New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.startrek.com/article/new-star-trek-series-premieres-january-2017 <comment><USER4> Kinda worried that this will be a "web-only" series, Star Trek needs quite a good production to work well, The budget for a TNG episode was 2M$ which was pretty unheard off back then and is even considered expensive these days (GOT which is currently the most expensive running show has about 6M per episode and when you count the fact that TNG had 24-25 episodes per season the overall season budget was almost the same).

I'm really hoping that the web production will be more akin to Netflix or Amazon Studios quality and budget rather than the usual network webseries tie in.

Also anyone has any ideas about the cast? there was a very long standing rumor / pre-production "Captain Worf" show that was supposed to happen but never did, I really hope that this won't be in the rebooted universe because it was well kinda meh.

Enterprise wasn't great (4th season was amazing tho), if this will be of the same quality as TNG/DS9 or even "mom we got stuck in the holodeck again" Voyager this would truly blow my mind, but as of now I am pessimistic beyond hope until I can see the cast, writers, and canonical premise.

<comment><USER5> Sci Fi shows are expensive to make period - which is why there aren't usually a lot of them on TV. Just think about it: for a normal sitcom or drama, costumes can be bought off the rack and shots can be done on location or on a sound stage with easily-sourced furniture / decoration / etc.

Everything on a Sci Fi (or fantasy) show has to be custom-made; from the costumes to the wall decorations to the light fixtures to the furniture. Custom making these things isn't easy, because they first have to be designed so they look like they "fit" stylistically, then built. A show like Star Trek will also have extensive makeup / prosthetics to depict the many different races.

Besides, Star Trek is an active franchise with two recent, very successful movies. No studio exec would ruin a franchise like that with a half-assed, underproduced web series. Because you can't do Sci Fi cheaply without becoming B-movie quality, this show will have to have at a minimum Stargate Atlantis levels of production value. They may just be putting it on the web because the Star Trek demographic doesn't watch network TV and the web is a better way to reach the core audience for the show.

<comment><USER6> > Sci Fi shows are expensive to make period

So never saw the Dr. Who series int he 1970s and 1980s :)

Personally I loved the campy Dr Whos a lot.

BBC - "Your almost Out of Budget and you have 3 part series to finish"

Producer - "No problem we will put a trash can over that guy and tape up a few trash bags, throw some kids paint on it and there is our new monster." "We will also call the gravel pit see if we can use it as a location during there lunch breaks."

<comment><USER5> Yeah; I'm excluding the campy Sci Fi from this -- any of the low-budget movies that the Syfy channel made, for example. They weren't intended to be good or even draw a large audience, and they did pretty well considering their budgets. But they didn't have the baggage or expectations that the "Star Trek" name brings with it.

And even with Dr. Who, most of the action takes place in the present day -- which helps with saving money on costumes and sets.

<comment><USER7> Let's not forget all the Doctor Who episodes that take place in the past, which effectively means they can raid the wardrobes of whatever BBC period drama is being filmed that week...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was a big Trekkie when I was younger...but I'm surprised at how poorly the show has held up when rewatching on Netflix. I think what spoiled me was the revamped Battlestar Galactica. It's not the dated special effects that bother me, it's the way the utopia of Star Trek's future and technology began to provide way too many plot crutches. By the end of TNG, it seemed like every crisis resolution involved reversing the polarity of some piece of equipment or weapon at the last minute. DS9 was my favorite series up until the latter seasons, where again, fancy technobabble would save the day over well-written plots. I never watched much of Voyager or Enterprise...but it seemed the technobabble only increased, with time travel being thrown in for variety. With Voyager, the absurdity of tech continued from the beginning...IIRC, even though Voyager was banished in the middle of nowhere with purportedly limited resources, some technicality about how the holodeck worked allowed them to basically use the holodeck all the time, as if it ran on magic and dreams (which is basically what the holodeck stood for in all the new series). Even the utopian future of no-currency was rendered a bit absurd with DS9 and the introduction of Ferengi as main characters, and constant mentions of "gold- press latinum"

BSG spoiled me because it showed, credibly that a space-faring future is unlikely to be clean and sanitized. I think one of my favorite aspects of BSG were the mundane ones, such as how having everyone spread out on different ships hampered logistics and communications. In Star Trek, of course, this was solved with instant communication devices, though the impact of instant communication in TNG-and-on seems rather limited compared to what we experience in the Internet-age.

Since the OP states that the new series shares the same writers as the rebooted movies, I'm assuming that the altered timeline will be adopted by the new TV series? The reboot Star Trek films were flashy and entertaining in the way that modern action films are entertaining...but they took up the technology-as-deus-ex-machina to the next level...Scotty created a teleportation device that rendered starship travel moot and, of course, life- giving Tribbles.

<comment><USER9> I feel with Netflix making watching episodes in order and re-watching shows much easier, DS9 is holding up pretty well. If you ignore some of the techno- bs and make a leap of faith on the religion stuff, the dialogue (while theatrical) is tight, the acting (besides the doctor) is pretty good, there's some suspense between the characters. The story evolves. Rewatching I especially like Quark, Garak, Odo - the characters that are not human and their different perspectives.

<comment><USER10> DS9 was in many ways the best of Star Trek. Season-long plot arcs worked really well (Gul Dukat was a villain for the whole series! Oh, how he evolved!), and the focus not just on characters, but the relationships between characters, was fantastic. The Season 5 finale, when the Federation abandons the station and families are torn apart? Incredible.

<comment><USER11> Ironically, the best Star Trek series was the one that deviated the furthest from Roddenberry's vision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Trek at it's best:

1\. Isn't afraid of being slow, talky, and philosophical (Sorry J.J.). TNG had many excellent episodes specifically because it was willing to risk being "boring", while DS9 evolved Trek into the homogeneous "action" formula that has dominated Voyager, most of Enterprise, and the recent movies.

2\. Is a force for idealism. The captains of Star Trek are paragons of humanity, and are supposed to find the high ground when tackling murky issues. The original series featured the first on-screen interracial kiss. TNG dove into many thorny ethical issues. While TNG took a hard stance against torture, Enterprise portrayed it as a useful tool.

3\. Boldy goes to new places. Star Trek (2009) did nothing new geographically, but at least it went off the reservation by destroying a storied and beloved Trek locale. Not everyone liked that, but at least it was daring. Into Darkness (2013) aped Khan badly, completely missing out on what made the original character and movie special. In general, the Trek movie franchise has been chasing Khan for too long, and needs to focus on other aspects of Trek.

4\. Is smart about technology, and self consistent. Nerds pay attention to this stuff. Khan beaming directly from Earth to the Klingon homeworld functionally obliterated the vastness of space in the rebooted Trek universe. Trek doesn't need to blow previously imagined sci-fi tech out of all proportion to be interesting. It's strength, historically, has been inventing new technologies and examining their impact on humans. Is there anything in the new Trek movies that, in a few decades, we're going to be saying, "Hey, Trek predicted this!".

5\. Doesn't solve everything by modifying the deflector dish. (Corollary to 4) Voyager, I'm looking at you. All of the series occasionally penned "tech" into their scripts to lazily magic their way out of situations. At some point this became standard practice and as much a part of the formula as always having at least a few minutes of "action trek", no matter how inappropriate it was to the episode. This is a crutch that should be used as sparingly as possible.

6\. Features interesting, well-developed alien cultures. The original series may have debuted the Klingons, but it was TNG that fleshed them out into a living, breathing culture. TNG debuted the Cardassians and Bajorans, but DS9 benefited greatly from exploring the cultures of both these races. The formula of Voyager forced a return to shallow portrayals of "species of the week", and the show suffered greatly as a result.

<comment><USER4> DS9 had to deal with the "grey" areas of civilization and military organizations in the latter seasons and they did it very well, as well as what happens to society when it has been griped by fear (e.g. shapeshifter agents on earth).

Enterprise started kinda ok (not great) but then 9/11 happened (which happened technically like a week or 2 before the 1st season aired, but it was too fresh to touch) which meant that it had to deal with that thing with it's very own 9/11 in the 3rd season.

With the 4th season they pretty much went into "concept-album" fan service type of self containing arcs and it was pretty damn freaking good, they brought allot of excellent talent specifically Manny Coto which pretty much made the biggest fan service production once he was made the executive producer and the exclusive writer of the show. With maybe 1 or 2 exceptions i put every episode of Season 4 of Enterprise in my personal hall of fame both in terms of Star Trek and general Scifi episodes.

Episodes like In a Mirror, Darkly, These Are the Voyages, United are what Star Trek should look like and they had a full season of them.

<comment><USER13> These are the voyages is widely considered one of the worst episodes of trek and an insult to the series.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 99% press release trying to demonstrate the economic viability of CBS All Access. 1% about Star Trek.

</comment><comment><USER15> Currently re-watching the Next Generation on Netflix. The remastering is wonderful; you can really see the film-level quality in things like Geordi's visor, etc. What I miss most about the Star Trek universe is its optimism; particularly during The Next Generation days. Sci-fi has largely mirrored the militarism of the past decade. If the new series brings back some of that optimism, I'd be excited.

</comment><comment><USER16> While we're here, let's also acknowledge some of the fan-funded efforts that have been keeping the spirit alive:

[http://www.startrekaxanar.com/](http://www.startrekaxanar.com/)

[http://startrekrenegades.com/](http://startrekrenegades.com/)

I, for one, am really looking forward to Axanar as much or even more than these official series.

<comment><USER4> Renegades was nigh godawful. Prelude to Axanar reminded me of the real-action adverts that big budget games have these days was very HALO 3-eque, not good or bad persay, but it was just a relative short (20min) for their kickstarter so not much to judge it by, the VFX looked professional but very un-Star Trek like which was some what disappointing but unless you have the DS9 effects team that managed to make 3D-CGI look like filmed scaled models or the team behing BSG/Firefly you won't probably get the realistic look either.

<comment><USER16> Renegades I won't dispute. But I felt like Prelude was exactly what it set out to be and did quite well for that too. Both are doing remarkably well considering the budgets they've been given (even Renegades).

In this day and age we have the privilege to pay for what we want to see, if we feel like it. People love to complain, but seriously, if we aren't willing to pony up the cash for something, why should we expect to studios to produce what we want to see? Even paying for a Netflix subscription will split your money so many different ways that the studios aren't going to be getting that much at the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Two Words: Starfleet Academy.

It would be perfect to introduce a new crew and follow them through the Academy years. They could either do the backstories of existing characters to introduce new ones. You can combine the fun of Hogwarts-eque school, with younger drama, and still throw in lots of science and adventures.

<comment><USER18> Didn't they do Starfleet with the Bakula series?

<comment><USER19> Enterprise was set before Starfleet existed, where nobody knew what they were really doing. The idea was for the crew to make the mistakes that set the precedent for future Starfleet's regulations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The brand-new Star Trek will introduce new characters seeking imaginative > new worlds and new civilizations, _while exploring the dramatic contemporary > themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in > 1966_.

Although the series is aimed more at the US than the rest of the world, What if they decided to tackle the current migration issues? Those will only become bigger in the future as climate change will provoke more mass migrations.

Aside from being contemporary, the topic is a great source of material for dramatic stories too.

EDIT: Could tie in neatly to the Vulcan planet being destroyed in the new timeline.

<comment><USER21> I'm really hoping its not set in the new timeline. My hope is that it is a continuation of the Post Deep Space Nine/ Dominion War/ Voyager timeline. I would hope they look at whats happened in the books set in that period. The final borg invasion, the rise of the typhon pact, and Dr.Bashir from DS9 becoming sort of a Ed Snowden character.

<comment><USER22> +1 for any proposal that casts Siddig el Fadil as anything other than a terrorist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "CBS All Access"? Nobody wants to buy individual streaming services from every studio/network. Stop trying to make it happen. Just sign a deal with Netflix or Amazon[1] and accept you missed the boat.

[1] And really Amazon is only acceptable because it's free.[2]

[2] Given that having Prime is pretty much non-negotiable anyway.

<comment><USER24> Netflix and Amazon don't seem to be interested in becoming the Comcast or direct tv of the Internet.

The amount of content Netflix and Amazon can create is limited. They cannot pay for every tv show for 100-120 bucks a year. Look at what a mature company like HBO produces for 180 a year. 3-5 hour long prestige dramas. 5-8 half hour comedies. Some low expense reality tv like Bill Mayer or Real Sports.

Netflix may be able to scale better, if they get 80% of households they can go cheaper. But they aren't going to be q total replacement for all media.

And you don't want them too. One company with control over all media would be a disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a bit disappointed how pessimistic this thread is. They're bringing Star Trek back! There are 1000 reasons it might fail, but it's GREAT to see them trying. The ideals are timeless.

</comment><comment><USER10> I, for one, am optimistic. Even though the JJ Abrams reboot movies sucked, he's not the only one who can do the work. There are hordes of people in Hollywood who grew up on Star Trek, love it properly, and want to bring back the spirit of exploration and optimism and the ensemble cast work that make the older series so compelling. I think the world needs a new Star Trek - <USER2> that isn't just shiny effects, but holds true to the sense of hope and courage that I loved and still love. And I know it can be done.

On the plus side, the quality of ensemble-cast science fiction tv writing has exploded over the past 15-20 years, starting with how Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer built season and multi-season story arcs that depended on character growth. I would _love_ to see the sort of rich, passionate writing that made Firefly, Walking Dead, and other shows so effective applied to Star Trek!

And I'm a little biased toward the development of web-only series - <USER3> friends of mine are doing Cartoon Network's first web-only series, and I'm really hoping it succeeds spectacularly and points a new direction for CN. Fixed timeslots in general are a dated way of doing shows now. Timeshifting is the norm.

So yeah, hope for a bright future. And screw the Prime Directive.

<comment><USER26> What did you dislike about the reboot films? I really liked them, I thought they were cast well, and were over-all pretty good.

edit: others in the comments have noted that the reboots are basically just action sequences with none of the underlying social themes that made Star Trek significant in the first place.

<comment><USER27> They were fine action films, but they totally lacked the heart and soul of the tv series, particularly the tv series' focus on exploration and diplomacy and resolving conflicts without violence.

Granted, this has often been the case with Star Trek films (First Contact was sort of an action movie for example).

<comment><USER28> > Granted, this has often been the case with Star Trek films (First Contact > was sort of an action movie for example).

This is a point Trek fans rarely acknowledge.

Star Trek the TV show is often more thoughtful and deals with social commentary well. However Star Trek movies rarely are.

Let's look at the classic Star Trek movies: Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, and The Undiscovered Country are all action films. The Voyage Home is a comedy.

Which leaves just two: The Motion Picture and The Final Frontier which both reviewers and audience alike pan for being some of the worst classic Trek films.

Next Gen isn't much better: Generations, First Contact, and Nemesis are all action films and Insurrection is extremely borderline.

So when people say "JJ Abrams ruins Star Trek by producing an action- adventure" they're really ignoring the history of Star Trek films which are full of only that.

<comment><USER29> I thought "First Contact" was not a very good Trek movie. It always struck me as a movie that was made from a non-Star Trek script that was retroactively made into a Star Trek script. I also thought Captain Picard's behavior was wildly inconsistent with how he was portrayed in the show... not where he went all "Goodfellas" on the Borg in the holodeck, that was a fine character moment, but when he "mercy killed" one of his crew. This was something the TV Picard would never have done. He would have risked his life and the whole ship to save that one crewman and not just given up so early one... after all, he was dragged off and assimilated himself, but he was rescued and recovered.

"First Contact" also played fast and loose with established canon a lot more than any other movie had done. I didn't care for the portrayal of Cochrane as a drunk loser (although this has no bearing on James Cromwell's performance... he is always great).

There's nothing wrong with action in Trek... it's built into the concept, but the action was always less important than the Big Ideas... at least until some of the movies, and especially the vapid JJTrek reboots came along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > available exclusively in the United States on CBS All Access

> will also be distributed concurrently for television

So, is it on TV or not?

<comment><USER31> For the concurrent distribution, I believe they are referring only to international distribution. For example, House of Cards was broadcast on traditional TV channels in countries that did not have Netflix (like Australia, New Zealand, and India).

<comment><USER32> They state in the press release that it will premiere on TV then move to their steaming service.

<comment><USER33> > The new series will blast off with a special preview broadcast on the CBS > Television Network. The premiere episode and all subsequent first-run > episodes will then be available exclusively in the United States on CBS All > Access

> will also be distributed concurrently for television and multiple platforms > around the world by CBS Studios International.

\- CBS Television Network first, then

\- United States - exclusively CBS All Access

\- International, _except United States_ \- multiple other platforms

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> They'd better just blow out the stops, go like 4000 years in the future and start imagining some out there stuff. I don't need people in makeup and masks fondling iPads and acting all utopian cause Roddenberry said so.

<comment><USER35> They had the PADDs on star trek more than decades before tablets where released, yet another example of star trek being ahead of its time

as for your "Utopian" comment, in the last few decades we have entered the era of plenty, the main problem encountered by startups we see here in HN is not that they are not innovative its that their products/services get drowned out in a sea of plenty

Given a few hundred years and plentiful+cheap energy it is not beyond the realm of imagination to imagine replicators, hell on a recent cruise i nicknamed then soda vending machines "the replicator" because the thing could spit out hundreds of different drinks with a few taps.

So a world of the future would be fairly "socialist" as machines and cheap energy allow people to devote their times towards science, exploration, art etc, we are already seeing this happening today and further mechanization and robotics will only speed up the trend

<comment><USER34> I'll grant them 15 years ahead of the iPad, but the show was supposed to be hundreds of years advanced.

My utopian thoughts aren't really around the economics. Star trek humans are all pure of motive and work to do the right thing in all circumstances, modulo plot-necessitated black hats. I'd prefer a bit more humanity there. Humans are far more complex than the black-and-white morality plays star trek tends to be.

If they make a show that has "wrath of Khan" level pathos to the characters, I'm in. If it's action schlock or morality plays, the star trek brand isn't enough to attract me, particularly if the technology alternates between "stupidly unreal" and banal.

<comment><USER36> Yeah the real part of the tech that kicks me out of the show is how shitty the computers are. Having manual pilots doing anything seems absurd. In some episodes, rigging the computer up to do something is seen as something tricky and complicated.

Even in-universe, it doesn't make sense. The Holodeck is sophisticated enough to fly ships through physically real environments. (They do physics tests in the deck.) So just use whatever great AI system powering the Holodeck to do whatever advanced maneuver you need.

Also, the biggest fake tech: The communicators. The show clearly shows a person hailing another on the comm badge. BUT there's no delay in the response. "Captain to LaForge" \- "LaForge here". We see that the recipient always hears the entire message. We also see there's no delay in the reply, much less than "Captain to" takes. I suppose this is easily solved by the commbadge just reading neural patterns and determining who you're gonna call. But there's no mention of that, and the badges don't seem to function that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Star Trek is a franchise that was slowly being crushed by the mass of its own canon--five television series, ten feature films, books, comics, video games, and a devoted fanbase will do that.

That is likely why the Abrams films rebooted the universe--restarting from the Captain Pike era--with a big enough change to justifiably say it changes _everything_ that the previous continuity ever did.

And that is rather fortunate, because if they had made first contact in 2016 rather than 1996, people might conceivably be throwing money into the Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter interfaces to the Borg-net, rather than foolishly engaging in any futile resistance. The cube-ships would be ruthlessly harvesting our most shareable lolcat videos, and everyone would be walking around in identical jeans-and-hoodies outfits and calling everything "amazing".

A reboot is really the only way to restore the franchise to its original mission to simplify today's social issues and frame them up against the backdrop of a more progressive starfaring society, so that people can get some perspective on those things that might otherwise be too close to home in a somewhat entertaining way.

For instance, given the South China Sea situation, I would guess that at some point, the new Star Trek series would introduce some alien species as proxies for China, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, and maybe even Brunei, and the China-aliens would be constructing artificial dwarf planets out of hazardous nebulae using unlicensed Genesis devices, and using them as bases to harass passing scientific and mercantile traffic. Then some of the people watching would obsess over details and completely miss the broader point.

</comment><comment><USER38> Hopefully this will be a look forward beyond Voyager rather than going back again..

<comment> drunken-serval Personally, I don't see anything wrong with going for an alternate timeline and a modern take on starship design. As long as they don't turn Star Trek into an action franchise, I'm okay with it.

<comment><USER39> > As long as they don't turn Star Trek into an action franchise

Oh god, that would be tragic.

<comment><USER40> Well that's pretty much what the last movie was.

That being said I thought it was quite good when you didn't think of it as 'star trek'

<comment><USER41> Yeah the two new movies were essentially action movies that captured the feel of the TOS characters.

<comment><USER24> All the movies except 1 and 4 were essentially action movies. And 4 was mostly a fish out of water comedy.

<comment><AUTHOR> As much as it's often panned, Insurrection is the most Star Trek of Star Trek movies. It's about the Prime Directive at it's core. The Undiscovered Country is also a great example of a movie about diplomacy.

Sure, every movie is going to be action-packed for film screens, but those two I felt stuck to Star Trek's ideals more than the rest, where the movie focused on stopping a specific evil villain.

<comment><USER24> It's been a while since I saw Insurrection and Undiscovered Country, but you could make a similar argument about Star Trek into Darkness. It was about the struggle between a militarized starfleet and a starfleet about discovery and exploration.

<comment><AUTHOR> I honestly just feel Into Darkness is a movie about Khan. I've never felt the new Trek movies put out this discovery and exploration vibe. They certainly haven't attempted to do so as of yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have always been interested in watching Star Trek, having watched some of Deep Space Nine with my dad and thinking it was okay when I was really young in addition to enjoying the new movies. I figure now is a good time seeing as this is coming out in a little over a year. Any suggestions as to what order I should watch it in or if I should avoid any of the series?

<comment><USER41> The original series is probably worth watching all of, just because there aren't that many episodes, and a few of them are real gems; it also sets the stage for some other things that are worth watching.

Read a summary of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (actually if you can, read a summary of a summary, the pacing of the movie is so ponderous). The even numbered movies are the best, but it's probably worth watching the 3rd one as well for continuity. The majority of the fandom pretends that the fifth movie never happened, and is well worth skipping.

The Next Generation (TNG) and Deep Space Nine (DS9) are the two that seem to have the strongest following with Voyager being a bit divisive among the fandom (depending on who you ask it either sucks or is good).

You will have to suffer through the first season of TNG and just trust that it will get better.

DS9 can stand on its own fairly well, but if you want continuity you can watch any time after season 5 of TNG. DS9 enters a fairly significant tone shift around season 4, and season 1, like TNG, is not necessarily representative of the entire series.

[edit] Here's a super-short summary of the above:

TOS

Movies: 2,3,4,6

TNG: at least first 3 seasons, if you don't like after season 3, drop. If you're impatient, you can watch just the pilot than skip to season 3 and not miss _too_ much.

DS9: Seasons 4 and 5 of TNG develop some of the races that are prominent in DS9, so it's best if you wait until at least season 5 of TNG to watch, if you really didn't like season 3 of TNG, then this will stand on its own though.

Voyager: It was _not_ my cup of tea; some fans liked it though.

<comment><USER43> There are lists of episodes that hit the "classic" ones, but the original series was remarkably suitable to binge-watching on Netflix, partly because there were few seasons. Many of the episodes are retellings of classic tales, some are downright lame or campy. However, the main characters' development is good. There are some interesting discussions of ethics and philosophy in there, as well.

There are certainly episodes that suck, but the better ones are things that you will find have informed our pop culture lexicon, and are referenced in many other things. Watch it for the characters, more than the individual shows, IMO.

<comment><USER41> TOS is definitely YMMV; my wife flat-out can't stand it, while she will watch TNG with me. And as you point out there just weren't that many episodes, and they establish a base that all of the other series refer back to, so I agree it's worth watching all of for all but the most minimal run-through of Star Trek.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Any word on the setting and how the alternate timeline reset of the of 2009 movie fits into the cannon?

It seems like there are couple possibilities. 1) They act like the reset in the 2009 movie didn't happen, and the new show is just set sometime after TNG/DS9/Voyager, with the same continuity.

2) Everything is reset and we get a new show set sometime after the reset.

I guess there is this: >The new television series is not related to the upcoming feature film Star Trek Beyond which is scheduled to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in summer 2016.

<comment><USER45> Since the new series is being exec-produced by Alex Kurtzman, who was a producer and co-writer on both the 2009 _Star Trek_ and _Star Trek Into Darkness_ , it seems pretty safe to assume the series will be set in the new timeline/continuity those movies established. I'd read "not related to _Star Trek Beyond_ " more as them saying it won't be tied in any specific way to the plot/characters of that film than that it'll be completely outside the rebooted continuity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Oh, no. Kurtzman ran Hawaii 5-O and Scorpion, two of the worst shows ever produced in the history of television. This thing is going to blow hard.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can't wait to see what it will be like, was entertained by every series so far.

Hopefully more like most of the series and less like the new movies.

<comment><USER47> Your wish is unlikely to come true, as the new series is being written/produced by the head writer of the last two movies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's a shame that they would be very unlikely to option New Frontier by Peter David. He created some great characters there (although I think the latter books have gotten a bit screwy).

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

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm surprised nobody mentioned Star Trek Continues [http://www.startrekcontinues.com/](http://www.startrekcontinues.com/) yet. It's financed by donations and has imho very good acting and dramaturgy.

James Doohan's son Chris even impersonates Scotty. (Stays in the family, I guess...).

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm skeptical. TV shows in general have taken a turn for the worse lately, with the best series not even really airing on cable. Here's to hoping it's not just another cobbled-together excuse for showing you an ad every 10 minutes.

<comment><USER51> They have most definitely not. There's just a higher signal to noise ratio.

You have * Fargo * Boardwalk Empire * Mr Robot * Suits * True Detective

These are stellar shows with high production qualities.

There's generally no ads on web streaming during the show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Hopefully this would be based after the end the war with the Dominion at the end of Deep Space Nine. Enterprise and the new movies have made me tired of Star Trek, not interested in prequels and origin stories any longer.

</comment><comment> valm- It appears we will all need to pay CBS %5.99 a month to watch this.

<comment><USER53> Yes, CBS has this weird notion that you will pay $5.99 a month _AND_ watch commercials that you can't skip.

I get that they "think" its like this now, they get paid by the cable company for their channel (the $5.99) and they send them content with commercials (which they have sold), but the new world is NetFlix which charges monthly, but has now commercials.

<comment><AUTHOR> People love to make the Netflix comparison, but it's generally silly. First- run, current-season material is vastly more expensive than the backlogs and cheap movies Netflix buys.

You couldn't/wouldn't want to pay for how much current TV shows would cost in commercial free. Netflix works because they only buy cheap content.

<comment><USER54> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_dist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_distributed_by_Netflix)

<comment><AUTHOR> Largely irrelevant. Netflix shows are at a budget Netflix controls, rather than the pricing maze of licensing content from major networks. Many more shows, often with higher budgets. And with a price premium because Netflix would be competing with their own services if Netflix was given earlier access to them.

<comment><USER54> My point was that they are actually producing "First-run, current-season material". They have several shows that have gotten attention for their quality.

You say "you couldn't/wouldn't want to pay for how much current TV shows would cost in commercial free.", but a show with a 10 million dollar budget and a million viewers would cost $10, not a lot more than Google Play for current season stuff (per episode), so apparently people are paying about what it would take.

<comment><AUTHOR> For just that show. And when you look at the hundreds of shows these streaming services offer, at a potential cost of $10 a pop per user, per show, you start to understand why you still see ads when you pay to subscribe. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm a huge fan and hope it's an alternate timeline that can still stick to some of the original stories. Maybe with refresh ship designs :)

</comment><comment><USER56> It sickens me that a post with this much activity and interest was modded out of existence. Boo, Hacker News Mod, whoever you are. Boo. Lighten up.</comment>


Scientists Show How to Make an Invisibility Cloak (Sort Of) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/science/weird-science/scientists-show-you-how-make-invisibility-cloak-sort-n210961 <comment><USER2> I've stopped paying notice to articles relating to: Teleportation, Invisibility, Cures for ilnesses in other species of animals.

<comment><USER3> Actually, this is a quite cool invention, using the lenses for bending the light and the effect is quite neat.

Real science this time.</comment></comment>


Don't Put Your Work Email on Your Personal Phone - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/dont-put-your-work-email-on-your-personal-phone-ef7fef956c2f <comment><USER2> Funny story (well OK, not so funny), I worked at a company where the FBI decided to pay a visit and investigate some potential naughtiness performed by members of the senior staff. They asked questions such as "Do you use your cell phone and personal email for company matters." Guess what a lot of them said, "Yep, have to." That immediately made their personal equipment, etc. in scope for the investigation and they confiscated it. Interestingly enough, any crime discovered while in pursuit of another crime can also be prosecuted. (Guess how they leverage people to flip.)

After hearing about that, I never attach anything work related to my personal equipment. There is too much liability. Anytime that anyone even whispers about me using anything I own for company use, the answer is a resounding "No." You honestly, don't know who you are really working with/for and what they are actually like.

<comment><USER3> Recently my employer has pushed for Okta Identity management. And somewhere in that plan they somehow thought appropriating employee personal phones was a good idea. Now we can't login to certain internal apps without a mobile device because Okta needs one time password/accepting push notification. And the otp/push notification should necessarily happen on a mobile device. Given that company hasn't provided any mobile devices to employees, everyone is forced to use their personal phones.

Any ideas on what happens in such cases?

<comment><USER4> Can't you ask for a key fob OTP code generator device? Employees who work at sensitive client sites in many cases wouldn't be allowed to connect their phones to the Internet and may have restrictions placed on the usage of it. A separate hardware key generator (which is really a second factor) could possibly help (depending on the situation and need).

<comment><USER5> You can ask, sure.

That doesn't mean that the company will provide any such thing, much like they're clearly not providing company cell phones to the GP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is certainly a very good reason to not put your work account on your personal phone, but my primary reason not to is that it's my device and I pay for the service. If my company needs me to be available beyond my 9-5 workday, they can pay for it.

If there's an emergency, they can always call, but I don't like being "always on".

<comment><USER7> > _If my company needs me to be available beyond my 9-5 workday, they can pay > for it._

If you're salaried then they _are_ paying you for it based on the job requirements, it's part of the job and one of the things that separates hourly employees from salaried ones.

Unless you're talking about the cost of your cell plan or device? But even then, a lot of companies will pay for your plan and subsidize part/all of your device if they have a legitimate work reason to need to contact you and expect a fairly quick response outside the office.

EDIT: To be clear I'm referring to US law/practices. The _entire_ point of salaried as opposed to hourly work is that it is based on performance rather than hours, and it's up to you and your employer to come to agreement on what performance means. At some companies salary might be for 40 hours, at others it's for 60 or 80 regularly. It's your own responsibility to find out before taking the job, and decide for yourself what you're willing to provide or not.

<comment><USER8> No they are _not_. Salary is for 40 hours a week, +/\- 5 hours depending on temporary circumstances.

Salary is not 40 hours working + 128 hours on call per week.

<comment><USER9> This of course depends on your particular employment contract. In some cases, someone may agree to be on call whenever they're not working and AFAIK (IANAL) such contracts are legal in some circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If your employer subscribes to an ethical model which permits them to abuse MDM, viewing your web history and tracking your location, you need to do more than remove your personal device from their control.

You must find a new employer—preferably while you make public this repulsive behavior.

<comment><USER11> How does one know if an employer is abusing MDM? Honest question... I have no idea. I just point my iPhone's mail app at our Outlook 365 server and that's it - I assume that installs a profile that allows them some remote access (I believe they can remote wipe the phone, but maybe not), but no idea how to tell if they're doing anything else.

Edit - looking at Settings->General->Profiles, there is one entry, which is for connecting to my Olympus camera. Nothing for the office.

<comment><USER12> Generally MDM software swallows up everything. It's been a while since I managed an MDM instance but we could track everywhere the employee went by default and when I suggested we turn it off there wasn't an option nor did management want to. We could see every app pretty much everything on the device. I will never install MDM on my phone after managing it. I've also seen phones accidentally wiped. Back up your phones.

<comment><USER13> Does turning off location on your phone mitigate their tracking of where employees go? I realize the other problems are still there, but I'm wondering if that would help. I turn on location on my phone once in a blue moon when an app gets too damn annoying that I actually need to use right then.

<comment><USER14> Depends on the MDM and phone really but, No. Triangulating a cellphone on the network via cell towers is a tried and true feature of wireless infrastructure. Even your phones GPS capabilities are most likely "A-GPS" meaning Cellular Assisted; It'll use cell location data when GPS satilites are slow/unavailable.

GPS toggle isn't doing much of anything besides application permissions enforcement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a remote contractor. Usually, if my customer wants me to install some tracking software (recording you're present in front of PC, tracking mouse/keyboard activity, etc) I agree only on one term: they need to send me a machine with this software so I can use it while doing work. I lose customers this way, though most of the time people agree to not have this kind of software involved instead of rejecting offer altogether.

If I worked in an office environment and company wanted me to use tracking software I'd see no problems with it. But it should be installed on a company provided phone. Which in the best case I'd leave at office off work, or in other cases - carry home and store it there.

<comment><USER16> Tracking software?! I often have remote contracts and have never been suggested to install any presence or keyboard activity trackers. Sounds horrible. You are a professional, not a teenager.

I think that would be such a red flag for me of how everything else is at that client that I would never agree to the contract in the first place.

Since most of my clients allow BYOD I sometimes get asked to ensure I have antivirus etc installed. Which is ok as long as they don't dictate which software. So far that has been fine for all clients.

I have some clients that insist on a locked-down laptop to access some parts of their network, and they happily send me one that I use it for mostly email only. Having tracking software on it would be pointless as it would only show 5 minutes of email checking activity every 2-3 hours.

Unless by tracking you mean webcam and slack status? That seems acceptable to me. And as I mostly encourage(insist) that my teams use webcams when they are remote pairing etc it would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise.

<comment><USER17> Upwork is a giant freelancer market. They pitch their tracking software as protection for both sides: proof of work.

[https://www.upwork.com/hiring/for-freelancers/using-the- upwo...](https://www.upwork.com/hiring/for-freelancers/using-the-upwork-team- app-for-payment-protection-and-collaboration/)

<comment><USER18> Doesn't CrossOver do that as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I work from home/remotely. For years I've followed a simple policy. I don't use work devices for personal use, and I don't connect my personal devices to any work accounts. I've never had an employer that's had a problem with this, and the most I've ever heard is comments about how I'm just inconveniencing myself because I carry two phones, two laptops. But the reality is, it's been extremely beneficial when I've had to work in compliance sensitive companies for exactly the reasons listed here and then some, and it's a minor inconvenience.

If you're a tech worker you can afford to buy your own personal equipment for personal use. If the company needs you to have equipment to do work, they can purchase it for you. Simple as that.

<comment><USER20> I love having a work laptop that only has work on it but I've never been able to have a personal laptop that doesn't eventually get all the work stuff onto it at some point.

What do you do if you're lying in bed watching a movie when you remember that you need to schedule a meeting with X for tomorrow at 11am? Do you get out of your warm bed and pull out your work laptop and add the calendar entry and then climb back into bed or do you just pause the movie, log in to your work calendar and make the entry real quick before resuming the movie?

The closest I've ever had to making this a reality was when my work computer was an iMac so I'd just leave it on 24/7 and RDP into it from home (I lived within WiFi distance of the office so all this was done via LAN). Even then, when the work stuff was going to take more than ~5 minutes, I'd still end up doing it natively from my home computer rather than deal with RDP lag.

edit: I also really struggle with what IM programs to keep on my work laptop these days. Medium of communication doesn't map cleanly onto work/personal contacts so I either deal with friends pinging me while at work or missing vital messages from people expecting a business response/having long professional conversations using a phone keyboard.

<comment><USER21> > What do you do if you're lying in bed watching a movie when you remember > that you need to schedule a meeting with X for tomorrow at 11am?

Carry your work phone to bed and use the calendar app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > On Android, there are tools that help prevent IT from reaching into your > phone. If it's allowed by your admin, you can create a separate "work" > profile that contains sandboxed versions of your apps to avoid blurring the > line between personal and work. The work profile can then be disabled on > demand and flipped back on only when you need it, providing a level of > control that iOS doesn't yet allow.

This is changing with iOS 13 and the introduction of User Enrollment, which siloes off work data and adds restrictions to what corporate IT can access.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. It's surprising that the article doesn't mention iOS 13 and user enrollment which hopefully solves the issue.

<comment><USER24> i would laugh if appleconnect/switchboard gets around that somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >When you add a work email address to your phone, you'll likely be asked to install something called a Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile

...what? The Outlook app containerizes your email accout specifically so that you dont have to do this. Your company can remotely wipe your work account and only your work account.

Of course MDM gives access to your phone - thats its whole purpose.

<comment> drunken-serval MDM gets applied if you want to access your exchange server with the default iOS apps because those apps don't have remote management built in.

If you use the Microsoft apps, you don't need to have an MDM applied because those apps handle the remote management functionality themselves.

<comment><USER26> No it does not (source: iOS device user and Exchange admin).

Adding an Exchange account to an iOS device optionally allows the Exchange client to enforce password and screen lock requirements, encryption, and allow for remote device wiping.

It does not have any access to device location, data, photos, contacts, or anything else you can think of outside of device passcode, encryption, and remote wiping.

An MDM profile is a completely separate thing from Exchange. Also, unless the iOS device is supervised (which has to be done at time of setup and would require wiping the device if you want to supervise one that's already setup) you're extremely limited in what you can do and see.

<comment><USER27> This guy MDMs (and is 100% correct).

Source: We provide employee's with iOS devices and use VMWare Workspace ONE (formerly AirWatch) along with their Secure E-Mail Gateway and also use Apple's Device Enrollment Program. This provides for as complete control over the device as you can get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > When you add a work email address to your phone, you'll likely be asked to > install something called a Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile. Chances > are, you'll blindly accept it. (What other choice do you have?)

I use the Nine mail/calendar app[1] to keep all that contained. It integrates nicely with the native Android apps but keeps all of the security and control options within Nine itself. It looks like they are also beta testing an iOS app but I have no experience with that version of it.

For example, if the mail account security settings require a screen lock code, Nine will require a code to access the app but this won't affect the actual phone's unlock screen.

Similarly if a data wipe request is sent from the server it will only affect Nine.

[1] [https://www.9folders.com/product/](https://www.9folders.com/product/)

<comment><USER29> You beat me to it. Nine also allows easy connection to multiple Exchange accounts, has a variety of other nice features and has been around long enough to have a very solid track record.

This kind of sandboxing is one of the things third party apps like this have always been known for, going all the way back to a really old one whose name in blanking on which I believe maintained its own entirely internal calendar, files, etc. (Dataviz maybe?)

Edit: this may still be useful for some people, but the work profiles introduced in Android 5+ may make it less relevant at least for anyone at enterprise scale or otherwise using MDM through a service provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> At least if your org is on Office365 and doesn't have too restrictive policies, you can get your email over standard IMAP. There also exist some nice man-in-the-middle proxies which pretend to exchange servers that you've implemented the policies they ask for.

I've got multiple "work" (one is a volunteering role) office365 exchange accounts on my personal phone, using [[https://sites.google.com/site/bikomobi/exchained](exchained)](https://sites.google.com/site/bikomobi/exchained\]\(exchained\)). Seems to work well. I'm sure the respective IT departments would give me a stern talking to, but there is nothing in either job that is of any sensitive nature whatsoever so their blanket "ask for admin permissions on my phone" policies can get f __ __d, frankly.

<comment><USER31> Experiences vary. Some stodgy F500's have IMAP and ActiveSync locked down in various ways that force you to run the Outlook app.

<comment> drunken-serval The Outlook iPhone app doesn't require MDM.

<comment><USER31> It can, and their MAM blurs some lines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I had to deal with this a number of years ago, and my response was "If you want MDM on the device to enable mail, then you buy me a separate device. Otherwise, I will access mail when I am at my corporate laptop or on the web via VPN." Never let them MDM your personal device, because they will possibly auto-wipe your phone if something proprietary or secret leaks out via email and you are on the distro.

</comment><comment><USER33> Remember 10 years ago when people were predicting/building technology to let our phones run multiple "virtual" phone instances on a hypervisor, solving the work phone/play phone single device dilemma?

I'd still freaking love this feature ten years later. I don't want app level segregation of work and play, I want them in entirely different "instances" of my phone.

> [https://arstechnica.com/information- > technology/2011/09/samsu...](https://arstechnica.com/information- > technology/2011/09/samsung-boosts-vmware-plan-to-virtualize-android-phones- > tablets/)

> [https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2009/01/01/the- > nex...](https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2009/01/01/the-next- > frontier-mobile-phone-hypervisors.aspx)

> [https://gizmodo.com/vmware-for-mobile-devices-lets-you- > run-w...](https://gizmodo.com/vmware-for-mobile-devices-lets-you-run- > windows-and-andr-5160685)

<comment><USER34> I guess you just need a GNU/Linux phone for that. Librem 5 is the hope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sneaky medium, I used to have a paid account and the page looked like I couldn't read the article until i resumed the paid membership. Signed out and clicked on the link again and was able to read the article. Account deleted!

</comment><comment><USER36> Not sure how complete this list is, but here's Google's MDM knowledge base articles: [https://support.google.com/a/answer/7036693](https://support.google.com/a/answer/7036693)

Mobile Reports: [https://support.google.com/a/answer/6072773](https://support.google.com/a/answer/6072773)

Device Audit: [https://support.google.com/a/answer/6350074](https://support.google.com/a/answer/6350074)

Mobile Alerts: [https://support.google.com/a/answer/3230421](https://support.google.com/a/answer/3230421)

Edit: Furthermore, on iOS, you can go to Settings -> General -> Device Management -> <Select MDM Profile> -> More Details -> MDM Profile. The list of rights are listed there.

<comment><USER37> Anything sketchy? I dont have Google Device Management installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Thinking ahead to the next time I need it (I haven't tested this), I was looking into current respectful options for people who are on-call in some way.

Considerations included not interrupting personal time or reminding people of work unnecessarily, location privacy, certainly not doing MDM of personal devices, security simplicity, etc.

The most interesting option was the old-school one-way radio alpha/numeric pager. It turns out that the Boston hospitals still use these heavily, as do some EMTs, and they're considered much more reliable than cellular- and WiFi- connected smartphones.

I'm imagining people on-call have their pager on, and it's only used for emergencies. There would be a couple/few numeric codes for the few different appropriate possibilities of importance/urgency/nature/modality, and what you should do. The most usual code might mean get on email/chat ASAP. Another code might mean phone devops ASAP. Code "666" apocalypse might mean call a car service immediately, get on phone/email/chat while you wait, don't delay to groom or anything.

As a matter of culture, all of the codes are worth bothering someone in their personal time. For example, maybe there's no code for "hey, if you have a second, it would save me half an hour if...". (Of course, we have to not raise the importance/urgency bar too much, or people might end up staying on chat or something, because the pager's bar is higher than their own.)

<comment><USER39> When my company wanted to issue me with a work phone, i looked for the most pager-like thing around. The only reason i would ever use it is to receive alerts when i'm on call, and to do 2FA to connect my laptop to the VPN, so i would like it to have small size, long battery life, and a loud speaker. I couldn't find anything at all like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> At my current org, it was hinted to us that if we tied (email forwards, etc.) or added any work account to a personal device, that the personal accounts and device could be subject to audits.

Don't mix your work and personal stuff. Keep it separate, keep it safe.

</comment><comment><USER41> Yes, if it's important to your company for you to be able to receive any of their communications wherever you are, they can pay for a phone plus service to give to you for that purpose. Don't let them use your personal phone for that.

<comment><USER42> But I still don't want to carry two phones.

Which is why I only redirect my company phone regular voice calls to the private one when I'm out of office. If it's urgent, call. If it's not, I'll get to it when I'm in the office.

<comment><USER41> That is totally understandable, and I hope you don't get in trouble when law enforcement comes looking for your personal device that somehow got caught up in their list of devices to look for.

<comment><USER43> You watch too many movies.

<comment><USER41> I've been a party to too many situations where this sort of thing happens.

I'm not making this up, y'all; I've sat there with the other side's data collection party when _my_ boss was telling me to let him collect the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is not about work email, this is about MDM software. The title is confusing.

<comment><USER45> There are a lot of companies that require you to enable MDM before you can setup an email account, I've seen it on android back in the day when I had a smartphone.

FWIW when that happened I just started using the cruddy web interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Weird title. It has nothing to do with e-mail. It is the MDM that is the problem.

</comment><comment><USER47> I actually gave up my smart phone a year ago. I've been with a feature phone (Nokia 3310) for a full year now. My position at work is this: _" Given that I'm at my workstation 85% of my day, if I'm important enough to need to check e-mail 'on the go' or outside of work, I'm important enough for the company to get me a second phone - one dedicated to work and work only."_

</comment><comment><USER48> If you have a recent Samsung phone there is a feature called 'Knox' that splits off your personal files from the work-related stuff. Knox is like a secure container that's fully isolated from the rest of the phone -- like a phone within a phone. Knox cannot access your personal files so the assertion that it can 'wipe your data' or spy on you would be incorrect (it only works with the container.)

What the article mentions about tracking is a legit concern though, IMO. Within a container it's still possible to access the GPS sensors. I'm not sure if the user can block this / opt-out? It's possible that an app may have to request permissions to use the GPS. In any case, I would say the situation is still better and more transparent on Samsung devices than this article would imply. I don't know about other devices but I can tell you Apple phones don't yet have an equivalent secure container solution (like Knox or Enclaves) so I'd be more concerned about the security situation on those devices.

<comment><USER49> This is true of Android work profiles too. The MDM solutions I've seen use Android work profiles underneath, so your never in risk of your work accessing personal photos or data. The work profile and all work apps are in the septate container.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I feel like most/many articles such as this are targeted at large enterprises/organisations. I've never been asked to install anything like MDM on my phone for any company I've worked for if needing to/wanting to view work email on my phone. But then I've never worked for a company who has more than around 25 members of staff.

<comment><USER51> Company size and industry definitely play a significant role in the roll-out of managed device policies. Some organizations are required to pass specific ISO/IEC standard certifications with regards to their security policies. Managed-devices with remote-wipe capabilities being one such requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This headline's a little sensationalist. There are a lot of workplaces that don't use MDM.

Don't put your employer's MDM on your own phone. Make them buy you a work phone.

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't put it in my phone because it gives the company an out to turn your phone into an IT BYOD asset. This makes it subject to a wipe if you ever left the company.

</comment><comment><USER54> Or... just use the web app to check your mail. If you want notifications, this seems like a great use for PWA.

<comment> yoz-y Depends, some companies have mail accessible only from trusted devices web app or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> My boss had his phone completely wiped because his kids tried to unlock it a couple of times. Apparently we had that behaviour programmed as a company policy...

</comment><comment><USER56> What if you have multiple iOS devices and you MDM one of them connected to the same iCloud account, what risk exposure do I have? The same?

</comment><comment><USER57> This "stop and think" warning is very good, but let's be honest, in many roles you can't say "no" anymore. Most companies require a significant subset of employees to use their personal device for work and have corporate accounts active on it.

It may not be true for you personally, but I bet it is for most people who have on-call rotations.

Features like Android's separate profiles are critical. We need similar sandboxing on all platforms. I don't think we can change the 24/7 availability culture, but we can change things from a software side to make it less onerous.

<comment><USER12> A company cannot force you to use your hardware to run their business at least not without compensation. Having a phone number that can be paged is significantly different than installing MDM software that can track literally everywhere you go, wipe your phone without your permission, etc. If a company is saying you "must" install something in your personal device without any compensation on top of your regular paycheck this is incorrect. If you use your own car for work you're typically compensated with mileage or you can write it off on your taxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Don't work anything on your personal anything.

</comment><comment><USER59> This appears to be why you shouldn't put an MDM on your phone.

I have my work slack and email on my phone, just with notifications turned off on both. There was nothing about installing an MDM.

</comment><comment><USER60> I've seen the same thing with Chrome. If you log into Gmail it automatically link the browser with the corporate account for all Google services. And if you go on the settings page (chrome://settings/) it shows "Your Browser is Managed by Your Organization". This allow the manager to automatically install extensions, filter websites... I removed the auto managed browser while being connected and it wasn't an easy task unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER61> Interesting that this was just about spying, when the real reason to keep work email off your phone (imo) is to maintain work life balance. If I can access my work email on my phone, I will access my work email on my phone. Constantly. I'm bad enough with my phone and my personal email.

Everywhere I've worked I've told my manager I turn off work when I leave (unless I'm oncall). I've never had this be a concern, across three large companies.

<comment><USER62> Having work apps on your phone is not mutually exclusive to having work/life balance though.

I have work apps on my personal device primarily for when I'm away from my desk during work hours. I disable notifications etc. outside of work hours.

I wouldn't say I'm really happy with it, but it does permit me some freedom to be away from my desk without the risk of missing something important during the day. It's a trade-off I've decided I'm willing to make.

Work also provides guest wifi which is conveniently configured by the Android for Work profile, so data usage while at the office isn't really a concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Similar could be the case, when an office gmail account is used by a number of employees for viewing & replying official emails.

One employee who is logged in using office gmail in his/her android phone. The person (other employee) knowing the password can easily view most of the phone activity by visiting [https://activity.google.com](https://activity.google.com) (which includes search history with location).

</comment><comment><USER64> I only have my work Slack, not email, on my phone because of this.

Something I've wondered: why do they only do this for native email? Why can I use Slack without it? In college even our student email accounts had MDM (which was pretty silly), but I worked around it by just viewing my email in the web browser. Are locally-stored emails somehow more vulnerable than my browser cache and the messages stored in the Slack app, or are those just loopholes?

</comment><comment><USER65> How many companies provide a company phone and allow the employee to use it for personal stuff? I thought that was the norm. I would question any company that expected me to provide my own phone to perform their tasks. Of course if they paid me enough, this would be negotiable.

Regardless, if I installed their remote monitoring S/W on my phone or used their phone, I would abandon any expectation of privacy on that device.

</comment><comment><USER66> One option is to use Blackberry Work[1] which gives your it department just control over an encrypted container, not the whole phone.

[1] [https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/forms/campaigns/q2_19/byo](https://www.blackberry.com/us/en/forms/campaigns/q2_19/byo)

</comment><comment><USER67> I've had a couple employers offer to transfer my personal number to my work- provided cell phone. I said no thanks, and carried two phones around instead. But it was a surprisingly popular option among my coworkers. They'd rather let their boss own their personal, everyday smartphone than carry around two phones.

</comment><comment><USER68> When I came in to my current company last year, the only way to get work email was by enrolling your phone in our "company portal" which was based on MS's Intune, part of their 365 offering, which by the way is horrible. There was no IT director and the lawyer and CFO who drove the plan had draconian rules, so bad that only a few people ever enrolled, and those who did regretted it, as their phones would be wiped several times as unqualified people "poked around" in the system. Exchange and outlook alone can handle email data safely with remote wipe of company data without total MDM and device 0wnership. I changed to that immediately, and in the past year we've needed to wipe only two people's phones, and it went without a hitch. MD is a tool that frequently is more than required for the situation.

</comment><comment><USER69> This should also apply for work slack.

At this point, especially if I'm working at a company that isn't a startup, I will not work somewhere that expects me to have slack available at "all times". After hours if I'm not on call I simply do not respond.

For this reason I'll never do dev ops work haha

</comment><comment><USER70> And this is why I really want a phone which can run virtualized Android environments.

</comment><comment><USER71> > When you add a work email address to your phone, you'll likely be asked to > install something called a Mobile Device Management (MDM) profile.

My wife was asked to do this, and (and a discussion with me explaining what that means) she told them they could buy her a phone if they wanted that.

The company I work for does not require it, and I agree to have email and slack on my phone. They don't reach out to me on off hours unless there's a very good reason.

</comment><comment><USER72> Maybe I have never worked a corporate-enough job to see this, but at all the tech companies I've worked at, the idea of requiring an MDM profile on your personal phone to access work email would be more or less unthinkable. I've known engineers to balk at installing a simple, no-permissions-required multi- factor authentication client; I can only imagine the revolt that would ensue were they asked to consent to remote management.

</comment><comment><USER73> TLDR: "do not put work email on personal phone, as the company may ask you to install mobile device management (MDM) to manage your device, which gives them opportunity to spy / control".

This conflates two different things: work email and MDM on personal phone. While I would never install company MDM on my personal phone, many organizations allow you to access work email from personal phone, no MDM strings attached. My 2c.

</comment><comment><USER74> Our IT policy is pretty broad and obnoxious so i just carry two phones. Couldn't be arsed to try and keep things separately with policy and software.

</comment><comment><USER75> Seems like I have Company Portal installed but it's not activated, and the permissions don't mention being able to look at browsing history. Just "Erase all data", "Monitor unlock attempts" and some things like that. Some lesser things on "Outlook Device Policy" which is also not activated. PingID, Outlook, and Amazon Workspaces are on here.

</comment><comment> what-the-grump Dont put your work email on your phone, because it comes a discovery item in court including all your texts, emails, etc. MDM aside.

</comment><comment><USER76> Or, you could check to see if any of this applies to you, rather than panicking. Blogpost would have been helpful had it provided more detail:

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202837](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT202837)

</comment><comment><USER77> Why anyone would allow an employer to install MDM software on their personal device is beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER78> I don't believe I ever actually accepted this on my iPhone.

But trying to search around I can't find anything about how to actually find out. Does anyone know?

I assume Settings >> General >> Profiles, but it is empty so not sure.

<comment><USER36> If your device is enrolled in MDM, it would be listed there in Profiles. So your device is probably not enrolled in an MDM policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I'm surprised it's not more common for phones to support two sims and have an almost dual boot like separation of them (more like desktop computers having multiple user accounts)

</comment><comment><USER80> While you're at it, leave slack off your personal phone too.

</comment><comment><USER81> Our company uses G Suite's Advanced MDM on a G Suite Enterprise account. I administer its configuration.

Unless I'm missing something, there's not an obvious way to "spy" on employees, which this article is claiming. Perhaps it's possible, but if it is, it would require _a lot_ of deliberate effort to accomplish. For example, there's not an out of the box way to track employee location. There's not a way to track employee internet browsing history out of the box.

TLDR: using G Suite Advanced MDM, there are not out of the box solutions for tracking or spying on employees in the ways suggested in the article. It might be technically possible, but to accomplish it, your company would need to make a (large) deliberate effort to do this.

<comment><USER82> >There's not a way to track employee internet browsing history out of the box.

Some large enterprises use MDM to deploy certificates and proxy policies that essentially force you into a MitM situation, with the intention of tracking browser usage.

Location is a bit more tricky. I would say that's less common, but I've seen MDM solutions that offer location tracking as a feature

<comment><USER81> Yes, there are probably sketchy MDM providers that specialize in employee tracking / spying.

I'm speaking to what's possible to accomplish out of the box with G Suite's Advanced MDM offering, without an extreme amount of additional effort.

(This is relevant because, when prompted to install a MDM profile, the MDM provider such as G Suite is visible to the end user)

<comment><USER82> I mention this because one of the top use cases for MDMs is deploying said MitM setups. It's common in certain industries, like for banks and for schools. Saying this from experience because I worked for a company that produced both an MDM product and a MitM product.

For an MDM solution on iOS there's a big list of supported profiles you can deploy after the MDM profile is installed ( see [https://developer.apple.com/business/documentation/MDM- Proto...](https://developer.apple.com/business/documentation/MDM-Protocol- Reference.pdf) under "request types").

If the device belongs to the organization, you might not even know these profiles are installed, if it's a BYOD environment you know you are installing the MDM profile and if you open the settings page you can manually inspect which other sub-profiles have been installed by the MDM.

But you're right the MitM itself isn't built into the MDM, because that's a totally different product category ("Secure Web Gateway"). The MitM setup only works if you have an MDM to enforce the certificates and proxy setup upon the user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > These tools often allow administrators to pry into how the phone is used as > well, retrieving call logs, SMS history, and in the most extreme cases, full > logs of web browsing.

I doubt any of these (call logs, SMS, web history) are possible on iOS even with an MDM profile installed, unless it's call logs from the company's own VoIP app or web history from its own browser app. SMS? Nope. On Android all these are possible for any app that's given the permissions, even without MDM.

Can anyone who knows more validate or confirm the veracity of this claim in the article?

</comment><comment><USER83> I have two phones. My work email is installed on my work phone. My personal phone doesn't get used much. Sometimes I leave it at home.

</comment><comment><USER84> Anyway, you probably don't have a role in your organization that requires you to check your work emails outside of the office.

</comment><comment><USER85> > you'll likely be asked to install something called a Mobile Device > Management (MDM) profile. Chances are, you'll blindly accept it.

Say WHAT? That's the entire premise of the article. Any sane person who have even a vague idea of what a MDM is will answer with a resounding NO.

Is there actually serious companies who ask their employees to install a MDM on their personal phone? The moment you install a MDM on a phone, that phone is no longer your own, it now belongs to the company.

<comment><USER22> > Is there actually serious companies who ask their employees to install a MDM > on their personal phone?

Every company that does BYOD?

<comment><USER62> Can confirm; the Fortune 500 company I work for has pretty extensive support for BYOD. Managers can be stodgy about providing work phones, plus carrying two devices is a pain.

I use Android so I'm relying on the Android for Work sandboxing, but truthfully I don't know the exact details of what that does and does not allow my employer to access. It does bother me, but I don't feel like I have a whole lot of choice. Being able to respond to Google Chat messages at any time (when away for lunch, for example), is feeling more and more like a requirement/expectation.

Also, commuting on the train pretty much requires mobile Hangouts support (which Google effectively makes impossible to use via a website if you're on Android), unless you want to always be at your desk in the office prior to the first meeting each day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Good advice for many reasons, but unless you let your company root your device, they cant track you and your behavior.

</comment><comment><USER87> While I sympathize with the privacy concerns, carrying two phones around is pretty much a dealbreaker for me.

<comment><USER88> It can be annoying sometimes, but honestly it can also be pretty cathartic to leave your work phone behind when you go for a bike ride, or out to dinner with friends etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Misleading title. Should be "Don't put your work's MDM on your personal phone".

</comment><comment><USER90> I did the opposite. Put all my personal stuff on my work phone. No way am I going to carry around two of those bulky monsters. The only bad part is that a bunch of my online identities are now directly coupled to work, unless I can convince them to let me keep the phone if I ever leave.

</comment><comment><USER91> The title is misleading; MDM should not be equivocated with "work email".

</comment><comment><USER92> Well, yeah. Was this not obvious? Are people actually _doing_ this?

If an employer wants me to be reachable by phone they can give me a work phone. Why would I voluntarily turn my personal phone into a work phone?</comment>


People are the only thing that matter.  - <AUTHOR>

Discuss. <comment><USER2> Which direction do you want to take this discussion?</comment>


Dear Wired - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/553-Dear-Wired.html <comment><USER2> I don't foresee Wired ever publishing the response if it's written as poorly as it is here. Krawetz knows his stuff and could very well be in the right, but his rebuttals are too long and technical (re. boring) for a publication like Wired to touch.

If the rebuttal was boiled down to one or two well written paragraphs of his most salient points, Wired may continue the discussion.

My .02</comment>


You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1014267515696922624 <comment><USER2> It's amazing how many of the "bullshit insane" things in neuroscience make perfect damn sense from a Bayesian brain standpoint.

If you're saccading to update an approximate posterior _model_ of the visual scene, you don't _need_ to "pause" or "blank out" the blur of the saccade. Each fixation is a _sampling_ of the environment under generative assumptions, so yeah, your previous posterior becomes your new prior, and as long as the saccades don't take _too_ long, your new prior is accurate enough to make decent predictions! Since what we consciously experience is the predictions themselves, we don't notice any gaps until the bottom-up prediction error signals become _huge_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice writeup. Would be great to have a traditional blog-like version of it, the twitter feed is somewhat painful to read.

<comment><USER4> [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html)

<comment><USER5> This should be the linked post by the moderators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, so now how do I hack my eyes so that I see enemies better in FPS games?

<comment><USER7> By fixating on the cross-hair, and using the mouse to look around (rotating the camera) instead of moving your eyes, I'd guess?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do people think it's a good idea to post a 1700 word writeup on Twitter? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm legitimately curious why anyone would want do this. Do you think your audience enjoys reading tiny post after tiny post? Do you just love posting short messages in sequence SMS-style?

<comment><USER9> Well, it has 28k retweets, 72k likes, and a hundreds of 1-on-1 engagements and Q&A. More than I've seen in pretty much any Disqus comment section.

Doesn't seem like the best tweet to die on to make your point. The results surely answer all of your questions.

It's a weird format, but I encourage you to at least try and appreciate it instead of dismissing it. I'll try: It's kind of like what a blog post might look when annotated on genius.com: each point can spawn its own discussion and people can engage the author on any subtopic right there alongside the content.

Another benefit of the anti-narrative format is that it has an immediate quickstart. One second you're reading the opening tweet about how "bullshit our brains are", and the next you've learned something interesting. You might not have even clicked into a longer-form format about how the eyes work, there's just no commitment.

<comment><USER10> Yep, people post long-form content to Twitter because there's engagement there. Literally no other reason because it is a terrible medium for reading and writing long-form content like this. But that level of engagement is rare on proper "long-form" sites and personal blogs.</comment></comment></comment>


How can we default on dollar denominated debt most of it which we own ? - <AUTHOR> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Estimated_ownership_of_treasury_securities_by_year.gif someone please explain to me how we can default on dollar denominated debt ? S&P decision makes no sense. <comment><AUTHOR> S&P decision makes no sense.</comment>


Ask HN: Just using IPv6? - <AUTHOR> How many people have turned off IPv4 for home and are just just IPv6? <comment><USER2> You can't turn off IPv4 yet without losing 3/4 of the relevant internet. Just try it. It is easy on macOS, when you have native IPv6. But you won't be able to report your findings here, for starters.

You can cheat with DNS64/Nat64 or lw4to6, as shown here

[https://blog.apnic.net/2018/06/28/lw4o6-one-step-further- tha...](https://blog.apnic.net/2018/06/28/lw4o6-one-step-further-than-dual- stack-networks/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I was thinking after I posted, accessing ipv4 over ipv6. A flip on the tunnelling we used to gain access in the first place.

My ipv6 coonection stoppedworking fora few months before I noticed, I'm keen to make it more fundamental.</comment></comment>


Public offering of bonds painless compared to shares - <AUTHOR> http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/columnists/article6586951.ece

<comment><USER2> The difference is that shares are a portion of the company that you're giving away along with the rights of partial ownership and such. Selling bonds is essentially like getting loans. You find that a bank will lend you the money you want at 7% interest and that investors will buy your 6% interest bonds. So, you sell the bonds to the investors and your costs are lower.

With stock, they get a share of your company and if it does better than expected, they get more. With bonds, it's fixed. Should your company go under, they're entitled to be paid before your shareholders are. And if you own the company, that means that the bondholders will get their money back before you get to see anything from the failed business.

While bonds are by no means no-risk items, they're very different from stocks and more akin to the loans that a bank would make.</comment>


Participatory Innovation started here...where will it end up?  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ideastox.com/

<comment><USER2> Interesting, I have not heard of this before. How does it work?

I'm curious how different it is from aleveo.com</comment>


Hcrknews.com (Flagged / Censored content can be seen) - <AUTHOR> http://hckrnews.com/ <comment><USER2> I'd love to get a discussion going on whether people support or oppose the flagging (and subsequent disappearance) of politically charged topics on HN. While HN is not a politics site, some of these censored topics have been tech- related.

I guess it comes down to a value judgement: is it worth discussing tech politics even if it spawns flamewars and heated arguments? I think it's worth it, but this is certainly debatable. Curious what other HN users think.

My own thinking is that political discussion between opposing factions is always going to be contentious, but that doesn't mean it should be suppressed. However, angry rhetoric can lead to further polarization, so I'm not sure what the right approach is.

Edit: funny enough, this topic itself was flagged and killed! I've vouched it, but I'm open to hearing arguments for why this link doesn't belong.

<comment><USER3> Maybe just add a special topic flag "politics" and let everyone have a convenient switch in the profile settings whether they want to see those topics in the feed or not?

<comment><USER4> That topic flag is called reddit.com/r/politics. We are already choosing to come here instead of there.

<comment><USER5> I have always bowed to the wishes of PG and the mods when it comes to calling out articles as too "hot"

This is a funky one, though. The issue itself is about how politics affects what we can say and not say online. In that way, it's a "meta" issue.

I can still understand the flagging and death, but damn. Google, Apple, and Facebook are huge monsters that control hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and virtually everything a huge chunk of the world's population sees and does. This is a tech story. It's a politics story. It's a story about business. It's all of that.

This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their head in the sand. For ten or twenty years, we've created the internet and all the things people use today. When asked about morals, ethics, and politics, we've just said something like "We make the tools. We're not responsible for their use"

And here we are in a security and surveillance state that _we 've created_. We're refusing to _even talk_ about Google's desired monoculture because we're unable to maintain civil discourse.

I get it. But fuck me. Something's really wrong here. I can't help but feel that the tech community at large -- and HN in particular -- is no longer working towards the betterment of mankind.

Something is terribly broken. And we had a big part in breaking it.

<comment><USER6> > This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their > head in the sand.

This happens _all the time_. Techies being 'apolitical' is a huge problem, and of course those very same techies then turn around and scream blue murder when laws are made that hurt their interests or when their tech is used to further some political goal they do not agree with.

<comment><USER5> Being apolitical is fine. I try to be that way publicly and in my work. I fail sometimes, but I try.

But when I look at huge messed up things in society, and I _know_ there are people on HN who had a big role in making them that way?

At some point you gotta cut the crap. Not taking a stand is taking a stand. Nobody gets a free ride. There's no special "get out of difficult conversations for free" card that we tech folks get that others don't have.

I do not think HN needs to be reddit. But yes, I do think a second room for the intersection of tech and politics (and _only_ that topic) is way overdue. We are better than this.

<comment><USER6> > We are better than this.

We could be, but we're not. This is what we are right now, a bunch of people that can't even have a rational discussion on a subject such as this.

<comment><USER5> I spent my entire youth reading sci-fi stories about mankind making new technology that eventually wipes out the species: giant robots, viruses, nuclear bombs, and so on.

And this it what we got? Tweeting and liking posts? This is the scary tech that's destroyed mainstream media and now threatens to lay waste to civil discourse in general? Typing little comments into boxes? Really?

Nobody can say the universe doesn't have a sense of humor.

<comment><USER7> Some of us have spent our entire adult lives working to prevent technology that "wipes out species". It's not an accident that these things did not occur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FYI you can view dead/flagged submissions by going to your profile and enabling showdead.

I don't know if this is the correct place to criticize HN's moderation policies, it's kinda disheartening to see the list of submissions that were removed. News articles regarding the diversity memo were allowed but submissions linking to the actual memo were removed for some reason. If the actual memo is sexist/bigoted, then people can read it directly and decide it for themselves, instead of relying on second hand information.

I mean even if you agree with what Google did, isn't it good that we discuss about it and point out the things that were problematic with that memo. What good does it do if we just try to shove the incident into a closet and pretend that it never happened?

Edit: Even this post was flagged :/

<comment><USER9> _" News articles regarding the diversity memo were allowed but submissions linking to the actual memo were removed for some reason."_

No, this article, the first one to publish the full text of the memo, got 353 points and received 616 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895)

Several subsequent submissions of the same content were flagged as duplicates.

<comment><USER8> The Gizmodo article omits several of the links to various studies that the actual memo makes. Even though the article actually mentions this, I doubt many people will actually will make the effort to know what those references were. And to be honest I don't think many people read beyond the articles summary, as evident by the discussion of the post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As an aside, I do find it interesting that this submission is nowhere to be found from the main page itself (or at least 5 pages back, despite 50 points and 17 comments. I guess it was flagged/vouched back, but having showdead on in your hacker news profile does nothing to help if the algorithm drops the submission into nowhereland.

That is reason enough for the existence of hckrnews.com, imo.

</comment><comment><USER4> The flagging isn't a rogue algorithm.

It's the majority of the sites users saying they don't want to keep seeing the same two toxic viewpoints throwing shit at each other.

<comment><USER6> If that were the only way it was used it would be fine. But it is also used to simply shut down rational discussion on subjects the flaggers don't like.

<comment><USER4> I use hckrnews myself and don't see this happening. Would you mind identifying which threads you think have been incorrectly flagged?

<comment><USER6> In the last 24 hours you'll find plenty of those about the Google affair, most likely shut down by Googlers flagging those links to shut down any discussion. Hard to tell without knowing who the flaggers are, which is one reason I don't like flagging.

<comment><USER10> I find the chronological history of hckrnews.com adds context to why many things get flagged. For example, immediately after the bloomberg article was posted about Google firing the memo author, were several other articles with the same content (from arstechnica and nymag) which were immediately flagged. Any time an inflammatory subject gets beat to death, the same process happens.

So in that respect, I often agree with the submissions that get flagged (including this one), but I do think news.ycombinator.com could do a better job of collecting and displaying these flagged submissions. For example, duplicate submissions could be made children of the submission that was allowed to stay.

<comment><USER6> Those merges sometimes happen but they're a moderator intervention and so have a pretty high cost associated with t them.

The biggest gripe I have with the flagging is the paternalistic aspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want to see flagged or censored comments, you can enable those in your profile settings, just change _showdead_ to _yes_

<comment><USER12> Yes, but it's rather difficult to find censored articles in the first place, once they've gone dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When posts are flagged, is there a reason that is provided and is it viewable somewhere?

It seems like there's a lot of legit, even large threads that have been flagged and removed. Even ones that don't seem offensive, they're just related to or covering news on some things that perhaps some people find offensive. Seems crazy that they'd disappear.

I'd be interested in reading the justifications for removal.

<comment><USER14> Users flag posts. It's not a moderator action.

There's a setting called showdead that you can change to see all the flagged posts.

<comment><USER13> Ah, thanks. Sometimes I see mods intervene on comments and that kind of thing, so I figured flagged posts went into a queue before removal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To create an intentional false dichotomy: if I have to choose between a site that surfaces all content regardless of controversy but accepts that related discussions will be lower-quality, and a site that directly or indirectly suppresses some content to maintain higher-quality discussion overall, I will choose the latter.

I appreciate that some people feel that the "loss" of some submissions due to automatic flamewar detection algorithms or user flagging is a problem, but I, for one, appreciate that the discussions that remain on the front page (for a long time) have a reasonable guarantee of being high quality.

Relatedly, it may also have an effect on the non-controversial submissions by establishing that flamewars will not remain in high positions for long. (I realize that's a bit of a "broken windows theory".)

<comment><USER8> Most of the recently flagged submissions were related to the diversity memo. I don't mind if fluff articles from dailydot are removed. But then when a verbatim copy of the memo was posted, and even that was flagged. I highly doubt that was flagged because it would have low quality discussions. People just abuse the flagging system to hide content that they don't agree with.

<comment><USER15> I also doubt that it was flagged _because_ it would generate low-quality discussion. But I do not doubt that low-quality discussion would have followed had it not been flagged off the front page.

I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are going to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more powerful tool (comments) poorly.

<comment><USER6> > I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a > high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are > going to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more > powerful tool (comments) poorly.

Flags are the more powerful tool. A single flag is the equivalent of many upvotes and annihilates the whole discussion. That's a lot more power than a comment, which can be dealt with on an individual basis.

<comment><USER15> That's a fair point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Meh, the stories were killed for a reason.

Thanks @dang and the rest of the team for keeping HN relevant and sane. It's never a fully objective decision, but I'm glad to leave that to them rather than have to dig through crap to find something good ( _cough_ unlike reddit _cough_ ).

</comment><comment><USER17> Besides the flagging, I really like hckrnews as a daily reader. The ability to see immediately what is new since my last visit (and to tune the number of posts I want to see) is a huge timesaver.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely absolutely agree with this! hckrnews is what I use to keep track of what's new on HN since I last visited!</comment></comment>


Results of Universal SARS-CoV-2 Screening in Women Admitted for Delivery in NYC - <AUTHOR> https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009316 <comment><AUTHOR> >Of the 211 women without symptoms, all were afebrile on admission. Nasopharyngeal swabs were obtained from 210 of the 211 women (99.5%) who did not have symptoms of Covid-19; of these women, 29 (13.7%) were positive for SARS-CoV-2. Thus, 29 of the 33 patients who were positive for SARS-CoV-2 at admission (87.9%) had no symptoms of Covid-19 at presentation.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my idea - GoMommyAuctions - <AUTHOR>

I wrote some code to help me filter out good domains listed on GoDaddy Auctions from the bad ones. I wrote this for the following reasons -
1. GoDaddy does not show page rank, information on backlinks or pages crawled by google.
2. There are many domains that show a fake page rank by redirecting to a high page rank domain. I ended up buying such lemons :(
3. There are domains that do not show up when you do a google search for info:domainname.com. This is definitely something to be checked up on before buying a domain.
Since it worked for me, I figured it could help others out there who use GoDaddy Auctions. I would like your feedback on the following points -
1. Does this add value to others who use GoDaddy auctions?
2. What do you think about the usability of the app?
3. I thought the name was cute - Do you think I'd face any issues with it? (legal issues from GoDaddy)
4. How could I monetize it? Do you think its valuable enough to pay a monthly fee - $10 a month?
Here is the URL - http://www.gomommyauctions.com
Entries listed with a red page rank are potential scam domains. You can click on the page rank to get additional information on the domain that it is redirected to. You can also click on Google index and links to get additional information.
Please feel free to rip my idea to shreds. I can take the criticism :) <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable Link - <http://www.gomommyauctions.com></comment>