Cold Calling Techniques - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessballs.com/cold_calling.htm <comment><USER3> A partner and I used to have a used medical equipment business. Cold calling, unfortunately, was a big part of it.

One trick we learned was to pitch the OPPOSITE of what we were trying to sell. That is, we asked if the medical office was interested in SELLING the equipment we were offering.

So the typical call script (yes it was a script) was like this: "Good Morning, this is XXX from YYY. We're the largest purchaser of ZZZ in the country. I wanted to find out if you might be replacing any of your ZZZ over the next 12 months."

Now we became somebody interesting to talk with because we could solve their problem, namely take some of their old equipment off their hands. Of course, anybody who might be "replacing" something could also potentially be interested in buying something.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish this were actually about cold calling techniques--i.e., how to honestly approach someone and maximize the importance of the information you transfer to them--instead of how awesome cold calling is.

excuse me, how awesome 'good' cold calling is. god. "why it's good that cold calling is so difficult for most sales people"

because that makes it more exclusive. bleh. hacker news was made less worthwhile with this link.

<comment><USER5> He gets more specific later in the article. It seems that the key to effective cold calling is patience and seeing things from the prospect's perspective.

Cold-calling is difficult for most people because they don't have the patience to understand the prospect's needs and help the prospect understand his own needs and how the product they're selling can help meet them. Bad salespeople try to convince prospects to buy their product.

Once you understand the basic principles of effective selling, it's up to you to creatively apply these principles in your own situation. There is no one true cold-calling technique in selling just as there is no one true programming technique. The best you can do is study the basic principles and examples of their application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great - I currently have 41 missed calls on my office phone. 41 of which will be people cold calling me, even when I've had the receptionist repeatedly putting them straight through to voice-mail if I don't recognize who they are and why they would be wanting to speak to me.

If you make want to sell things via cold calling please give some consideration to whoever you are calling.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bletch, I hate cold calling, that is having to do it, and I've plenty of experience.

I had a job in a market research agency, and we'd do cold calls for mobile phones companies, car companies etc. usually to do a survey (yes I was one of THOSE people).

Then about a year later I went to a sales recruitment agency (I'm not a sales guy, but at the time I was desperate for work and would try anything, despite my father warning me to keep away from sales).

They were kind of a training outfit and recruitment agency. They would test a bunch of candidates to see who had potential, then put the ones who passed through a 1 week intensive coarse (great coarse by the way, I was exausted by the end of it).

Then they try to "sell" you to other sales companies, it landed me with a telesales job which lasted for about 6 months (in which I did much cold calling).

All I can say is I hate cold calling, it gives me the sweats, but it damnwell works, so if the margin is worth it, learn a little yourself and give it a try, you don't have to hire a salesperson, become one yourself.

<comment><USER8> Where was this and what was the agency?

<comment><USER7> This was in Dublin Ireland, and the agency was called School of Sales in College Green, their website was <http://www.schoolofsales.com/> but theres nothing there now. It was 2007 when I went through there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >* cold calling alone can create and be a business in its own right - <USER2> cold calling is effectively the ability to make things happen - whereas every other business activity needs cold calling to start up and survive

Huh. even if you expand cold calling to include all 'approach someone to ask for a sale' this is plainly untrue, especially after the advent of the Internet. I don't think I've cold-approached even one customer. And really, my business model simply wouldn't work if i had to. with my margins, paying even a mediocre salesguy a commission would eat me alive.

Actually, this is everything I don't understand about sales. What sort of person responds to a cold approach, when it is almost always the case that you can get a better deal (either a lower price, /or/ something that better meets your needs, sometimes both) going out and searching for something on your own? Are you targeting people who don't care about price only?

<comment><USER10> Everything is dependent on your market. To paraphrase Dharmesh Shah, "enterprise products are sold, not bought." Part of that selling process is making sure prospects know you exist, and understand the value you provide. Cold calls are one way to do that. Not a very cost effective (or effective) way to do it, but still one way.

Personal example: today I got a cold call from a guy who runs a shop that produces short video interviews with companies and their customers. Their product looks awesome, but they're so small and I new I probably would have never found them otherwise. We'll probably use them.

On the other hand, if we do it, that'll be the second cold-call product I will have purchased in 10 years running this business.

<comment><USER9> my biggest issue was his "all businesses depend upon cold calling" statement, which is simply not true.

But yeah, in your case, that sounds like a company I might buy services from... but I wouldn't respond to a 'cold call' at least not via phone, just 'cause I find that so offensive. (I might respond if the sales pitch was soft, and it was pitched in a semi-social place. A "oh, and what do you do?" at a local hangout, sure, i might buy from that, if I thought that the method of sales wasn't adding significantly to what I'd pay (which is to say, if the product wasn't available from a 'price on the website is what you pay' type vendor.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I found "The Cold Calling Podcast" to be quite insightful and practical if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER12> I've tried to fetch this podcast, but it seems to be somehow unavailable or defunct...

<comment><USER11> Wow, you're right. Their site is gone and it's not downloading properly on itunes. Wonder if its out there somewhere.

They stopped recording them a while ago and said they had recorded all they had to say on the topic, but shame its been taken down.

<comment><USER13> Take the podcast down then human nature being what it is people get interested in knowing what they've missed. This is a good technique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is of course a paradox (albeit not a true one) when a sales person tries to act like an expert advisor. Prospective customers know he/she is a salesperson, so acting like an expert advisor may come across as phony.

> "Your opening proposition in the introduction should be a broad strategic > interpretation of your more detailed product offer"

Right. It's exactly what makes you think, Huh? What on earth is their product? I see websites like that every day and I get annoyed. They show you a very general strategic message on the home page even though they are a one product company. I'm so grateful that startups do not follow this dated trick.

</comment><comment><USER15> The best technique I ever learned was to say 'Mr. Smith Please' instead of 'May I speak to Mr. Smith please?'. The first sounds more confident and is a little devious (the receptionist often thinks you are a friend, coworker, or important client). You can't be called out for lying, and it is extremely effective at getting the cold caller past the 'gatekeeper'. I'm glad I'm not in sales anymore.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is also useful The Superstar Salesman's Handbook: 150+ Greatest Tips on selling [http://bighow.com/news/the-superstar-salesmans- handbook-150-...](http://bighow.com/news/the-superstar-salesmans- handbook-150-greatest-tips-on-selling)

</comment><comment><USER17> a cold call is a pitch, and a pitch is a story. learn how to tell a compelling story from beginning to end and you will find cold calls much easier and more profitable. this takes REPETITION</comment>


DHH: Drive development with budgets not estimates - <AUTHOR> https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3746-drive-development-with-budgets-not-estimates

<comment><USER2> I make medical software. Should I heed such advice? Imagine you are the patient...or your spouse, kid, mom, GRR Martin?

Why can't we instead be professionals and scientists and maybe estimate with data and models and rigor? Not SWAGs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do estimations work for you ? How accurate are they ?</comment></comment>


COWL: A Confinement System for the Web - <AUTHOR> http://cowl.ws/

<comment><USER2> This has some heavy hitters behind it, both in authorship and their organizations.

I wondered how it compares to Caja, and this is what their "Towards .." paper states:

 _" Caja, ADSafe, and FBJS offer sandboxing by defining safe subsets of JavaScript; these subsets tend not to support JavaScript's full functionality, and as retrofits atop existing browser interfaces, they are also vulnerable to various attacks"_

<comment><USER3> Caja is something you can do server-side to filter JavaScript. COWL is a modification to the browser security architecture. Hence, unlike Caja, a web site cannot unilaterally deploy COWL. On the other hand, if COWL or something like it makes it through the standardization process, it would have a far more significant impact on web security than Caja.

<comment><USER4> Caja is (more?) often deployed on the client side to filter Javascript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the page, and the example. The key is "privacy with functionality". You can write some JS with certain code paths able to access outside resources, but once you enter constrained code paths, you get limited basically through a dynamically applied SOP.

Their example of a password strength checker -- say you download updated bitmaps (bloom filters) from a central location which alert for risky passwords being used. Now you can trust any code path which actually sees the password will be locked down through taint detection.

I wonder if there's a basic mechanism, or if they have to identify every possibly avenue for tainting? There are a lot of static locations you could stash bits, so are you just denied access to all of that? Or somehow is it all mirrored?

I want to make sure I really understand what they are saying can be trusted, what privacy guarantees are provided? What exactly is sandboxed?

<comment><USER6> Hello, one of the paper authors here.

One of the jobs that our implementation has to do is close down all channels by which JavaScript could leak data: so this includes postMessage, the DOM, XHR, cookies, local storage... fortunately, these overt channels are well specified DOM APIs so from the implementor's perspective it's not too difficult to lock them all down. (And we just deny access, there's no "shadow" structure s involved.) There's nothing too fine grained going on: if you read private data, everything it isn't allowed to flow to is locked down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish COWL went as far as this proposal for domain sandboxing:

[http://mortoray.com/2014/09/30/a-secure-and-private- browser-...](http://mortoray.com/2014/09/30/a-secure-and-private-browser- sandbox/)

I know Google would never agree to do something like that - unless Mozilla, Apple (the new "privacy" company) and Microsoft (another one pretending to defend user privacy) would put pressure on Google by adopting such a system, together.

<comment><USER8> > _Resources can still be included from a variety of domains, but the data > they use is exclusive to this sandbox. A script from google.com on > youtube.com would be completely isolated from the same script running at > blogger.com._

1\. How would that work exactly? There's nothing stopping the script from sending data back to a server for later association with another site.

2\. How would a site (or the user) authorize specific 3rd-parties to operate within a given site? This problem is seen by anyone running NoScript today, observing how sites break/work as a subset of 3rd-party scripts is incrementally enabled.

3\. If servers are sharing data in real time with commercial 3rd-parties, would they be required to disclose this to users? Publishers don't disclose this today. NoScript allows users to identify 3rd-parties and block them. If this is done on the server, is there a loss in transparency?

4\. In general, systems which implement strong isolation are immediately met with user requests to relax this isolation in specific contexts. E.g. Apple added inter-app communication in iOS8. How can "contextual whitelists" be maintained for cross-domain risk management? Should these be determined by the browser vendor, user, or server? Do we need a multi-stakeholder model like CSS, with user preferences negotiated at runtime with publisher preferences? What happens when proprietary DRM is running in the client?</comment></comment>


The [Security] Dangers of Friending Strangers: the Robin Sage Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://science.dodlive.mil/2010/07/21/the-dangers-of-friending-strangers-the-robin-sage-experiment/

<comment><USER2> Long story short: make a Facebook profile for a fake young female security expert (photo: <http://j.mp/as3O85>), send incessant friend requests, and --- shockingly enough --- many people will accept those requests. Fame follows.</comment>


Free .party domains with coupon code HappyHour - <AUTHOR> http://register.party/

<comment><USER2> There doesn't seem to be a limit on the number of domains bought using the coupon code.</comment>


The latest CentOS 7.3 image is available, and here's a list of everything inside - <AUTHOR> https://anchore.io/image/dockerhub/67591570dd29de0e124ee89d50458b098dbd83b12d73e5fdaf8b4dcbd4ea50f8?repo=library%2Fcentos&tag=latest#overview <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13160022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13160022)</comment>


Learn You Some Erlang: Buckets of Sockets - <AUTHOR> http://learnyousomeerlang.com/buckets-of-sockets

<comment><USER2> I can't wait for chapters on Mnesia and distributed Erlang. I've been learning Erlang for fun over the past few months and LYSE has been an absolute godsend.

Also looking forward to this in book format

</comment><comment><USER3> The site looks good but I'd like to read that on my kindle. Is it available in ebook format, or similar ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't done it myself, but a reader of the site has written a script to do it for you: <https://github.com/igstan/learn-you-some-erlang-kindle> . I've worked with him to make sure vital images are kept -- the rest he might have dropped, I haven't used it myself. It seems to give pretty good results.

<comment><USER3> Awesome, just what I needed!</comment></comment></comment>


This Is How Your Hyperpartisan Political News Gets Made - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-the-hyperpartisan-sausage-is-made <comment><USER2> I thought I was going to see a picture of the BuzzFeed newsroom...</comment>


My experience with using TLA+ in distributed systems class - <AUTHOR> http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2015/01/my-experience-with-using-tla-in.html <comment><AUTHOR> TLA+ is one of the most successful formal verification tools in the industry (probably because as far as verification tools go, it is relatively simple yet very powerful). It is used at Amazon to formally specify and/or verify their AWS services[1], it's been used by Intel and Compaq to verify complex cache- coherence protocols, and it was used to formally specify and prove the distributed Raft algorithm.

[1]: [http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/4/184701-how-amazon- web-s...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/4/184701-how-amazon-web-services- uses-formal-methods/fulltext)

</comment><comment><USER2> To save others the trouble, here's the link that introduces the TLA (three- letter acronym), TLA+:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/tl...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/lamport/tla/tla-intro.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Pros: PlusCal is relatively easy to use and understand. TLA Toolbox is self contained. You have an editor, a model checker and other tools right out of the box. Two or three books written by Lamport. Nice material base. Theory behind this model checker is relatively lightweight. Compare it with some sophisticated process algebra, for example.

Cons: PlusCal is not able to handle process spawn operation, as far as I know. So if you are to model real system where clients come and go, you have to write your spec in pure TLA+ which is unmaintainable, because it is just a logical assembler.

State explosion problem.

Java as implementation language. So you are using your CPU cycles not the best way.

Built-in proof system is not able to and was not supposed to check your proof. To do this you have to use some other tools like Coq (fix me if I am wrong)

Nearest competitors in that nich: Spin (yeah!), Alloy, EventB. Just let you know that there are alot of model checkers out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> TLA+ has its own proof system (TLAPS[1]) that, while it doesn't yet support all TLA+ features, is getting better and is quite capable.

Java is _very_ efficient, and TLC uses parallelism and even distributed parallelism (and can store states to disk).

This is first I hear of Spin, and I'll be sure to give it a try, but TLA+'s is considered easier to use and/or more expressive than many other solutions, and has the added advantage of being used in the industry (as far as formal verification tools go, that is).

I would very much like to hear more about Spin.

[1]: [https://tla.msr-inria.inria.fr/tlaps/content/Home.html](https://tla.msr- inria.inria.fr/tlaps/content/Home.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. I read about TLAPS. It seems it relies on SMT solver to uncharge proof obligations, and no way for you to manually prove your claim using lower level tactics, like in Coq. So you rely on heuristic nature of SMT solver.

About Spin[1]. If you compare the user base of Spin with the user base of TLA+ I bet you will wonder how many users out there were using verification tools all those years. Lamport released his tool like 20 years later than SPIN started to spread. He did a great job, but there is no innovation in my opinion.

I think that serious industry players like Intel, Google or NASA are using all spectre of verification tools, including self written tools. Intel is using there own tool for some of their chip verification AFAIK. My colleague went into Intel to help develop verification scripts using this tool.

TLA+ has been promoted by Amazon with their latest technical report. Yes, it has more expressive types (records,tuples,sets), but it comes with a cost of lowering your verification performance rate. There are many subtle tradeoffs to make.

We tried to use several formal verification tools in our latest distributed project. We tried Spin, TLA+, mCRL2, Coq. There is its own philosophy, pros and cons behind each tool, but in our case Spin made the best job: we had to invest not so much time but found many concurrency bugs in our distributed algorithm. Its pros is that it has very basic data types and not very good parallelism support nor in multi thread nor in multi-node form.

[1] [http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html](http://spinroot.com/spin/whatispin.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you compare model-checkers like Spin and TLA+ with type-based approaches like F* and Coq, especially in terms of ease of use? The latter group doesn't seem to be getting much real-world usage, and I have the sense they are _much_ harder to use.

<comment><USER3> In short: Spin and TLA+ are "push-button" mechanisms where computer are trying every possible trace of your system to check system state against supplied invariant. Pros: You don't have to think much about your systems thin properties before verifying. Cons: State space explosion so not every real system is a subject to such verification.

Coq,Agda: Manual/Semi-manual correctness proof of your system. You can reason about even "infinite" systems with this approach using relatively little computation resources. But to do so you have to gain a _deep_ insight about your system behaviour, computation semantics, network semantics (if distributed system is checked) and other properties. If you are lucky you can proof property under question, even it assumes very large moving parts. If not then you cant tell that this property can be proved at all. So these are more like platforms for quasi-manual deduction.

F* is trying to take up a niche between manual proof and quasi-automatic proof using SMT solver for those of theorems which can be proved this way. The problem is that SMT solvers are generally suck, there is no sound theory behind it, so it is more like guessing in my opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the case of the 2nd miniproject testing the naive physical-logical clock algorithm, why isn't the simplest counterexample that the logical clock advances twice for each message send/receive, and so if the message send rate is greater than half the physical clock rate, it always skews the logical clock at a rate greater than the physical clock rate?

</comment><comment><USER5> > Model checking with 2 acceptors worked, but I gave up on model checking with > 3 acceptors since it took more than an hour.

Does anyone know how the TLA model checker works? I wasn't able to find this information. Does it use a SAT/SMT solver? Or brute force search?

<comment><USER6> Exhaustive search across all states and state transitions. There's a distributed version which helps with especially large state spaces. Combinatorial explosion is an issue. In some cases the best/only option is to formally prove correctness with the built-in proof language; the model checker works well in tandem, for quickly checking assertions before putting effort into a proof.

Generally the model checker alone works just fine, though.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, it's exhaustive search. Fortunately storage costs have dropped like a rock over the last few decades, so problems that were hilariously impractical only a few years ago are now checkable on commodity hardware. A fully interlinked (ie guaranteed symmetric inter-node bandwidth) cluster on Amazon EC2 with aggregate memory (even before you start touching secondary storage) in the Terabytes can be rented for a few 10s of $ an hour at spot prices. It may be that Formal Methods time has finally come!</comment></comment></comment>


If you're 27 or younger, you've never experienced a colder-than-average month - <AUTHOR> http://grist.org/news/if-youre-27-or-younger-youve-never-experienced-a-colder-than-average-month/ <comment><USER2> Too bad such an important topic is covered by such a shitty post. Obviously the expert source referenced in the article <http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/10> is referring to global average temperature.

</comment><comment><USER3> Average over what timescale? If you take it back 250 million years, then every human being alive has seen _only_ colder than average months.

<comment><USER4> Just about to post something similar. So much of the global warming rhetoric is just FUD for people who don't understand statistics. For people claiming to know that the increase in temperature for the last 100 years is significant, what is the standard deviation of the change in global temperature over 100 year periods for the last 100k years?

<comment><USER5> >what is the standard deviation of the change in global temperature over 100 year periods for the last 100k years?

I see your point, but we don't have that information and probably never will. We don't have strongly statistically significant measurements until ~1600. But we have to operate with some uncertainty to make decisions worth trillions of dollars.

We know the increases we've seen in the past century are of a much higher magnitude than what we saw in the few centuries before that. We believe this is true for at least 1000 years back (see the hockey stick curves). We know the increases in the past 100 years are correlated with human actions, especially greenhouse gas emissions. It is (IMO) common sense to hypothesize this correlation is a causation; we know the causation doesn't go the other way, and we know there are no confounding factors (i.e. the same thing that caused the heating caused us to emit way more greenhouse gases). This is where climate change skeptics attack, which is unfair because it is impossible to prove a causation. If we assume the correlation is a causation, we know the increases we have seen would not have naturally existed. And this is what matters to many scientists.

The increases are not "significant" in the statistical sense per se, they are significant in the possible effects on our world.

<comment><USER6> > we don't have that information and probably never will

[http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/the-big- picture-65-million-...](http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/the-big- picture-65-million-years-of-temperature-swings/)

<comment><USER5> It's not useful to compare 65 million years of data + huge error bars with 1000 years + medium error bars with 100 years + tiny error bars. The uncertainty of what was happening 50000 years ago may very well be greater than the changes we are worrying about in the past century (I don't know this for sure, I can't find error estimates in your link).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This title is nonsensical. The temperatures referred to are global averages. Yet the only ones people can actually experience are local temperatures, which sometimes are lower than average.

<comment><USER8> It's even less relevant for people who don't go outside. The only temperatures they ever experience are set to their own personal preferences, or the preferences of their caretakers.

<comment><USER9> Or the harsh whims of building maintenance. I wonder what percentage of thermostats sold in the world are the ones in offices not wired to anything...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this "beyond astonishing"? 27 years is minuscule on in a geologic time scale. Climate trends are measured in hundreds and thousands of years, if not more.

</comment><comment><USER11> And between April 1889 and October 1925, there wasn't a single warmer-than- average month.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat

An interesting anomaly is the warming between the 1860s and 1940s. Especially given the comparatively slight amount of CO2 released in those decades compared to our own.

Temperature norms may move across greater timescales than just 100-150 years. Of course, if we were to explore that, the discussion goes off the rails into talk about the "MWP," "historical reconstructions," "Mann, et al.," and other murkily useless topics for internet bulletin boards.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _above the 20th century average_

so, we're 12 years into this century, and he's comparing to a 100 years span. 27 years which means 15 years of the last century. selective number picking. meaningless post, move on.

</comment><comment><USER12> Unless you live in the UK or France (to my certain knowledge) and probably a huge chunk of the world beyond that.

<comment><USER13> It appears to mean a global average.

<comment><USER12> Which underlines the lack of any meaningful truth in the key statement.

<comment><USER14> Why? (Unless they somehow live wholly isolated from global temperature affecting their experience.)

<comment><USER9> One might question how you could "experience" a global average temperature, unless perhaps you travel a _whole_ lot.

This is an important topic, but _"If you're 27 or younger, you've never experienced a colder-than-[global]-average month"_ strikes me as a rather silly statement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Anvil – a tiny reactive android UI library - <AUTHOR> http://zserge.com/blog/anvil-2.html

<comment><USER2> Is it on maven central?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've just published the release today, it should be available within the next few hours. Meanwhile you can build it from the github sources.

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be available as:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>co.trikita</groupId>
            <artifactId>anvil</artifactId>
            <version>0.0.2</version>
        </dependency>

Gradle:

        compile 'co.trikita:anvil:0.0.2'</comment></comment></comment>


Evoloution's Third Replicator - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327191.500-evolutions-third-replicator-genes-memes-and-now-what.html?full=true

<comment><USER2> [http://lesswrong.com/lw/l6/no_evolutions_for_corporations_or...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/l6/no_evolutions_for_corporations_or_nanodevices/)

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/ks/the_wonder_of_evolution/>

</comment><comment><USER3> There is certainly the possibility of a third replicator, where the patterns are copied by machinery rather than biological processes, but we are not there yet. In the primordial soup of our Internet, we have only the very simplest form of life so far -- viruses, which only really seem to be alive when inside a host. We have a few true self-replicators, but they exist only in protected bubbles inside simulators, and cannot survive on the real network.

I think it's quite likely that a new form of replicator begin on the Internet, but there's no sign of it yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting but way too long.

The third replicator that will doom us all: the web (and the power it, along with all the connected devices consume).

More interesting (to me anyways): What if little by little Google "decides" to start showing us information that will lead to our destruction?

Like what the traditional media mostly does, except we trust Google, right?</comment>


M/S Estonia accident radio transcript - <AUTHOR> http://oona.windytan.com/estonia/ <comment><USER2> William Langwiesche wrote a really good article on the view of passengers from inside the sinking vessel. It's well worth a read.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea- st...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea- story/302940/?single_page=true)

It would be nice if someone could please _not_ stick a fatuous "TLDR" here.

<comment><USER3> Just to reiterate, this is an excellent article, even if it is chilling.

It's funny, you wouldn't think, even 20 years ago, that this sort of stuff could still happen. But humans are still human, and the sea is still the sea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading these disaster transcripts always haunts me. But it's also nice to see strangers rally to help each other. There is no discussion of cost, delay, or hardship.

It seems very weird to me that ultimately, according to Wikipedia, they buried he ship with pebbles. Why was this done, I thought most sunken ships were left alone.

<comment><USER5> The wreck is covered with pebbles at great cost to prevent anyone diving on the wreck to investigate what happened. Then no one can prove anything and everything remains just speculation. Ban any diving, threaten anyone diving the wreck with arrest and then just completely ignore the relatives' calls for an independent investigation.

Then in this information vacuum ordinary people do the rest by alleging anyone who questions the official line is a "conspiracy theorist".

I mean science can answer so many questions, but only when you have trace evidence to examine.

<comment><USER6> There have been investigations and video inspection of the wreck. "Everyone" agrees that the official explanation is correct.

The reason for covering the wreck is that the disaster was a major national catastrophe; if 800+ hadn't died it would never have been considered.

Says Wikipedia:

 _" In the aftermath of the disaster, many relatives of the deceased demanded that their loved ones be raised from international waters and given a land burial. Demands were also made that the entire ship be raised so that the cause of the disaster could be discovered by detailed inspection.[27][28]

Citing the practical difficulties and the moral implications of raising decaying bodies from the sea floor (the majority of the bodies were never recovered), and fearing financial burden of lifting the entire hull to the surface and the salvage operation, the Swedish government suggested burying the whole ship in situ with a shell of concrete.[29][30] As a preliminary step, thousands of tons of pebbles were dropped on the site.[28] The Estonia Agreement 1995, a treaty among Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Denmark, Russia and the United Kingdom, declared sanctity over the site, prohibiting their citizens from even approaching the wreck.[31]"_

<comment><USER4> I still don't understand why it was burried just because it was a tragedy. Was there some practical concern that bodies might slowly creep out of the wreck onto the surface or that people would loot it?

<comment><USER7> It's lying at 50-70 metres deep. If it is not recovered, the "grave" is open so to speech for curious divers, and that was very much not desired. Either recover it or bury it.

The Titanic was different; it lies below 4000 metres of water.

<comment><USER4> I see so it's mainly because the depth made it so accessible. Thanks. That makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is the relevant Wikipedia article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Estonia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Estonia)

<comment><USER9> It's 20 years to the day since this event. I'm guessing that's the reason this was posted now?

<comment><USER10> Yes. Newspapers here in Sweden ran different kinds of "Remember Estonia" articles during the last days.

Aftonbladet had a pretty interesting (and very long) article about it: [http://story.aftonbladet.se/?id=602](http://story.aftonbladet.se/?id=602) (in Swedish)

<comment><USER11> Norwegian Aftenposten also published a pretty good interactive story of the event: [http://mm.aftenposten.no/estonia/](http://mm.aftenposten.no/estonia/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having spent a little time on the sea, it's remarkable how much weather impedes any operations, and naturally accidents often happen at night in bad weather.

These huge ferries just had to wait there and about a hundred people died right outside in the sea.

Just running a regular rubber boat in normally windy weather on the Baltic is next to useless as the propeller spends a large portion of time out of the water and you can't get anywhere. Coast guards and specialized rescuers have better high speed RIB boats. And in the Baltic it's probably nothing compared to North Sea weather.

If one could develop a large enough quad- or hexacopters that could be stored on all ferries and deployed to pick up people and lower them to ferry decks, that would help a lot. Hypothermia kills people so quickly there's often not enough time to send specialized help craft from far away.

<comment><USER13> > If one could develop a large enough quad- or hexacopters that could be > stored on all ferries and deployed to pick up people and lower them to ferry > decks, that would help a lot.

Unfortunately, quadcopters can not be scaled up because the physics of multirotors doesn't scale nicely. The inertia of the blades goes up to the fifth power of the blade length. Double the blade length, 32x inertia. This would give prohibitive power and mass requirements.

A lot of quadcopter research focuses on using multiple copters for lifting co- operatively because building big ones is not feasible.

Multirotors are not particularly good in high wind conditions either. Even the specialized search and rescue helicopters (e.g. Super Pumas and SeaKings) had difficulty operating (and some were unable to operate) in the hostile weather conditions during the Estonia disaster.

Short of carrying on board search and rescue helicopters (and trained crews) and and other hoisting equipment, there is very little that can be done to rescue humans from the sea in storm conditions.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the good summary! I knew there was a limit to scaling, didn't realize it was the fifth power...

On the other hand, if you're just lifting the copter itself and one person, it doesn't have to be the size of a full blown helicopter. Then again, its utility is limited then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/2...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/28/newsid_2542000/2542093.stm)

</comment><comment><USER15> Helsingin Sanomat (Helsinki Times) made an impressive article about the incident with background ambiance and videos. Do other newspapers do these kind of interactive stuff?

[http://dynamic.hs.fi/2014/estonia/](http://dynamic.hs.fi/2014/estonia/)

There was also a similar article made about the Plura cave diving accident with all that stuff and a friggin minimap of the divers!

[http://dynamic.hs.fi/2014/syvalla/](http://dynamic.hs.fi/2014/syvalla/)

<comment><USER16> The New York Times has also been publishing a number of these interactive types of articles.

Ex. Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek [http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow- fall/#/?part=tunne...](http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow- fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wikipedia says the wreck site is monitored by the Finnish navy with radar. If you were to approach the wreck via submersible, I would assume you would not be detectable.

<comment> Tuna-Fish The gulf of Finland has one of the most extensive underwater listening systems in the world. You cannot start up a screw anywhere between the Marienhamn and St Petersburg without the Finnish Navy knowing about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 01:41.39 Helsinki Radio You see, someone on channel 16 has had a carrier on the whole night and nothing is going through. I can hear you now though.

</comment><comment><USER19> The mayday call from Estonia and the ensuing radio traffic is available on Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7cZTEQJ2VQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7cZTEQJ2VQ)

</comment><comment><USER20> Documentary: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFDGL_ehpkI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFDGL_ehpkI)

Warning: It is pretty bloody harrowing.

</comment><comment><USER21> Am I missing something? The transcript ends with listing of helicopters and times. Is there supposed to be more?

</comment><comment><USER22> RADIO fit with an ALLEGED 'conspiracy theory'? [http://heiwaco.tripod.com/app1.htm](http://heiwaco.tripod.com/app1.htm) Anders Bjorkman. book Lies and Truth about the ... Accident

what fun. with no degree in Naval or Maritime Engineering does the human obervations fit with the official explanation of the PROCESS and using open source basic stability calculations / physics?

What is disturbing is that the human process is flawed similar to the Costa Concordia - Italy Cruise Ship. The captain can just decide to change course to a dangerous path and there are FEW CHECKS on the captain or LEADER OF THE TITANIC.

Full Speed Ahead! Damn the icebergs. Welcome to Bash shellshock and the process 'fork bomb'</comment>


Bayesian Machine Learning Explained - <AUTHOR> http://fastml.com/bayesian-machine-learning/ <comment><USER2> This post has been sitting in my bookmarks for a while now - at first I liked the initial part which is very clear and "beginner-friendly" \- the best bit, however (and the main reason why I came back to the post a few times now), in my opinion is the "Resources" section at the end, which is really exhaustive.

</comment><comment><USER3> For Bayesian I recommend PyMC3 (the default version of PyMC is still 2, but 3 is functional and in fast development). Once you know a bit of Bayesian statistics, there is a wonderful tutorial in Jupyter Notebooks: [https://github.com/markdregan/Bayesian-Modelling-in- Python](https://github.com/markdregan/Bayesian-Modelling-in-Python)

(Also, I've learnt from it the practical difference of fixed priors vs hierarchical priors.)

<comment><USER4> I get a 503 error on the actual notebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice post.

For getting started with Bayesian thinking and analytics, I highly recommend "Doing Bayesian Data Analysis_ A Tutorial with R and BUGS" by John Krushke

<comment><USER6> Seconded. It is the only book I found with a practical, down to earth approach. Highly recommended.</comment></comment>


Why We Can No Longer Trust Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2421733,00.asp <comment><USER2> _This is a financial disaster waiting to happen. Microsoft is oblivious if it is not doing something to divorce itself from the NSA.

Apple, on the other hand, could have come out smelling like a rose, but following the death of Steve Jobs, who apparently refused to play ball with the NSA, it stupidly jumped on board to join the PRISM club._

According to the Prism slides, it really looks so:

       "Dates when Prism collection began for each provider

       Microsoft 9/11/07
       Yahoo 3/12/08
       Google 1/14/09
       Facebook 6/3/09
       PalTalk  12/07/09
       YouTube 9/24/10
       Skype 2/6/11
       AOL 3/31/11
       Apple (added Oct 2012)"

Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011.

If it's true, it's one reason more to deeply admire him.

And can you just imagine how much more sales Apple would get now for not being on that list?

<comment><USER3> That reminds me of Putin a little bit. Even if you think some leader is an asshole, sometimes you need an asshole to stand up to an even bigger bully. I just imagine someone like former president Medvedev (and with no Putin in sight) would've offered Snowden to US government on a silver platter, just like France, Spain, Portugal and Italy tried to do (fortunately unsuccessfully). I remember I was very much against Putin when he fought the US' anti-rocket shield, but over the past few years I've started to understand why he would do that. No country should own the whole world.

<comment><USER4> Don't mistake a former KGB guy's taunting for a principled stance. Here's how Putin deals with whistleblowers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko_poisoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko_poisoning)

<comment><USER5> You certainly have a court decision or at least an official accusation to support your claim? Just asking.

<comment><USER4> You might find some of what you're looking for on the wikipedia page I linked to. But courts are only very rarely the place where accusations against heads of states are examined, especially when it comes to superpowers.

<comment><USER5> I read it carefully. Name "Putin" is not mentioned anywhere in the Investigation section.

Please stick to the facts.

<comment><USER4> If the accused can prevent a proper investigation I will make my mind up based on the clues that exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A couple of years ago at a Linux conference in Germany I had a discussion with a Microsoft employee at their booth. At that time I was a 'hardcore' linux user with no trust in Microsoft at all. The discussion with the employee went like this:

      Me: "Hello. Could you tell me what Microsoft is doing at this Linux conference? I honestly want to know that."
      Him: "We are here to show how our products can work well together with Linux related products."
      Me: "Why would I as a Linux user use Windows or any other product from you? We all know that you spy on me - at least indirectly."
      Him: "Oh no. You are misinformed. We have a lot of business customers with very sensitive data. Can you imagine what would happen to us if they found out that we spy on them? Business users are very sensitive in that area. We were screwed. And we do not spy on regular users as well. You may also know that this would be totally illegal according to German law."
      Me: "So you are saying that you do not spy on businesses or other kind of users of your products?"
      Him: "Yes! We were screwed otherwise!" *giggle*

He had a smile on his face for the whole discussion. Maybe because he had this discussion with those paranoid Linux users for the last couple of days of the conference. Paranoid!

Microsoft is so screwed guys.

Edit: I was not rude to this guy. We had a beer together later that day. I am sure he did not know anything about PRISM and was just doing his job.

<comment><USER7> To me seems you were just kinda rude to some guy that was getting paid to do his job.

<comment><USER8> Indeed the guy most certainly didn't know shit. On the _other_ hand, rude or not, Lina turned out to be right and the MS-guy turned out to be ignorant of the type of company he was working for, as well as defending.

Additionally these so-called "paranoid" questions didn't came out of thin air either. 10-15 years ago I also was _very_ distrusting of Microsoft and what they were doing (there _was_ a lot of anti-trust going on ...). But somehow they starting doing a few things right, wrote some good software and OS in the mean time and they "regained my trust" to the point I'd speak out against senseless M$-bashing, and perceive it as something childish.

Well, _that_ I am no longer going to do, lest I have to eat my words. That "trust" is completely gone, and I feel kind of foolish for believing it existed in the first place, "trust" is a kind of thing that happens between two persons, not between a person and a gigantic corporation. The latter is too volatile, there can be no build up or breakage, it's every moment again different, dependent on who is in charge and which individual personalities are involved in a decision. Rationally, one instant snapshot cannot make or break the trust of the next one.

I do feel kind of foolish. I'm typing this on Win7, planning to install Linux for a while now, but I had some crazy wild ideas for a dual-boot scenario in mind that I never got around to and everything just worked so there was no hurry.

Before next week I'll be back on Linux, maybe even sooner.

<comment><USER9> > to the point I'd speak out against senseless M$-bashing

Senseless bashing - including intentional miss-$pellings and holding one company (Microsoft) to different standards to others (Facebook, Google, Apple) is still childish.

However, not all bashing is senseless - Microsoft has a lot of explaining to do. Sure, so do Facebook, Google and Apple but that doesn't let MS off the hook. It makes the case for installing a Linux instead a _lot_ stronger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dvorak's article is a regurgitation of previous HN discussions on this topic.

I have said in the previous HN post and I will say it again here: don't pile on Microsoft alone. These spying policies make every US-based services company untrustworthy to whomever privacy is important. Come to think of it, I'm not sure whether you can rely on European services either because it seems that gov't surveillance is widespread.

On the other hand, maybe if we do pile on Microsoft, and stop using their products for this reason alone (even though Google, Apple and others are in the same boat), it will force them and their lobbyists to influence their gov't shills to put a stop to these programs.

<comment><USER11> Yea, remember that PRISM is designed to target _foreign_ communications, so if you are an American, you might be actually safer.

<comment><USER12> That's bullshit.

The problem that people like you don't seem to understand is that online communications can be secure, unless the companies owning the servers themselves cooperate and companies have to cooperate if they have to do so by law.

It's only the US that has such a huge budget for spying on people's communications and the US is also part of a select handful of countries going to such great lengths to suppress the freedom of speech about it.

If I were to start a company in Romania (which is part of EU btw), the NSA can suck my dick as there's absolutely nothing they could do to make me cooperate and keep my mouth shut while doing it.

<comment><USER11> True, but I am talking about the practical risk based on what is known about the spying.

<comment><USER12> What really bothers me about this is not the actual spying - I always assumed that governments do engage in whatever spying they can get away with.

What really bothers me about this is that U.S. companies and individuals have to keep their interactions with the NSA a secret, while obeying whatever demands the NSA has, including the installing of back-doors.

Trust is a fragile thing and we rely on trust for conducting business and for living our lives. My trust in U.S.-based companies has been shaken. Even if the affected companies (such as Google, Microsoft, Apple) want to be trustworthy for their customers, they can be coerced by law to obey whatever the NSA demands and they must also keep it a secret, with absolutely no transparency - they aren't even allowed to say " _yes, the NSA demanded some things and we unfortunately complied_ ". Even worse, they can be coerced into making public statements that are full of lies.

I can no longer trust any U.S. based company again.

For example, right now I'm using Skype. But what if the Skype client has a backdoor allowing one to open and listen to my mike any time they want (it's a proprietary blob, we'll never know). What if this backdoor gets hacked and used by people that are not part of the U.S. government? So in spite of the best intentions of the people working on Skype and the NSA; even if I've got " _nothing to hide_ ", Skype is all of a sudden a security liability and nothing (short of an open-source client that I can compile and run) can prove otherwise, because Microsoft isn't allowed to be open about it. And I can no longer rely on the fragile trust I've had for Microsoft, because Microsoft can be coerced into being untrustworthy.

See how it goes? We'll see how this unfolds over the next years, however the damage done to U.S. companies will prove to be massive.

<comment><USER11> >however the damage done to U.S. companies will prove to be massive.

Will?

<comment><USER13> It probably already has, in lieu of current European rattling.

I don't expect that GOOG or MSFT will suffer any damage in short term. But in long term they have proved unreliable. This erodes confidence. And if it keeps eroding, it will eventually cause them to collapse.

I'll be doing my earnest to move away from any non-OS tool. And will advocate others to do so as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of Ken Thompson's famous Turing Award paper from 1984. In that paper, he described a malicious compiler that added security holes to properly written C programs.

The real question isn't about whether you can trust Microsoft. It's can you even trust Intel?

 _" The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."_

[http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html](http://cm.bell- labs.com/who/ken/trust.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> GNU/Linux, and Free software and hardware in general, look to be the BIG winners out of the NSA brouhaha, because all non-US governments, businesses, organizations, and individuals around the planet who need to safeguard their private or confidential information now have reason to mistrust proprietary (unauditable) software and hardware.

Free, open software and hardware are less likely to have secret 'back doors' installed or embedded in them because their innards are under constant public review by multiple eyes -- out in the open, not behind closed doors.

\--

Edit: added last sentence.

<comment><USER16> Mistrust of commercial solutions does not translate into trust for open-source ones. Have you audited the crypto code of all your packages? Would you even know how?

<comment><USER2> Exactly. Even more interesting, all of the source code can be OK and just some subtle configuration tweaks can be enough to compromise you. Or just some build flag that you don't even see in sources. Often you don't know the build flags of every binary as soon as you use binaries. You also don't know if the compiler is tweaked to do some preprocessing you don't know about (see _Reflections on Trusting Trust_ by Ken Thompson):

[http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html](http://cm.bell- labs.com/who/ken/trust.html)

For security conscious the prefect state is the OS which changes very, very slowly, fixing only security bugs and having binaries used by as many people as possible and which change so seldom that more people can even check them by disassembling them. You don't want to only check sources, you want to disassemble the binaries and decide if they match the sources.

And only then you want to be sure that all configurations are what they should be. Not easy at all.

<comment><USER17> You _can_ (which is not, necessarily, to say _do_ ) know if the compiler is tweaked: [http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting- trust](http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust)

This only works if you are building things yourself or trust the group building things, of course, but it's way easier than audit by disassembling binaries.

<comment><USER18> How does this deal with [1]? Also, how do you know that your disassembler isn't compromised?

[1] [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/184874/is- ken...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/184874/is-ken- thompsons-compiler-hack-still-a-threat)

<comment><USER2> Disassemblers produce assembly code, not the HLL code, so they are many orders of magnitude easier to write from the scratch than modern compilers. They typically expect human involvement as soon as there's non-trivial assembly- level engineered self-modifying code. Hopefully there's no much of such code in the results of the compilers we use.

Also if you check the whole discussion you'll see I already discussed Ken's work.

<comment><USER18> Ok, I appreciate this information (and I'm trying to follow the discussion but I didn't see you talking of Ken's work).

But I'm still curious; even though you can write the disassembler by hand, how can you be sure that you're compiling it with a non-compromised compiler? Or do you mean write it in e.g. ELF format directly (and that's assuming the OS isn't involved in filtering offending code, though it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the OS could be generally modified in such away without detection)?

<comment><USER17> The more general and diverse the tools you use, the less likely they are all compromised in the same way, and the more likely any compromise will show up in other contexts. Using tools at different meta-levels may also be worthwhile (machine-code vs. interpreter).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think it is time to rethink everything, Not just Microsoft. Cloud computing is at risk now too. From Amazon to Google Drive, Gmail, etc. Shared hosting is not even secure any longer. Our connections from our isp can be the source of their spying.

People want the ease of computing not secure computing. The polls show it. In the US everyone but the geeks are OK with the NSA. Sad.

The system is going to have to change to federated data. Email, Social media, everything. Appliances owned by the individual. Either located in the home or small server appliances "rented" at a colocation facility and every user's info on their appliance. Any warrants are served to the individual not the "processing" or interpreting host that parses the data in their UI or service. The host, whether Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc would notify the requester that that info is on a server rented solely by the user and they have no standing to grant or honor the warrant as they are the wrong party.

Please note I use voice typing due to fine motor control and this comment may contain errors.

<comment><USER20> I agree, something like this needs to be done. It will take a lot of work. I think the free software/ open-source movement is robust enough that we can turn our attention to this. Copyleft and free software licenses are social hacks that work in tandem with the free software model. We perhaps need a social hack to underpin this federated data model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> John Dvorak sounds like a tech version of those economic & political loudmouths that spread definitive and absolute truths with very little evidence (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter). That's because their purpose is not to generate light but to generate heat; to cause controversy instead of inform. It is the journalism equivalent of the Rolling Stones and Madonna: scandal as a marketing tactic.

These people remind me of the Austrian writer Karl Kraus: "The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he."

The fact is that for almost all big corporations there is so much money, training and culture involved in MS platforms that a shift away from it is just to hard to do, unfortunatelly.

<comment><USER22> Not all businesses are big corporations. There are a great number of small companies that can much more easily implement Linux for their employees to use. I think the point to be made here is that moving forward, (a) a lot of people can really do all of their computing on Linux now, and (b) an increasing amount of software is being written for the modern web so MS/IE lock-in is going away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Microsoft is oblivious if it is not doing something to divorce itself from the NSA"

No John, unfortunately it is not really an option to move 57,000 employees and a headquarters out of the United States. That is what would need to be done. None of the people making statements for these large corporations are lying voluntarily.

<comment><USER24> I wonder how much pressure the NSA can and does exert on corporations that refuse to coöperate in this manner. And whether those on the list really had an actual choice in that manner. I guess a large government organisation has plenty of leverage if need be.

<comment><USER25> You mean would the NSA bring up the CEO of the company on random charges after he says no, put him in jail, and get someone more agreeable to run the company? They've done it before! Look up Qwest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> To be honest I dont blame too much on Microsoft. Being a business they needed to survive. It is not like they have a choice and government could very well bring another antitrust trial. Microsoft refuse to play balls to US government at first and they were nearly spitted into 3 different companies. So like any big cooperation they have to pay money for lobbying to buy them safety.

And Microsoft is evil, I mean in Google's sense of evil and even Microsoft admit it.

But What about the one who claim them self do no evil and itself being so righteous. Joined Prism on 1/14/09?

And I would really love if the Movie could add bits on Prism agents coming in like some fucking retard, and Steve would tell him to F __k off.

NewsPaper and Media, intentionally or not trying to diversify the hate and focus on PRISM away from Government.

They are ultimately the one to be blamed.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "With that said, do you really want to buy a Microsoft product? Do you want > to buy anything that gives easy access to snoops poking around at their > leisure? If you'd think twice about this, then why would a foreign > government rely on Microsoft Office with any confidence? Personally, if I > were any foreign government or corporation, I'd stop using all Microsoft > products immediately for fear of America spying on me. Nothing can be > secret."

That's exactly what I'm hoping will happen. It may be the only way to actually roll back most of this shameless and abusive mass spying of everything and everyone. I'm not sure what else would stop it. Americans protesting it? I'm not holding my breath for that one, and even if they do, they'll only try to fix the spying internally, as they couldn't care less what they do to the world as long as the government keeps telling them "it's to keep them safe" (which _obviously_ trumps everyone else' rights).

<comment><USER27> > "With that said, do you really want to buy a Microsoft product? Do you want > to buy anything that gives easy access to snoops poking around at their > leisure?

You know... Up until this whole NSA/PRISM thing got uncovered, Microsoft had actually rather successfully started to rebuild the perception and image of its cloud-service Azure.

It had shown the world that in less than a year, it was well on its way to catch up with Amazon Web Services. It was going from an experiment to serious business. Something the company _invested_ in. Even more so than the traditional parts of the business.

As someone who once looked at Azure and laughed it off, I was coming around, actually considering it. I don't have any inside info on this, but I would guess/assume Azure was just about to take off. All those investments, finally about to pay off.

Then the whole NSA/PRISM thing came about. Now there's no chance in hell I'm going there. Not that I expect AWS to be any better in that regard either. I'm currently pulling out my data from Google. I trust them even less.

Hell, at this point, the only viable option privacy-vice seems to be open- source software, deployed by me, to an account I control, hosted on a service- provider outside the US's reach.

It may not be immune to unauthorized, illegal snooping, but it will be off the main grid, take a bit more effort and it wont be done automatically 24/7.

If I become paranoid enough to put in the effort, I'll just get a VPS instead and encrypt the shit out of it.

(Disclaimer: Not a US citizen.)

<comment><USER28> Exactly. Microsoft were making a comeback and I moved my email and online storage from Google to Microsoft. Now I feel back-stabbed.

I don't use the hate word often, but I HATE Microsoft now.

Just for the record, I think Dvorack is bang on with this article. Couldn't agree more.

<comment><USER11> Personally, I would not go that far. I mean, what is the practical risk?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wait a second... they trusted Microsoft?

;-)

Seriously though, if you don't play ball with the NSA, they come after you, your business, and your family with the full weight of the US government. Your wealth or status means nothing against it.

Which means, as a parent, I can relate.

Yes, you and I can sit here on my keyboard and say we would have stood our ground, but when you have a children and a mortgage, suddenly things are very different. Suddenly, you think that maybe fighting this one particular fight isn't worth the damage to you and your family.

That, my HN friends, is why the whole NSA PRISM thing is so evil and why it outrages us: Even those normally beyond the law (the rich and famous) are suddenly victims like the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER30> _Microsoft, despite denials, appears to be in bed with the NSA. Apparently all encryption and other methods to keep documents and discussions private are bypassed and accessible by the NSA and whomever it is working with._

 _With that said, do you really want to buy a Microsoft product?_

Notice the words _appears_ and _apparently_. Until there is specific evidence to take those two words away from those sentences, hardly anything will change.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't think native MS apps running on a local machine are a risk, I imagine (with a little nieviety) that if MS apps/OS were phoning home on a regular basis with the content of ones documents - someone would have noticed and raised a flag (or did I miss it). Nor is exchange BCC a copy to the NSA - again someone would have noticed. Cloud services excluded.

PS. It's *buntu that spins my propeller.

PPS. I'd be interested in what RMS has to say, not just about MS in this case but the whole PRISM/NSA thing in general - he has been warning us.

<comment><USER32> >Nor is exchange BCC a copy to the NSA - again someone would have noticed.

True, but what about Windows Phone vs. Android (with Google's apps, not just a FOSS build like Replicant) vs. Apple? Which is the lesser evil for your privacy?

<comment><USER33> > Which is the lesser evil for your privacy?

Cyanogen.

<comment><USER32> _With_ Google's apps? I've already mentioned Replicant ([http://replicant.us/](http://replicant.us/)) in my original post. Replicant is a fully-FOSS Android distribution based on CyanogenMod.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> But WHAT, exactly, can't we trust? I've seen NO technical detail to any of these discussions, yet there are a number of sub-systems that might be compromised:

\- low-level crypto APIs (the 'DLLs' referred to obliquely in the article); these are more interesting. I imagine they could be compromised for weak session key generation or other leakage of key / plaintext, or generate the session key in such a way that the mythical 'NSAKEY' can decrypt it. Huge impact, if so, but only to certain software; AFAIK Mozilla doesn't use the Windows crypto API / certificate key store (but Chrome does).

\- SSL certificate generation (built-in CA for Windows Server builds); certificates stored and replicated via Active Directory; does anyone actually use this? In fact, does anyone actually use client SSL? It is likely also used for domain peer replication, which could potentially be over an external network (but why would you not use a VPN there?)

\- Encrypted File System; already contains an escrow key-recovery mechanism to allow administrators (including domain admins) to recover a lost user key. Only likely to be relevant if hard disk or backup images seized, so less impact.

\- BitLocker drive encryption; similar to EFS but uses a hardware TPM and is per-machine rather than per-user. Fairly sure escrow key recovery at the domain level is possible here too. Again, only likely to be relevant if hardware or backups seized.

\- Office document encryption; did anyone SERIOUSLY think this was worth using anyway? There are so many key recovery services out there for this (Elcomsoft et al)

\- Communications applications (Skype et al); again, did anyone SERIOUSLY think this wasn't already being monitored, even before Skype became a Microsoft product?

\- Some other OS-level 'phoning-home' behaviour. I simply don't believe that no-one has spotted this happening, if it's there - we can do traffic analysis too, and there are plenty of people running Wireshark on their own networks.

<comment><USER18> How do you know Wireshark isn't compromised? Further, MS _does_ phone home all the time to check for updates and so on. If something extra was hidden in there would we know?

<comment><USER34> Build it from audited source?

As for updates, I imagine if you set up a domain you can run your own WSUS update server, MITM the connection, etc. - and then compare the behaviour with a "regular" home PC.

The problem really is how deep the hole goes - as per Ken Thompson "Reflections on Trusting Trust", 1984.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Any serious discussion of moving US businesses off Microsoft stalls when it reaches the "non technical" departments.

I put "non technical" in quotes because many of the people in HR, Accounting, Marketing, etc. are very tech-savvy. Marketing folks, for example, would love an all-Mac office setup, but they generally have to have Windows PCs for Powerpoint, Visio, and CRMs, to name a few. HR needs their IE6 in-house apps. Accounting can't even hire anybody who wants to try getting their work done on a Mac.

I realize I'm not even talking about Linux here; I think that just underscores my point.

Does anyone have a counterexample? Because I would pay top dollar for a Linux solution to these problems, but haven't seen anything worth buying.

<comment><USER36> Your problem isn't technical, it's financial. Moving away from Windows and Office means converting all the organisation's documents to another format, re-training users in the new OS and productivity suite, re-writing VBA scripts (which often doesn't work well).

Then you'd have to de-couple the entire organisation from Active Directory. And refactor (at best) or re-write (at worst) all custom in-house apps that rely on either Windows or Active Directory.

It's just too expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Someone on reddit asked a very interesting question with regard to all this information about US snooping...

What about UEFI? Should that be assumed fundamentally insecure from this point on?

</comment><comment><USER37> Linux for all the things! That's the only viable solution

<comment><USER38> One wonders how tainted Linux is, if one considers systems including SELinux. Yes, I realise the point of SELinux is to make it more secure, but the association with the NSA (they created it) makes it very difficult to trust.

<comment><USER39> What can you possibly mean? It's open source i.e. code is available to anyone's inspection.

<comment><USER40> But who does inspect it, not me for sure. So, how safe actually is Linux? And how safe is any distribution?

<comment><USER41> The fact that it is available for everyone to inspect means it can be peer reviewed: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review)

That doesn't mean you're supposed to review it or that it is reviewed at all, but it is a requirement for the open source development model.

About the Linux kernel, see this example: [http://kernelnewbies.org/UpstreamMerge](http://kernelnewbies.org/UpstreamMerge)

From Quality control section: "Some of the world's best developers will be going over your source code with a fine comb. This may be embarrassing for a few days or weeks, but in the end the code tends to work better and be more easily maintained. In some cases the upstream developers have made network and storage drivers 30% faster, making the hardware more attractive to customers."

<comment><USER40> It's definitely better then not open source, but still I'd love to know more about those "world's best" developers and who pays them.

Open source is the necessary but not the sufficient condition. It needs to be reviewed by independent people, otherwise the open source part is useless.

<comment><USER38> It's also safe to say that the NSA are not completely stupid. Any nefarious code would unlikely be completely obvious, even to top developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The same thing is happening at Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other tech companies. Why single out Microsoft?

<comment><USER27> Because statistically unless you're in a clear minority, Microsoft makes the OS which you do all your work and process all your data on.

It's sorta a big deal.

<comment><USER43> Sure, but all the leaks so far are about cases where your data is already going through Microsoft services. If there were any evidence that there was a backdoor in Windows itself, or in any Microsoft software, then you'd have a point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Actually, why nobody mention anything about Intel and Cisco? I would image it would be much more effective to build backdoor to network appliances if you want to spy someone.

<comment><USER45> True, but if the network traffic between you and, say Office 365, is encrypted, the NSA would need to decrypt that. It'd be so much easier if Microsoft just handed over the actual, unencrypted, files. I can easily imagine the NSA login screen for Microsoft's PRISM interface with a "Yes, I have a proper court order" checkbox under the password field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Uh, I might sound like a clichy old grumper but is this really _any news_ since the 90's which is when Microsoft found the internet?

It's practically been the operative description of Microsoft for decades that they're interested in profits (and potential profits in certain circles disjoint from the end users), not the privacy or security of their users.

</comment><comment><USER47> "So the first news I see regarding Microsoft today is that Ballmer refuses to talk about the company's wearable computing strategy. My first thought was, "This is its priority? Wearable computers? So it can spy on your day-to-day activities?" The next story I read was about how Microsoft is going to reshuffle the organization, which prompted me to wonder, "Re-org? Why? So it can put some intelligence agency folks in charge?""

Seems like Microsoft has a lot of issues to worry about. Doing a reorg when the company is struggling just to put an agency person in charge seems like a lot of work. Why not just put them in charge in a small internally announced move?

</comment><comment><USER48> The reason is obvious in China. Google is blocked by GFW, but Bing is not. So, there must be some dirty business between Microsoft and government of China. If Microsoft can do this in China, they can do this anywhere, even in USA.

<comment><USER49> The dirty business is that Microsoft is willing to cooperate with the Chinese government and censor its search results. Google publicly pulled out of China precisely because it was unwilling to do that. Even so, China did renew Google's Internet license, and they do run ditu.google.cn (un-offsetted maps, possibly only accessible from within China).

Google is not actually blocked by the firewall. Gmail is slow, occasionally lots of dropped packets, and other passive-aggressive behavior, but not blocked. Search generally works ok, unless, say, you are a tourist searching for information about a certain popular tourist destination in the center of Beijing. Groups, Docs, and other free exchange of information services are blocked, though.

<comment><USER48> Censor its search results? You mean Microsoft cope with the government to filter the result. Great! Today they filter the results. Tomorrow they will share the user data with government. You are right, Google is not actually blocked by GFW. If you search something the government think it's sensitive (just they think), they will block you from Google for serveal minutes. After that, you can connect to Google again. I say, what the hell is that? Fuck the government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The fact that the url of this article ends in .asp kind of makes me laugh a little. Although I would love to see movement away from Microsoft products, its clearly much more difficult than the article makes it out to be.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm a fan of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, so it's sad to see when a company's founder steps down. I feel like the ambition and drive sometimes disappear...then bottom line and dividends matter over pride.

</comment><comment><USER52> No longer? Like if there were not enough reasons not to trust them (or any other proprietary software vendor) before.

</comment><comment><USER53> _rely on Microsoft Office with any confidence_

This seems to imply using Office, like in Word/Excel?, somehow poses a privacy risk. Is that true? And how exactly?

</comment><comment><USER54> Windows should be banned in all countries except America. Open source OS is the only way to go. I'm not saying Linux since it's not exactly the most non technical friendly OS for people requiring more than basic usage but windows definitely isn't the OS for the future and it needs to die.

<comment><USER55> unfortunately, the inertia is too big for any single organization to stop. If you have a business selling software, it would be borderline insane to not target windows as a platform. You may target others, but you _must_ target windows, or basically, get no business. If, or when your resources are limited, you only target windows.

So the problem is perpetuated - windows is the only platform that is basically guarenteed to have a market. So as a user of software, you'd stick to windows, and as a maker of software, you'd stick to making software for windows. Other platform is almost an afterthought. Unless web based software radically changes (i need to unzip a file - what web based software will do that for me?), this will not change.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you upload a .zip file (don't know about the other formats) to Google Docs, it can access its content.

There are probably other services/tools, because technically, there's nothing stopping you from unzipping files in the cloud, or in web based software. It's just the matter of uploading something and then downloading the content after it's been unzipped on the remote server. So it's just more expensive in terms of network traffic.

The availability of the tools that do that, other than Google Docs, is another thing. Honestly wouldn't know, don't recall ever needing it before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I don't think any large company has any choice in the matter. And this article targeting Microsoft. Apple is doing the same exact thing, who cares if they signed on afterwards? All the major tech companies are, and no one is going to stop using any of them. Get real.

</comment><comment><USER57> /me reads article.

/me checks byline.

Holy crap. Yeah, I remember when Dvorak was quite the Microsoft fanboi.

My how times change.

<comment><USER11> I think he wrote about the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, including the unethical "Microsoft Munchkins" attacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> When a company does what's asked of it by a government and people are upset with the company something's seriously wrong. A company's main priority is typically to make money within the bounds of the law. A government's should be to improve the quality of life and uphold the moral values of its citizens.

I have a feeling had Apple been first on board rather than last the journalist would argue that Microsoft were evil for not complying with a government request and that Apple clearly had the vision to help the nation's security, but maybe that's just me?

<comment><USER59> Be that as it may, _I_ cannot change _your_ government. I can, however, stop relying on any of the companies who are complicit in spying on me.

The problem here is the divide between national government and international corporations, where the corporations' actions influence far more people than the direct actions of the national government.

I cannot exert any influence over a government that isn't mine, but I can decide which companies I support and entrust with my data and business. Your dichotomy of government vs company is therefore not correct. I can (and should) be upset about both.

<comment><USER58> Fair point well made. Opinion updated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Question: when did we _start_ trusting MS that we now can no longer?

</comment><comment><USER61> Trust or not, I'm still writing code today for the 95% of people that are running Windows and Office. The irony is that the code interfaces to PGP/GPG...

</comment><comment><USER62> I don't remember last time I used bill's products.

</comment><comment><USER63> AFAIK, if you control the layer 1 fiber lines, it doesn't matter the OS, the vendor or the application in question. NSA will intercept your data while on transit. Of course, if you can have DLLs packaging everything the way you like, appending the right file extensions and cleaning all the metadata... that's more than welcome.

</comment><comment><USER64> The more interesting discussion for me would be around which large IT players we actually _can_ trust?

</comment><comment><USER65> Hubris: [http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v_lrohZ_1rU&desktop_uri=%2Fwatc...](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v_lrohZ_1rU&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dv_lrohZ_1rU)

</comment><comment><USER66> So, after SElinux, another big push form NSA to open source community?

</comment><comment><USER67> I want to know who trusted Microsoft to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER68> "Why We Can No Longer Trust Microsoft" Are you kidding when did anybody trusted microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER69> Trust no longer!? You shouldn't trust any corporation to do anything other than maximize profits.

</comment><comment><USER70> We never really could. NSAKEY, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER71> We can _no longer_ trust Microsoft?

Crazy. I've been trusting Microsoft all this time, and now, what to do!?!

</comment><comment><USER72> Someone trusted them before?

</comment><comment><USER73> When could we trust them?

</comment><comment><USER74> > Why We Can No Longer Trust Microsoft

LOL. Who was dumb enough to have ever trusted them?</comment>


K-Hole Issue 5 – Chaos Magic, Founder Mode, and the Weaponization of Burnout - <AUTHOR> http://khole.net/issues/05/ <comment><AUTHOR> "The fundamental element of magic is the ability to manifest or sublimate things, whether they're emotions, states of being, people, or the Statue of Liberty. Magic is the art of making things appear or disappear, out of nowhere or into the void.

This magic, the lady-in-a-box, rabbit-in-a-hat form of magic, is predicated on two questions: where did she go? And how did we get here? When you're a baby, things are constantly appearing out of fucking nowhere and vanishing with no hope of return, until at some point you learn pattern recognition. But let's not forget that on some level believing that the sun will rise again is rooted in magical thinking."</comment>


Just in case world ends today? - <AUTHOR>

Just in case world ends today, what would you like to say to people on HN. :) <comment><USER2> So long, and thanks for all the fish!

<comment><USER3> See you at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe! The cocktails are awesome. And most importantly .... Don't Panic !

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's been a pleasure, see you on the other side.

</comment><comment><USER5> It was enlightening. Thanks.</comment>


Whatever happened to due process? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.easydns.org/2013/10/08/whatever-happened-to-due-process/

<comment><USER2> "Rapid takedown" was foisted on us in 1999 when the original registrar agreements were being negotiated at ICANN. At the time, it was held out as a threat - agree to rapid takedown, or be subject to US regulation. At the time we didn't realize that it was the intellectual property community making the threat - it came to us under the cloak of the ISP community, which we've since realized meant "Big Telco's with massive media holdings".

Its been a slippery slope every since.

oBDisclaimer: I work at a large registrar and was in the room when the original contracts were being discussed and negotiated. I'm sorry for the part I played!

<comment><USER3> Freejack, very interesting. What would be the best course of action to preventing these takedowns, or at the very least, prevent the abuse of takedown notices?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was an incident a week or so ago where the admin of a Finnish punk website posted a scan of an "information request" he had received from the police. This request was to provide registration information (especially email and IP addresses) of certain users of the site.

The common factor was that these users had participated in a forum thread discussing organizing a (apparently entirely peaceful) "shadow event" of the traditional presidential Independence Day reception.

The "request" came with a gag order and without any mention of an appeal process. The rationale included was a generic boilerplate "investigation or prevention of crime" with no mention of anyone being suspected of any crime or planning thereof. The gag order was, obviously and quite defiantly, disobeyed by the admin.

Now it appears that these kinds of requests are perfectly legal, do not require the authorization of any member of the judiciary, and appear to be used quite carelessly to gather information about people not officially suspected of anything. Getting "official" personally identifying information from ISPs _is_ much harder, though, but this does not look good especially given that the new police law currently in planning stages is expected to considerably extend the electronic powers of the police.

<comment><USER5> Each country has its own laws for this sort of thing, so it's hard to generalize.

<comment><USER4> Sure; I wrote the post in a bit of haste, just meant to share a related anecdote. The alarming thing about the case is that it seems to have come as a surprise to most observers that the police actually does have such powers in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Due process went out of the window a long time ago when the US showed everyone that it is certainly possible and even admissible to seize domains without any sort of process. The US (department of homeland security, no less!) started seizing domains about 2 years ago. They went and basically took down any domain that was related to large scale piracy (demonoid) or counterfeit goods (sites that sold fake gucci bags, that kind of stuff..). The other kind of site that they targeted were mostly sports streaming sites (ones that streamed ESPN, etc.).

It was obvious that the UK would follow soon enough seeing that such a thing was entirely possible. Of course when the US seized a spanish website (rojadirecta) domain, they were challenged in court and lost. [0] There were also several other incorrect seizures where the US government ended up seizing sites that had nothing to do with any illegal activity and then returning them a year later [1]. This is what happens when you ignore due process.

Most small service providers and ISPs feel threatened when a big government like the US comes after them. Unless they have properly defined protocols for dealing with this kind of stuff, the support rep will probably buckle under pressure and hand over the data.

Personally, I've seen instances where domain registrars are often requested for private registration data without court orders or any sort of legal basis. Some registrars hand out the data. Some registrars email their customers asking them to transfer away (so stop being our customers) to continue protecting their privacy. Some registrars actually have the guts to say no. It really varies.

We're certainly at a point now where governments can easily coerce internet businesses to bend to their will. There will be a brave few who will stand tall but I don't know how long it will be before their backs/businesses are broken and bent (lavabit being a recent example).

Of course the UK government probably doesn't have access to the root name servers and therefore is left with sending out notices. But there's no telling when governments (who are of course sponsored by corporations as we all know by now..) will start cooperating with each other for such take down requests. Sort of like the reverse surveillance agreements with Germany/Australia/etc. (can't spy on my own citizens ? no worries, you spy on mine, I'll spy on yours, and we'll exchange notes!)

And I thought the dark days of the internet were in the 90s...

[0] - [https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-returns-seized-domains-to- strea...](https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-returns-seized-domains-to-streaming- links-site-after-18-months-120830/)

[1] - [http://torrentfreak.com/feds-return-seized- domain-111208/](http://torrentfreak.com/feds-return-seized-domain-111208/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is due process the wrong term? Can't due process occur after the fact? For example, you can be arrested for suspicion of drunk driving, taken off the road, put into custody, and found to be innocent, and that is still part of due process. Your actions appeared to be causing a threat to others, so the government stopped your actions immediately and let the courts decide your guilt or innocence. How is that different than taking a site that is suspected of harming other people offline immediately and then work on deciding guilt or innocence?

 _Note:_ I don't necessarily disagree with the author, but I am playing devil's advocate here.

<comment><USER8> I think you make a good point. I've always thought in such situation law enforcement should be responsible for some damages if the verdict is innocence to disincentivize overly aggressive tactics. If you're taken off the road for drunk driving, but are found innocent and missed work, I believe the police should be responsible for lost wages. At least within reasonable limits. In this case, I think it would be good for law enforcement to be willing to put up restitution to legitimate business that are hurt by these tactics.

edit: Sadly, I fear the costs would merely get passed on to tax payers eventually anyway, and would perhaps not actually promote more prudent and judicial use of powers.

<comment><USER9> Drunk driving endangers lives, can websites really endanger lives?

<comment><USER10> Would you download a car... while drunk?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A little background: the guys who sent the letter are PIPCU, a new department with funding for two years who are undoubtedly keen to get results quickly and cheaply.

A weirdness of PIPCU is that they're City of London police, not London Metropolitan Police as you'd expect for a department with such a wide remit.

<comment><USER12> What is the difference between City of London police and London Metro police? (US resident, my only time in London was a quick drunken jaunt through SOHO on a long layover)

EDIT: Thank you all for informing me!

<comment><USER13> I would think it's the distinction between the "City of London" (just the city itself) and the "London Metropolitan Area" (the city and surrounding sprawl).

<comment><USER14> "The City" is a tiny little slice with something like one hundred residents. It bears zero relation to London, the London Urban Area, the London Metro Area, or the London Municipal Area.

<comment><USER15> 7400 at the last census (2011), but many thousands of workers during the day.

<comment><USER14> What's 7300 human lives between friends?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Amazing that in this era of phishing the PIPCU expect someone to take significant action _against their own customers_ on the basis of an e-mail.

And I'm 99.9% positive it wouldn't have been PGP or S/MIME-signed for authenticity.

Kudos to Mr Jeftovic for insisting on proper instruments, such as a court order.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, check out the page they wanted us to redirect the domain too [http://22.214.171.124/](http://220.127.116.11/)

"Don't use those other guys, use these guys instead"

It's like reverse online piracy, hijack the traffic from a bunch of domain takedowns and push your own cronies sites.

pro-music.org - based in london, UK whymusicmatters.org - London, UK thecontentmap.com - London, UK

Nice scam

</comment><comment><USER18>
      What gets me about all of this is that the largest, most
      egregious perpetrators of online criminal activity right
      now are our own governments, spying on their own citizens,
      illegally wiretapping our own private communications and
      nobody cares, nobody will answer for it, it's just an out-
      of-scope conversation that is expected to blend into the
      overall background malaise of our ever increasing serfdom.

The truth doesn't have many friends with the powers that be.

</comment><comment><USER19> This should get on the front page, the title is ambiguous, but the article itself is about a very abusive law enforcement request.

</comment><comment><USER20> How can an email be considered legally binding? This would go straight into my spam folder.

<comment><USER21> It can't, I would have deleted it immediately. The real requests comes in snail mail and are the only ones I reply to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They are only ordering to redirect the domain to a sole ip address? Not serving HTTPS? Should links point to secure versions of seized domains or simply to attest their identity. I think it's ok to say they are the criminals on the internet and not necessarily the other way. Not that requests cannot be legitimate but at least a basic level of quality must go into the actual process because here it just looks awkward. Not to mention shitty html behind it: if you takedown domains, please show some style :)

</comment><comment><USER23> We need more support for ICANN alternatives, so when something stupid happens its just inconvenient.

[http://dot-bit.org/How_To_Browse_Bit_Domains](http://dot- bit.org/How_To_Browse_Bit_Domains)

</comment><comment><USER24> The title of the article (as fascinating as it was) seems rhetorical. Can't easydns just point the PIPCU to their own Domain Takedown Policy and instruct them to take it further with ICANN and the courts of the Province of Ontario?

</comment><comment><USER25> Due process, presumption of innocence and other such "nuisances" are something that the DRM lobby tries to kill.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's not the 'net that they want to censor. It's your brain.

</comment><comment><USER27> it says a lot when siding with criminals is in the best interest of law abiding citizens than siding with the goverment.

</comment><comment><USER28> Dead and buried.</comment>


Ask HN: Advice on my website potentially being acquired - <AUTHOR> I have a company in California as a LLC and another company is interested in acquiring one of my websites and all of the data and intellectual property involved with it.  The website is a SAAS product with Braintree as the gateway.
I don't have much experience with this, and was wondering if anyone can provide any insight to:
1) If the company acquires the website, are they actually buying my company out?
1a) If the company just buys the website and my company still is mine, does anyone have insights into the tax liabilities?  I'm guessing I would get one huge sum of money in one shot?
2) Does anyone have any experience on the transferring of IP to another company and the transition process?
3) Anything else I should consider other than talking to my accountant?
(also this is a throwaway account) <comment><USER2> You probably need to talk to a M&A professional about this, a lawyer/firm that specializes. How much it will cost depends on how big a deal it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, the ballpark cost is probably about $100,000 for the acquisition</comment></comment>


Will third-party recruiters ever disappear? - <AUTHOR> Do you think internal recruiters or another type of recruitment model replace the third-party recruiters that exist today? <comment><USER2> It's possible but the solution would have to create less friction than the third party model and the friction has to be reduced from the point of view of the employer not the employee as ultimately it is the buyer who controls the method of recruitment. Recruiting moved away from internals to 3rd parties because business could forego the costs of in house recruitment in exchange for giving up a small amount of initial control over who they interviewed and paying someone else to do the sourcing of candidates.</comment>


Stolen: da "inci's the Last Supper: released as torrents - <AUTHOR> http://www.zoomready.com Some website has released da VInci's the Last Supper at 500dpi, or at least parts of it.  Word on the street is they plan to print full size copys. <comment><AUTHOR> They're at it again! This time they released Judas 1 gigapixel. Can't wait for the download. Now all I need is my 44" printer...</comment>


Foxy - CSS3 Framework: Using CSS3 Calc()  - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vladocar/Foxy-CSS-Framework

<comment><USER2> On the blog...

" _If you have some .class { width:25% } that will make 4 columns grid (25% + 25% +25% + 25%). The problem is that you can't have precision px margins (gutter). So in the past you had nested divs or .something-like- this{width:24%; margin-left:1%}..._ "

" _With calc() that problem is solved now we can have .class{width:calc(25%-10px); margin-left:10px} . And with that we can have the flexibility of the % and the px precision._ "

This was never a problem if you separated your layout markup from your content markup, like so.

Hello, world

Hello, world

Bear in mind that calc() has terrible support [<http://caniuse.com/#search=calc>]. Box-sizing fixes the problems addressed by this "framework" without deferring to an expensive and inappropriately used calc() property.

I see no reason why anyone would use this over a grid model such as this [[https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/blob/master/core/grid/...](https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/blob/master/core/grid/grids.css)].

<comment><USER3> Extra
s just to control margins looks very much like having to add markup just to do layout, i.e. mixing markup with layout. Your nested div has no semantic meaning, they are only present for layout.

<comment><USER2>
s are semantically neutral so while it is extra markup, it's not like they had any semantic meaning in the first place. The relevancy of semantics is a can of worms in of itself...

If you're not interested in separating layout markup from content markup, the box-sizing property might be for you.

But I'd certainly avoid using calc()...</comment></comment></comment>