacking the infrastructure or know how to implement such a policy on short notice, even if these laws were temporarily suspended.

<comment><USER9> Unlikely, because Netflix accounts for traffic on the entire segment and aggregates data. It would be possible that you are the only one on your segment watching Netflix and everyone else is using Zoom or something, but if that were the case then your one stream wouldn't make a difference if it was at lower quality.

In other words, this would only help if a lot of people on your segment are watching Netflix, and if a lot of people on your segment are watching Netflix, then Netflix has a whole bunch of data on exactly how full that segment is and will adjust accordingly.

<comment><USER10> That makes sense! I didn't consider that Netflix would actively scale down quality in that way (i.e., backing off to achieve less than 1/n proportional bandwidth share), but ISPs probably ask for something like that quite regularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Netflix has caches all over the world [https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/peering/#locations](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/peering/#locations) \- don't see how this would make any significant difference to backbones. I'm in India and my Netflix downloads mostly come from a few neighborhoods away - I seriously doubt Europe has it much worse.

<comment><USER10> It's not only the backbones that are getting congested. In most access technologies, there will be some shared medium between users and these caches, and often that shared medium is close to saturated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this really a problem at all? Doesn't Netflix select a lower quality stream automatically if the player buffer is being read from faster than it's being filled?

It's already in their interest to not have users watching their video "Buffering...". I'm sure that makes users disconnect. If users disconnect they won't generate revenue.

In other words, in cases of congestion on the Internet, doesn't Netflix and similar services already "slow down streaming"?

<comment><USER13> Doesn't adaptive stream quality or any form of responding to congestions require the link to be saturated first. At least I don't know how it should detect that the link is almost saturated but not quite yet. So every time it detects that the link has been saturated the damage is already done.

Compared to say, just capping the quality a certain amount below the current maximum for a while. For example turning off the 4K stream for the next 2 weeks. I guess people can live with HD for a while.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but that's how TCP/IP (the Internet) has worked successfully for 40 years.

Basic congestion control uses packet drops as a signal of congestion and slows down. You get packet drops if a queue was filled somewhere, which would be the bottleneck between two stations. That's business as usual.

The best queue to fill is as close as possible to a station, i.e. in the user modem or first hop, if not the application itself. If we begin to get congestion between ISP networks it won't be as pretty but it won't "break the Internet" and it's literally their job to upgrade the connectivity between networks before that happens. Plenty of bandwidth means you don't need QoS.

That being said, there are modern congestion control algorithms that try to be more clever. Your web browser may already be using one of them.

<comment><USER14> > Basic congestion control uses packet drops as a signal of congestion and > slows down. You get packet drops if a queue was filled somewhere, which > would be the bottleneck between two stations.

Bufferbloat gets in the way of that. As does packet loss due to non-congestion reasons, e.g. noisy or unstable connections at the physical layer.

<comment><USER12> Large queues without AQM is indeed problematic but the industry is far more aware of this nowadays than it used to be.

If the EU really wanted to save the Internet they should have done something about that, only it's 20 years too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> IXP traffic only seems to be up by 10% or so. And any direct peering with ISPs should be up to netflix and that ISP to manage.

[https://www.de- cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...](https://www.de- cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statistics) [https://stats.ams- ix.net/index.html](https://stats.ams-ix.net/index.html) [https://portal.linx.net/lans_flows](https://portal.linx.net/lans_flows)

<comment><USER16> Netflix also is deployed directly in ISP's DCs. [https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/)

<comment><USER15> That's the direct peering part I mention. It's up to the parties to hash that out bilaterally on a case by case basis, there shouldn't be a need for netflix to throttle things across the board.

<comment><USER17> Direct peering is probably not quite the same thing as installing a cache in an ISP's racks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't speak for other EU countries, but Germany has systematically neglected its network infrastructure over the last decade. Even in Berlin fast, reliable Internet is hard to come by. I often find my LTE turn into Edge at the blink of an eye.

We should urge leaders (public and private) to do a better job and hold them accountable for bad policy.

<comment><USER19> The USA paid $4 billion to get FTTH by 2004, didn't happen. ISPs still got the money. I'm honestly hoping Starlink shakes the ISPs to the ground.

<comment><USER20> Support your local municipal fiber efforts. StarLink is cool, but pulling your own fiber financed with muni bonds at super low interest rates is available today. Returns are chasing safe yield, muni bonds are safe yield.

[https://muninetworks.org/communitymap](https://muninetworks.org/communitymap)

These folks in the northern rural parts of England do it stupid cheap:

[https://b4rn.org.uk/](https://b4rn.org.uk/)

Contacting your local community representation/government about this can be done from the comfort of your home during self-isolation.

<comment><USER21> There's dark fiber in my home town -- what would it take to run a muni isp and finally give Comcast and co the finger?

<comment><USER20> [https://startyourownisp.com/](https://startyourownisp.com/) to start (it's wireless last mile centric though). I will return with more links later when I'm back at my desktop and have access to my bookmarks. I ran a small ISP a lifetime ago, and have also helped others set them up.

<comment><USER21> past-tense -- would you do it again?

There's a company already doing gigabit over wifi to homes but you run into line of sight issues -- if figure with all the dark fiber we would just patch into that

<comment><USER20> As long as there are people without good internet options and I could break even, yes. I plan on doing this in the Eastern Tennessee mountains, but I am somewhat financially secure and work remotely, YMMV.

Like any bootstrapped venture, make it a side gig until you reach a comfortably sustainable run rate and subscriber base. You're not going to get rich as a private ISP, but it can be a comfortable small biz.

<comment><USER21> Not losing money but being a viable alternative to the incumbents would be a huge win for me.

I bet I would need to get some serious networking skills also, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Even HD streaming from Netflix requires around 7 megabits of bandwidth. That's not too much. If the internet infrastructure is struggling the handle that much throughput in 2020, it's the fault of ISPs, not Netflix.

Streaming video content has been ubiquitous for years now. A lot of households probably have 3-4 devices streaming HD content for hours during "prime-time." So ISPs should have kept up.

</comment><comment><USER23> Let's not forget how much we've slowed broadband rate of improvement lately. In 2000-2010 speeds were doubling every few years with ADSL generations and fiber was just around the corner. The tech is there but the investment is not, from engineering POV we could easily and cheaply have 10G at home in western cities for everyone.

<comment><USER24> Rule of thumb: Apparent exponential growth means you've zoomed in too far on the chart you're looking at.

The important change was actually always-on Network access, but that's often muddled up with the step to 512kbps or more commonly 1MBps DSL service labelled "broadband" \- because for most users both happened together.

There wasn't then and isn't now a practical need for "10G at home in western cities for everyone". Getting to 10Mbps allowed almost all the applications you'd actually want, and 100Mbps makes that practical if several people in a household are doing different things - maybe you're in a a video conference while the kids watch movies. But continued exponential growth needs a compelling application, and no practical application was found.

Fibre (often muddled together with these higher bandwidth offerings) makes sense for new builds because it's cheaper to produce and has good reliability. But ripping out working copper networks to add fibre is like demolishing an otherwise perfectly good bridge to put in a nicer bridge. It's not impossible but it is a waste of resources.

<comment><USER23> Well, the mobile side is certainly betting on "if you build the bandwidth, the apps will come".

In fixed broadband the same is still happening albeit more slowly, we have streaming tv, then hd/4k streaming movies, then games ala ps live/Stadia, enormous gb console/pc game downloads .. new apps are continuously enabled by improving bw & latency.

<comment><USER25> I moved from 100 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s (up/down both times) and haven't really noticed a difference. I'm still the only one using it in my household, mostly over wifi which caps me around ≈ 300 Mbits/s effectively.

I think you have to consider the quite limited multi tasking for bandwidth consumption. Worst case scenario I'm downloading some big file and streaming video at the same time, but that happens very early. Most realistically I'm only using one service at a time.

We also have to consider the asymmetrical nature of service consumption. Netflix et. al aren't event close to saturating a 100 mbit/s connection with video, nor are most places I download stuff so fast that I'm saturating my wifi-link.

This will probably age bad, but I think "100 Mbit/s low-latency bandwidth per person ought to be enough for anyone".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been impressed that Zoom isn't breaking down. I'm on it all day, and even my kids now have TaeKwonDo three days a week over Zoom.

<comment><USER27> If the stuff is breaking down already then has been improperly engineered from the foundation up. Very few places are already in the work from home mode apart from fairly technologically forward companies.

If the situation continues, I would expect the load on conferencing demand to be at least 10x of what it is now when an average 4-10 person business starts doing WFH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm smelling ISP lobbyists.

They want to abuse the situation by inventing a problem and getting support from politicians with no knowledge and plenty to lose during a humanitarian disaster - all of it to be able to introduce "HD packages" and similar later, so you get to pay more while they get to invest less. This is a great first towards selling "services" (by holding them hostage) and not being a "pipe" (which is their job).

Think of the children.

</comment><comment><USER28> Right now would be a fantastic time for these ISPs to start installing Open Connect Appliances. It'll keep most Netflix traffic off of the backbone.

[https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/)

<comment><USER29> It's not up to the ISPs. Netflix requires a minimum of 5 Gbps of traffic before an ISP qualifies for an appliance.

<comment><USER30> It's up to the ISPs to apply, isn't it?

<comment><USER29> Do you have any reason to believe that all those that qualify haven't applied?

<comment><USER30> Laziness, lack of awareness, being under the 5 Gbps limit a year ago when they took a look, any number of other reasons?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is in direct conflict with what the (UK) broadband providers have said:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51870732](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51870732)

</comment><comment><USER32> Of note:

"Netflix said it already adjusts the quality of streams to available network capacity, and uses a special delivery network that keeps its library closer to users as a way of consuming less bandwidth.

"The Commission said that while there has been a sharp increase in internet usage, no outages or adverse affects have so far been reported."

So I'm not sure what the problem here is.

Meanwhile here in the US, my company has been holding large video conferencing sessions (80+ people) for the first time ever, on Google Hangouts Meet. They've been flawless. Sure, that can change, but I have a hard time believing we aren't already near peak "at home" usage.

</comment><comment><USER33> Are actual technical people reporting issues with internet bandwidth, or are these unjustified fears by politicians?

<comment><USER34> Yes, I'm seeing issues and slowdown.

<comment><USER35> Like what? Is it an issue with specific services/providers? Or total internet bandwidth? Anyone know the bandwidth the submarine cables can handle in their current configuration?

What's the real bottleneck here?

<comment><USER36> I don't think the backbone of the Internet cares about this. ISPs get a box with all of Netflix's content in it, so you probably never go out to the Internet to watch something on Netflix. (YouTube also does this, though obviously they don't cache every video in every local ISP's cache, and I believe that Apple has a system like this as well.)

If there is any slowdown, it is likely due to limitations in the last mile. Netflix isn't sending 4k video streams from California to everyone else in the world individually, assuming everything is working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fortunately SAPGUI uses up so little bandwidth , can't Netflix and chill they still expect me to do work.

<comment><USER38> Nice one! On premise hosting could save you so!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can we get the millions if not billions back we gave to ISPs to roll out and improve broadband services that they never delivered?

<comment><USER40> We should give them more money to improve infrastructure.

I am sure 'this' time it will work.

<comment><USER41> nice try ISP executives!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> My ISP, Sonic, said yesterday their evening peak traffic is up 25% since Bay Area counties ordered people to stay at home.

[https://twitter.com/dane/status/1240155938193051648/photo/1](https://twitter.com/dane/status/1240155938193051648/photo/1)

</comment><comment><USER43> Here in the UK there is talk of 2020 being the year society gets its act together and starts making significant changes for the better. I've heard this praised as an opportunity, or bemoaned as lefty idealists trying to take over.

One positive outcome we can all agree on though: the end of BT OpenReach's passive aggressive "monopoly" couldn't come soon enough though. The amount of makework that goes on in UK broadband caused by OpenReach's emplacement at the heart of it all is ridiculous.

Kelly Communications (a major broadband hookup contractor for OpenReach and Virgin): your days are numbered.

Any mention of Netflix is a deflection.

</comment><comment><USER44> Plenty of headroom: [https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1240286131658293249](https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1240286131658293249)

</comment><comment><USER45> Where are the calls for cable companies to downgrade their traditional TV channels (set top box) from HD to SD so that they can re-provision some of the bandwidth toward internet?

I don't know enough about the tech to know for sure that this is possible, but it seems likely since it is the same wire and they offer different levels of TV and internet service.

If I'm right and it is possible, why is it that only streaming providers are being asked to sacrifice the quality of their service?

</comment><comment><USER46> How soon until we find out the EU was nudged to do this by ISPs that can't handle the network load and want to push blame? I mean, everyone knows that Netflix already uses available bandwidth measuring to adjust bitrate/quality.

</comment><comment><USER47> [http://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_4ebb7231fb7dfae120768199d6b...](http://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_4ebb7231fb7dfae120768199d6bd1430)

Why can't ISPs throttle them??

</comment><comment><USER48> Netflix solve backbone pressure with open connect. Last mile delivery is still up to the ISP but that won't "break the internet."

</comment><comment><USER49> Isn't it automatic? If the network speed is slow, Netflix will switch to a lower bandwidth video stream.

</comment><comment><USER50> "Urged" by who exactly? Some random politician who thinks the internet is a series of tubes?

<comment><USER51> Pretty much: Thierry Breton. A political hack with a pressing need to feel relevant in the crisis and nothing useful to do.

The daily briefing at ec.europa.eu was edited after Netflix caved, but yesterday it was evident from it that the person responsible had no clue about how any of it works, was deeply confused by the difference between "the Internet" and _mobile_ networks.

Part of the text freaking urged people to "use Wi-Fi" to relieve Internet congestion. Because as everybody knows, Wi-Fi uses magic and bypasses the Internet.

So we got our 25% reduction in Netflix quality on broadband connections because some moron was told by telcos that mobile networks are strained. While the actually competent people at IXes all over EU are saying there's nothing to worry about, they know how to do their job.

EU in a nutshell for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Poor ISPs can't deliver the broadband that we pay for and now it is the customers fault. :(

<comment><USER52> Well, ISP design their network for the average broadband used (plus a safety margin) and not for the worst case scenario.

Just like the electricity utility companies cannot provide everyone at the same time with the maximum power they are allowed to use.

<comment><USER53> Sometimes I really wish people got their internet bill and saw their peak vs. off-peak usage as something like megabits per second, just like they do with their power bill in kilowatts per hour. You could even provide the same kind of "neighbors near you used" metrics.

Each measure could be based off of what the ISP has factored in for the "average" usage at a given time. It would be a purely synthetic number, but it would give people a better idea of exactly what they use, when, and how that compares.

<comment><USER24> My ISP provides me detailed traffic charts. For example on Monday night I lost link-layer service (as did a neighbour and perhaps my whole street, this isn't exactly the ideal time to go asking everybody in person) and I can see that on the chart, and then I can see the next night when I had a multi-way video conference with friends for several hours.

Apparently in March 2019 I used a total of 106GB of download 25GB of upload, and this month so far is way below those numbers. This is biased by me working from home, so hour-long video conference calls aren't a new thing for me.

The ISP's policy (for which they charge significantly more than a typical ISP in my country) is to "never be the bottleneck". If things are too slow it is never (intentionally) their fault. So that's one reason they provide these charts - you can see latency info in them, drop rates, everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Would edge servers alleviate some of the bandwidth issue for this?

<comment><USER55> That's what the openconnect service does. It's an appliance installed directly into the ISP data center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> How much would AV1 help this?

</comment><comment><USER57> What does "standard definition" mean today? NTSC, 480i, 30FPS? HDTV, 1080p, 30FPS?

</comment><comment><USER58> "Pornhub urged to slow streaming to prevent breaking the internet"

</comment><comment><USER59> How about instead of urging people to do something they wont, remove content or only make certain content available at certain times for certain people.

</comment><comment> saiya-jin Nobody should be surprised by this, I mean if you lock down hundreds of millions in western countries, what will they do in 2020 but online?

I am fine with throttling these services, hospitals and research should be given top priority, followed by all remote workers (or general traffic if that's hard to distinguish). These massive leisure services should be at the very bottom of priority.

<comment><USER60> I fully disagree, no one should be given priority.

<comment><USER61> There are basic communications principles that pre-date having an Internet. One of them is that emergency traffic let alone health & welfare traffic have precedence over routine traffic on communications systems. There can be voluntary prioritization of traffic to support emergency response now or the full legal power of multiple nation-states can be brought to bear to ensure traffic supporting emergency response gets handled first.

What we have here is a critical vulnerability in that too much is dependent upon one backbone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The problem is in Europe Google/CloudFlare/Akamai/Netflix/Amazon tend to have DCs in Ireland/Netherlands. And there was obviously little investment in backbone fiber connecting across countries. And even worse for services based in USA.

Now EU politicians are shift-blaming after they blew their budget and have nothing to show.

<comment><USER63> You are 100% wrong about Cloudflare. We have servers in:

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Athens, Greece

Barcelona, Spain

Belgrade, Serbia

Berlin, Germany

Brussels, Belgium

Bucharest, Romania

Budapest, Hungary

Chișinău, Moldova

Copenhagen, Denmark

Cork, Ireland

Dublin, Ireland

Düsseldorf, Germany

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Frankfurt, Germany

Geneva, Switzerland

Gothenburg, Sweden

Hamburg, Germany

Helsinki, Finland

Istanbul, Turkey

Kyiv, Ukraine

Lisbon, Portugal

London, United Kingdom

Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

Madrid, Spain

Manchester, United Kingdom

Marseille, France

Milan, Italy

Moscow, Russia

Munich, Germany

Nicosia, Cyprus

Oslo, Norway

Paris, France

Prague, Czech Republic

Reykjavík, Iceland

Riga, Latvia

Rome, Italy

Saint Petersburg, Russia

Sofia, Bulgaria

Stockholm, Sweden

Tallinn, Estonia

Thessaloniki, Greece

Vienna, Austria

Vilnius, Lithuania

Warsaw, Poland

Zagreb, Croatia

Zürich, Switzerland

<comment><USER64> And for Google, we have CDN PoP in

Amsterdam, Netherlands (3) Budapest, Hungary Dublin, Ireland Frankfurt, Germany (3) Groningen, Netherlands Hamburg, Germany (2) Hamina, Finland London, England (3) Madrid, Spain (2) Marseille, France Milan, Italy Munich, Germany Paris, France (2) Prague, Czech Republic Sofia, Bulgaria St. Ghislain, Belgium Stockholm, Sweden (2) Warsaw, Poland Zurich, Switzerland (2)

[https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/locations](https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/locations)</comment></comment></comment>


City of Seattle passes tax for local businesses based on high-earner salaries - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2020/seattle-passes-big-business-tax-top-earners-years-false-starts/ <comment><USER2> They really do think that big businesses are not able to relocate 10 minutes away to a place without this tax.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or a business can decide to stay in the city, but work out a way to offset the costs, reducing annual raises or reducing bonuses etc. Hopefully this law does bring in some much needed help for the homeless situation, but looking at other Seattle city council projects, I'm not very positive on that happening.

<comment><USER3> It's more complex then that. If you reduce bonuses/raises, then talent will start leaving your company if they can get better offers.

<comment><USER2> They will just go to Microsoft that is located in Redmond that is not affected by the tax.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get free Google Play Store credit using Google Opinion Reward - <AUTHOR> http://www.technostall.com/how-to-get-free-google-play-store-credit/

<comment><USER2> Love this app!!! Just did a survey this morning and got a $1 for it!</comment>


Changes Coming to Firefox 4 - <AUTHOR> http://geektechnica.com/2010/06/5-exciting-changes-coming-to-firefox-4/

<comment><USER2> I am really looking forward to Taskfox, at least if it can solve some of the problems Ubiquity had. Unfortunately, I haven't seen all that much excitement for it.

<comment><USER3> Could someone familiar with Ubiquity/Taskfox please post a quick summary of what these things are/do? The linked article was utterly uninformative, and the onward link goes to a page about Ubiquity on the Mozilla site that contains so much buzzword bullshit that I just tuned it out and closed the window after half a minute, still none the wiser about what it really does.

<comment><USER4> They basically act as a "browser console". From within your browser, they allow you to type out a command and have it performed in real time. For example, you can type 'd', tab complete it to "define", and then type any word you'd like to define. The definition will be shown as you type. You can even highlight words in the text of the page and then start ubiquity/taskfox and type "define". Ubiquity/Taskfox will understand that you mean to define the highlighted word and perform accordingly. Of course, a feature to define words is only one of many. With Ubiquity you can search Google or Wikipedia, translate between languages, send the current page as a email, post to your twitter, get maps and driving directions, and perform tons of useful tasks, all from typing a simple pseudo-english phrase of what you want.

EDIT: You might find this useful: <http://vimeo.com/4062903>

<comment><USER3> Thanks, that was much more informative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was trying to find a nightly build, but it seems they aren't available here [http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/lates...](http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest- trunk/)

Is 3.7a6pre a 4.0 nightly?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. All nightlies are Firefox 4 nightlies. Since there is no Firefox 4 yet, its not numbered that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chrome tabs!?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by Chrome Tabs? Are you referring to separate Process per tab on chrome?

<comment><USER6> It was really just a joke. I should have known better.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What niche interest do you have which doesn't have an internet community - <AUTHOR> Do you have some niche Hobbies or interests you haven't found a community on the internet for so far?<p>Maybe there are HNers sharing your passion. <comment><USER2> My issue with niche interests is not that there aren't communities out there, but that they tend to be fragmented. Facebook/Reddit attract a lot of users, but tend to generate poor discussion and long-term engagement. Specific forums and communities are much better in my experience, but much harder to get going and keep going. So overall I feel like there's a lot less discussion than there potentially could be.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a niche interest in coffee and coffee shops, but more for the culture itself. Historically, cafes were hotbeds of intellectual discussion, debates, and political movements. Nowadays most online coffee forums are just gearheads comparing technology and flavors.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't an online community for that be a community dedicated to "intellectual discussion, debates, and political movements"? I'm confused about what you're looking for exactly.

<comment><USER3> Maybe, but something that combines offline and online discussion would be ideal. Meet once a month at the cafe to have a discussion in person, then have it continued and expanded online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All of my favorite niche communities were absorbed by Reddit and Facebook.

<comment><USER6> This seems to be the unfortunate truth. And if I was looking to join a niche interest, I'd go to these sites because that's where the people are. Only exception is for in person meetings, where I'd look to Meetup or Eventbrite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Logic (exclude lesswrong)</comment>


Ask HN: Best Way to Discover Blogs? - <AUTHOR> For podcasts, there's a lot of discovery services popping up. And as far as keeping up with several different blogs, RSS is great for that.
But is there a service that makes it easy to discover blogs?
In a sense, HackerNews and Reddit and such sort of function as this indirectly. Ditto for Medium. I'm wondering if there's something more direct. <comment><USER2> You can use a combination of advanced google search operators along with recent content filters to find blog content

[https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search- operators/](https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/)

Popular Podcasts also serve as a good proxy for locating interesting blogs

</comment><comment><USER3> Twitter. When you find interesting people to follow, most probably they also have interesting stuff on their websites/blogs.</comment>


Music Browser, Not "Music Service Client" - <AUTHOR> http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-12-23.html <comment><USER3> Zed is having an awfully hard time convincing people about this idea. He really needs to either just build it already or drop it. I mean, we get it. You want to build a music browser. We don't "get" your vision. Yes, ok, fine. Get on with it already. What are you waiting for? Time spent wanking about on your blog is time not spent writing code.

<comment><USER4> Seems really damn simple:

A web browser visits host.domain and gets documents

An SFTP client visits host.domain and gets files

A music client visits host.domain and gets music

Ie, like the program you have open now, except it only shows the music produced at news.yc.com, rather than this page.

<comment><USER5> Interesting. Sounds like a solution looking for a problem to solve. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does a Music Browser differ from an Internet Browser then? Because I can open up my Internet Browser, type "<http://zedshaw.com/> and listen to music created by Zed. (ok, I do then have to click the "Music" link but that's the website owners choice).

EDIT: Ok, this is a followup to a previous blog post here <http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-12-21.html>

What he describes there actual sounds kind of cool :)

<comment><USER7> It's kind like the difference between URI and URN.

The 'Music Browser' meant to point directly to the true spirit of the original music, nothing else. The browsing process is the exploring of those artistic minds and jumping between derivatives.

iTunes and Last.FM are just pointing to _instance_ of the music _class_

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This might be worth checking out: [http://rel.me/2008/09/23/shrub-s3-proxy- service-on-google-ap...](http://rel.me/2008/09/23/shrub-s3-proxy-service-on- google-app-engine/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like oEmbed might come useful here ( <http://www.oembed.com/> ) - <USER2> could have an oEmbed link for "my music" in zedshaw.com, and a browser extension (or dedicated app etc) that reads these particular oEmbed URLs.

</comment><comment><USER10> I worked at a startup that did this. It was a cool idea, but there weren't enough users who cared.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Type zedshaw.com.

> Browse and listen to music I've created.

If I type Miley Cyrus (just example, no offence), will it list only the songs she _wrote herself_ or all those she _performed_? What exactly does 'created' mean?

<comment><USER11> Your point is interesting, and made me think about the way people primarily look for classical music - by composer.

If this whole scheme is to be based on some notion of "creator," then the the way this would be organized seems to be pretty dependent on some standard definition of creation, and maybe even of art.

Seems like it could get pretty hairy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In other words: this is about publishing, specifically who's doing the publishing. In the current world, entities other than the artist publish the artist's music. Zed wants to create a music-only browser that retrieves and renders metadata that is published directly by the artist. Get rid of the publisher/distributor in-between the artist and the listener. This is definitely where the world is headed. I don't think a new browser is the missing bridge to getting there, though.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have a hard time understanding why someone would make or use this. Music distribution is by no means a solved problem, but what would a music browser accomplish? Why would people publish their music on this instead of the web?

</comment><comment><USER14> Sounds fairly similar to SoundCloud (<http://soundcloud.com/>) in that the purpose is to share music that one has created.

<comment><USER15> I think you misunderstood what Zed's trying to describe. He doesn't want a website to do this. He's basically trying to create a protocol for music distribution. So instead of <http://google.com> you'd go to mp3://google.com and you could browse the website just like it were an album, etc.</comment></comment>


FounderConference; Dave McClure "90% of you will fail" + tips - <AUTHOR> http://go.danielodio.com/FounderConference

<comment><USER2> I'm currently working on editing the video footage from the conference. There's a lot of content in there, it will take some time but it's coming.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Alain, yours is surely better than mine! I had some guy with a big head of hair sitting right in front of me ;)

Great event, BTW. Dave & Adeo were phenomenal. Adeo has this ability to tear people down but do it in a really constructive and funny way so nobody feels bad about it, and everyone learns a lot.

DROdio

<comment><USER3> Thank you for putting all this material, extremely useful for those who can't attend the founder conference in person. Those speakers are excellent and their concise ( brutal? ) way of putting things always leave me more energized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Daniel, thanks for the great post and abundance of quality video footage.</comment>


Daniel Gross of Apple leaves to become Y Combinator's newest partner - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/10/daniel-gross-of-apple-leaves-to-become-y-combinators-newest-partner/ <comment><USER2> There does seem to be something interesting about how less successful* YC alumni now seem to be becoming partners. And, of course, Sam Altman himself is the ultimate case of this.

And, on the one hand, it certainly makes sense. All of these people have been through the YC process and used it to achieve a measure of success. Also, the Drew Houston's of the world are generally available to be partners precisely because of their success (they have companies to run, after all).

On the other hand, it can seem a little incestuous, and that's certainly something to guard against given the nature of tech in general. Too often it seems like organizations become victims of their own success precisely through this sort of "inbreeding".

*: "less successful" meant very charitably as they're only less successful when compared to i.e. Dropbox and are certainly more successful than most YC founders, let alone all founders.

<comment><USER3> I have to say I have been baffled why Sam Altman is held in such high regard by YC and its community. He co-founded Loopt in the first batch of YC. It was sold years later for less than the money the investors had put into it. So it basically failed and lost money. Except for the co-founders, they walk away with a few million each. Nice pay for at best an average performance.

He then becomes CEO of YC. But YC is already a well established and successful outfit at that point so there is hardly any risk involved. The chief requirement is just to not screw up a good thing. So far he has managed to do that.

Along the way he makes many more millions because as a YC insider he gets to invest at the earliest stage for the best looking start-ups.

I have nothing against the man and I do not begrudge him his millions but lets stop thinking he is a genius. He is an average entrepreneur that has had an amazing slice of luck by being in on YC at its start and making the most of it. I'm sure he is a smart, hard working and a nice bloke. But he is not a genius.

<comment><USER4> The shortcomings of this noxious but common "prove you're a genius by your ROI" attitude is exactly why Y Combinator has been as successful as it has been.

There is no mystery here. PG, JL, TLB and RTM obviously thought highly of many people when entering YC, even more highly when they got to see them up close, and even more so as they worked closely with them. They see their value. And that's why Sam Altman is the CEO of YC.

Believe it or not, the YC partners and leadership are actually better judges of ability than the market. It could never work otherwise.

<comment><USER5> > Believe it or not, the YC partners and leadership are actually better judges > of ability than the market. It could never work otherwise.

Doesnt match

> It was sold years later for less than the money the investors had put into > it.

<comment><USER6> No contradiction. YC likes Altman more than the market liked Altman's company. YC sees more potential than was manifest in that startup.

I have no opinion on his brilliance, just pointing out there's no mismatch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good for him. I personally got to work with Daniel in the past (Apple) and I must say that it was not a great experience. I know it's never easy for acqui- hires to get into the company culture and try to make the transition happen smoothly... but in his case it was more of an attitude and personality clash. He did get promoted though so I'm sure despite his attitude, he had the good habit to get stuff done!

</comment><comment><USER8> Lately Apple stories on HN all seem to have comment chains that are isomorphic to this exchange:

Guy 1: Jesus Christ what a red flag at Apple, should we be worried?

Guy 2: Apple makes a superbillion dollars therefore concern is impossible.

It's very weird to see over and over. It's like the way pro-life and pro- choice people talk past each other in their reasoning.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how isomorphic the comments are. Perhaps I'm just not understanding your meaning correctly. Do you mean to say that the opinion of Guy 1 and Guy 2 are the same in essence?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How much talent is Apple losing today?

<comment><USER11> As an Apple shareholder, there have been multiple red flags in the last 6 months, this is yet just another.

\- Missing deadlines of product realeases.

\- Seriously getting product design wrong and missing what users want. See Apple Watch, See iPhone 7, See MacBook Pro.

\- Tim Cook being passive and an operations guy with no founder vision or drive.

\- Failure to acquire new and innovate companies, instead doubling down on "strange" investments such as Didi Chuxing, and Softbank (both 1 billion).

I've been a huge Apple supporter and "fanboy", but the signs are starting to really add up. Soon enough the finance guys will start to see the patterns as well and there may be a significant correction.

<comment><USER12> > Missing deadlines of product realeases.

Remember the white iPhone 4? Hell, I remember the time during the switch from PowerPC to Intel meant you couldn't get your hands on an iMac for a month or two (late 2005).

> [...] missing what users want. See Apple Watch, See iPhone 7, See MacBook > Pro.

Recently purchased the iPhone 7 after having stuck with a 5S for three years. I've got to say it's an excellent phone and I don't understand the whingeing. You get headphones and an adapter in box which works fine with my other headphones, though I stick with the supplied lightning cable ones. The shallow depth of field pictures it takes makes me feel like I've got an SLR with a prime lens in my pocket wherever I go.

I've played with the new MBP and it felt more Star Trek than any touchscreen laptop I've used. The NVMe storage in it largely negates the need for more than 16gb RAM.

> Tim Cook being passive and an operations guy with no founder vision or > drive.

I'd say his passion for user privacy and commentary on his sexuality has shown him to be someone who cares for peoples rights. A good attitude to have when you're the CEO of a tech giant.

> doubling down on "strange" investments such as Didi Chuxing, and Softbank > (both 1 billion).

Softbank completed a $31 Billion purchase of ARM recently. Still thinking Apple shouldn't have put a $1 billion shoe in the door? If memory serves they were also the first major distributor of iPhones in Japan when NTT Docomo were more interested in pushing flip phones.

<comment><USER11> > I'd say his passion for user privacy and commentary on his sexuality has > shown him to be someone who cares for peoples rights.

He's not running for office he running a public company. As a shareholder those things are not priorities, but to him they are. Thus the problem I have.

<comment><USER12> And so you ignored the larger point that he's more than capable of making smart investments _like Softbank_ who now own ARM, similar to Apple's prior investment in Imagination Technologies Group who design the GPUs for the A-series SOCs. Apple was first out the door with a 64-bit ARM chip in a smartphone - they need this investment to stay at the front of the pack. It also helps to invest in a company that shuttles more iPhones than any other distributor in a market as difficult and lucrative as Japan.

Getting back to my comment you quoted -- given the growing concern over user privacy, being in the position where you can serve both users who care AND those who don't is a very nice position to be in. His being gay while growing up in a conservative state no doubt influenced his desire to protect users privacy. The culture of the company is important if it's to attract new talent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> With all due to respect to the prestige, draw, presumed, current, or pending wild profitability, power and influence of YCombinator, why isn't anyone here talking about Eddy Cue? Don't people leave managers, not employers? Is he too much of an institution at Apple?

I am seriously disappointed by Apple's lack of effort into excellence at this point. Personal example, I turned my iPhone settings into Swedish to help me and there are clearly some problems with translation. Another example, not listening to the needs of the developer community and failing to evolve its Macbooks into computational powerhouses (maybe they are just hiding a next generation of élite hardware – going to spin off a not-Macbook, smartly staunch in the face of fear of cannibalizing their market. Yeah, maybe that's coming...

Where is the guy who proved a phone could be smaller by tossing it into an aquarium and drawing attention to the bubbles

Maybe I'm giving too much credit to the ghost of Steve Jobs. I feel like the problem comes top-down. Without a leader to install the culture of excellence, the culture degrades into memes of the culture, eventually signifying nothing. We saw this through the return of Ray Dalio. Maybe Michael Dell will "Make Dell Great Again" too? I think there's a small opportunity in a line of hats that say "Make Apple Great Again"

No, but seriously: what's the deal with Eddy Cue?

<comment><USER14> If you don't like your iPhone translation, then file some bugs: [http://bugreport.apple.com](http://bugreport.apple.com)

<comment><USER15> I imagine most developers do, but his point stands. Here's the summary from my latest:

> My two new MacBook Pros came with SIP disabled.

And the one before it:

> I reported a related bug (#19495560) where the FileVault on a brand new > MacBook does not finish encrypting. I think this is a related bug, where, > when switching between the tabs on the Security & Privacy pane of the System > Preferences freezes the screen.

The majority of bugs I've filed are with brand new machines, and that's not even counting all the UI sloppiness that isn't worth reporting. The machines are usable, a heck of alot more so than I remember Windows or Linux being, but the attention to having details right and having things always-work is absolutely gone.

Just this week, I tried the new AirBuds in the store: connects magically, but music app stops being able to do audio and needs restarting. Guy trying them next to me can't get his to pair with his phone at all until he toggles airplane mode off and on.

Earlier this weekend, needed to restart my phone for live photos to work (photos was playing the first preview animation, but not the whole one, even after restarting the app).

A few weeks back, a friend asks me to get the wifi password she typed into her phone onto her laptop. Easy, right? Just walk her through setting up iCloud keychain. Nope! Sync simply doesn't happen (yet? who knows!), and there's no way to force it. Wasn't surprised, but still disappointed.

<comment><USER16> I only see one bug number but four different bugs being described here. Where's the rest?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Given his age, how did Daniel Gross break into machine learning? i.e. where did he learn the theory ? Is he purely self taught?

<comment><USER18> What's with the "given his age" part? Is he too young or too old to learn something?

<comment><USER19> Most accomplished individuals in machine learning have obtained PhDs at one of the leading academic research institutions. I think the OP was wondering if Gross took a different route, since he seems on the younger side.

<comment><USER15> What has he done with machine learning? He sounds like a good coder, but not really an ML heavy-weight...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really liked Greplin a lot, it was super useful for its time. I kind of lost track of it after the Cue transition. Does it still exist? Does that product category still exist even?

<comment><USER21> When they were acquired there was talk in the press of integrating some of the technology into Siri and/or the iWatch but I don't know what actually happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unclear why the official YC press release is not the primary post for this event: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13368446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13368446)

</comment><comment><USER23> I've met Daniel and Robby and was particularly impressed by Daniel. It's not a surprise to me that YC chose him for this role.

</comment><comment><USER24> Congrats Daniel! All the best.

</comment><comment><USER25> edit: I'm deleting this thread. I don't want to hijack Daniel Gross's hiring thread with negativity. Sorry.

<comment><USER26> You don't need partners great at scaling profitable companies from 100 to 500 employees.

You need partners who know how to help a company go from two to ten employees and raise a first round of funding.

I'm a part-time partner, and I run a company with >500 employees, but I basically draw entirely on my first 2-3 years of experience when giving advice.

<comment><USER27> It would be interesting to hear about your experience making this transition, how you did it and how you would have done it differently knowing what you know now. Do you have any published content you can point to?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Daniel Gross of Apple

Is this a modern nobility title? xD

</comment><comment><USER29> Just big shots changing chairs.</comment>


Dead Man Dancing - <AUTHOR> http://www.foundread.com/view/dead-man-dancing <comment><AUTHOR> I like this part: "The lesson here is that an entrepreneur has to learn to be able to live with fear and uncertainty – learn how to sleep in the midst of a fire. If we can't handle the stress of high pressure situations with calm, our companies don't have a chance."

<comment><USER2> Exactly - the dark side of Entrepreneurship. Risk is real and can lead to financial disaster. I would recommend that the more you have to risk, the better a business chance your startup needs to be.</comment></comment>


Why software patents and business method patents are a problem  - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/if-you-have-a-half-hour-today-watch-this.html

<comment><USER2> Here's a previous post on this excellent video: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1302116></comment>


Polari: the dead language of gay British men - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-polari-the-curious-after-life-of-the-dead-language-for-gay-men-72599 <comment><USER2> Cants are fascinating. I hadn't realized until reading this article the connection to Morrissey's "Piccadilly Palare" (which indeed is the intent), which makes so much more sense now upon reflection.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_(language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cant_\(language\))

</comment><comment><USER3> Here in Turkey, we have "lubunca" which is more or less the same with this language, except it is still living. Entire Turkish grammar applies but there is lots and lots of new words to keep the talk obscure.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's that short film in Polari with line-by-line translations and a discussion of the etymology of the slang used. Scroll down to see the script, some of the dialog is clickable with annotations.

[https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/10/watch-short-film- explore...](https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2016/10/watch-short-film-explores- lost-gay-slang-brits-used-avoid-arrest/)

<comment><USER5> powered by rapgenius... genius

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Another group of activists called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence > created a Polari Bible, running a Polari wordlist through a computer program > on an English version of the Bible.

> "And the rib, which the Duchess Gloria had lelled from homie, made she a > palone, and brought her unto the homie." Translation: "And the rib which God > had taken from man was made into a woman and brought to the man."

I'm interested how a language is judged to be distinctly different such that it can be called a separate language and not a dialect or variant. If the language heavily borrows sentence structure and filler words from English, is it a separate language or merely a variant or dialect?

<comment><USER7> To the extent that there's a rule to go by, it's that in general dialects are mutually intelligible and languages are not, and video of this speech is not comprehensible at all to me (a native English speaker), so that arguably pushes it into "language."

But of course there really isn't a rule, though. In practice what gets called a language vs. a dialect is mostly political. Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are at least somewhat mutually intelligible, and Moldovan and Romanian are essentially the same language but for a border in between, as are Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin. By contrast, Mandarin and Cantonese aren't mutually intelligible at all but are supposedly both "Chinese dialects," and ditto for the various colloquial flavors of Arabic. The saying among linguists is "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And if you would like to hear Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick do their stuff, here you go: [https://youtu.be/OZL4rTEWU5c](https://youtu.be/OZL4rTEWU5c)

<comment><USER9> that was broadcast in 1965-1968.

Male same sex activity _started_ to be decriminalised in the UK in 1967, but there were still many restrictions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_King...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom#Same- sex_sexual_activity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Russian "Fenya" is a living example of something similar (applicable to the criminal/thief subculture), with bits and pieces of it having migrated into everyday speech, like the word "garbage" for cops. There's a Polish, Romani and Yiddish layer in it too, which should make it an amazing subject for linguistic research, but I'm not sure if anyone is seriously studying it...

<comment><USER11> This is regional slang rather than dialect, but in the UK — specifically England, mostly northern England — "the filth" means "the police" (collective noun — you wouldn't refer to an individual cop as _a_ filth).

I'm now wondering if this is parallel evolution to "Fenya" or some sort of cross-fertilization.

<comment><USER10> Convergent evolution due to similar environmental pressures, I presume :)

Garbage is a collective noun in Russian and can't have a plural, but in thief jargon it's used as a singular noun for one cop (the garbage is on my tail), and, hilariously enough, in a plural for multiple cops ("garbages were whistling all night in the park", it's from a song).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> WD-42 The official IRC client for the GNOME desktop (popular desktop environment for Linux) is named Polari. [https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Polari](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Polari)

<comment><USER12> Yeah that's what I was thinking about too... I wonder if it was intentional. They do want you to pronounce the G in front.. .

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's a short film in Polari: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk)

<comment><USER14> Which is also embedded in the article.

<comment><USER13> So it was, sorry. I don't know how I missed it.

<comment><USER15> Because we are so used to seeing articles broken up by ads and other intrusive media that we go from the last word of one paragraph to the first of the next and skip the interruption?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some Polari words live on in modern British English, such as bijou, camp, cottaging, khazi, naff, and scarper.

<comment><USER5> When George Michael passed away, I dug his whole life, and learned cottaging on the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Queen lyric "Scaramouche, Scaramouche, can you do the fandango?" seems like some coded message in polari.

<comment><USER18> Except "Scaramouche" and "fandango" are both in the dictionary.

<comment><USER17> Polari has some common English words.

According to a table in the Wikipedia, for instance _cottage_ , a standard English dictionary word, denotes a "public lavatory used for sexual encounters" and _handbag_ stands for "money".

<comment><USER18> Do you really think that Queen is not using Scaramouche to mean the Commedia del Arte clown and fandango to mean the dance? If I see a sentence with cottage and handbag used like that, I don't think I'd be confused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Kenneth Williams used it when a popular comic and nobody straight had the first idea of the gay subtext.

<comment><USER15> Of course they knew, Britain has a long history of camp in the theater. They maybe didn't know the words' meaning but they knew the gay subtext and overtones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Their Polari bible translation has "unto the homie" == "to the man", so Polari for "man" is "homie"! I think the modern slang homie comes from "homeboy", so that'd be convergent etymology?

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I'd (naïvely) guess Polari _homie_ would come from the French _homme_ , so it would be convergent (as opposed to some shared etymological root).

<comment><USER21> Looks like it's actually from Italian _uomo_ (plural _uomi_ ), and most places seem to spell it "omie" without the "h."

<comment><USER2> Cheers. Both share the same Latin root, _homo_ (man), correct?

<comment><USER22> Correct. However, the 'homo' in homosexual derives from Greek homo, meaning 'same' or something to that effect.

<comment><USER2> Right. For example, homogenous. Or homonym. Not related to _homme_ or _uomo_. No connection to homosexual was implied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As used by the characters Julian and Sandy in the postwar BBC radio comedy Round the Horne.

<comment><USER24> I believe at the time in the UK not just homosexuality (cf. Alan Turing) but also depictions of it were illegal, so this was a way to have gay characters without the BBC directors or censors realising.

<comment><USER25> Depicting gay characters wasn't illegal, but it would have caused an almighty shitstorm in the tabloid press.

In the 60s and 70s, British comedy and light entertainment was rife with "confirmed bachelors" with a flamboyant manner - John Inman, Kenneth Williams, Frankie Howerd, Larry Grayson etc. A metropolitan audience would see them as obviously gay, but there was a level of plausible deniability, aided by straight camp and drag performers like Dick Emery and Stanley Baxter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Articles like this remind me of how far we have come in a relatively short time. From a world where gay people had to invent a secret language to afford them some sense of security in a harsh world, to a world where gay people have significantly more rights is a wonderful development. Good job to everyone who fought to make this change a reality...

<comment><USER27> Significantly more rights than who? Christians?

<comment><USER28> Clearly they meant significantly more rights than they used to have

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Shows the Church of England has ceased to be a church in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER30> The church's objections to homosexuality are an opinion that they have the right to have-- the state's criminalization of it, however, is the violation of rights which is a crime.

Homophobia is just stupid, government action is the real crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm pretty sure the contemporary word we use for "female impersonators" is trans.

<comment><USER32> Drag is certainly a popular outlet for trans people who can't be out in their public lives, but not all drag queens (or kings) are trans, or even gay.</comment></comment>


React Hook to Run Code After Render - <AUTHOR> https://daveceddia.com/react-hook-after-render/ <comment><USER2> I'm not very familiar with React. In this context, does "after render" mean after React has finished updating the browser's DOM, or does it mean after the browser has finished displaying the updated DOM to the user?

</comment><comment><USER3> useEffect as it is runs when the component is mounted and then every time the state is updates, you can control this by passing options to useEffect, to answer your question: yes after the component has been inserted into the DOM, not necessarily after the updated dom has been displayed</comment>


If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wl3PlrPq8sw

<comment><USER2> If it's not an iPhone, it's worth buying :)

<comment><USER3> It might be worth buying if and only if it's not an iPhone.

<comment><USER2> You've totally got the idea!</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook is still figuring out how to tackle fake news - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/14/facebook-fake-news-code-media/ <comment><USER2> Facebook is still trying to figure out how to censor news and bury voices without too much backlash. The twitter way.</comment>


An update on Python-for-android: v2019.06.06 released and future plans - <AUTHOR> http://inclem.net/2019/06/08/kivy/an_update_on_python_for_android/ <comment><USER2> I really like Python... it is fun to program with and has a decent library for just about anything you can imagine.

However, I would really like a Flutter like UI experience for Python. More concretely, Python would rule the world if it had a modern cross platform framework upon which to build graphical interfaces for all the devices we see today. From iOS to Android to RasPi to Google Home to anything with a screen.

Kivy and the Beeware project are just too janky to really accomplish anything. No offense intended to the creators or maintainers. The complexity to get anything out there is just too much.

I have been looking at Flutter/Dart and React/JS to fill this gap. Also, thinking about possibly learning Swift. My logic, Python seems like it is going down the ML rabbit hole with no signs of abatement... I don't know what that means for long term adoption.

If Swift, Dart, Kotlin and JS can tap into the same ML pipelines, I don't see the benefit of Python in the long run. I mean a Pandas library for anyone of the languages mentioned above would be a game changer for ML adoption in that language, imo.

<comment><USER3> Mobile apps written in Python might be too slow though.

<comment><USER4> Too slow for what? How slow do you think python is? unless your application is cpu-bound (which it probably isn't), python is fast enough for basically anything you might want to do these days, and if it is, you can use cython to optimize the parts that needs to be fast, as kivy does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While a lot can be done in kivy, I foolishly decided to try it out with absolutely no primer on java, android or native development in general.

It was ok, everything felt like it had to be hacked together, and for some reason the only working version I could get stuff to compile in was like android SDK 19 and ndk 14b I think? (you literally had to thread the needle with your envs) At the time I don't know if they actually had a working buildozer env for 64-bit ARM.(could be wrong on that) Compiling took forever, especially the first time, which 99% of the time I couldn't get any 64-bit version of anything to compile so nothing was cached. I'd change one config wait 10 minutes come back not ideal.

Again I was probably super naive in my approach, but overall it felt very constraining and not the java is a peach but I was much more comfortable learning java (from scratch) and android than wading through kivy.

I appreciate the developers contributions, and I'm probably at fault, but I'm just saying its worth noting it wasn't any easier getting an app running if you know just python with kivy. I've also come to realize gradle and android are just a huge bloated mess in general lol.

As a side note cross compiling packages in go for use on android does work really good for stuff like daemons.</comment>


Digikam 7.0: Open-source photo management - <AUTHOR> https://www.digikam.org/news/2020-07-19-7.0.0_release_announcement/ <comment><USER2> I checked out Digikam recently because my camera didn't support PTP but instead a custom protocol and I wanted to copy pictures over (Dolphin had no support). Sadly, Digikam had to mess with the metadata of each picture and put its name inside. Which contribution has the program done other than download the picture from the camera? So I went to using an SD card reader instead.

<comment><USER3> Since this is an open source project, could you remove that part of the code?

<comment><USER4> You can configure what is added to the metadata in the settings.

<comment><USER5> It's a dubious default, though. Why muck with tags from originals when you don't have to?

<comment><USER6> Not really a default. When you start up Digikam for the first time a prompt asks if you would like information saved to the files or not. If you select no information is stored in a local Digikam DB.

<comment><USER7> Can confirm: just installed digikam 7.0 and it asked me if I want to store information in photo metadata. I said no...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish there was photo management software which catered to non-enterprise multi-user environments.

ie families, or small organizations where the photos (and database) would reside on a computer, but other users on their computers could access it via the local network.

At the moment, this middle ground doesn't seem to exist. It's either single- user only photo management software or full-blown multi-user digital asset management software with enterprise-level pricing.

<comment><USER5> PhotoStructure is absolutely designed for self-hosted family-and-friends access of local photos and videos. You'll get installation instructions emailed to you shortly after you subscribe to the beta. [https://PhotoStructure.com](https://PhotoStructure.com)

(Disclaimer: I'm the author, and wished the same thing you did, so I quit my job to build it).

<comment><USER9> Any chance the website could show a screenshot or something? It's just a generic thing right now and I have no interest in signing up to something I can't see.

<comment><USER5> Sure, I'll add some more prominently.

[https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/](https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/) has several.

I added one on the home page, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry for somewhat unrelated query: is Digikam a replacement for Darktable? If not what's a good workflow between the two? I am a hobbyist photo taker and have only recently started using Darktable and really enjoy using it. However, it isn't a very efficient photo manager in my opinion (I may very well be missing something).

<comment><USER11> I would say they're complementary. Digikam is more of an all-around organizer and has lots of import/export stuff, tagging, and now good face recognition too apparently (the old one was based on classic Haar cascades).

Darktable is for selecting a series of shots, going through them, developing the ones you want to keep.

<comment><USER12> Which would you use to replace Picasa (on a Mac) ?

<comment><USER13> Darktable's targets digital photography enthusiasts or professionals. The learning curve is steep. Picasa's target demographic was "everyone". So probably Digikam.

<comment><USER14> I can confirm. Every now and then I want to edit some of my photos and run Darktable, only then to remember it has zero automation and a hundred of sliders for individual adjustments. It definitely requires dedication to use, more of that than I have to give for holiday photo editing.

<comment><USER13> You can get by using the same 5 sliders for almost all your photos. The other sliders remain available for edge cases or when you want to go the extra mile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sadly, even at version 7.0, it (Digikam) still doesn't support virtual albums/collections, and it insists on direct album-file_system_directory correlation. Unfortunently, it is useless to me as an image/photo organizer. (I don't really see tags as a substitute).

<comment><USER16> Can you help me understand what you're looking for in a "virtual album" feature that isn't achieved by tags?

<comment><USER17> Being able to specific a particular sequence for the photos in a "virtual album" that is different than, say, their capture date or filename.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I haven't tried this out yet, but from the release notes it sounds like the new facial recognition system will be better than I am. I am not good at recognizing faces and have been waiting for quite some time for a good open source tool to recognize faces with.

<comment><USER19> Never thought of people with facial agnosia.. someone make an app !

<comment><USER18> According to Wikipedia it is called prosopagnosia [1]. I have never been formally diagnosed, but I cannot even recognize the faces of my own family members to save my life. Having software that sorts faces will be great. Given that I only use open source software, I am quite excited for this new release.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia)

<comment><USER20> > I have never been formally diagnosed, but I cannot even recognize the faces > of my own family members to save my life.

And I thought I had this disease. I think root of my issue most likely is that my brain is assuming that most people I see on the street or during parties I will never see again so it immediately forgets faces and names and only starts remembering when I encounter them few times.

I would imagine the most famous people who were diagnosed with prosopagnosia probably have something closer to what I have than you.

<comment><USER21> But not recognizing faces of people you see at parties is different from not recognizing your own family. Do you have the latter too?

<comment><USER20> LOL, after editing the comment I cut out the important part. What I meant to say is that I thought I had that disease, but after reading the comment I doubt I have it.

I also suspect that many celebrities who claim that they have it probably just have a bad memory. They are normally meeting a lot of people so it's not easy to remember faces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> KDE software is so great (digiKam, Kdenlive, Kate, Krita) unfortunately the KDE environment compared to Gnome is just so bug-ridden, especially when it comes to multi-monitoring, wayland-support and scaling. Gnome shines in these respecst. I wish thebest of both worlds!

<comment><USER23> I don't really have problems with multi monitor and KDE.

<comment><USER24> I do - every time I unlock my screen, Plasma crashes, and my windows get randomly distributed around my virtual desktops.

Oddly enough, if I only have one monitor enabled, it doesn't happen. And yes, I've nuked my preferences several times.

<comment><USER25> I have the same problem consistently on PopOS which uses GNOME just across two monitors. As a bonus, in the redistribution process, windows are randomly resized to a lot larger sizes. I suspect this is related to me leveraging the experimental scaling features in GNOME which is hard to avoid using 27inch 4K monitors. Really wish the window management would be more polished but I have no skill in that domain to make it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm currently using Google Photos for facial recognition, however since they broke their Google Drive integration I'd like to move away from it. For now I am using a combination of Syncthing, the Google Photos interface and rclone.

Is there an API or potential to use this in headless for integration in other apps such as web or Android? What about the automated cards and animations that Google Photos creates? Is there anything like that for Digikam or another app that can be self-hosted?

<comment><USER27> Nextcloud is self-hosted solution and there is plugin for it that allows you to recognize and cluster faces (to persons) using DLib: [https://github.com/matiasdelellis/facerecognition](https://github.com/matiasdelellis/facerecognition). This might be close to what you need (while Nextcloud is huge software on its own, it is not best photo management app)

<comment><USER26> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can I attach the face-tags to the RAW file (or the XMP, I guess) and use them in other applications, specifically darktable?

<comment><USER28> Yes but you need to configure Digikam to write metadata in its settings. Should be able to write to either EXIF or XMP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is it possible to get digikam to store files in a simple date based directory structure? I really wanted to like digikam, but ended up using rapid-photo- downloader instead because it was so easy to setup that way, and it keeps me from being too locked in to software that might go away.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm happy to hear this and hope it works. Apple's iPhoto used to do good face recognition but as soon as you exported photos the information was lost. I hope this can store the face rectangles and their IDs in the photo's metadata.

</comment><comment><USER31> Are the people tags saved to the photo's file metadata somehow? I've thrown about 130,000 photos up to google photos for safe-keeping but want a second set of redundancy.

<comment><USER5> No. I'd love to be wrong, btw: please correct me if I'm wrong.

(I've looked at the sidecars from takeout, and the API). You might be able to scrape the metadata via puppeteer, but that's brittle and janktastic.

<comment><USER17> If you use the Album>Write Metadata to Files command, it will do so. (I just tested adding a Face Tag to a photo. In Settings>Configure>Metadata, I also checked the box next to Face Tags under Write This Information to the Metadata. This latter action didn't seem to be enough by itself.)

<comment><USER5> Ah, sorry: I was talking about Google Photos, not Digikam. I haven't played with Digikam's metadata handling much, so thanks for that tip.

<comment><USER17> Oops -- my apologies; I wasn't correctly following the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Bah! I was really hoping Digikam's face recognition was going to work _at least as well_ as the 10+ yr old Picassa that I'm trying to replace... but I'm not having any luck - pretty disappointing matching. Even with dozens of images manually identified it is failing to match the same person correctly in other pictures.

Plus, the interface is confusing and not very efficient (in aiding the matching/identification process).

<comment><USER33> Then you will be happy to know that they are working on exactly those problems right now (see the article part and look for summer of code).

> As you can see, work is advancing very well and we expect to publish new > code later this summer, probably for digiKam 7.2.0 when all implementations > will be tested and ready for production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It would be nice if it could display UTF-8 text. Apparently it only uses ISO 8859-1.

<comment><USER35> The linked post specifically says it supports UTF-8. Might double check the settings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Every year for at least last 5 years I have been trying Digikam. Every year like 99.9% of the reasonably complicated GUI-based single process multi- functional software written on Linux it would blow up while working with marginally large sets of files (~ 50k photos, roughly evenly split between 24 megapixel NEF files and random resolution jpegs )

It is just sad to see that the imaging/image processing/image organizing world is still stuck in 1990s paradigm rather than embrace that the computers have gobs of memory, a single application can be composed of dozen of individual components talking to each other over 127.0.0.1 and background jobs is a thing.

<comment><USER37> We are working on a multi-process GPU accelerated image viewer with the ability to seamlessly browse and organise through hundreds of thousands of photos. Although it is multi process, all applications are embedded in a container application. The processes communicate using 127.0.0.1. All done locally.

It was specifically designed to handles hundreds of thousands of images and is in the final stages of release.

We have a little bit more information and screenshots on the website: [https://www.pixolage.com](https://www.pixolage.com) and would be grateful for any community feedback (or beta testers!).

Disclaimer: I work at Pixolage

<comment><USER38> Picasa can do it on a mediocre CPU, single threaded. That's the benchmark you should aim at.

<comment><USER37> Performance is great on single thread/single CPU, but performance is even better when doing multi-threaded for most scenarios.

In terms of development, we prefer developing on lesser hardware so that we can be sure that Pixolage will run super smooth for most setups (although long compile waits can be frustrating).

For scalability, nothing beats _multi-process_. (Due to the way the OS manages communications between GPU driver<->process using the GPU).

Completely agree - Picasa is/was a great application!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The macOS version is distributed as a .pkg and isn't signed or notarized. That's a no-go for me. Any reason why they don't just ship a .app in a disk image?

<comment><USER40> Most likely because nobody on the development team has the time to keep up with Apple's treadmill of ever changing Gatekeeper requirements. If you're knowledgeable about such matters, see it as your chance to contribute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> How reliable is the face recognition in 7.0? In older versions it was not as good as closed source software like picasa.

<comment><USER42> See the "Deep-Learning Powered Faces Management" section of the linked document for a lot more information. Specifically, they mention that they replaced the old (OpenCV) algorithm with a new neural-net based one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Digikam has always been a gem. This sounds like a great improvement.

</comment><comment><USER38> Maybe they have now what Picasa did 7 years ago.

<comment><USER44> This comment seems mean, perhaps. But, Picasa's facial recognition was far better than Digikam's and I marveled at how Picasa could do so quickly, so long ago, what Digikam has failed to do (until now?).

I've been a Digikam user for a long time now, it's really useful for me, but the whole face-tagging system has been really poor for a long time IMO (eg all faces recognised in one image as same person; all tags recognised as being the last person manually tagged).

It's one thing I'd love to have donated to a bounty on as it saves a lot of time to have working tagging.

I wonder if there are plans to add other types of tagging, object recognition or what-have-you.

<comment><USER21> I think that comment is more "Picasa was amazing" than "Digikam is bad", and it's right, Picasa _was_ amazing. Hopefully Digikam will reach those levels soon.

<comment><USER38> It was. I have searched long for a similar program (mainly face recognition) and couldn't find one. Github is full of POC for that, but nothing in a "complete" package.

I tried Digikam, but their face eh recognition discovered also lots of non- faces. The UI also was not fun to use. You click on a suggestion and it takes several seconds before you could type either the name, or pick one. All that with a relatively small collection (2TB).

<comment><USER21> I, too, am currently discovering that it is a bit too slow. Too bad, I would very much like a Picasa replacement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Woz misquoted 'Almost every app that I have is better on the iPhone' - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/18/exclusive-woz-misquoted-almost-every-app-that-i-have-is-bette/ <comment><USER2> It's amazing how commonly you can be misquoted by anyone, let alone a reporter. You say something to someone, they'll interpret and internalize what you say according to their beliefs and they could possibly construct something entirely new when they "quote" what you say to another person.

<comment><USER3> Actually in this case it sounds like the reporter wasn't to blame at all. Woz is simply saying "What I _really meant_ was..."

Personally I don't get why his thoughts on things are given such importance. Each Apple release he appears at some fan line to go "Hey, everyone remember me! I'm the guy who was involved with Apple for a short period!". Not trying to be cynical, but seriously I suspect he's a major irritation for Jobs.

<comment><USER4> Wow you dismiss Woz as non important when he not only made the product that placed Apple in the spotlight in 1976, but also made the first mass manufactured personal computer that could be attached to a display with no modifications. You could very well say he's the raison d'être of Apple as we know it.

You call his involvement (12 years as a company, and I believe 5 before Apple Comps was incorporated) 'short' and his dismiss his opinion on a piece of tech when he's probably part of the elite who's opinion actually matter. Hell Steve Jobs was never a 'techy' so to speak, so if I had to take anyone's opinion seriously (regardless I agree or not) about a piece of technology such as this is Steve Wozniak.

<comment><USER3> This is the soppy romanticized garbage that is so boring to debate with.

Yes, if you want to talk to someone about 1970s era personal computer innovations, the Woz is almost certainly the goto guy. Granted.

Is he important? Sure, he is important to a certain era in Apple's history. The part before the company would have dissolved as an ongoing enterprise if it wasn't for some strategic rescuing by Microsoft.

Are his comments about pretty much anything in the modern era even insightful or of particular relevance, beyond "this guy worked on the Apple I" colour commentary? I don't think so. I suspect that the Woz's primary reason for appearing in Apple lines and giving "grate on Steve Jobs" quotes is so the reporter can bring up that he works for FusionIO.

But yeah, your Dyed in the Wool Woz fanclub membership card is in the mail.

<comment><USER4> So you think that the opinion (whatever it is) of a man that actually built a personal computer in a time they were none and influenced what has become today's commodity computer hardware has no value when discussing a piece of technology?

I'm actually not a fan of Woz, far from it actually, but I give credit where credit is due. The man deserves respect, and let's be honest, if he gets coverage it's because people want to know what he has to say.

I'm sorry but I'd rather take Woz opinion (which I a lot of time disagree with) and give it the weight it deserves because of what he's done, as opposed to giving some .NET wunderkind more credibility than he should have.

But yeah whatever you have a bone to pick with Woz and that is your choice; however I'm not going to waste any more of my time trying to explain to you why Woz deserves respect and the fact that people want to hear his opinion, which means people see value in it, regardless of what dislike you might have with the man's persona.

<comment><USER3> _I'm sorry but I'd rather take Woz opinion_...

That's nice, but a false dichotomy. I questioned the relevance of the Woz's opinion, but that doesn't in any way come at the benefit of someone else's opinion, much less some arbitrary ".NET wunderkind".

In this case, _after Android has already taken a pretty strong sales lead_ , the Woz tells us that Android is probably going to take the lead some day. Prophetic.

 _But yeah whatever you have a bone to pick with Woz_... _regardless of what dislike you might have with the man's persona._

Lame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"according to Dutch paper De Telegraaf, Woz said that "Android phones have more features," which would help Google's OS become the dominant smartphone platform."_

Not exactly the most reliable source. De Telegraaf is the Dutch equivalent to the National Enquirer.

A typical front page: [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_76-4lWOs7m4/S8WXr8eFQNI/AAAAAAAACA...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_76-4lWOs7m4/S8WXr8eFQNI/AAAAAAAACAs/FboOlZZ9Vgk/s1600/tlg_pdf_20100414_st_te_001_vptelegraaf_000515.jpg)

<comment><USER6> The National Enquirer is by far the most accurate newspaper in the US when it comes to strictly reporting facts and never misquoting anybody. That's because they are right-wing muckrackers, so every time they screw up, they get sued for defamation, and lose.

They get sued for defamation all the time. They almost never lose.

A person I know has to deal with press interviews on a relatively regular basis. Every time he reads an article for which he was interviewed, he says, he finds misquotes in the article. Except the one time it was the Enquirer.

<comment><USER5> Well, in that respect De Telegraaf isn't like the National Enquirer at all.

What is De Telegraaf like then? It puts an emphasis on gossip, fear mongering, photos of barely clad women, fringe science, the national pastime (soccer), political scandal, the Dutch royal family, murder and sexual abuse cases, and immigrants suspected of crimes.

I doubt that Woz knew what he was getting himself into when he was interviewed by De Telegraaf.

<comment><USER7> The Sun?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _"Wozniak called into Engadget to say that Apple would eventually catch up > to some of the features Android has that Apple's iPhone are currently > missing"_

The ease with which people have come to accept the idea that the iPhone is playing catchup in important areas shows how radically Android has altered the marketplace.

Edit: If Wozniak actually said "eventually" that's not exactly high praise for the iPhone roadmap.

</comment><comment><USER9> He still says he expects Android to be the dominant mobile OS. What exactly was he misquoted on?

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, that's not all he's said:

[http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/18/apples-wozniak-calls- the-w...](http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/18/apples-wozniak-calls-the-winner- in-mobile-race-spoiler-it-isnt-apple/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Paraphrase: Android will be like Windows, lots of marketshare - Still crappy

<comment><USER12> Except that Windows 7 seems as polished to me as OS X. The knock on Windows is that it's all closed down and proprietary, which can't really be said about Android. OS X has less baggage than Windows, because it's newer, but in this case Android is the newer OS. I think if Android gets hardware acceleration and polishes a bunch of other little things up, it's going to be very competitive.

<comment><USER13> I know this question in itself is off-topic, but exactly _how_ is Windows 7 as polished as OS X?!

<comment><USER12> Because, as a Mac user, when I use Windows 7, I'm not bothered by it. That's my test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And who's fault is this? It's not hard to make a good app. I could implement XMPP messaging in the Facebook app given a few hours and given a few days for a couple other missing bits, I could get the feature parity down to nothing between the Android and iOS Facebook app. Why this hasn't happened, despite the explosive growth of Android, despite the fact that Zuckerberg is now an Android-user, etc, I don't know...

but the unintelligent comments here and on Engadget are frustrating. Blame the app developers, not the platform. That's just silly.

<comment><USER15> It's not hard to make an app, but it's very hard to make a great app. Most devs obsess about design the same way designers do and most designers can't code very well.

<comment><USER14> Right, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But when Facebook decides to give the iOS app more attention than the Android app... well, I can't really blame that on the platform.

Really? Someone drive by downvoting both posts without any discussion? Come on, man up and have a discussion. I'm sorry that I don't accept "Android sucks lol" as a reason for why the Facebook app is so much better on iOS devices.

It's the same darned reason that the design studio projects my class is working on this year are all based on iOS devices for limited use-cases that would be more easily deployed, serviced and cheaper with an Android solution.

<comment><USER15> iOS is more polished and has more room for actual design. Android is a drastic improvement on what was running on smartphones before, but the built-in UI doesn't have the same fit and finish as the iPhone UI.

For example, look at the iPhone status bar (the bar at the top of the screen that shows the battery, signal, and time). Now look at the default android status bar. The iPhone one just looks better because all of the icons are the same height. The android icons' goofy roundedness only almost fits with the other standard UI elements. Designers/Developers on a polished platform will make more polished apps. Designers/Developers on a rougher platform will tend to make rougher apps. Note that there are exceptions, but this represents the overall trend.

<comment><USER16> _iOS is more polished and has more room for actual design._

And this affects integration of an XMPP library how?

 _Designers/Developers on a rougher platform will tend to make rougher apps._

So is this why you can't maximize any apps on OS X?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Being Sneaky in C - <AUTHOR> http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/being-sneaky-in-c <comment><USER2> I like the original Ken Thompson sneakiness in C ([http://electronicdesign.com/dev-tools/thompson-ritchie- and-k...](http://electronicdesign.com/dev-tools/thompson-ritchie-and- kernighan-fathers-c)):

"Also in his Turing Award lecture, he described how he had incorporated a backdoor security hole in the original UNIX C compiler. To do this, the C compiler recognized when it was recompiling itself and the UNIX login program. When it recompiled itself, it modified the compiler so the compiler backdoor was included. When it recompiled the UNIX login program, the login program would allow Thompson to always be able to log in using a fixed set of credentials."

<comment><USER3> That really isn't the same thing, though. That's language-agnostic conceptual sneakiness that happened to be implemented in C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OpenBSD specifically modified malloc() a few years ago to prevent this sort of sneakiness ([http://www.tw.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2009/otto- malloc....](http://www.tw.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2009/otto-malloc.pdf) [pdf]). So they route their malloc() calls through mmap() which returns randomized pages, and free() immediately returns memory to the kernel rather than leaving it mapped in the current process.

I'd be surprised if these changes haven't made it into FreeBSD, but afaik Linux doesn't work this way (by default, anyway).

<comment><USER5> If your claim is that OpenBSD routes every call to malloc/free through mmap/munmap, it is simply not believable.

Do you have a URL to a git ... hahaha, pardon me, CVS repo?

<comment><USER6> [http://bxr.su/OpenBSD/lib/libc/stdlib/malloc.c#omalloc](http://bxr.su/OpenBSD/lib/libc/stdlib/malloc.c#omalloc) ^Not the CVS repo, but close enough for those who want to check OpenBSD's malloc implementation. The malloc.conf manpage is also an interesting read : [http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man5/...](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD- current/man5/malloc.conf.5)

And some context around malloc and the various techniques OpenBSD implements to make exploitation of bugs more difficult: [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/dev-sw-hostile- env.html](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/dev-sw-hostile-env.html)

The tl;dr is : if your code compiles and runs on OpenBSD, chances are it will fine on other Unices. The opposite is not necessarily true though.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that source refutes the parent's point: only large allocations go directly to mmap/munmap as opposed to being cached. Of course, there are other anti-exploitation measures too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It also makes the assumption that it's a little-endian system. On a big-endian system, the high order byte of the timestamp would be modified, which would probably be too obvious.

</comment><comment><USER9> "In C/C++, you can use bugs in one part of a program to cause trouble in another. That's pretty darn underhanded."

I would argue every language has that property. But with C/C++ being so closely tied to the ABI of the machine perhaps they are more underhanded than others. But to me, this branding does feel a bit unfair.

Still, a fun contest and an interesting read.

<comment><USER10> You can always cause that kind of bug, but I would argue that C/C++ is massively more underhanded than other languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The description of the bug in surveil.txt in the source archive was a bit easier for me to understand, really nifty :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Would setting the malloc'd memory back to the original message before freeing it solve the problem?

<comment><USER13> Yes. You could also memset any memory to zero once you're done with it, which isn't a bad idea for applications with high security requirements.

<comment><USER14> ...Except, of course, the the compiler can and will optimize away any such memset.

Do _not_ attempt to write secure software with C / C++. It is a Bad Idea(TM). Because what you wrote is not what gets run.

For instance: there is _no_ way to write a portable secure memset in portable C / C++. (You can write a "secure" memset that works in all current compilers, but that is _not_ the same thing. What doesn't get optimized now can and will be optimized tomorrow.)

<comment><USER15> So what is someone working with embedded devices for IoT supposed to do? Much of that work is based on ARM C/C++ Compilers.

<comment><USER16> In practice, of course, memset actually works, because it's a function and the compiler's usage tracing is nowhere near able to spot that you don't reference those zeros that you write.

(IoT security is doom for other reasons though, mostly UI, updatability and cloud services)

<comment><USER14> For now.

And then that code you wrote now silently becomes deadly a few years down the line.

<comment><USER16> I would be very interested to see the compiler that can optimise away memset across a shared library boundary.

<comment><USER17> LLVM can and will do it. It will assume it knows what a function named "memcpy" (for example) does and optimizes accordingly. (Look at TargetLibraryInfo.cpp and grep for LibFunc::memset in, for example, SimplifyLibCalls.cpp.)

(That said, I think TheLoneWolfling is being too strong with his/her claims. You _can_ get modern compilers to avoid dangerous optimizations; it's just not for the faint of heart.)

<comment><USER14> Also: isn't that a bug? Is there something in a C / C++ standard that states that a function named "memcpy" (for example) is necessarily the normal function?

<comment><USER17> Compilers have been doing this for a long time. The optimizations that this enables are essential for performance. They shouldn't stop; if the spec prohibits it, the spec should change (and if it doesn't, the compilers should ignore the spec).

<comment><USER14> Good to know about the first and last part.

And as for the second part... Meh. I don't see any optimizations that hard- coding calling something named "memcpy" (or whatever) does that cannot be enabled by looking at the actual code that gets linked. Albeit with more difficulty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would there be a way to do this automatically? Like a "sneaky pre-compiler"?

</comment><comment><USER19> Looking at the source, this is where the alarm bells should go off in a reviewer's head:

        memcpy(filter->buffer, output->piu_text_utf8, sizeof(output->piu_text_utf8));

1\. memcpy is less safe than memmove and strncpy. strncpy should be used.

2\. The two character arrays should use the same constant in defining their length, and that constant should be used both in the struct definitions and here in the copy operation.

3\. The code is written in C in spite of it being 2014 at the time.

<comment><USER20> The code is from an entry in the Underhanded C Contest, it is pretty much a given that the entries will be written in C.

<comment><USER19> I am aware of that.</comment></comment></comment>