MongoDB vs Redis, a different interpretation of what's wrong with Relational DBs - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/post/MongoDB-and-Redis.html <comment><USER3> _I expect that in a few years what was the real problem with RDBMS is going to be very clear, even if now it can look confusing enough and there are different alternatives and it is very hard to meter the relative value of the different solutions proposed._

I expect that in a few years antirez will study relational theory and conclude that he's been incrementally, unknowingly, implementing an RDBMS this whole time.

<comment><USER4> Redis can be the most useless piece of code in the world but it is very hard looking at the command reference to state that Redia is going to be an rdbms in my humble opinion

<comment><USER3> I'm not 100% sure, but it looks like redis might already have the low level building blocks of a relational dbms. The relational model is: relations + relational operators + boolean logic.

A relation is just a special kind of set construction and redis has sets, so relations can be built. All of logic and operations can be built from either (not + and) or (not + or). You have SISMEMBER (not), SUNION (and), and SINTER (or).

That might be enough.

<comment><USER5> You can't get select, project, or cartesian product out of ismember, union, and intersection. Also, union corresponds to and and intersection corresponds to or, not the other way around as your comment has it.

<comment><USER3> _You can't get select, project, or cartesian product out of ismember, union, and intersection._

Sorry, I didn't mention that redis has SADD and SREM for implementing projection. I'm not sure what you mean by select. You're right about product. I think that's what's missing.

 _Also, union corresponds to and and intersection corresponds to or_

That's exactly what I said. We both got it backwards.

<comment><USER5> Haha! You're right.

"Select" is the SPC-algebra operation which gives you the subset of a relation whose tuples satisfy some Boolean condition, e.g. firstname='bob'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem about RDBMS in web world is that it just don't fit the scenario. When RDBMS was born, it deal with large, relational, but relatively static data. You can use whatever query to get the organized result. But today's web world is very different. We have relatively static queries (get top 10 stories, get account XXX most recent posts etc.), but the data are changing all the time. Consistent query may be a good start to solve the problem.

<comment><USER7> this is an insane statement. High transactional capability is _exactly_ what you'd use RDBMS for. Or are there not that many credit card transactions per hour ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Far too many people are confusing problems with SQL with problems with the relational model.

SQL != relational database

<comment><USER4> Indeed. But for this to be fully in context add this: 99.99% of relational databases user base is using SQL databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my experience there are two sources of problems with Relational databases. They are either designed by Programmers or they are designed by DBAs. They both make a complete and utter mess of the task almost every time.

Programmers design databases to make their programs simpler and DBAs seem to design databases to make programming near impossible.

The most amazing thing is that Relational databases are simple things to understand and design - when you understand the data. That is probably where the trouble lies - neither of my two design groups understand the data - <USER2> both have entirely different agendas.

To get to the point - Relational Databases are fantasticly flexible high performance tools - it is just that so many examples of poorly designed databases abound that people get the idea that they are a less than ideal tool.

<comment><USER10> > DBAs seem to design databases to make programming near impossible.

Have you ever been in a situation where a C buffer overrun caused a data structure to get scribbled over, and instead of crashing, the program just started passing around corrupt data? In a long-running application, that eventually died for a reason that made no sense whatsoever? To the point where you know that noise got in the system, but you don't know _where or when_ , and everything is now suspect?

Imagine that happening to a hospital's medical records. _That's_ a DBA's nightmare scenario. They're not trying to "make programming near impossible", they're trying to systematically prevent (potentially incompetent) programmers from corrupting the data. Databases are good at including internal consistency checks into the schema design itself.

If a programmer new to your project got mad because they kept making asserts or unit tests all over the place fail, _and decided to delete them_ , how would you react?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My problem with redis is that it is permanently advertised as a "Database". It is not, it is a persistent cache with some nice query functionality. But _all your data must fit in RAM_. Otherwise bad things™ happen.

Some may consider this a small terminology glitch but for me it's quite a fundamental issue.

<comment><USER4> Even without the persistence you can say something is a database. It's not a coincidence that the term "in memory database" exists for example.

Btw everything is used to store data permantly, reliably or not for your specific needs/tastes, is a database.

Also you can use Redis in append mode if you wish, this will sync your data ASAP on disk. For now in order to do this you need to use netcat, but this will be supported with ad-hoc tools in the future. Still this will be the _discuoraged_ way to do things.

And about reliability, it's worth to note that with Redis there is a delay between the memory copy and the persistent copy of the dataset, but this is not about reliability of the whole dataset, all your data that is not about the latest few minutes is stored on disk permanently without any kind of risk.

Also, you appear to claim that if a database for design limits the amount of data it can hold to the amount of free ram, it is a cache. This is not the case IMHO.

<comment><USER11> _Even without the persistence you can say something is a database. It's not a coincidence that the term "in memory database" exists for example._

Then why is redis not advertised as an "in memory database"? It likes to be compared with MongoDB or TokyoTyrant but is clearly not playing in the same league.

Moreover it glosses over this issue in quite a self-righteous fashion almost everywhere. One example of many would be this gem from the "TwitterAlikeExample":

 _This means you can serve millions of users every day with just a single Linux box, and this one was monkey asses slow!_

That's just false advertising if your "millions of users" actually use the service. Just storing the plain account data for 1 million users would push the database into the 1GB realm. Go figure what happens when these users actually begin to leave a footprint.

 _Btw everything is used to store data permantly, reliably or not for your specific needs/tastes, is a database._

I'm not normally nitpicking about terminology. It just left a bad taste in my mouth in this particular case because the redis homepage doesn't bother to mention this critical difference to most similar offerings. The current blurb is highly deceptive.</comment></comment></comment>


How skilled are London taxi drivers at learning routes through unfamiliar towns? - <AUTHOR> http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-skilled-are-london-taxi-drivers-at.html <comment><USER2> I can't forget that time when a London taxi driver made a killing with me by in an unexpected city tour. I took a taxi at Victoria Station and told the driver to take me to _Kennington_ tube station. I'm not a native English speaker, and the guy understood _Canning Town_ , which is located approximately at the other side of the city, so I had to point it out on his map and cross the city again.

<comment><USER3> Once the same happened to me in Shanghai, but the Taxi driver insisted it was his mistake for not understanding my bad pronunciation and stopped the counter...</comment></comment>


Facebook Now Has Two Million Advertisers - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/business/news/two-million-advertisers/ <comment><USER2> that's a lot of psychological manipulation</comment>


The science of productivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHfjvYzr-3g

<comment><USER2> Good video. But they just forgot to place a little orange squared logo at 2:15 :)</comment>


Are You a Robot? Introducing "No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA" - <AUTHOR> http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing-no-captcha.html <comment><USER2> "If we can collect behavioural data from you, and it matches closely the behaviour of other humans, you are a human. Otherwise you're not a human."

Does anyone else get that feeling from the description of what Google is doing? I've tripped their "we think you are a bot" detection filter and been presented with a captcha countless times while using complex search queries and searching for relatively obscure things, and it's frankly very insulting and rather disturbing that they think someone who inputs "unusual" search queries, according to their measure, is not human. I have JS and cookies disabled so they definitely cannot track my mouse movements and I can't use this way of verifying "humanness", but what if they get rid of the regular captchas completely (based on the argument that eventually the only ones who will make use of and solve them are bots)? Then they'll basically be saying "you are a human only if you have a browser that supports these features, behave in this way, and act like every other human who does." The fact that Google is attempting to define and thus strongly normalise what is human behaviour is definitely a big red flag to me.

(Or maybe I'm really a bot, just an extremely intelligent one. :-)

<comment><USER3> > and it's frankly very insulting and rather disturbing that they think > someone who inputs "unusual" search queries, according to their measure, is > not human.

Insulting? how is that insulting? You are entitled. You are entitled you block scripts, use Google's FREE service to perform any search query to search the web while blocking any program that attempts to identify you as not a bot.

But if while using their free service they cannot identify you as a human given the factors they measure(becuase you actively disabled the programs that measure such factors), then I see nothing wrong in them trying alternative ways (which were a standard before).

I think you are making a storm in a teacup. If you feel offended by the way their website work, just don't use them. I don't see any red flags at all.

<comment><USER4> _You are entitled._

Has calling someone entitled ever been useful? For the last few years it's felt like nothing more than a petty "you're wrong" remark with bonus condensation built right in.

<comment><USER5> Do you mean condescension? Not trying to be a smart ass, I just got a chuckle out of the word choice.

<comment><USER6> There you go, being condensing again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They've been doing this for a while. With recaptcha, you got easier captchas (a single street number instead of two words) if the system thought you were human. There was an official post about this a year ago. [1] Now they have probably improved the system enough to be confident in not showing captcha at all. It's nothing revolutionary. If it thinks you're a robot, you still get the old captcha. [2] [1] [http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha-j...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/recaptcha- just-got-easier-but-only-if.html) [2] [http://i.imgur.com/pCKS8p5.png](http://i.imgur.com/pCKS8p5.png)

<comment><USER8> Am I being paranoid when I think that offering this "free" service is a great way to track people over even more sites and usually the most important conversion pages that don't have the usual google display ads. I don't see a big technological innovation here as it appears that mostly they are checking your cookies to see if they recognize you.

<comment><USER9> Every "free" service from Google has the end goal of serving you personalized ads. That's their business.

<comment><USER8> Certainly correct. I guess it is new for me that I'm requiring my users to give their data so they can be served personalized ads.

<comment><USER10> And there are a number of sites using Analytics, Adwords/Adsense, DFP and a number of other points of connection. They've already offered/bought recaptcha, all this does is make it easier for most people (who have cookies and JS enabled).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It says that they do take mouse movement into account but the cookie part makes me feel a little uneasy:

> IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly > human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web.

If this becomes a trend then major commercial websites will become unusable for people who are not accepting (third-party) cookies. "Because those damn bots" is a straw man argument to make people trackable by assuming that there are no other useability improving methods that don't track the user (which I think is highly unlikely).

<comment><USER12> It's only used to generate a confidence level.

"In cases when the risk analysis engine can't confidently predict whether a user is a human or an abusive agent, it will prompt a CAPTCHA to elicit more cues"

So if you have cookies disabled, you'll probably just get a regular captcha

<comment><USER11> okay, that's reasonable.

<comment><USER13> But then a bot need only copy a human's mouse movements and disable cookies and we're back to the status quo.

<comment><USER14> Sure, for the bot. Captchas are pretty effective against bots, what's wrong with presenting the status quo to a bot? This is meant to improve things for the real people. I will appreciate not having to decipher some strange text.

<comment><USER13> I'm just not convinced from what's been shown that they'll have a long-term ability to distinguish between human mouse movements and those of a bot. So I'm curious as to really how one can keep this in place before it's overrun by spam and you need to make it more difficult anyway. More power to them if it works, but they're pretty light on details that inspire confidence, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's definitely not only relying on cursor movements. A simple $('iframe').contents().find('.recaptcha-checkbox-checkmark').click() proved that I'm not a robot, without me touching the mouse.

<comment><USER16> The cursor movement story seems to be a smokescreen to dilute the fact they're actually running an internet wide monitoring network, tracking users from site to site and building profiles on them.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure where cursor movement was mentioned, other than the comments.

<comment><USER18> I read it in the wired.com article about this also submitted to HN: "And [Vinay] Shet says even the tiny movements a user's mouse makes as it hovers and approaches a checkbox can help reveal an automated bot."

<comment><USER17> I guess it's a lot more complicated than it looks at a cursory glance.

<comment><USER19> It's almost as if Google is playing its cards close to its chest to avoid tipping off people intent on defeating it's captchas!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Who wants to place bets on the "potential robots" more likely to be those without Google cookies or a Google Account?

<comment><USER21> I can't think of many better uses for the menagerie of different tracking methods that they have planted on me, to be honest.

<comment><USER22> Well if you ever run for political office it's going to save them a boatload on campaign contributions.

<comment><USER21> Eh, you never know. Attitudes toward certain improprieties have moderated in recent years...

<comment><USER4> So what? Other once acceptable behavior is no longer tolerated.

There is always a center, just because it moves doesn't mean that people can't be a socially unacceptable distance from it.

<comment><USER21> I suspect you have mistakenly stumbled into a lighthearted thread with an overly serious mindset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I recently added recaptcha to a site and got this version.

From an implementation standpoint it is utterly painless. The client side is copy/paste from Google's site and the PHP/server side was this:

          $recapchaURL = 'https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/siteverify?secret=600SZZ0ZZZZZIZi-ZZ0ZEHZW1000Z_0ZZZ00QZZ&response=' . request_var('g-recaptcha-response','') .'&remoteip=' . $request->server('REMOTE_ADDR');
          $recapchaRespone = file_get_contents($recapchaURL);
          if(is_null($recapchaRespone))
          {
                print("Recaptcha failed. <more error msg>"); return;
          }
          $recapchaResponeJSON = json_decode($recapchaRespone);
          if(!( !is_null($recapchaResponeJSON->{'success'}) && $recapchaResponeJSON->{'success'} == 'true'))
          {
                print("Recaptcha failed. <more error msg>"); return;
           }

Most of the time it just gives you that one checkbox, but if you use the form multiple times (e.g. testing) it starts to give you the classical text entry box. I have no idea how it works fully and this article only sheds little light on it.

<comment><USER24> Is that your actual secret? you might not want to reveal that/you should get a new one.

<comment><USER23> It is not. I kept the length and style the same to give a better example, but replaced most of the characters with 0s and Zs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So now spammers will use botnets… Oh wait, they already do.

They already have the botnets. Now they need to use those end-user machines as proxies, using the credentials already on the machine. They just need to figure out the other parameters: maybe it's running js code ? Then you can use a browser engine/selenium). Maybe it's the click pattern ? Just generate the json data and send it. They can even apply the same machine learning techniques to figure out the best way to circumvent the captchas.

And the escalation continues.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I feel like it won't be too long before spammers start finding ways to emulate users without having to solve any CAPTCHAs. Google is likely going to need to switch their 98%/2% to something more like 80%/20% (that is, 20% of users will still need to enter CAPTCHAs).

<comment><USER27> I am using a small tool that I wrote to integrate Google Keep and other Google stuff with KRunner and so on, and this tool (essentially being a dumb bot) also passes all the Captchas.

I'd say malicious authors would have it really easy now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Computer Vision guy here. Okay so you've made some improvements for normal users.

The captchas are still the old same, just not shown everytime. Still can be cracked with latest neural net techniques. The visual matching stuff can be guessed 6/10 times.

You still have audio captchas, that can be cracked.

If all fails you still have cheap labour from third world country. I don't see why this is revolutionary?

Google will now have their captchas present on every site and start logging user behavior in the name of identifying bots. Who says they won't use the data to drive their ad empire?

<comment><USER29> Even if the success rate of detecting robots stays the same, I would say this is still a win because the majority of humans won't have to mess with it any longer.

Even better: those with various disabilities won't have to mess with it. My parents' only disability that I know of is near-complete computer illiteracy and I can tell you from experience that every time they're presented with a normal CAPTCHA it's like somebody just handed them a Rubik's Cube and told them to solve it before they can create a profile. In every case I know of, they just turn the computer off and walk away. Now, these are what I would call normal humans (don't tell them I ever said that) so I can only imagine how aggravated those with visual and/or auditory problems get when presented with a crazy CAPTCHA. And when your revenue comes from getting people to submit these, I can see it still being a boon to the website, even if all they did was lower the barrier of entry _for humans_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> My guess is it's based on the tracking data they already collect on most people. I try to avoid it, so I get stuff like this:

[http://i.imgur.com/6mGYsav.png](http://i.imgur.com/6mGYsav.png)

I have no idea what that second word is supposed to be, so if you use this, I probably won't use your site.

<comment><USER31> It isn't user friendly, but often with that type it doesn't care what you enter for the tough to read world. The easy to read word is your test. The other is a way to harness people to do difficult OCR tasks. Some web sites have had fun organizing entering dirty words for the tough to read ones regularly to mess with the results :)

<comment><USER32> It's actually the other way round for the Captcha posted and most recaptchas I've seen. The easy to read word is the OCR and the hard one is the real captcha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here's the JavaScript behind it: [https://www.gstatic.com/recaptcha/api2/r20141202135649/recap...](https://www.gstatic.com/recaptcha/api2/r20141202135649/recaptcha__en.js)

It's hard to see what's sent over the wire (it's obfuscated), but the source gives you a good idea of what they're collecting. The biggie is the GA cookie which is running on over 10 million sites. Like any CAPTCHA, this is still breakable -- just load your actual cookies into Selenium or PhantomJS and replay your mouse movements. Of course, once you do that more than a couple times, you'll likely have to write a crawlers to generate fresh cookies. At that point, you may as well just break the visual CAPTCHA which is trivial anyway. Ie. You should still never use a CAPTCHA ([http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/07/02/why-you-should- never-...](http://www.onlineaspect.com/2010/07/02/why-you-should-never-use-a- captcha/)).

<comment><USER34> Captchas can also be useful as a differentiator between free/paid plans, or to slow down users (see 4chan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> In the long run, I think it's unavoidable that AI-type systems continue to improve, while humans don't, so this will become a harder and harder problem.

One helpful approach would be to separate out "why CAPTCHA" into preventing abuse (through high volumes) and "guaranteed one (or small number) per person" from "am I interacting directly with a live human", and using different things for each.

The naive solution to a lot of this is identity -- if FB profiles are "expensive" to create, especially old ones with lots of social proof, you can use something like FB connect. However, there are a lot of downsides to this (chief being centralization/commercial control by one entity, which might be a direct competitor; secondarily, loss of anonymity overall.)

One interesting approach might be some kind of bond -- ideally with a ZK proof of ownership/control, and where the bond amount is at risk in the case of abuse, but it's not linked to identity.

</comment><comment><USER36> The tiniest mouse movements I make while tabbing to the checkbox and hitting my spacebar to check it? Or tap it on my touch screen? And why wouldn't this be vulnerable to replaying a real user's input--collected on, say, a "free" pornographic website? Their answer seems to be "security through obscurity".

<comment><USER37> "Security through obscurity" is a weak concept, however the goal here is not security but fraud detection.

Obscurity is a legitimate component of a fraud detection system, for the same reason that hiding your cards is an important part (but only a part!) of being a good poker player.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wish they would explain more about how the user interacts with the whole reCAPTCHA leads them to know it's a person and not a robot, but maybe they're worried about people writing bots to get around their protections.

<comment><USER39> > However, CAPTCHAs aren't going away just yet. In cases when the risk > analysis engine can't confidently predict whether a user is a human or an > abusive agent, it will prompt a CAPTCHA to elicit more cues, increasing the > number of security checkpoints to confirm the user is valid.

Probably using a combination of G+ and GA to check your 'history' to see the activity is like a normal human. Visits a couple news sites each day, checks their gmail, searches for random crap randomly, GA registered a 'conversion' for some company = probably a human

<comment><USER40> I was thinking they may be looking at how long it takes for a user to click the "I'm not a robot" link. A robot would probably load the page and quickly, without delay, send the HTTP POST but I have to imagine they thought of this already and bots writers would quickly add a sleep() call in there at some point... Yea, I wonder about their internal logic too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In regards to the video, I feel like it has become a cliche to have upbeat, light ukelele music in the background for product demonstration videos. I instantly felt myself become annoyed when the music started.

<comment><USER42> And some unison whistling at the end to complete the cliche. Weird they would even have a video for something like this, leading me to be more suspicious of the mechanisms and data they are using behind the scenes to make this work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a misleading headline. Google will now look at your mouse movement but really be scanning to see if they've been tracking you across the web. Anybody who is is concerned enough about privacy to block/clean cookies will be assumed to be a non-human.

<comment><USER43> And then you'll do a captcha like they would have you done previously. So either you're status quo, or you get an improved experience if you're in the vast majority that don't do anything other than non-default. What's wrong with that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's interesting that the adversarial nature of internet security is "breeding" an adversarial AI. Inevitably, people will start working on AI to beat this new captcha. I think in terms of parallels to biological evolution, security/fraud AI has the greatest evolutionary force behind it. Fun and scary to think where this particular breed of AI will lead.

</comment><comment><USER45> I always assumed Google's use of reCAPTCHA was to augment the OCR used to digitize Google Books, particularly in results the software couldn't confidently match to a word. Is this true? It's interesting that it's still the fallback for the new method.

<comment><USER46> That was the original idea behind reCAPTCHA (which originated outside of Google, acquired in 2009), but my understanding is that they long ago ran out of actual text that needed human OCR'ing, and/or found other reasons that approach no longer was helpful.

The "help OCR while also spam protecting" thing isn't currently mentioned on Google's recaptcha product page.

<comment><USER47> It is:

> Creation of Value

> Stop a bot. Save a book.

> reCAPTCHA digitizes books by turning words that cannot be read by computers > into CAPTCHAs for people to solve. Word by word, a book is digitized and > preserved online for people to find and read.

[https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html#creation-o...](https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html#creation- of-value)

<comment><USER46> Good catch.

I wonder where i heard/got the impression that it wasn't really being used for this much anymore. Maybe from when most of the recaptchas most of us saw switched from scanned books to google street view photo crops. And I was also surprised by the implication that google's algorithms really needed human help for visual recognition of almost exclusively strings of 0-9. I would have thought that would be a pretty well solved problem.

Anyway, somehow I got the idea that recaptcha wasn't actually providing much OCR help anymore, but maybe I just made that up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Those computer-vision challenges mentioned in the blog post aren't 100% clear. For the first one, my eyes went directly to the cranberry sauce, and I thought to myself "Wait... is that one supposed to be clicked, too?"

<comment><USER49> I thought it was unclear too for a different reason - the text says "that match this one" which I read as being actual identical matches. Sure it's obvious when you see the images but that wording feels really awkward.

<comment><USER50> Same, my first thought was to look for the identical cat photo, or maybe the same cat from a different angle, not just other cats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> don't know if this works only for me but here is a live example - [https://www.google.com/cbk?cb_client=maps_sv.tactile&output=...](https://www.google.com/cbk?cb_client=maps_sv.tactile&output=report&photosource=panoramio&photoid=&cid=RoMfLbw- sME)

<comment><USER52> It gives me the new version as well, but it seems google is convinced that I am a bot. Getting a regular captcha after clicking the button and I have to say that this is a lot worse of an experience than regular old captchas. Now I have to wait for a few seconds after clicking a button, then still solve a captcha.

Hopefully it gets better with time.

<comment><USER53> Try this one:

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

It's very similar. I might go as far as saying that Google copied them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I've been blocking third-party cookies for a while, and I noticed that I only get the old, hard to read, captchas, instead of the easier version with numbers.

Too bad this new version won't work for me either.

</comment><comment><USER55> Obligatory XKCD: [http://xkcd.com/810/](http://xkcd.com/810/)

</comment><comment><USER56> I just hope it also works for pen-tablets, where the "pointer" can suddenly jump from one location to the next when the pen comes near the surface of the tablet.

<comment><USER57> That and what about those who fill their form with tab navigation ? No mouse involved here. It is just showing off ...

<comment><USER58> I just tried the one ins0 linked above, and tabbing through, using space to select the checkbox, worked fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's definitely not mouse based. I tried it in an incognito tab and it showed me the old form when I clicked the checkbox.

<comment><USER59> On what page did you tested the new system?

<comment><USER17> Here you go: [https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo](https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo)

<comment><USER60> 1\. Tested on my normal chrome where I didn't delete any cookies and logged in to my google accounts, and no adblocker running. So plenty of evidence I'm human, with all those cookies from big G.

2\. Tested in incognito mode: BAAM: I'm a bot, had to fill out the old captcha!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> This not even close to a Turing test.

I thought Wired was supposed to be a tech site.

<comment><USER62> Wired has been slowly moving from being a tech site to a clickbait/sensationalism site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I suspect there is no theoretically perfect solution to CAPTCHA. Bot must get good at emulating user and software must get better at identified users. None of our interaction with computer are non-emulatable so the war would be indefinitely ongoing.

But what we can do is to make it expensive for bot to emulate user. One way to do this is creating ID system which requires some form of payment and thus creating an ID and expensive proposition. For example, Amazon can make their user account as open ID for logins and provide the target system a flag IsVerifiedPurchaser. Payments don't have be strickly in direct monetary forms also. For example, Facebook can estimate ad revenue generated by an user so far and provide some flag as to whether user is active and trustable as not being a bot.

</comment><comment><USER64> It's based on Google account. There might be other vectors too. I tried browsing lots of pages in incognito, making Google searches, clicking ads etc. but that didn't help (might work in long term). Signing into my Google account (with history) was enough to pass the test.

</comment><comment><USER65> How long before you will have to answer a series of annoying and difficult questions if you _don 't_ allow tracking cookies and google to collect personal information (which I assume the far majority of users allow on a regular basis)? Not sure how I feel about this.

<comment><USER66> If they create services that you want to use so badly, they can charge you whatever they want for them. If you don't want to pay, I'm sure Bing will be happy to have you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I suddenly became extremely conscious of how I was moving my mouse for the duration of that article.

</comment><comment><USER68> Tangential: From a philosophical perspective, I wonder if notion of asking human beings if they are robots, will soon escape the space we consider virtual? In sci-fi (which more or less informs the masses not involved in such fields and have more sway over public opinion than say HN or LW), the premise focused on is that people seemed more concerned with asking robots/automata if they are human. I'm starting to wonder if such questions will become moot.

Though, I wonder if you can start to defeat such systems by slurping up headers sent on public networks (like coffee shops, public wi-fi in large cities, airports, etc) and with techniques like ssl striping, to obtain local- storage info being sent in the body.

</comment><comment><USER69> _> in the last week, more than 60% of WordPress' traffic and more than 80% of Humble Bundle's traffic on reCAPTCHA encountered the No CAPTCHA experience—users got to these sites faster._

Does this mean WordPress saw an 60% decrease in traffic from bots?

<comment><USER70> It still shows a CAPTCHA if it's not sure that you're a human or a bot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> The old recaptcha takes good sites and gives them terrible user experience. I tried to order tickets one time on ticketmaster and actually gave up because I couldn't get past the captcha. I hate current captchas with a passion and I hope they finally die. I understand fighting spam but when it completely ruins a user experience it's not worth it.

edit: Bury me with no explanation why? Please don't tell me you think the UX of using recaptcha is great. I'm a 28 year old dev with near perfect eyesight and It takes me several tries to get these right. They are horrible. I welcome this new change and hope it isn't easily cracked.

<comment><USER72> "Bury me with no explanation why?" \-- because your comment has only the most tangential relation to the linked article.

Downvotes are supposed to penalize _uninteresting_ posts, not just _wrong_ posts. No one likes captchas, and everyone has had shitty experiences with them. Your comment adds nothing to the discussion, doubly so since you're complaining about a type of captcha that has just been replaced!

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Hmmmm. Nice move Google. But I also remember that a machine passed the Turing test. And I don't like the sound of these two news together. Not because I'm worried about you, but because I'm worried about the websites I run as a dev.

Moreover, I'm not sure if most people know this, but reCaptcha was supposed to be converting ancient text to digital text[I read that once on quora, I'm not really sure if it's entirely true, but I guess it is]. So now, I can be less proud of not contributing to conversion of ancient texts to digital books.

And, I'd love you if you make the thing open-source, Google...

<comment><USER74> ha yeah that was definitely the original purpose/project of reCAPTCHA.... but I think shortly after the google purchase, the AI got so good at reading garbled ancient texts that G allowed it to move on to other things..like house numbers.

<comment><USER75> House numbers are actually the easier version, you got them if reCAPTCHA already knew you're probably human. After screwing it up a few times, it punts you back into the general category and you get two words again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I feel like there is a lot of discussion on whether its okay for Google to have this information or not, but truthfully if you don't want them having this info then don't use their services. Its that simple.

</comment><comment><USER77> It rise privacy concern for me.

If real name and email validation is mandatory, I will wonder what Google will use that data for. Is that some kind of monitor tool which want to know REAL NAME, EMAIL ADDR whenever you want to use a website?

Don't forget Google always beg for your telephone number for "security reasons", Google+ wants your real name for "Policy reason", I upgraded one of my Nexus to Android L, and everything I do has to sign in: some game(Botanicula for instant) work fine without internet in Android 4.4.4 but requires internet signin in Android L.

<comment><USER78> Where are you seeing mandatory real name and email validation?

<comment><USER79> In the video the user has to type in their first and last name, and an email address.

I have to assume there is a confirmation email, otherwise what's the point in asking for an email address?

<comment><USER80> I believe that the video was just showing an example of a form on which a CAPTCHA would appear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Why would you care whether a user is a robot? Surely whether the actions of that user are desirable or not is determined solely by those actions and not whether the thing performing the actions is a human or a robot. It seems like a better idea to disallow bad actions than to disallow robots. There are also people farms who solve captchas (e.g. via porn sites who ask you to solve a captcha which they then input to another site, or by paying people $1 to solve X thousand capchas).

<comment><USER82> Robots don't buy stuff. Their actions by definition are undesirable from the service provider's standpoint.

<comment><USER81> Then limit the access of everyone who does not buy stuff to X requests per minute?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Do they even need the checkbox anymore? They could track mouse movement, keypresses, history or whatever else they are tracking without showing any kind of GUI at all.

<comment><USER22> How do you track mouse movement on a tablet?

<comment><USER47> You could track other things like window scrolling or the focusing of other form inputs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Sorry if the article mentioned it (i only read the first few paragraphs) but looking at the cat click, that looks like a great way to generate training data for AI.

<comment><USER84> This is exactly what the previous implementation was as well. The "words" you had to recognize were either scanned from Google Books, or house numbers from StreetView, effectively enhancing their OCR training set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I always liked the captcha's that asked simple questions or told you what to type. Sites that used what is 1+3 or type the number four into the box below.

Is there really a system once employed that coders won't overcome in days? Do we need a trusted user system, where the machine registered at a central site and that can be queried by the commerce site? Recognition of the consumer machine through combination of mac/ip range/provider

</comment><comment><USER86> This will greatly help them with bettering their CV classification algorithms. The kitty picture matching question is a great example.

</comment><comment><USER87> Maybe I am getting ahead of myself but this seems to have huge potentials and is actually quite interesting from a whole other perspective.

If a machine can determine you are human what if it learns your unique patterns? Couldn't it then be used to determine you are you?

And couldn't this solve the problem of identity?

In the bitcoin world, what if you could use this to log into your bitcoin wallet?

</comment><comment><USER88> Think of Captcha as the first battle in humanity's fight against AI. Over the long term this problem has no solution.

<comment><USER89> Except by answering captchas, you're helping the machines (first words for books, then numbers for street view, now pictures for classification).

<comment><USER90> That's an interesting thought that every time we introduce novel classification schemes to resolve humans from computers we feed a large training set for them.

I never understood how that works, though. If I get a captcha street address wrong then that means they already had the answer, so how am I contributing?

<comment><USER91> For the street address ones you generally have to answer two questions, one that they know and one that they don't know. You're only 'tested' on one of them, but you don't know which. Once enough people have gotten the known one right and given the same answer to the unknown image they move the unknown image to the known pile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I wonder if they've taken into account people with movement disabilities such as multiple sclerosis or parkinsonism. Then again, the previous recaptcha techniques would be somewhat discriminatory against those with visual or auditory difficulties as well so they've had to think of this already

</comment><comment><USER93> There's practically no documentation for this. They have "examples" for many languages, but they're so sparse as to be useless. I don't have time to crawl through their code. I'm going to wait a few months before implementing this to see what questions pop up on the blogs.

</comment><comment><USER94> It seems like they're using cursor tracking to validate human-ness. Assuming thats the case: Since the cursor is outside of javascript's control, it would force the attacker one level higher (to the browser/os, instead of the dom). Not impossible, but still a significant barrier.

<comment><USER95> Not really, you would just need to reverse the js code, look at what data they actually send to google and randomly generate appropriate data like mouse movements.

<comment><USER94> Ah, good point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> > Google also will use other variables that it is keeping secret—revealing > them, he says, would help botmasters improve their software and undermine > Google's filters

I'm pretty sure that looking at the javascript calls will tell what "variables" they use, with browser agent, ip, cookies.

</comment><comment><USER97> I had my own simple 'captcha' on my site (since recaptcha could be annoying), but now I added recaptcha since it looks like it will be easier on users.

You just need to query recaptcha's service and check if the json string they return contains "success\": true".

</comment><comment><USER98> So how does it work?

<comment><USER99> Google collects all your data and applies machine learning to predict a probability value that you are human. If it is below a certain threshold you have to enter a CAPTCHA.

<comment><USER100> The question was more about on how the new captcha works, I guess.

<comment><USER99> The old system presented you a challenge-response test no matter what.

<comment><USER100> Sorry, I just thought "all your data" was a bit unspecific. I have no idea what Google collects in order to derive that. I have a lot of guesses, but "all your data" doesn't tell me in fact, how it works. And I thinks that was what the parent poster asked for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> The image captcha looks nearly identical to Confident Captcha: [http://confidenttechnologies.com/products/confident- captcha/](http://confidenttechnologies.com/products/confident-captcha/) (formerly Vidoop).

</comment><comment><USER102> Robot testing if user is not a robot.

Now that it knows how to detect humans, one day we'll all laugh when we read the news that Google can't log in to their own administration systems, because an AI security algorithm evolved the decision to lock out human beings.

</comment><comment><USER103> I'm concerned this will just ban people using obscure browsers, blocking javascript and cookies, and just behaving in non-typical ways.

Fortunately I rarely encounter CAPTCHAs outside of creating an account, and I can just do that through a different browser.

</comment><comment><USER104> Challenge Accepted!

</comment><comment><USER105> I feel like if anything this would just add some time to bots plowing through these so their web scrapers can move in gentle curves and whatnot to simulate a human. These don't appear to be that far off from being broken.

<comment><USER66> Forcing bots to slow down their interaction with online services to human speeds would still reduce spam by a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> I wrote my thoughts on this protection [http://homakov.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-no-captcha- problem.h...](http://homakov.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-no-captcha-problem.html)

</comment><comment><USER107> This is great news! I really really really hate the normal Captcha's.

It has a nice property: To combat spam, Google can tweak this as often as they like without bothering the users of a website or the devs running it.

</comment><comment><USER108> Anyone know where the documentation for the "old" recaptcha has gone?

How long can we continue to use the "old" way?

Seems like google want everyone to use this "new" method, which i am not so sure about yet

<comment><USER109> Here you are: [https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/old/intro](https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/old/intro)

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> Does this remind anyone of SweetCaptcha? [1] The image match games aren't new. Is one better than the other?

[1] [http://sweetcaptcha.com/](http://sweetcaptcha.com/)

</comment><comment><USER111> Here is a video introducing the no CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwslDn3ImM0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwslDn3ImM0)

<comment><USER13> If I had only seen that video, I would think this was an April Fool's joke. I then read the article and was relieved to hear there is a little more than this. Perhaps I'm just being pessimistic, but I feel like this only raises the bar a little. I would expect checks it does of mouse movements or headers to be spoofable quite quickly after introduction. I think the best measure mentioned is tracking which IPs are bots, but that's still going to have serious shortcomings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> I don't understand how this can't be spoofed. I can only see how it'll slow a bot down, and maybe reduce the number of accounts it can create/commandeer.

<comment><USER47> As long as it behaves like a human, what difference does it make if it's actually a really sophisticated bot?

<comment><USER112> That brings me back to "why are we trying to prevent bots?" And I'm under the impression that we want to prevent automated spamming of $web_community_resourse. So to answer your question, it makes a difference because once the really sophisticated bot is in, it starts spamming up the place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> Am I Robot by Goodnight Electric is awesome [http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=78nGkD3-0kU](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=78nGkD3-0kU)

</comment><comment><USER114> Did anybody notice that they killed the email obfuscation service? It made possible to share publicly your email, which was getting revealed with reCAPTCHA.

</comment><comment><USER115> I wonder how long it will take for black-hat hackers to crack this. I imagine that it will be very difficult to crack, but it seems inevitable to me.

</comment><comment><USER116> One day we are going to have thinking, feeling robots and all this prejudice against them is going to haunt us.

Seriously though, this is a great improvement.

</comment><comment><USER117> Is there a page where we can test out these new captchas? I'm curious about how they work in the wild, and this post only shows gifs.

</comment><comment><USER118> Isn't that like a reverse touring test? The machine has to guess if I am human and not I have to guess if I am talking to a machine.

</comment><comment> why-el Is there any published research on this? I am interested to learn about these risk analysis techniques they are talking about.

</comment><comment><USER119> If a bot just makes more random mouse movements of varied speeds, and takes a bit longer, won't it appear human?

<comment> iso8859-1 The bot probably has too much or too little mail in it's Gmail inbox, or maybe its is not many Google+ circles of confirmed authentic humans. Maybe the bot has not been using Google Chrome for a very long time, so its browsing patterns may still seem incoherent. This socially disconnected bot is abnormal; it doesn't fit into society. It deserves punishment; we'll make it click pictures of cats. Once it gets enough friends on Google+, we'll cut it some slack.

<comment><USER27> I posted this multiple times in this thread already, but I tried it with a Google Account that has a fake name, hasn't been used for over 2 years, has received nor sent any emails since then, is in only one Google+ circle, and was only ever used from Firefox.

And it passed the test. While trying it from within a Java client toolkit.

Like, I took the worst setup any spammer would have, and it passed.

How is this going to protect my sites from spammers? And on the other hand, am I even allowed to embed this into my site, if I am in the EU (Data protection, etc)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> Isn't that like a reversed touring test? The machine has to guess if I am human and not if I talk to a machine.

</comment><comment><USER120> I can not find any documentation about how to put in the new reCAPTCHA if you already using their older version...

<comment><USER121> I'm fairly certain that it doesn't require you to change anything, it will just start working. You must be a bot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER122> What am I missing? Breaking this looks much easier than a regular captcha...

This is the sort of problem that genetic algorithms are well suited for (a small, well defined input domain with a binary oracle). You'd simply generate a random path, run a smoothing function over it, see if that works, then iterate.

edit: does anyone know a site that is actually using this new widget? I only seem to be finding the older version... :/

<comment><USER123> You're missing the fact that they're relying on many cues, not just mouse movement. I don't think they're even discolosing everything they use.

<comment><USER122> You're missing the fact that they went from something that is quite difficult to get a program to do (essentially an AI complete task) to one that's _not_ AI complete.

It doesn't really matter how many non-AI complete components they are measuring... without at least one AI complete task, they removed the thing that makes CAPTCHAs work.

<comment><USER123> Except distorted text reading is not hard for AI anymore, and all "AI- complete" tasks, whatever that means, are pretty much broken nowadays.

So where left with a very hard problem, and their best solution so far seems to be security through obscurity with a bunch of non-disclosed "cues". Not great, but I guess it's hard to come up with anything better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> I really wish they hadn't botched this through use of the first-person pronoun.

"I'm not a robot" no, computer, you sort of are

</comment><comment><USER125> [Irony] Isn't "bot detection" a small problem related to "human tracking"??

</comment><comment><USER126> I noticed this a while ago when the Humble Bundle switched. I was able to break it with PhantomJS.

<comment><USER127> What do you mean by "break"?

<comment><USER126> Passing the captcha through an entirely automated procedure.

<comment><USER128> In bulk? It's not supposed to stop real users from using a bit of scripting.

<comment><USER26> It kind of is, actually. Cloudflare, for example, uses a single CAPTCHA to prevent ongoing DDoS attacks. If they switched to this new reCAPTCHA and if a DDoSer can use Selenium to get past the challenge, then the CAPTCHA process has failed.

There are always tradeoffs with this. I strongly suspect Google is going to have to restrict it within a year or so, resulting in the number of users who still have to solve CAPTCHAs closer to 10-20%.

<comment><USER128> 'a bit' being key. It's not like a DDoSer can't already solve captchas for three minutes if that's the only protection.

<comment><USER26> The work still has to be done manually in those cases, though, whether they type it themselves or rent use of a captcha farm.

<comment><USER128> In most scenarios you only have to solve one captcha. Those are not going to be significantly affected, since the manual work is minimal. It will provide a multiplier on traffic in the case that a captcha is needed for every single action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> So if the risk analysis fails I'll get to see a captcha PLUS the new cool check box !, nice.

</comment><comment><USER130> Let's make Captcha mobile friendly by having the client download MBs of useless pictures...

</comment><comment><USER99> I could imagine that this system could still be tricked with a Markov chain and some dedication.

</comment><comment><USER131> This looks like a very clever way to train machine learning algorithms on image recognition.

</comment><comment><USER132> Perhaps Google will be using this to train a more broader purposed image recognition AI

<comment><USER133> Yes exactly... the whole concept of their original captcha came from fixing OCR where the text was distorted. ie put armies of unsuspecting individuals across the globe to work to help their ability to digitize text content into something more searchable.

So, no surprise, same thing is going on here. It's much less about security than it is about deriving value from the solved image matches.

</comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk It seems plausible that as more sites adopt this kind of technology, automated web access (e.g. scraping) the web will become harder -- for whatever purpose, good or ill. This has long been an "arms race" between hiding and detection. I can hope that reasonable uses of automation still remain feasible.

<comment><USER134> You're welcome as long as you're respectful.

Just use a bot with a clear User Agent, not "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 7_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/36.0.1985.57 Mobile/11D257 Safari/9537.53". And, don't forget to start by reading my /robots.txt. If you behave yourself and abide by the rules, why should I ban your bot?

If for whatever reason I don't want to allow your bot in, you might still try and contact me to ask, and perhaps I could arrange for your bot to scrape my site.

Automated web access _to my site_ must obey _my rules_ because you're using _my bandwidth_ and resources.

<comment> dj-wonk This comment seems like a non-sequitur. My comment had nothing to do with a particular site, much less "your" site.

I was making a general comment about automation and detection. If the detection gets better than the automation, it could change the dynamic. There is no fixed rule that says that content providers will or will not allow scraping based on robots.txt or other guidelines. Some could elect to disallow any/all robot behavior, if they have the capability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> Now bots will have to up their game and really become human level agents. #evolution

</comment><comment><USER136> Given that I use keyboard to navigate, I'd qualify as bot easily.

</comment><comment> mr-no Where are you supposed to click if you're a robot?

</comment><comment><USER137> And what about people with motor-neural conditions?

<comment><USER138> I think worst case scenario is that they get what they have today (solve a captcha style problem).

Con: They _will_ have an additional click. Pro: They might get a more solvable puzzle than some of the "read this distorted text" images they would see today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER139> Hi all, if you want to give it a try, I've just added it to the MaterialUp submission form.

[http://www.materialup.com/submit](http://www.materialup.com/submit)

</comment><comment><USER140> will GUI automation tools be able to surpass this?

<comment><USER141> It probably uses a LOT more info than only the mouse move/mouse click. Remember, google tracking is embedded in probably 99% of websites you visit so from your ip, cookies, tracking, logged in Google profile, etc... they're able to know if you're a human or not.

<comment><USER47> So if I don't have a Google account or allow their cookies in other sites then I'm not a human anymore?

<comment><USER142> Nothing as dramatic : if you don't have a strong Google footprint, it is less likely that the system will recognize you automatically as human, and you'll have to answer the picture question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER143> So we're actually training users to behave like what Google's behaviour model assumes to be the behaviour of humas. Because then they won't get annoying captchas.

</comment><comment><USER144> I'm still more impressed by sites like [http://www.funcaptcha.co/try- it/](http://www.funcaptcha.co/try-it/)

Why have they not caught on?

<comment><USER80> This CAPTCHA is "fun" the way that fun-size candy bars are fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER145> Oh, so just program bots to provide a mouse movement toward a form element along a distorted path, and always trigger them through the UI rather than as events. Got it!

<comment><USER146> Yeah, good luck with that.

<comment><USER147> [http://phantomjs.org/](http://phantomjs.org/) makes this easy enough to do.

<comment><USER146> You seem to be assuming Google doesn't know of PhantomJS and many other automation frameworks. In fact, I personally wrote some of the code to detect them - not in ReCaptcha, but in a closely related project (which ReCaptcha may be using, even...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER148> The death of Lord Inglip.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is it keyboard friendly?

<comment><USER99> You can try it out here: [https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo](https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo)

If you are a recognized as human you could perhaps try it via Tor.

<comment><USER149> I wish these google pages wouldn't automatically assume you speak some language based on your IP address - I get mine in German without any option to switch. Aren't there standards for setting language in web browsers?

<comment><USER47> Your browser sends an "Accept-Language" header with the list of languages and order of preference you have configured.

<comment><USER150> Sure, but many sites including Google like to ignore these (or at least have done so in the past).

The rationalisation is that users don't change settings like these, so their location is a better indicator than what their browser thinks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER151> Equally as annoying.

</comment><comment><USER152> How does this work?

</comment><comment><USER153> kjh kh khk hkjhkj

</comment><comment><USER153> kjhkj hkj

</comment><comment><USER154> fuck

</comment><comment><USER155> Because ... Google.

</comment><comment><USER156> Just give us your full name. How is this better?

They might already have my name but not in an incognito window. But they want it, obviously.

</comment><comment><USER156> We can run robots to act on our behalf, but you can't. We can build and leverage AI, but you can't. Seems like that is where this is going.</comment>


Google Ideas - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/ideas/ <comment><USER3> Can someone please summarize what the hell this is supposed to be? Sure, DDOS attacks, hacking, etc are bad. What else, exactly, am I supposed to pull away from this horribly designed site?

<comment><USER4> > Google Ideas builds products to support free expression and access to > information for people who need it most — those facing violence and > harassment.

> Google Ideas is a team of engineers, researchers and geopolitical experts > who build products to support free expression and access to information, > especially in repressive societies. We focus on the problems faced by people > who live in unstable, isolated, or oppressive environments, including the > billions of people who are coming online for the first time.

> With the right tools, we can make the internet more free and open. Many of > us take the internet for granted, but for human rights activists, > journalists, and artists living under censorship, a free and open internet > can be a matter of life and death.

<comment><USER5> Google is such a strange company. Don't they participate in the suppression of free expression in places like China, justifying it as a cost of doing business?

edit: in an effort to not spread bad information, I'd like to retract my statement. It was based on outdated information.

<comment><USER6> This reality of the censorship appears to be well documented[1], and I don't think it's quite as simple as that. Here's the TL;DR

Google filtered terms the Chinese government required (by law), but did so by returning results saying that some items were filtered out specifically so users would know their results were filtered. Google never gave any information on who searched specific terms, but after some attacks on their servers in an apparent attempt to get this information, Google announced they would no longer filter searches for China. Talks on how to accomplish this broke down, and Google redirected their China site to Hong Kong, which has no censorship restrictions, but the Great Firewall seems to be filtering results.

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#China](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#China)

<comment><USER7> They stopped the redirect[1] and now just show a link to Google Hong Kong.

They also removed the warning that the user's search results were being filtered [2].

To the best of my knowledge, the current status: User visits Google China - [http://google.cn](http://google.cn) \- This is a hyperlink to Google Hong Kong on the front page \- IF user searches via Google.cn, the search results will be filtered by China not self-censored by Google. They will NOT be presented with a warning anymore. \- IF user searches via Google.hk, from mainland china, the same thing will happen and the results will still be filtered. [3]

At this point, I don't believe the link to .hk Google serves as much use as it does a political statement.

[1] "Google stops Hong Kong auto-redirect as China plays hardball" [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/google- tweak...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/google-tweaks-china- to-hong-kong-redirect-same-results.ars)

[2] "Google's dropped anti-censorship warning marks quiet defeat in China" [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/04/google- def...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/04/google-defeat-china- censorship-battle)

[3] "China censors searches on Google's Hong Kong-based search engine" [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/03/23/AR2010032301250.html)

<comment><USER6> I agree, I think their original stance, showing results and noting where they had to filter, was much better. But if that makes them a target, and can reverse and good they think they are doing if they are hacked by China and any identifying information (correlation with the Great Firewall seems likely) is found, I can see their reasoning. If you truly want to do the right thing, is making yourself a target that makes the situation worse the right way to go about it? It's a complex situation, and there's probably lots of information that we aren't privy to. At least it got press and there was some awareness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google's designers have totally lost it, just try scrolling on this page without getting dizzy:

[https://www.google.com/ideas/products/](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/)

The page looks so nice but then they proceed to destroy usability with bizarre navigation schemes and breaking nearly every common design pattern - <USER2> is just one of them.

<comment><USER9> For me it scrolls ridiculously slowly. And they broke the side scroll bar and arrow keys, so I have spin the mouse wheel a ton to get it to move at all.

I don't see what the point of breaking scrolling is.

<comment><USER10> In OsX + Chrome it works perfectly with the trackpad. They might have only tested this on a limited number of browsers/OSes ?

<comment><USER11> Unusable on OS X + Firefox. Definitely didn't test on other browsers.

<comment><USER12> Also unusable on Linux + Firefox.

<comment><USER13> It's broken on Windows + Firefox as well. Works fine in IE though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Julian Assange believes that "Google Ideas" is, amongst other things, a channel for Google to get involved in geopolitics while maintaing political cover and distance - and Google Ideas often engages in surreptitious actions in concert with the US government. [http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google- not-what-it-seems-279...](http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it- seems-279447)

IMO, anything Assange say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But then again, the same holds for Google PR.

<comment><USER15> Julian Assange is perfectly right in this case.

Google is already very involved in geopolitics.

Google Ideas is a way to protect US investments in culture export "civil society" apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does Google have a team working round the clock to develop the most annoying webpages possible? For as many "cool wow amazing" CSS tricks as this site uses, it doesn't do a good job of explaining what it is at all. And what's up with the products page? Why does it scroll so slowly?

<comment><USER17> I was hoping to learn more about the project too but they broke scrolling on that "wheel of content" thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Having a decentralized forum/chat/data system would be really awesome, even if that might be against google's interests. I really want the future to have more p2p systems.

There was edonkey, then bittorent, then the cloud, then git, then bittorrent sync...

I don't understand why systems like freenet and bitmessage have not taken off. The internet was built for p2p, but it's still mostly used as a broadcast system where everything is centralized.

Why isn't google trying to fund those projects ? Because they re so much invested in the web of HTML content they can't look eitherway.

<comment><USER19> I had a rant about this on Twitter yesterday[0].

Google makes money precisely because the web is centralised. If we moved to P2P systems they could still provide an index, but I'd wager far less data would ultimately pass through them. Not to mention that if people were more in control of their data rather than LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, I bet they'd be less inclined to having it indexed publically simply because they have a choice.

There's all sorts of network effects and shitty incentives at play, and it's a shame.

My twitter rant (not the whole thing even)

> though they have their place, centralised systems reinforce the role of the > middle man, which is prime for rent-seeking and lopsided value

> in reality networks exist on a continuum between centralised/decentralised. > The web makes it difficult to choose the correct degree per case

> both centralised and decentralised systems have trust issues, but they are > different in kind not magnitude

> the incentives are wrong for innovation. Google requires centralised, so > HTTP is fine. Ubiquity, so HTML is fine

> web developers have spent years becoming skilled in their corner and are > incentivised to defend and perpetuate the platform

> if you think discoverability, zero-install and sandboxes are only possible > on the web, I invite you to consult the literature

> we could have decentralised, secure, simple, efficient primitives, but > network effects and incentives steer us away

> tech solutions are moot unless they incentivise behaviour that leads to > better returns for everyone. layers on HTML/HTTP will never do that

[0] [https://twitter.com/benkant](https://twitter.com/benkant)

<comment><USER6> In what way do you think the web is centralized?

<comment><USER20> That's a good question which deserves an honest answer but this comment box is really too small for that and essay sized comments are frowned upon.

For starters: navigating the web in the beginning consisted of clicking links which caused you to go from one website to another. This all worked well when (a) the web was small and (b) there were (hardly) no trash pages.

Search engines changed that, and once they got 'good enough' the link graph became a mere starting point for crawling the web rather than the way we navigated from site to site. For a little while the link graph was used as a popularity measurement but this too changed (because of the huge number of low value links).

Then we got silos. A 'silo' is a bunch of data locked up under a trade between users and large web properties. The trade is 'you give us your content and a bunch of information about yourself and we'll use that content to attract others and to sell ads'.

Examples of such silos are Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

Finally, if originally (and the internet itself) was strung together by a peer-to-peer approach it turned more and more into a division between producers and consumers, with the producers on the 'server' side and the consumers on the 'client' side.

Mobile devices accessing the net further accelerated this trend, right now the only internet (not web) applications that are still peer-to-peer are torrent applications. For the most part the division on the web is complete and hosting a web server on your very powerful cable modem or DSL line would be grounds for termination of your access.

Servers are hosted centrally and are operated by companies whereas clients are simply terminals that access the content stored on those servers.

I hope that answers your question in enough detail, you could easily write a book about this.

<comment><USER6> The internet is, by it's nature, peer to peer and decentralized. Cut a cable, or take out a large networks, the internet will route around it, either quickly (routes converging on a new peer) or slowly (a poorly connected network finding a new upstream to purchase connectivity through). That companies then build on top of this and implement services where they are the middle of both connections does not change this fundamentally, it just adds an optional layer. To assume our connections have upstream bandwidth that is never or rarely used is false. I would argue that we generate more content per-person than ever in history. The seer amount of pictures, videos, webcams, posts and comments is much higher than ever before. Are they hosting it directly from their connections? Usually not, but that's as much a case of being efficient and reaching an audience as it is in companies wanting control over the data. Even then, there are services which are decentralized from that, such as email. It's not efficient to host content yourself. Even the large networks use dedicated CDNs. For the end user, Facebook is a CDN.

That said, I agree there is a clear move towards our data and services being handled by fewer, and larger entities, such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. But they aren't a single entity, and I don't consider that centralized. Any one of those providers could implode today, and very little of their services could not be picked up by some competitor easily. I don't consider that centralized.

<comment><USER20> We call them datacenters for a reason. When I received mail in '95 or so the machine receiving it was the workstation I wrote the reply on.

Your peer-to-peer view of the internet died roughly in '98.

<comment><USER6> > We call them datacenters for a reason.

And there are many of them, some owned by companies that use them exclusively, some conglomerations of many different providers but owned by yet another party. How is this centralization? I still think you're just arguing that we've compartmentalized certain services to _sets_ of companies, for the most part, but even that isn't centralization, because there are multiple distinct companies using multiple distinct networks and in many cases they are presenting multiple distinct capabilities. Not having something handled at the end point does not mean it's centralized, there's a very large middle ground here, and that's where we are currently at. I'm not sure I see any evidence that we are moving away from that towards actual centralization.

> When I received mail in '95 or so the machine receiving it was the > workstation I wrote the reply on.

And many people that used POP3 continued to do so well into the 2000's. It's silly to run a mail server on your workstation. I know, I did it for years myself. You run into all sorts of stupid problems related to your workstation not being always on, badly configured backup MX servers, and other issues. We don't do it anymore not because we were forced out of it (you can still do it now), but because there are solutions that are better for most use cases, and we opt for those.

We don't all wash our own cars, or do our own plumbing, or even clean our own houses. Some people do, some people pay others to do that work. The fact they pay others doesn't mean we've moved towards centralizing those services. There isn't some national bureau of plumbing that is our only recourse when the toilet is clogged and we don't want to fix it ourselves.

<comment><USER20> Ok. So you say we're not trending towards a more centralized internet because you discard all proof that that is exactly what is happening. That's fine with me but it really doesn't help to move the discussion forward.

The _reasons_ why we are moving to a more centralized internet are what is interesting, such as - you rightly identified those - that stuff isn't always powered up and that keeping a mailserver up and running is work and so on.

But none of that changes that centralization is happening.

Multiple distinct companies != peer-to-peer internet. That's what a decentralized network infrastructure used to mean, where the 'peers' were equals.

Nowadays it means clients in one camp and servers in another, and large scale consolidation of those servers in the datawarehouses of a relatively low number of companies serving up the bulk of the data. If that trend continues it's not a bad or a good thing per-se but it would be good to stop and think about how desirable that is.

So from that point of view a lot of centralization has already happened.

Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming they can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any technical reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all your content (or google, or Yahoo).

In the end, convenience won over 'peer-to-peer', there are many reasons besides convenience (firewalls, for one) but the results are here and we'll have to live with it (except for a couple of die-hard hold-outs).

<comment><USER6> What I've tried to make clear, and either failed in or you disagree with this as well, is that I don't think saying we are "centralizing" or moving towards a "centralized" internet is correct, largely because that implies we are approaching, or event still moving towards, the end-point of that spectrum, which is _centralization_ , and that implies a single authority.

I think it is correct to say we are, or at least _were_ , decentralizing, _to a degree_. I think it's correct to say that we are not fully decentralized, which we were close to initially, but I don't think it's entirely constructive to say we are moving in a direction that leads to a centralized internet, and what that implies (a single authority, even if for a single service). I think we are moving towards, or have arrived at, what we see in many markets. Large dominant players that the majority use, but with a large market of smaller players that provide for the niche needs. Take the automotive industry, for example.

I think we are largely arguing over semantics, which is something I don't want to do, but at the same time it's hard to be sure I'm not just reducing your arguments to the point there's no difference and ignoring important points at the same time.

> But none of that changes that centralization is happening.

I think it's cyclical, and there will be periods where we move along the spectrum back and forth, but I doubt we'll get as close to the decentralized end as we started at, but for many reasons. I don't think we'll get all that close to the decentralized end either though.

> Multiple distinct companies != peer-to-peer internet.

My argument has not been "we are decentralized", it's been "we are not centralized". To that effect, peer-to-peer is irrelevant to my argument, and I've tried to make that clear.

> Everybody running their own mailserver: could be a good thing, presuming > they can be made easy to set up and easy to maintain (I don't see any > technical reason why not). Ditto webhosting, why should facebook host all > your content (or google, or Yahoo).

Because it's very, very inefficient. There are upsides to centralization (e.g. discoverability), just as there are downsides (e.g. homogeneity). I think the sweet spot that maximizes the upsides and minimizes the downsides is somewhere between decentralization and centralization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just getting a black screen with a mute button. Page source is more readable :).

<comment><USER22> You're not missing much imo:

[http://i.imgur.com/yN0f3Sf.png](http://i.imgur.com/yN0f3Sf.png)

<comment><USER23> you're missing a lot if you're into web design. of course, content is king and google fucked up big times by not having a proper fallback. but that parallax scrolling is the best I've seen so far [https://www.google.com/ideas/products/digital-attack- map/](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/digital-attack-map/)

<comment><USER24> I visited that page in both Chrome & FF and see no use of parallax scrolling. This is a good example of parallax scrolling:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Enhance your experience by turning on sound"

How about no. Seriously. Google of all companies should know better than to rely on autoplaying any sort of audible multimedia, especially as what I'm guessing to be the preferred source of information (guessing since - at the point where people started talking - I simply closed the tab).

</comment><comment><USER26> One of their products: Investigative Dashboard

[https://www.google.com/ideas/products/investigative- dashboar...](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/investigative-dashboard/)

Some good ideas there, but mostly it's a collection of high-level tools and visualizations...my main objection is that journalists have a tendency to see data and documents as "magic" and making a slick Investigative Dashboard doesn't really dispel that. The main problem of data and document collection is not much different than in data science, where research and data cleaning/collection is by far the most time consuming part of the process. Improving OCR (and let's give Google credit for its work on tesseract) and creating a more friendly interface for tesseract (such as a training GUI) would be much, much more useful to the average investigative reporter.

And in terms of collection/research: if Google took up the work of reverse- PACER (for court documents), or furthered its work in election data ([https://developers.google.com/civic- information/](https://developers.google.com/civic-information/))...those would also be hugely beneficial initiatives.

<comment><USER27> I'm getting 404s on the pages on the actual [https://www.investigativedashboard.org](https://www.investigativedashboard.org) site.

This sort of information would be useful for a project I'm working on, especially the business relationships.

<comment><USER26> IIRC, the corporate data is all part of OpenCorporates, which has its own API:

[https://opencorporates.com/](https://opencorporates.com/)

> _OpenCorporates aims to do a straightforward (though big) thing: have a URL > for every company in the world._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is confusing and I'm not entirely sure what the message is. What am I missing?

Edit: okay so I think I get it; they outline a product then you can click through and apply to use that product. Not very descriptive though.

</comment><comment><USER29> If I was doing sensitive stuff, I wouldn't expect Google to protect me from anything in which the US has economic or intelligence interests.

I think these products are meant for journos and NGO workers who want some level of protection without knowing much about what they are doing.

The way I see it from under my tinfoil hat, is that this is a bit of protection paid for by making your work instantly indexed and searchable by the US for various purposes.

<comment><USER15> It's more of a cyber shield for NGOs that align with US strategic objectives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Blank screen for most, try going to [https://www.google.com/ideas/products/](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/)

<comment><USER31> That one's blank for me too (Chrome 43, OS X 10.10). Any alternates?

<comment><USER32> Blank too, Chrome 42 on Windows 7, need help!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Like that glitch effect on the text and images, tried something similar with CSS clipping masks before. This canvas implementation is rather slick.

</comment><comment><USER34> I thought this was going to be about actual ideas not bla bla terrorists cyber dude fear mongering. Shame.

</comment><comment><USER35> "Protect against hackers" I still feel bad when I see the word hackers used like that. Although words end meaning what the majority think they means, it feels wrong to see this usage in a Google website.

<comment><USER36> Well, there's "Crackers", but that carries some racial connotations with it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I miss old Google... Their UI was the simplest, most basic of all saas companies. My browser uses my GPU and my computer has 4x as many cores, and 4x as much memory. But googles web pages are unusable on my machine.

It may not make web designers swoon circle jerk, but a web site with 0 CSS (or close to) would give a better experience. In this case, and in many many many others.

</comment><comment><USER38> Leave it to Google to create an atrocious, bloated, horrible UX for a dead simple content page.

<comment><USER36> It's not just Google. It has now become OK for developers to shift the burden of the app almost completely to the client. It has become OK to not care about graceful degradation if a user doesn't have JavaScript running. It has become OK to completely over engineer the front end, UX be damned.

<comment><USER39> i can never tell why certain comments get downvoted on hackernews. yours obviously has a sad tone, but people take everything literally here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Sidenote, but I'm taking a look at how googlers made this website. Reason for this is that whenever they create a webpage I can see how they've achieved an effect that people are blogging how to do efficiently. In this case the effect is the background parallax.

So... I see that they are doing this on their ideas page [1] with the following code on their background image :

        position: fixed; transform: translate3d(0px, -402px, 0px); -webkit-transform: translate3d(0px, -402px, 0px);

Difference from any other methods is they use position fixed and it actually looks smooth on my old mac.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'd be curious to know how Google's decides which ideas are worth defending.

</comment><comment><USER42> On first thought, this sounds like Google's version of Hooli XYZ, but on a deeper level I guess this is kind of like Facebook's ThreatExchange?

<comment><USER43> I think Hooli XYZ is supposed to be Google X, pretty directly.

<comment><USER32> Looks like hooli.xyz[1] got a better 'design' than Google. At least i can open their page.(Most HN users got a blank page when landing in goolge' IDEA.)

[1] [http://www.hooli.xyz/](http://www.hooli.xyz/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> People bitching about UX here. That's fine, freedom and all. But those comments being upvoted to top??!!

</comment><comment><USER45> Can't explore more than the landing page in Firefox... Wish I could see more.

</comment><comment><USER46> Fascinating. I'm not sure how long this has been around but feels like a nice counterweight to Tim Cook's critique last week about the importance of privacy and making the world a fairer/safer place.

</comment><comment><USER47> Just going to leave this here. [https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it- seems/](https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/)

<comment><USER15> Google, like most other multinational companies inside the US, have partnerships with various parts of the US government.

Google is aligned with the United States State Department and DoD when it comes to investing and spreading American culture and values around the world.

This partnership brings the United States a lot of value, and those at Google also believe that it enriches their company, America and the world.

There is a bit of a paternalism to the conscious design of culture export, and it can be hard to think clearly about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Inspired a little bit by Aaron Swartz?[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany)

</comment><comment><USER49> Direct link to products [https://www.google.com/ideas/products/](https://www.google.com/ideas/products/)

</comment><comment><USER50> As an aside, I can't help but be amused at how flash-like the experience is. Impressive what we can achieve natively in the browser these days.

</comment><comment><USER51> And when I try to help!

[http://cl.ly/image/0R1d0Q3n291z](http://cl.ly/image/0R1d0Q3n291z)

</comment><comment><USER52> I'll focus only on "Project Shield".

It's supposed to protect news outlets from DDoS. Fine.

It's altruistic. Fine.

I see no technical guarantee that some future Google couldn't pull the shield away from a news outlet that speaks ill of Google. Not fine.

No centralized "shield" tech can provide said guarantee--rather, only a decentralized, community-driven shield can be provably neutral. Amiright?

<comment><USER53> It which point the news agency could make a big deal out of it, probably not worth the hassle. I mean you can search for bad stuff about google on google and find results - they havent filtered that either

<comment><USER39> ha, if they filter that, it will be the ultimate red flag. i read an article on prisonplanet.com that said they removed them, and cnet.com from search listings on the front page because they published some critical articles involving google and the 'see aye lmao' (three letters)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-dub The website is a mess, but, I met a guy who works for this group a few weeks ago and it sounded pretty cool.

When I asked what the hell they did, he said that they did some Cloudflare like stuff for political speech in the middle east and spent a bunch of time on building and deploying infrastructure to link up a bunch of anti-human- trafficking agencies all across Asia.

</comment><comment><USER54> WTF is this shit? This site makes no sense, groundbreakingly horrible design, and totally unclear mission and purpose. Just 100% BS.

Maybe it's a jaberwocky. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas)

</comment><comment><USER55> Lol at the site not working on Chrome but working fine on Safari.

</comment><comment><USER56> Blank Screen!

</comment><comment><USER57> That infinite scroll on their "Products" page is the best "Idea" they've implemented on this site.

</comment><comment><USER58> A few issues in mobile Safari: background cropped in landscape mode and form submit button styling on :hover.

</comment><comment><USER59> Investigative Dashboard doesn't seem to work at all beyond the home screen. Not sure if it is just FF.

</comment><comment><USER60> Similar site [http://www.hooli.xyz](http://www.hooli.xyz)

</comment><comment><USER61> Interesting content but one of the worst scrolling mechanics I've seen on a website

</comment><comment><USER62> I smell another too big to fail coming in 20 years for some of these tech companies.

</comment><comment><USER63> Here's an idea for you, google: don't hijack my effing middle click. I use it to open the link in a new tab. It's not up to your website to override that.

</comment><comment><USER64> So I get a blank blue/purple screen.

 _Shrug._

</comment><comment><USER65> Google's influence is quite concerning. Being a corporation, it should not be allowed to be a player in geopolitics.

Break it up.

<comment><USER66> > Being a corporation, it should not be allowed to be a player in geopolitics.

Says who? Corporations have been waist deep in geopolitics since (at least) the beginning of the 20th century. see British Petroleum & the Iran coup, or Hearst and the American-Spanish war ("You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.")

Here's a list of corporations that are also players in geopolitics

\- Fox Media (and anything owned by Rupert Murdock)

\- Oil companies (e.g. Haliburton)

\- Movie studios

\- Fracking companies

\- Numerous corporations behind TPP/TTIP

<comment><USER67> > Says who?

As I read it, parent commenter said this. It is an opinion.

> Here's a list of corporations that are also players in geopolitics

It does not follow that it should be like this.

<comment><USER39> i think sangnoir wrote it in a morally outraged tone, and listed evidence to support littletimmy's post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I was recently talking with my friend about Google and he brought up a good point.

Google had a really deep and good idea with PageRank for search, but what truly innovative ideas have they had since then? Scaling datacenters with commodity hardware? Giving people lots of free email storage? These were neat tricks (and huge engineering challenges) but they don't feel very game changing. Maybe I'll feel differently if I can ever get my hands on a self- driving car, but until then... I'm honestly curious what game changers Google has produced.</comment>


China Snares Innocent and Guilty Alike to Build World's Biggest DNA Database - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-snares-innocent-and-guilty-alike-to-build-worlds-biggest-dna-database-1514310353 <comment><USER2> Earlier this year, I was called into the police station in Shenzhen China. Long story short is, I lease a home here and there is a rule if you don't stay in a hotel, you need to register with the local police station upon entry. Well, I didn't know it applied upon every single entry and exit even if I lease my own home and frankly the local police didn't know either. Anyhow, they pretty well booked me with fingerprints and a mugshot. The guy that did the fingerprints pulled out a saliva DNA swab and was getting ready to hand that to me and I was simultaneously getting red-in-the-face and ready to unload with a hell-raising objection. Fortunately, before I exploded, a higher level officer walked in and waved him off not to make me do the DNA swab. But for sure, they are building the database.

<comment><USER3> I expect that soon enough they will start routinely fetching DNA from foreigners as well. Nations in which the population would object to such things can offload some of their DNA cataloguing requirements to China and others, so people in the US and UK and so on can include the Chinese database in the search when they're matching DNA. Sure, you'll only get people who have been to China (etc.) but it's better than nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://archive.is/qQrgh](http://archive.is/qQrgh)

<comment><USER5>
        503 Service Unavailable

        Resources to service this request are not available.

        This message is sent by Blue Coat PacketShaper.

Did we kill it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The social control aspects are worrying; unmentioned in the article, but equally important, is the likelihood that this is likely to give a significant boost to China's competitiveness in biotechnology.

<comment><USER7> Why would their competitiveness in biotech be a worry? I can see worrying about some of the unsavory parts (getting DNA samples from heretofore innocent people, under false pretense, one might add) but the leg up on better analytics is not a bad thing.

Never the less, the tech for most of sample processing is from Thermo-Fischer.

<comment><USER8> > Why would their competitiveness in biotech be a worry?

They claim rights to territory held by over a dozen separate neighbors and have invaded more than one since 1980. There's a strong argument to be made that China pulling ahead in a military technology will spark WW3, or at the very least the invasion of Taiwan—an advanced democratic nation with a population on par with Australia's.</comment></comment></comment>


Bash Git prompt without Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://bloggoergosum.us/2008/04/12/useful-git-prompt/

<comment><USER2> Simpler: PS1='\w$(git branch &>/dev/null; if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "($(git branch | grep '^ _' |sed s/\_ \ //))"; fi)\$ '

<comment><AUTHOR> cool. I like that better. I didn't google before doing mine. Also, there was some reason I didn't want to call 'git branch' twice, although now I can't remember what it was.

So it goes with this kind of stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Too complex.

Try this one instead. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163168>

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason I did it this way was because I had other uses for my rfind() function.</comment></comment>