The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html?ref <comment><USER2> It took fierce competition to even get broadband companies to advertise what they are offering. I had to deal with a very small local monopoly in Western Maryland that just advertised "faster than dial up," had typical pings of over 200. It was thick on the local board, had a deal with local government as the sole authorized supplier in the county.

Now I'm in a different part of the country, can get FiOS, but while Verizon's service always delivers over 50 Mbps on speedtest sites, it often chokes on Youtube or Netflix. When that happens, there's no simple way to determine if it's the provider or some random provisioner in the middle. This is the future of getting screwed by telecoms: worthless metrics and plausible deniability for service degradation.

I happened to get a deal by calling all the providers in the area, then playing their offers off of each other. I recommend everyone does this every few months. But the fact that was so easy doesn't really make me feel very comfortable. If they can haggle, it just signals how much rent they're charging from all the unwary customers.

<comment><USER3> lol at calling all the providers. the free market fails if left alone, under shady regulations it is almost a joke.

i found a aDSL number for ATT that was not advertised (and you reached a person on the first minute!) that was the result of some obscure regulation that they had to provide dsl without charging for a phone line if so i wanted. it was a very good service. as i was next door to their trunk.

i moved, less than 20miles, but another city. called att to transfer service, the rep read something and the burst out a sad "ah, sorry, this is verizon territory".

and that is exactly what i get here. verizon. nothing else. the 2nd or 3rd biggest city in los angeles, and i can choose, verizon.

<comment><USER4> Eastern Europe, especially Bulgaria and Romania, would beg to differ about the "free market fails if left alone". Between 2000 and 2010 it was basically a free-for-all for ISPs and each city had almost dozens of them running wires on poles, on apartment building facades, on... trees.

And today you can get a 1 Gbps connection (in reality it works at 900 mbps in Europe and at around 300 mbps across the Atlantic) for less than $20 per month.

How could you call the banning of new infrastructure (through an insane ammount of regulation) by local authorities in the USA as Free Market?

<comment><USER5> Something like this happened in Russian cities too. Broadband is cheap, fast, lot's of competition, cables hanging between apartment buildings etc.

Recently there have been some troubling signs when (government) monopolies started to buy smaller private ISPs. Internet is still cheap and fast, but who knows what will happen…

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm _so_ glad the concept of "dial tone", video or otherwise, never crossed the demand for and rollout of content-neutral, flat-rate-billed, backbone- peering-supported Internet Service.

Having worked in voice telecom billing for 11 years, it is my observation that phone companies adore detail billing. Imagine an ISP bill which details all the websites you visit, and bills each visit according to some value _the phone company_ might opaquely ascribe. It might have gone that way with a thankfully unimplemented evolution of the amorphous notion of "video dial tone".

Had this $200 billion boondoggle actually given us megabit access, then it would be... access to what, exactly? I can't imagine phone companies providing access to the flat-rate, always on, servers-allowed, content-neutral Internet we have now, no matter the bit rate.

The thought of all phone companies collectively coming up with a service like Netflix is, to me, as unimaginable as the thought of those same phone companies coming up with the iPhone.

Yes, $200 billion is a shameful waste of ratepayer funds and a regulatory failure. But thankfully, it neither collared nor crossed with the Internet.

In my opinion, separation of ownership of content (and applications, and platforms, and end users) from the common carriers who own some of the "plumbing" which connects routers to routers to routers becomes fundamental to a free Internet.

(Edits for grammar, clarity, tone)

</comment><comment><USER7> > Then there were regulatory problems as the FCC tried to control deployment > centrally while states and cities tended to view video dial tone as just > another cable company to be taxed and regulated.

That seems like the most egregious thing in the article: treating Internet- based video delivery as a cable company. The concept of local cable franchise monopolies is ridiculous enough to begin with, and the only possible justification hinges on not wanting to have multiple sets of cables wired everywhere. Content delivered over the Internet completely eliminates that justification, leaving no possible rationale for making such services subject to franchise regulations.

<comment><USER8> They should be subject to regulation; they should not be granted monopolies. These are two entirely different concepts. The current system grants them monopolies, and fails to regulate them appropriately. This is exactly the wrong way round. But this is the problem with politicians: monopoly provides concentration of cash, and this can be tapped into far more efficiently from the perspective of political exploitation. Its much easier to garner a donation from a rich individual with concentrated cash, than many individuals. Likewise, its much easier tax a few firms or not with tax {X} in return for special favours. Its much harder to garner the support of the diffuse and middle classes (not to mention, even get/keep their attention). So, this is sort of a classic case of _political economy_ in the instrumental sense...on both sides.

<comment><USER9> _Actually_ , campaigns nowadays run on the concept of "bundlers," who are rich people who act as a funnel for their rich friends.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United_States#Bundling)

<comment><USER10> You mean they used to, until the limits on secret donations from one rich guy were gotten rid of.

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing that you're referring to something in particular?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The first comment on the page sums it up:

"America is the only country in the world where BRIBERY is legalized and stupidly called lobbying."

<comment><USER12> To be precise, bribery isn't just legal, it's mandatory under the current campaign finance setup.

Campaign finance reform is a prerequisite for addressing any of the anti- consumer legislation we are stuck with today. Best of all, it hasn't been turned into a partisan wedge yet, so there's hope, assuming we can find a way to make people care.

Unfortunately, last time I saw a campaign finance reform proposal cross the HN frontpage, it fell off within 5 minutes :(

<comment><USER13> Campaign finance reform has always been a partisan wedge, insofar as the party that loses the most seats in a given election cycle is the one touting how much it's needed, but shuts up the next cycle when they gain the most seats. Thus, the only politicians willing to put money into that fight are either already outnumbered, or just crazy (or smart) enough to vote against their own future reelection.

<comment><USER12> > the only politicians willing to put money into that fight are either already > outnumbered, or just crazy (or smart) enough to vote against their own > future reelection

1\. This division doesn't fall strictly on party lines, which was my point.

2\. With a modicum of cleverness you can get around the immediate issue (politicians don't want to give their opponents a leg up in the next election) by engineering the changes to phase in one position at a time and "lock in place" only when beneficial to the incumbent (e.g. in a year when corporate support backs out for one reason or another).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm Australian, am I to understand that our internet quality and distribution is only just approaching what the American's had in 2007? WTF!?

I wish poor internet connection was something I could really get upset about, but I guess the rest of my life is a lot better than most around the world.

<comment><USER15> As an Australian that lived in America for a long time, trust me when I say life in Australia with crappy internet is significantly better than life in America with fast internet.

You don't want to live there, trust me.

<comment><USER16> You've got to be more specific when you say "there" or at least mention what you found wrong. The US is a large country with vast differences between the cities. Your experience in one area could be dramatically different from another area in the US.

<comment><USER17> I understand that a significant majority of the United States' healthcare system is lacklustre.

I understand that a significant majority of the United States' only offer limited annual leave (compared to Australia's 4 weeks).

I understand that a significant majority of the United States' suffers from an extremely high murder rate for a 1st world country.

This is a sample of why I don't want to live in the US, even though they have fast internet.

<comment><USER18> The health care system is fine if you can afford it. The main problem with American health care is financial, and if you have good insurance (which should come with any good job) it's fine. Not great, but on par with the rest of the first world.

Limited annual leave depends on the job. If you're in software engineering or similar, you're unlikely to have a problem. If you get offered a job that doesn't offer the annual leave you want, either negotiate for more, or just don't take that job.

I doubt your statement that a majority of the US has an extremely high murder rate. Some parts of the country certainly do, but much of the country is perfectly safe. The overall average rate is higher than other first-world countries, but that does not imply that most of the country has a higher rate. Crime is not spread out evenly.

You may want to look into why you understand things that aren't really correct, and figure out how that happened.

<comment><USER19> Murder rate thing is probably because an Australian national named Christopher Lane, in the US playing Baseball at college, was randomly murdered in Oklahoma this year. He was out jogging when a couple of teenagers ran up and shot him in the back for no obvious reason.

Australian politicians immediately started telling people not to visit the US because it's so full of guns.

<comment><USER17> I've never heard of Christopher Lane before.

Wait, actually, on second thought, I have. But that didn't have any impact on my opinion of the US.

The murder rate statistic "thing" (as you described it) is based on the actual murder rate statistics. And my knowledge of US gun control.

<comment><USER19> Clearly, not a very nuanced understanding of what those statistics actually say (see post from mikeash above) or an intelligent perspective on the relevance of gun control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone who comes up with a reasonable way of bypassing the natural local monopolies of cable companies is going to make a fortune.

I would think dense wireless networks in urban areas could work. I'm not an expert, and would be interested in hearing from one, but I imagine that wireless networks could benefit from algorithmic advances in a way that might be more difficult in traditional copper/fiber networks.

If you gave me (someone with very little wireless experience but used to be a cable guy) carte blanche, here's what I would investigate:

Several routers in an urban area which require minimal installation and can be mass-produced and immediately interchanged - think roof access, and could be turned on and off remotely, maybe battery operated, flowing to relatively few fiber hubs.

Infrastructure advantages: Network algorithms have come a long way, and the ability to dynamically add or scale nodes as needed could have great performance/cost balances that aren't possible with fixed nodes. And upgrades do not require new lines, just more and better routers. If a router dies, replace, and send the old one to a shop somewhere inexpensive. No midnight service restoration pay.

Customer advantages: I connect to wifi the same way I do right now. Zero home installation (google Comcast horror stories if you need imagery).

If I were to start, I would do it in an urban area with a landowner that had a monopoly. Hyde Park, Chicago is like that. There are basically two landowners: University of Chicago and Mac Apartments. You have to make one community love you to pieces before branching out, and that would require a lot of cooperation. Of course a danger here is if Mac suddenly decides that they hate you and removes access privileges. But if that worked, and you got more funding to expand, imagine the word of mouth: "Here's how installation works: it's a wifi network and you connect to it".

A la "it's a folder, and it syncs" dropbox. Presumably something like this has been tried before, but that's true of many things that end up working (like search engines or social networks).

<comment><USER21> > Anyone who comes up with a reasonable way of bypassing the natural local > monopolies of cable companies...

I'm nowhere near a socialist, but government intervention is a perfectly reasonable way to deal with natural monopolies. How do you think Northern European and Asian countries pulled so far ahead of the US on this?

<comment><USER22> Disclaimer: This is an observation, unsupported by facts, and please take it as such.

I'm pretty sure that the ISP sector is not constrained in any way by a natural monopoly. Take a look at the Internet in Romania wikipedia article[0]. In my view telecom companies have grown to disproportionate sizes, almost everywhere in the world, and this has given them enough power to buy the lawmakers. A lot of legislation has been passed to protect them, state laws, national laws and even international laws. So no, I think that the telecom sector has been intervened enough since its creation, what the consumer needs is to completely deregulate it, and to let the free market work its magic.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania)

<comment><USER23> So just anyone can dig wherever they want whenever they want, laying redundant fiber and tearing up the streets?

<comment><USER22> Somehow I doubt that that would be the most efficient way to do it. But maybe a couple or three companies could lay redundant fiber, while another two used existing infrastructures with new implementations, and maybe a couple more could offer satellite connections.

I don't know, this is just pure speculation. What I know for sure is that the reason to protect companies that exploit "natural monopolies" is to protect the consumer. And right now, the protection of these companies is hurting the consumer, more than helping him.

Yeah, in an ideal situation the state would be able to provide "free" internet at a really low cost. But that solution overlooks this huge problem: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgJ644LPL6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgJ644LPL6g)

<comment><USER24> I strongly suggest that if you're going to espouse these opinions, you do some math first.

In this case, I suggest you model rural America's density, and the cost to lay down a wire, or fiber, or whatever in a town, along with all the needed infrastructure.

Then I suggest you model the financial returns of that investment under conditions where there are multiple players.

If you do this well, you'll find that as you add competition, you add marketing cost, and you're also forced to amortize the fixed infrastructure costs over smaller and smaller numbers of consumers. And you'll also find that whoever was first to market in that area has a dominant position from a game theoretical perspective, and can make moves that would make it essentially impossible for any competitor to enter the marketplace profitably.

Natural monopolies aren't made-up things.

<comment><USER22> Assuming that natural monopolies do exist, you just described how they actually work. They don't need the protection of the government because the incumbent has so many advantages over the entrant, that (most of the times) there is no need to offer any incentives to any company for it to be the first one to exploit a natural monopoly.

<comment><USER24> The government regulations aren't there to create or protect monopolies. They're there to control monopolies that were likely to occur anyway, so that the monopolists can't use their position in an overly extractive manner.

Since these regulations occur at a local level, some of the rules are more effective than others, and some of them are straight-up corrupt. But the common case is not government creating monopolies, but rather government restraining them by regulating them.

<comment><USER22> Ok, I guess I was looking at it wrong.I was thinking about government-granted monopolies where the government willingly prevents competition. It is my understanding that this was how of most of the telecommunication companies around the world started.

<comment><USER24> I've heard of other scenarios where the government prevented competition, but they nearly all boil down to the same core: the constituents want X, but some sort of market failure is occurring (or likely to occur) and a temporary market intervention was able to resolve it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have tried posting this idea a couple of times before and have been roundly scolded, but oh well, here goes again. I think... that readers of this forum are ideally equipped to find a way around this problem. What I mean to say is that it is universally felt by everyone that they hate their broadband provider, phone company etc. Why can't we, the tech community come up with a competing technology? I know many have tried to do "open source" types of mesh wifi networks, but I think something more robust than that is needed. Everyone agrees current companies are leaving their customers unsatisfied, hence there must be an opportunity there for someone clever enough to come up with a good alternative.

<comment><USER26> It's not a technological problem. The technological barriers have been taken care of. Google Fiber exists and is awesome and affordable. The reasons we don't all have Google Fiber level of service are political: regulatory capture, monopolies and oligopolies, conflicts of interest, etc.

<comment><USER27> It's only not a tech problem if every service has Google levels of server capacity and performance. Websites still regularly fall over when posted on aggregation sites.

<comment><USER28> They fall over because they're misconfigured (namely, default Apache config on a $5 VPS; works fine at low traffic, but throw some more at it and Apache spawns more processes than you have RAM, starving the DB and OS filesystem cache, then swapping to death), not because websites are bandwidth-limited.

<comment><USER27> I'm not just talking about simple static websites. Please, let's not pretend that upgrading everyone to fiber will be sufficient. You know better than that.

<comment><USER28> I don't know what systemic tech problem you think exists for web hosts. There's no lack of bandwidth on their side of the internet -- heck, if you excluded Netflix and YouTube, over 60% of last mile capacity in the country would be completely unused during peak hours. Those few sites, like video streaming services, that are bandwidth-limited also tie their revenue to consumption -- more bandwidth on the consumer end just widens their potential customer base.

<comment><USER27> There are many infrastructure changes that are needed in order to increase the performance of the Internet besides faster home connections. CDNs / caching / DNS performance / SPDY / distributed computation and on and on and on. The OP makes it sound like the only thing between us and 0 ms response times on every service and every web page is some politics.

In other words the reason we don't have Google Fiber levels of performance is because 1) we don't have Google Fiber and 2) all the infrastructure to maximize the potential of that last mile connection isn't there. 2) is a problem!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just remember to resist the urge to think of this as corporations stealing money from the government. This is government stealing money from citizens.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely. Corporations do nothing but good. They bear no responsibility for their purposeful misuse of the funds.

And government does nothing but bad.

Swear on your stack of Ayn Rand books that the world would be better if we had more corporations, because they are perfectly ethical and never screw anybody over.

Yes, that's right. Never blame the con artists^W^Wcorporations who didn't do what they promised. Instead blame the government for trusting them.

<comment><USER30> You're taking what he said and swinging it so fully in the opposite direction it makes you look as crazy as him.

Can't we both agree that corporations and governments abuse their power as a matter of fact?

<comment><USER31> Why not tone down even more to get to the fact that not only can they both abuse their power, but they can both not do so too. Not all politicians and corporations are created equal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nothing will change until we get to the root cause. Get corporate money out of politics. Its really sad to tell you the truth.

</comment><comment><USER33> We need to remove the local legal monopoly protection granted to cable operators and telcos.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is not really an American problem. In nearly all developed countries the delivered broadband "moore's law" has been abysmal compared to what technology allows.

In an apartment building the cost of per apartment gigabit ethernet with a couple of trunked 10 gig ports for last mile would be very very low.

(And we'd have much faster tech for same money, but development stalled due to lack of deployment - 10 gig ethernet is what 12 years old now?)

<comment><USER35> It's mostly a North American and maybe Australia thing tbh. Europe and Northern Europe and most of Asia/Africa is significantly better then NA.

<comment><USER36> It's bad in Europe too, you get just ADSL2 or bad cable in cities for the most part. I'd say ADSL2 worse for >90% of the population and improvement is very slow.

ref: [http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/07/average- global-...](http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/07/average-global- internet-speeds-climb-to-3-1mbps-as-uk-tops-7-9mbps.html)

(also shows that US bandwidths are better than Europe on average)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I remember reading this years ago. It's just as sad today as it was back then.

</comment><comment><USER38> In the bay area, if you can get our bandwidth needs at the level you need from them, I highly recommend Sonic.Net. They seem to be trying to do the right thing/build infrastructure/and bring better broadband speeds to people in the bay area.

I recently left them to go from DSL to go to Wireless w/ a local reseller of some of Sonic's service. I gave up a few static IPs to get 20Mbps symmetric. I'm one of those where upload is just as important as down. Price is reasonable given I could get rid of my land line and some other costs.

</comment><comment><USER39> My Charter High Speed internet went from $60 to $40 a month on the spot just by threatening to leave them and go with AT&T U-Verse. And I did it all through their chat with a sales rep online without calling anyone. They even gave me a free cable modem.

Moral of the Story: Shop around and make threats, you are the customer they need you and your money. They'd rather lose $20 a month than lose $40 so you can almost always talk the prices down.

<comment><USER28> That's because you have two options to choose between. Many have none, so it's either pay the price or have no home internet. Where the only choices are Comcast and Verizon, which offer near-identical packages and pricing in most markets, Comcast's retention department no longer negotiates. If you threaten to switch, they'll tell you to go ahead, and send a door-to-door sales rep to your home every 6 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> PacBell had built one of these next gen networks, it was even in limited deployments, as soon as SBC bought them, they killed it. It was an HFC network (hybrid fiber/coax)and was a commercial ready product. I'm not in a position to find citations right now, but if you google Pacific Bell and Hybrid Fiber Coax, you'll find the cites.

</comment><comment><USER41> [2007]

</comment><comment><USER42> [http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/11/the-worlds- cheapest-a...](http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/11/the-worlds-cheapest-and- most-expensive-internet/)

Internet cost as part of income is more accurate

<comment><USER43> More accurate than what?

Cringely's claim is that various subsidies and tax breaks, totaling 200 billion dollars, were given to telco operators with the understanding that a 45 mbps symmetrical connection would be developed and offered to end users. The companies received those subsidies and tax breaks, but didn't develop the system they claimed they would develop and instead built a system that is nearly 27 times slower (I use the term built loosely there since the ADSL network sits on top of the same old copper wire infrastructure that has existed for decades and decades).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> funny how this article came back today, I'm visiting my grandma, she has an ipad as her computer (first successful adoption of a computer for her btw, she previously had bought 2 computers and didn't take to either one) and I'm looking at her internet speeds and I can't deal with it. She is paying $28 for 3 mbps (max) speeds. It's dsl from at&t. I ran a speed test and she only gets about .5 mbps. I get about 300mbps(when plugged into ethernet) when I'm at school...

</comment><comment><USER45> Last-Mile solution: blimps.

</comment><comment><USER46> what's the tl;dr please?

<comment><USER47> ISP's took lots of money to build better internets, then told politicians that the current set up is what they asked for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> My broadband service is terrible. Far to expensive, it is slow and drops packets. And the competitive environment sucks. Comcast and Regulators: go to hell.

I'll vote for any politician who is interested in improving the situation.

<comment><USER49> > My broadband service is terrible

My business gets 10mbps down, 2mbps up, for $90/month in Los Angeles. It also goes down frequently (5-6 times a year). I think the next best upload rate (5mbps) was $400/month or so with some bullshit "enterprise" plan.

It takes way too long to do simple file transfers from my office to a remote machine. I fucking hate it and our culture of monopolies can go to hell.

<comment><USER50> My business has a redundant 10Gbps connection to our cabinet at zColo. We lease the dark fiber (but it doesn't run very far, so it's not very expensive.) The cabinet has a 1Gbps uplink for Internet.

Home is 50Mbps FTTH right now. Google should start to deploy in ATX during 2014, and when they come to my neighborhood, I plan to switch to Google Fiber.

I also have a Time Warner fiber service on premise, mainly for one of my employees who lives just outside Elgin, TX. (but also because we get a redundant 100Mbps connection.

While I spent an order of magnitude more than you, I also have much better service. :-)

<comment><USER51> I have lived in a number of places in northern Sweden. All had fiber to the house. New houses doesn't even have copper-lines for phones any more, they all go fiber. Some houses don't even have phone-outlets, only a 100 Mbit/s RJ45.

A town with 2500 people (100 Mbit/s the last 20 years, Between $60 and $30 per month)

Smaller town with 250 people (100 Mbit/s the last 15 years, $30 per month)

Small city with 100 000 people (100-1000 Mbit/s the last 15 years, $35 per month including IP-phone box and phone-account)

Been wondering how long it would take for you guys to do something about your internet connections. You keep blaming the big distances and so on but everyone I know is living in big cities and still has realy bad DSL...

<comment><USER52> Oh Sweden, is there anything you can't do? I'm impressed by this country, especially considering what they manage to pull off with such a small population.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Common Mistakes in Logo Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/6-common-mistakes-logo-design/

<comment><USER2> > Rest assured, it was white-hot in 2006, but has since aged like a half-eaten > apple.

It must have aged pretty well then, considering that one of the most iconic and timeless logos _is_ a half-eaten apple.</comment>


Chief Lying Officer - A lie should make you look better, not worse. - <AUTHOR> http://www.productivity501.com/chief-lying-officer/8828/

<comment><USER2> I saw two comments when I clicked the comment link:

TWAndrews: _I think most people would be more enraged by "we're going to delay your flight because it's less profitable for us" than "Oops, wow, we screwed up."_

Symmetry: _I wonder if they had to tell a lie because switching which passengers had to wait would have violated some FAA regulation?_

My dad was a pilot (between "Commercial" and "General Aviation"). The first comment, I thought: "Well, that's why the airlines lie about this sort of thing". The second: "If there isn't a regulation in place, and companies were more transparent about this sort of thing, there'd be enough anger to result in a regulation".

I recall a huge uproar a while back because of an airline having an unusual number of weather delays, which (at the time, not sure if this is still true) meant that they had no responsibility to pay for passengers lodging.

Here's the thing: The few customers who are very regular travelers manage to squeak out a voucher (they either know how to hack the system or can rely on their _platinum_ status) and the infrequent remaining, especially leisure, travelers are angry and vow never to fly with that airline again. The problem is, if you work for a reasonably large company that has a Corporate Bookings/Travel department, you are _not_ the airline's customer. At my company, if I travel, I am required to take the least expensive flight as determined by our booking system or travel agency service with very little wiggle room. If I want a direct flight (and I always do), where I live, it's guaranteed to be the same airline 90% of the time. I'm glad for this, I don't mind that one airline, but the other 10% of the time it's an airline I positively _hate_. In addition, the booking systems prices are almost always more what I can find doing a simple search on my own (I had a flight that would have cost $400 via Expedia but the least I could find on our booking service was $1400).

On top of all of that, one of the prime reasons we use a custom booking service is because they include a custom company hotline for sorting out these exact problems. I'm not going to say "conflict of interest", because their customer service division worked out a huge mess at 1:00 AM involving a missed flight and later missing luggage that saved me having to stay an additional several days a small town in Montana, but all of this ends up making the person the airline answers to either the booking service or the applicable federal regulation. Neither are my top choice.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think most people would be more enraged by "we're going to delay your flight because it's less profitable for us" than "Oops, wow, we screwed up."

<comment><USER4> Would you prefer to fly with greedy corporate pigs or incompetent screw-ups? The OP clearly prefers the pigs (as would I, actually.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Or we could simply start treating consumers like Adults. I would prefer the honest truth even if I didn't like it, to a lie that defers my emotions onto unrelated targets.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if they had to tell a lie because switching which passengers had to wait would have violated some FAA regulation?

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great stuff. I've often encountered corporate lies like this, which caused me to wonder, "Ok, I get that they feel they need to lie to me. But couldn't they at least tell a lie that doesn't blatantly insult my intelligence or make them look like bigger idiots than necessary? Aren't they smart enough to do that, if they are smart enough to figure out the need to lie?"</comment>


'Priceless' Stradivarius violin stolen in armed robbery in Milwaukee - <AUTHOR> http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/stradivarius-violin-stolen-in-armed-robbery-in-milwaukee-b99193907z1-242463151.html

<comment><USER2> Pretty sure the whole stradivarius thing is just audiophilia all over again.

EDIT: yeah, pretty much: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradavarius#Comparisons_in_so...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradavarius#Comparisons_in_sound_quality)

EDIT2: "just" was the wrong word. Obviously they're fabulous pieces of art in themselves, and doubtless beautiful to play. But like other art, they aren't valued based on how good they sound/look. I'd like to point out that I care about this a lot less than the tone of my original comment might imply.

<comment><USER3> What are you talking about?

Edit: oh I see, you think strads are nothing special. Too bad for you.

<comment><USER2> I didn't say they were nothing special. Those $15,000 dollar headphones sound _amazing._ It's that the price is way out of proportion to the quality.

It would be fine if people admitted that strads are great largely because they're old and historically important, but they insist that they're superior violins.

(Of course, that's still fine. Whatever.)

I suspect that violinists are actually able to play to a higher standard on a strad, just because they're so thrilled to be doing so and this makes them focus more/less. This then feeds back into the idea that they sound better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stealing a 6 million dollar stradivarius is an incredibly stupid idea, really. With only about 650 surviving Stradivari instruments around, this is about more than just the sound. Its the same reason I bought a Martin over a 100 dollar import acoustic guitar. The Martin has a flawless 3 piece rosewood back and the construction quality is pretty much impecable. I know I could play just as well on a cheap guitar, but the aesthetics of my guitar make me want to play it more often, take better care of it and I do think there is a negligible sound quality difference vs something cheaper.

Maybe there isn't, but I know that 40 years from now when my kids inherit this guitar they will have something that has retained its value and will be treated like a keepsake instead of relegated to a landfill as "junk".

Its just like any hobby or discipline, when you are interested in it, you want to have great hardware/software to participate.

<comment><USER5> > It's the same reason I bought a Martin over a 100 dollar import acoustic > guitar.

The difference between the $99 (or even $199) plywood special and even an entry-level solid-wood guitar (starting closer to $500) is much more than just aesthetic. There are obviously exceptions but as a rule, the playability difference is profound.

There is another increase in quality/playability as you get into the mid-range offerings. Fit and finish are just a little bit better, tolerances are tighter, materials are of higher quality.

> Maybe there isn't, but I know that 40 years from now when my kids inherit > this guitar they will have something that has retained its value and will be > treated like a keepsake instead of relegated to a landfill as "junk".

I cheated on this count by buying a guitar made in 1974, so my kids will get a 75 year old guitar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I imagine that the thieves would likely treat this as an art theft, and hold it for ransom rather than try to sell it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think I've seen two other reports of thefts involving this particular make of violin here in London in the past year or so. It really is a very high profile instrument.

<comment><USER8> They are very high profile. And the fact that they get moved around, used,and loaned out probably makes them a much more tempting target compared to a painting or sculpture that, for the most part, stays in one museum.</comment></comment>


FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow - <AUTHOR> https://rietta.com/blog/2016/03/16/its-not-just-one-iphone/ <comment><USER3> Remember how New York's (physical) master keys became easily accessible[1] despite the fact that they were supposedly so carefully managed? All that effort, all that trouble, and now not only is there essentially no security at all but the master keys _created a security hole_ that did not need to exist.

The security of encryption is similarly proportional to the security of keys. The fewer things you have to secure, the easier it is to keep them secret. The "master key" concept in New York only served to create something of great value that people wanted to acquire, and massively increased the risk when that fell into the wrong hands. _Obviously_ the same thing could happen with an encryption key, except it is worse because you don't even have to be in the same country as the source of the key to acquire it or use it.

[1] [http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/pols-public-outraged- sho...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/pols-public-outraged-shocking- master-key-security-breach-subways-article-1.167499)

<comment><USER4> Interesting article. I find amusing this (quite popular) type of argumentation:

> "This is a serious security breach," said Councilman Peter Vallone > (D-Queens), who heads the Council's Public Safety Committee. "We know > terrorists are planning to attack our subways, and the MTA and NYPD better > find these magical morons quickly, and then make them disappear for a year > in jail."

Like the only thing between terrorists and the subway platforms is that they can't afford ticket, so they have to go through the staff gate.

<comment><USER5> But that is _so_ revealing of the mindset.

      * We can have strong encryption just for the good guys
      * We can have master keys that only approved staff will use
      * We can block all the bad things on the internet and it'll be like they don't exist
      * If we have a back door into an encrypted device, only the good guys will use it

It's like no politician ever read about crime. Staff can't be blackmailed or bribed. No one working for the govt ever used resources for their own ends. No govt agency ever tried to blackmail an inconvenient public figure. Because a terrorist once made a terrible attempt at a bomb in his trainers, quick, we'd better make millions of people remove their shoes at airports. Clearly no terrorist has the wit to try a different approach.

The list is so damn long, yet people who really should know better get it wrong with depressing regularity. Are most politicians _really_ that stupid? What are their advisers advising FFS?

<comment><USER6> It's a huge lack of systems thinking. It's like they believe that the universe somehow cares about what they were trying to accomplish.

* If we reward schools for increasing student test scores, then we'll have better schools.

* If we fund a "war on drugs", we'll reduce the damage drugs do.

* If we enact rent controls and mandate the construction of below-market rate housing units, it'll help people afford housing.

This belief - that "having a goal and doing something that pattern-matches to helping" works - is incredibly dangerous in policy-makers. It's also incredibly difficult to fix, since the incentives for politicians are to make rationalizations that are convincing to voters, and that kind of reasoning is much easier to convey.

<comment><USER7> > If we enact rent controls and mandate the construction of below-market rate > housing units, it'll help people afford housing.

To be fair, this does in fact help many people afford housing. It just doesn't fix the endemic issue.

<comment><USER6> These are political favors to local interest groups. It actively hurts the ability to find housing for everyone not blessed by the powers that be.

Dense housing _is_ affordable housing. When there's an empty apartment that you're moving into, where do you think the old resident moved to? There's only a few options - a new place got built that they moved into, the old resident died, the old resident moved out of the housing area, or the recursive option that cashes out into one of the previous ones. If you stop building units ("affordable housing" mandates) or arbitrarily keep low-income residents from making housing bids (rent-control), the only bids for housing are going to be from tech workers and market-rate housing gets ridiculous.

Fundamentally, the problem is that there's X people who want to live in the area, and only Y housing units. The price is going to go up until the market clears. Handing out political favors so that the people who vote for you don't feel this reality isn't solving the problem: only building more housing will.

<comment><USER7> > the problem is that there's X people who want to live in the area, and only > Y housing units

I don't think this is the same problem you would address by rent control.

> Handing out political favors so that the people who vote for you don't feel > this reality isn't solving the problem: only building more housing will.

And yet, there are many people living in rent-controlled housing who would disagree with you. The person and problems you're painting do not exist outside your head.

<comment><USER6> >I don't think this is the same problem you would address by rent control.

Of course not. Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river.

>And yet, there are many people living in rent-controlled housing who would disagree with you.

I'm not at all surprised that the beneficiaries of political favors support handing out those favors.

<comment><USER7> > Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the > expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting > district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in > the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river.

I'd love to hear the argument for this. Again, many people living in rent- controlled houses would disagree. Just because people are poor you cannot write them off as votes.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html)

>Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that "a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available."

<comment><USER7> Ok, so economists agree that "a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available". Thankfully, economists don't run our country. How does this support the statement "Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones."? Quantity and quality of housing are arguably much less important than ensuring there is a viable working class—just see how terrible a place SF or Manhattan is to live.

<comment><USER6> There's two different questions that policies should answer - what sort of stuff do we get out of it, and who gets that stuff. These are often referred to as allocative and distributive, though I'm remembering the precise technical wording from memory so I could be wrong on that.

That's the distinction that drove me to make the political versus economic benefits distinction. Rent control as a whole makes things worse - there's less housing, it's of worse quality, and it drives up the cost of market rate housing. On the whole, it's a bad allocation of resources: we'd much rather have cities with more housing that's of higher quality (because people are more than willing to pay for it). The problem is that this sort of policy creates winners and losers, and the losers are often the ones who get to set local policy.

There's two solutions - have a ban on rent control at a higher jurisdictional level (Washington State does this), or bribe current residents to lift rent control. The latter should make everyone better off - we pay for keeping the working class viable with the overall economic gains made by lifting rent controls.

Anyhow, my overall point is that we should hand out the who-benefits stuff without making society worse off as a whole, simply because the locals who happen to live in an area are able to hold overall policy hostage.

<comment><USER8> >pay for keeping the working class viable with the overall economic gains made by lifting rent controls

The economic gains from lifting rent control are going to go to slumlords, not just get dispersed to everyone. Also, housing isn't an elastic supply market. when rent goes up it doesn't necessarily mean the quantity of housing will increase as a result since housing is often limited by zoning, drainage, and many other things than profitability of rentals. Also when you consider the destabilizing effect of people having to move every few years due to rental price fluctuation, it's not really a clear cut benefit to "bribe current residents to lift rent control" if that were even an option.

>we should hand out the who-benefits stuff without making society worse off as a whole, simply because the locals who happen to live in an area are able to hold overall policy hostage

but this is how democratic communities work... local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most.

<comment><USER6> >local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most.

Local optimization is not the best strategy, even according to the those doing the local optimizations. Both participants in a Prisoner's Dilemma are better off if they hand their decision-making over to a third party, conditional on the other person also doing so. The Bay Area as a whole wants affordable housing, they just don't want to make the Bay as a whole better off by making unfair sacrifices in their neighborhood.

It's a classic coordination problem, caused in large part because decision- making is too local compared to the regional benefits of housing construction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So... the FBI is essentially arguing we should all keep our doors unlocked because they have had to do some investigations in the past where they came to a home that was locked and it was hard for them to enter the home.

<comment><USER10> The FBI want to have a giant warehouse that houses a copy of every house key but we don't need to worry because no one will ever manage to break in to the warehouse.

<comment><USER11> And everyone with legitimate access to the warehouse will be 100% trustworthy no matter what for the entire span of time they are granted access, and nobody without legitimate access will ever be allowed in, even someone like a co- worker of someone with access, and even under the full supervision of someone with legitimate access.

<comment><USER12> An even stronger guarantee: That the definition of trustworthy and "good guy" are unchanging, and even in a dystopian future where a rogue actor is in control of government, those keys are safe because they understand the morality of the people who created them.

<comment><USER13> I'd say something to invoke Godwin's law, but it seems pretty clear that genocidal governments that sweep into power love having access to copious amounts of detailed records.

<comment><USER14> They don't even have to be genocidal; they could just be Richard Nixon.

<comment><USER15> Or Donald Trump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if anyone has explained to them there is this thing called open- source software. Sure you may be able to convince/force Apple to give you some sort of key escrow system but do you think you can convince the GPG developers?

If you implement key escrow and it's public knowledge that encryption systems that implement it are useless then people that actually want to hide stuff will simply use GPG and other uncompromised systems.

The only thing this sort of system is good for is enhancing the reach of the surveillance apparatus. That is, spying on innocent people. As for why they want to do this.. no-one knows but it's awfully concerning.

<comment><USER17> I see this objection raised so frequently, and I feel it really misses the point badly.

The tech community tells itself that it won the first "crypto wars". You cannot win "wars" against governments in that sort of sense and the first crypto war was never actually won at all. I think in light of events in recent years we need to reinterpret the events of the 90's in a new light - the tech industry didn't win, rather, after realising how awful and worthless the software the cypherpunks produced really was, the government simply got bored of playing.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, gives one tiny shit about GPG. GPG is so bad, such truly unusable software, that terrorists would literally rather die or risk lifetime imprisonment than use it:

       http://privacy-pc.com/articles/how-terrorists-encrypt-threatscape-overview.html

Governments don't care about GPG now, they don't care about some theoretical open source program that you could install from abroad, they only care about the encryption their adversaries actually use which - given that 99.9% of the FBI's adversaries are not crypto experts - turns out to be whatever ordinary people are using automatically thanks to tech companies switching it on.

This is especially true because often people don't meticulously plan crimes out ahead of time: they either commit crimes of passion, or they make basic mistakes. So if you have to plan ahead and convince not only yourself, but all your accomplices, all to install some exotic and awkward to use piece of technology ... well, a lot of bad guys won't do it.

So. If the FBI succeeds in breaking the encryption used by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and a few other big names, then they've got 99% of the guys they want.

<comment><USER16> GPG was just an example. Other end-to-end open-source systems are more widely used like Signal are the same, not exactly easy to insert a backdoor into a system that is a) open and b) completely distributed with no central key authority.

Maybe it still misses the point because the FBI doesn't actually care about hitting hard targets. If that is the case that is pretty sad.

Average crimes can be solved with average tools, we shouldn't be authorising access to phones and other electronic intercepts or access without crimes that go beyond average.

You could argue the San Bernadino case was beyond average, and you would probably be right. But the perps knew that too, that is why they destroyed the phones after they were done, chances are they took other measures too but no one will know as they destroyed the devices.

What is clear is not that these laws wouldn't make their jobs easier - <USER2> almost certainly would. But they aren't needed and that implementing them would have 0 effect on the actually hard targets that they in theory would be useful for neutralising.

<comment><USER18> > Other end-to-end open-source systems are more widely used like Signal are > the same, not exactly easy to insert a backdoor into a system that is a) > open and b) completely distributed with no central key authority.

If Signal weren't available from any of the major app stores, such that it didn't work on iOS at all and didn't work on Android devices without turning on the intimidating option to allow non-Play-Store apps, how much usage do you think it would get compared to today?

Making real security hard to get would cause far fewer people to actually use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sort of a bummer that lawmakers don't have a better understanding of encryption in general and what it protects. They'd condemn hackers breaking into phones/accounts and stealing important notes/pictures, but turn around and condemn the very technology preventing that from happening to _everybody_

Anybody here want to run for office and be a voice for tech rights?

<comment><USER20> It's only a dichotomy if you see it from the angle where data is sacrosanct and its beset on all sides by evil trying to do it in.

The better way to approach this issue, long term, is from a legal point of view with an interim state where encryption holds us over. That is the law decides who may or may not own or access a certain type of data with penalties upon tort or criminality. And we develop civil protocols for days governance between people and between people and governments.

Like trademark. You could have it so trademark, i.e. authentication, is protected by mathematics, or you can have it protected legally.

Personally I don't believe the answer to data theft or surveillance is more mathematics in the form of encryption, but sensible laws regulating data its, use and access with penalties for transgressing. Obviously this would require international cooperation and would be a long way off and in the interim we'd need encryption to protect against unauthorized access until we reach that state of data governance. But ultimately the answer is not "make everything s black hole".

We don't protect against thieves by building impenetrable houses, we rely on legal instruments to dissuade burglary.

<comment><USER21> Thieves can't traditionally steal your stuff on a mass scale without you ever knowing about it and then cost effectively use it to economically and psychologically manipulate entire populations.

Once someone has your data, you don't know what they're doing with it and neither does the government. Which means they have to be prevented from getting it in the first place, which means encryption and laws that encourage and facilitate encryption.

<comment><USER20> Then the problem is putting so much meaning to data. Why should my ID (or SSN) have so much value? Why should my medical records have so much value? Medical records have value mainly because it can lead to discrimination, so the solution to that is remove the value of discrimination (job, medical care costs, etc.) based on medical conditions.

<comment><USER21> > Why should my ID (or SSN) have so much value?

Because it existed before the invention of public key cryptography and is now permanently entrenched. If you think you can fix that, go do it and then make this argument after nobody is using SSNs anymore. Also, your argument for not deploying cryptography is "we should solve that problem cryptography would solve if it was more widely deployed"?

> Why should my medical records have so much value? Medical records have value > mainly because it can lead to discrimination, so the solution to that is > remove the value of discrimination (job, medical care costs, etc.) based on > medical conditions.

You say "the solution" like all we have to do is snap our fingers and people will stop discriminating based on medical conditions even though doing so is highly profitable. The way the laws against that type of discrimination work is by _preventing the discriminating party from obtaining that information._

Also, good luck passing or enforcing a law that says prospective mates can't discriminate against you based on your medical or mental health records. To say nothing of the outright violence that would result if the names of women who get abortions became known to the wrong people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here is the source code for the Linux Kernel including dm-crypt: [https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....](https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/)

Here is the source code for cryptsetup: [https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup](https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup)

Here is the source code for GnuPG: [http://git.gnupg.org/cgi- bin/gitweb.cgi](http://git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi)

I have these files on my hard drive.

There are probably cryptographers that can recite the RSA/AES algorithms from memory.

We have the Internet and general purpose computers.

The only way you're getting rid of encryption is destroying all of that. I don't know why people feel the need to resort to arguments about economic damage, civil rights, whatever.

This is the fucking _Internet_ we're talking about. This isn't some biscuit tin with a particular pattern that Uncle George really, really likes. It's the god damn Internet.

You want to destroy one of the most beautiful creations humanity has ever seen, in the name of what? Stopping a few marathons being bombed?

Is the entire government clinically insane? Would they turn the sky green if it gave them more power? Am I still living in reality?

<comment><USER23> What most people probably don't realize is even if the government was somehow able to successfully outlaw cryptography and eliminated it completely from the face of the earth, it would do absolutely nothing to prevent future marathon bombings. The two simply aren't related, and there is nothing on this phone that is going to magically help the FBI, NSA, or any other TLA find and stop terrorists from acting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> In the future, the few years following Snowden's revealations may be viewed as the golden years of strong cryptography: A time when service providers and application developers began taking these issues seriously.

We're moving into a new era now. All it may take is a single attack in the US to drive the legislative and judicial branches to roll back all the fantastic improvements we've seen over the past few years.

<comment><USER25> They can "roll back" for mass marketed products but not for some simple, open source software in standard C that someone runs on an old PC with PC/DOS, no hard disk and no network connection. So, when turn the power off, the PC forgets everything about the de/encryption. The only non-volatile storage is on diskette. If worried, then just burn those. With the encryption done, the output is just a base 64 file of gibberish safe to mail to the NYT, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. And with no attempts at security, can use products from Apple, Google, and Microsoft can send such data with no problem.

The little command line programs on PC/DOS? Easy enough for middle school students to use; when that was state of the art computing, middle school students did use it.

<comment><USER26> And then they will outlaw the possession of said standard C software, as well as of computer hardware that does not comply with government-mandated eavesdropping. And then they will pass laws that force you to give up the encryption key to that Base64 data or face imprisonment. Even if the Base64 data is just a sequence of completely random bits - because who would keep sequences of random bits around, unless they're a terrorist trying to hide something?

I'm sorry, but I don't think pushing encryption down into the underworld is a viable solution to the problem. There's no limit to the bad laws that the government can pass. The only real long-term solution is to recognize encryption as a right, otherwise we'll only keep seeing these repeated attempts to outlaw it.

<comment><USER25> > And then they will pass laws that force you to give up the encryption key to > that Base64 data or face imprisonment.

IMNAL, but my understanding is that such a law would run into rock solid, granite hard, iron clad parts of a little issue called the US Constitution. E.g., if the cops ask you a question, then you don't have to answer. The person's lawyer can just tell the cops that "My client has no idea what that base 64 gibberish is."

For encryption as a recognized right, no, that's asking a bit much of the US political system.

BTW, for the person receiving the base 64 code (that's the way JPGs, etc. are sent in e-mail), first go through base 64 decoding and, then, apply the receiver's private key to that to decode back to the secret message, e.g., where and when the boy and his girlfriend are going to meet and carve their initials on a tree.

Base 64 is in the internet standard for e-mail and there is called MIME for multi-media internet mail extensions. So, the idea of MIME is to permit sending pictures, audio, movies, etc.

So, in arithmetic, base 10 has digits 0-9, that is, 10 digits. Base 16 has, right, 16 digits, 0-9-A-F. Base 2 has, you guessed it, 2 digits, 0-1. Well, presto, bingo, base 64 has 64 digits, 0-9, a-z, etc., all simple, ordinary printable characters such as e-mail had been sending right along.

Well, with 6 bits, can count from 0 to 63, that is, have 64 different patterns. So, given a stream of bits, can replace each 6 of them with one of the base 64 digits. And there is a simple solution for what to do with any few bits left over. So, that is how to take any stream of bits and 'encode' it to just printable characters easy to send via e-mail.

A huge fraction of all Internet data is sent as base 64. So, base 64 data alone is nothing suspicious.

<comment><USER27> > IMNAL, but my understanding is that such a law would run into rock solid, > granite hard, iron clad parts of a little issue called the US Constitution. > E.g., if the cops ask you a question, then you don't have to answer. The > person's lawyer can just tell the cops that "My client has no idea what that > base 64 gibberish is."

"And here our intelligence network shows proof that your client has talked about this base64 gibberish in the past with other people, so let's add perjury to your charges".

But your point is valid, you have a right to not incriminate yourself in the US. The case with Apple, however, is that a third party you've trusted is being asked to breach that trust. The 5th does not apply at all.

Not to worry, however, as long as you don't communicate with anyone, you're safe. The moment you do communicate with someone though, you'd have to put your trust in them. And then the FBI could demand, __from them __, the conversations you 've had. And then the 5th has no value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If all US crypto is backdoored, the rest of the world and the criminals will use non-US crypto.

The FBI also wants to infiltrate communities of human rights activists. There are many reasons not to overly trust them.

<comment><USER29> Our Project (actor.im) already started to adopt russian encryption.

<comment><USER28> Open source encryption should do the trick, if a backdoor gets added, just fork it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The FBI can whine about this all they want. I hope that the lawmakers interpret it as the FBI spitting in their face, because that's exactly what's happening. We have had this debate already -- in the 1990s -- and this was the result:

"A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government's ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication." [0]

The FBI can lobby to change that, but that's not what they're doing. They're lobbying that OTHER laws (e.g. the All Writs Act) enable what they want. Frankly, that's absurd... how can a 1789 law overrule a 1994 law when you're talking about modern technology?

Ironically, the FBI is creating incentives for new tech startups to incorporate outside of the USA. If you're building a product which depends on reliable encryption in order to be valuable, why the fuck would you incorporate in the USA?!? You would alienate foreign customers who are suspicious of the US legal/surveillance apparatus. And you would be entering a murky legal landscape where it seems increasingly likely that, if your startup ever becomes big enough to be a target, the government will require some kind of key escrow or it will shut down your business or even jail you.

In the face of that much uncertainty, it seems like it would be _asinine_ to incorporate in the USA.

Maybe there is space in the market for a business to commoditize offshore incorporation. Make setting up a Seychelles corporation as easy as setting up a US LLC. Build in as many legal protection mechanisms as possible, e.g. owning the corporation via a trust that you are the sole executioner of.

[0] [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/47/usc_sec_47_00001002----...](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/47/usc_sec_47_00001002 ----000-.html)

<comment><USER31> _Maybe there is space in the market for a business to commoditize offshore incorporation._

Like [https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas) except outside the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Scary that something so important will be determined by the perception of the vast majority of the public, who has no understanding of what's at stake.

To most people arguments like "it will help us find terrorists and pedophiles" and flawed analogies with doors and keys are much more appealing, only because they are easy to understand, while the opposite arguments sound philosophical, alien or carry less weight because they contradict what "the experts" (i.e. the FBI) claim.

But they shouldn't sound so: what's happening is wrong not just because of the practical fallacies of the pro-restrictions arguments -in which most discussions focus currently- it is wrong because the only way for government monitoring to be effective in the end, is to outright criminalise secure encryption by everyone. It should be blatantly obvious that the most dangerous of their claimed target group, wouldn't be dissuaded by the inconvenience of using custom/non-friendly software/hardware, so any lesser measure would be just useless.

And on that premise, how can many people not see how wrong it would be if one day we are called criminals for exchanging a truly private message with someone? In what words and with what simple examples can you make non- technical people see how bad this reality would be and how far it can stretch to things that they do care about? And that even if it didn't, it would still be fundamentally wrong...

Not a rhetorical question by the way, I've tried to participate in such discussions and failed miserably to be convincing -so any tips are appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER33> So we've moved from the clipper chip to, prospectively in the near future, the Clapper chip. History is trying to repeat itself, but this time we have legal precedent.

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

[https://blog.cr.yp.to/20160315-jefferson.html](https://blog.cr.yp.to/20160315-jefferson.html)

All this sort of tactic will do is result in irreparable damage to the tech sector and the US economy. No murders, rapes, child abductions, terrorist plots to destroy buildings, or whatever other specters they summon to haunt us will be prevented.

<comment><USER34> > On October 15, 2003, almost nine years after Bernstein first brought the > case, the judge dismissed it and asked Bernstein to come back when the > government made a "concrete threat".

I guess the threat's technically not here yet, but seems like it's right around the corner. djb, pack your bags for the ninth circuit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Comey's argument makes sense at first. Why not have a trusted escrow provider keep keys safe, and also respond to court orders when necessary. It feels almost like a checks and balances kind of argument, the kind that Americans find persuasive with our three-branch government.

The problem is that _we now know that the government has the goal of unlawful surveillance without oversight from courts, the legislature, or the public_. There is essentially an ongoing "by any means necessary" attack on civil liberties.

Why should we think that the government is not planning to infiltrate the escrow services and preemptively capture all keys?

There has been a profound breach of trust (revealed by Snowden) and we must insist upon the rule of law and basic democratic transparency before we consent to any further risks.

I try not to be cynical but I am thinking that the trend we are on is leading to strong crypto being largely criminalized. I am hoping that our decentralized systems adapt to this threat and offer solutions that cannot be shut down (like Bitcoin and Ethereum).

Incidentally, if Apple seems likely to lose the battle over a back door, it ought to offer an Ethereum smart contract that will unlock one phone every day, require a key provided by each member of congress (with 100% consent required to unlock a device), and publish all unlock key requests on the Ethereum blockchain after a 30 day delay in case an investigation is in progress.

This protects against mass surveillance, but offers a very small back door with full transparency and no potential for large scale use (or abuse).

<comment><USER36> So what do you do when the "trusted" escrow provider gets hacked, just like OPM was, and countless US corporations who've had customer records and credit card numbers stolen?

What's the point of using encryption if you're going to put the keys in the hands of some unaccountable entity which is easily hacked? You might as well not use it at all then.

<comment><USER35> I didn't argue any of those things. I think you missed the subtlety of my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It seems as though the tech community (myself included) uniformly agrees that the FBI's requests are unreasonable.

Is there someone with a sound technological understanding of encryption that thinks we _should_ have some back door / key escrow / master key? I've seen that Fred Wilson and other USV partners seem to think the FBI's requests are reasonable, and usually I trust their analysis. But this whole thing just seems like such a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER38> Rest of the world will just do encryption in their hardware/software. Good luck to USA tech companies if this law will be enforced.

</comment><comment><USER39> This sounds like the equivalent to the TSA approved locks for luggage. Just decoration and no real protection at all.

<comment><USER40> The funny thing is that if you transport firearms you CAN'T use TSA locks. Which I find very funny, it is as if they are saying we don't trust our own people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Keep an eye on the would-be profiteers. Why would VCs like Fred Wilson land on the side of the FBI and parrot their position despite certainly knowing better? Because there are billions of dollars of government investment money being lined up to implement the wishful thinking key escrow and other back- door schemes. Even if back-doored encryption is doomed in the market, co- investors will be rewarded.

<comment><USER37> As naive as it may be, I had never considered this. I think Fred is a trustworthy enough guy that he may not consciously be thinking about profiteering, but I can't figure out any other reason a tech investor would support back doors.

<comment><USER41> Shrewd plays or profiteering from idiocy... call it what you like. Look at the people on this forum who know a great deal about security. Some like to portray themselves as thoughtfully open minded - that they are seeking a solution. They make respectful noises about legal traditions. They know it boils down to exhuming the corpse of key escrow and rebranding it. But they are in a position to profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The FBI director is hanging out on a very long limb and sawing away. Even if you mandated in the US that everyone only use HTTP and no encryption everyone will just use it from other countries. Even if one country on earth has one competent programmer implement one secure framework everyone will use it. This is beating a dead horse long after its been cremated.

<comment><USER43> All you have to do is look at Korean banking to see that Rube Goldberg machines with questionable security practices can easily become standard with the "correct" legal apparatus in place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Schenier, Hal Abelson, Adelman (from RSA) already wrote about key escrow almost 2 decades ago. From the text:

> All key-recovery systems require the existence of a highly sensitive and > highly-available secret key or collection of keys that must be maintained in > a secure manner over an extended time period. These systems must make > decryption information quickly accessible to law enforcement agencies > without notice to the key owners. These basic requirements make the problem > of general key recovery difficult and expensive -- and potentially too > insecure and too costly for many applications and many users.

> Attempts to force the widespread adoption of key-recovery encryption through > export controls, import or domestic use regulations, or international > standards should be considered in light of these factors. The public must > carefully consider the costs and benefits of embracing government-access key > recovery before imposing the new security risks and spending the huge > investment required (potentially many billions of dollars, in direct and > indirect costs) to deploy a global key recovery infrastructure.

[https://www.schneier.com/cryptography/archives/1997/04/the_r...](https://www.schneier.com/cryptography/archives/1997/04/the_risks_of_key_rec.html)

</comment><comment><USER45> If the FBI gets its way on this, quite simply the US will no longer deserve the technology industry it currently has.

I for one would follow companies moving abroad to do the right thing and avoid these shenanigans entirely.

On top of it being the right thing, it is also in Apple's economic interest to fight this since the US is but one market. They also happen to have enough cash to flat out threaten to move all affected products out of the US and have them built by a non-American subsidiary.

</comment><comment><USER46> The problem with these slippery slope arguments is that they start treating unlocking a phone as the equivalent to breaking network encryption when technically they're not at all the same. Apparently the FBI wants you to think they're the same too? If so, don't let them away with it.

Signing a software update with a private key you already have is using crypto as it was intended. We presume private keys can be kept secure with enough effort, or public key encryption doesn't work, https doesn't work, software updates don't work, game over. Any attempts to get private parties to turn over their private keys should be strongly resisted, but requiring them to sign something given a search warrant adds a procedural step that acts as a check on government power (they can verify that the search warrant is valid, minimize scope of the change, and fight it in court if necessary).

Key escrow is a whole different thing, where they require a whole new system to be designed to preserve keys that would normally be destroyed. It's hard to preserve information when the user wants to destroy it (they can block network traffic and destroy the phone), resulting in all sorts of bad effects on system design and new vulnerabilities.

</comment><comment><USER47> Let's imagine they succeed. So all strong encryption will need to have the keys stored "safely" somewhere. Perhaps at some government-controlled server, because we all know they are super secure.

So, what happens once the keys eventually leak? When nation states AND terrorist organizations get the keys to unlock everyone's encryption?

If "think of terrorists" is the rhetoric here, what happens when THEY have access to our devices?

</comment><comment><USER48> As much as I object in principle, it's an interesting technological puzzle. I've been wondering about a hardware-based solution:

* A fuse that when broken reduces the cost of cracking the security from 'impossible' to something an organization with large resources, such as the FBI, can do in a day.

* When the fuse is broken, a message is displayed to the user indicating it. At least, the device might not boot, tipping off the user that something is wrong.

_

It would meet these requirements (am I overlooking any important ones)?

* Nobody could mass-crack the devices. To crack it, you would need the device in your possession and a day of significant computing power.

* It would require a significant investment of resources, so it wouldn't be done for trivial issues.

* Users would know when their device has been cracked: It would have to be out of their possession for 24 hours and they would be notified.

_

The question is, could such a thing be implemented in a way that it couldn't be hacked (without great difficulty)?

<comment><USER35> See my other comment in this thread for a solution

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think an interesting approach that could be taken by Apple is to concede to letting the FBI have a master key, so long as they hold an insurance policy that covers the damages in the case of a key leak, including but not limited to the potential damage to Apple's brand and market value, and the same damages to all of Apple's customers that relied on their security.

That would force the FBI to reconcile the costs of maintaining a multi- trillion dollar insurance policy with the expected value of a potential reduction in terrorism. When it comes to the US government, money seems to talk louder than anything else...seems like it could possibly work.

<comment><USER50> I, for one, would gladly enjoy having to pay for the insurance policy in the form of taxes out of my paycheck to cover the stupidity of having a master key system in place, not to mention when the premiums skyrocket after said key gets stolen and all of our iPhones get breached. /s

<comment><USER49> That's exactly the point. Apple agreeing to their demands in exchange for a reasonable insurance of the potential risks would force the FBI to reconcile their unreasonable demands with the public.

I would imagine that the biggest cheerleaders of the FBI's side in the general public are Republicans. Can you imagine them ever supporting this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Great, 10GB file filled with random data will be illegal in another country.

</comment><comment><USER52> They're right to want that, and the public is right to refuse them.

</comment><comment><USER53> No FBI. Hell, not that long ago I started the work to become an agent. I love law. I love bad guys being put away. But you have _ZERO_ need for an escrow on strong encryption. It is perfectly legitimate that citizens don't give up their secrets. This is why we have discovery, warrants, and the Tenth Amendment (however riddled with holes it now is). The government has no compelling interest here.

</comment><comment><USER54> How is this even news anymore?

It is utterly and completely unsurprising that all the government agencies involved in law enforcement on all levels will fight a never-ending fight against _anything_ that impedes their ability to do what they think their job is.

They don't care about privacy or any of that, and see restrictions to getting full access to all data as we see bugs in our systems that keep them from running correctly.

<comment><USER55> News doesn't have to be surprising to make headlines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Nothing stops anyone from developing software that can be installed on mobile phones to encrypt this or that. This will be a type of Cold War between those with something to protect and those who want everything transparent.

I will choose to encrypt outside of what they OS does and to hell with every other idea.

Besides, all one has to do is encrypt, use one-time pads and keys are largely irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER57> It's not clear to me where this article gets the idea of what the FBI wants. I haven't seen anything from the FBI or from Comey that indicates that they want to place limits on future cryptographics systems.

It even seems like Comey is aware that the particular technique he is asking Apple to use will not apply to future phones made by Apple, and that the reality is that cryptography will soon reach the point where the FBI will not be able to rely on decrypting data as part of their investigative approach.

Yes, if Apple creates this exploit, then that exploit will potentially be available to other state actors and criminal enterprises. But only for iPhones older than the 5s. Fundamentally, as other commenters have pointed out, this is not creating a backdoor -- this is using an existing backdoor to install a bigger backdoor. It is, of course, possible that in the future even newer iPhones might find themselves vulnerable to unauthorized decryption, but really, the FBI's ask in this particular case really is narrow in scope, because it does only apply to older phones.

I don't see the slippery slope here that many people seem to think exists. The slope begins and ends with a phone released in 2013. All any person (criminal or otherwise) has to do is buy a newer iPhone, and then this whole discussion no longer applies.

<comment><USER58> The issue isn't a technical one as much as a legal one. If the FBI can get the government to interpret the All Writs Act the way they want (any private entities must do what the govt says to aid a criminal investigation unless explicitly forbidden by law) to force Apple to write a custom version of iOS for them this time, the fear is that they can use the same law to install backdoors in ongoing versions. Legally there would be precedence for Apple to have to allow investigators to access other phones as well by means of making Apple write code to do so, which in the future could mean tracking location, turning on microphones and cameras, etc.

<comment><USER57> > the fear is that they can use the same law to install backdoors in ongoing > versions

There is no reasonable interpretation of the All Writs Act (which regards subpeonas) that could be interpreted to force Apple to preemptively make their OS insecure. If they include a backdoor in future versions of the iPhone, or if the FBI discovers a vulnerability, then it is entirely possible that they could use the same precedent to force them to open the backdoor for them, or even give them a metaphorical prybar for the backdoor.

But the point is that Apple is rapidly moving towards (and in their opinion, has already achieved) a hard stop -- they no longer possess the technical capability to break a locked iPhone after the 5s. For a specific case, and a specific subpoena, there is no work that Apple can do to comply with the subpoena.

And, like I said, it seems clear that Comey understands this, and is not asking Apple to weaken security in the future, and I see no indications that he is asking for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Many people want gun laws to change. For better or worse there will still be millions of guns on the street. So if you don't want "bad guys" to use guns or encryption it would be pretty impractical to go back in time and prevent these technological & regulatory forces that provided the means for them to exist,

</comment><comment><USER60> Washington Post published TSA Master Keys

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/09/tsa_master_ke...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/09/tsa_master_keys.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> Ah, the twice-per-decade re-run of the Clipper Chip fiasco. I wasn't aware we were already due for one.

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

</comment><comment><USER60> Is this equivalent to FBI residing in your phone ?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartering_Acts#Modern_relevan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartering_Acts#Modern_relevance)

</comment><comment><USER62> Watch the first video under 'further reading'. Many of those congressmen seem very biased and uneducated while deliberately misconstruing basic knowledge and law.

Edit: wanted to commend congressmen Mr. Issa, Ms. Lofgren and Mr. Johnson.

</comment><comment><USER63> We need to have the FBI's entire internal records copied and held by a third party in the judicial branch, so that they can be examined under court order when necessary.

</comment><comment><USER64> I remember the government making the same arguments when PGP came around.

All this has been ignored before and all this will be ignored again.

</comment><comment><USER65> I look forward to seeing how the FBI plans to prevent people from all over the globe using PGP.

</comment><comment><USER66> Yeah, I bet having to get a warrant to search houses makes their job harder, too. I:

</comment><comment><USER67> Every local police department will be able to break strong encryption at their own discretion. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is an inevitability.

Let that sink in before we consider the validity of their proposal.

Their escapades will not be limited to criminal investigations, but whatever they want. There will be no oversight and access will be unlimited.</comment>


Show HN: CoderPad, an etherpad + REPL for coding interviews - <AUTHOR> http://coderpad.io?hackernews <comment><USER2> I think your pricing is a bit over complicated and feature list too wordy.

300 pads/month - clear makes sense

Unlimited pads under 15min - This shows up for every tier but I'm not really sure what it means.

Save pads for later review - Just "Save Pads" gets the point across.

Custom pad branding - Just "Custom Branding" gets the point across.

24/7 support availability - Just "24/7 Support" gets the point across.

Just my two cents. Don't get me wrong, I think you did a great job with the design and execution.

</comment><comment><USER3> No PHP? No matter your opinion of its merits, doesn't its size alone merit inclusion?

PS. Upvoted anyway, because this is a nice tool and idea, and because your demo process was slick!

<comment><USER4> No. PHP should never be used for anything, ever.

<comment><USER5> booh, can't stand this childish php rants anymore ...

ruby and python can also be shitty in the wild as php, please stop such foolish statements once and for all.

<comment><USER6> I thought he was being sarcastic and poking fun at the common HN sentiment, but it's pretty clear from his other comment he is serious. Hope I don't have to deal with dogma like this when I join the workforce.

<comment><USER7> I thought he was too.

But remember, the best way to avoid dealing with this dogma in the workforce is to use some other language. It's a win/win... not only do you not have to deal with silly PHP shame, but you ALSO don't have to deal with PHP, which isn't as bad as the haters say, but is still pretty bad!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From an interviewing perspective, it would be nice if you could create pad "templates" from which you could instantiate a pad with existing code that the candidate would have to somehow modify/fix.

Also, I'd love to see how saving pads for later review actually works before buying - even screenshots would go a long way in deciding if I want to pay.

Have you considered offering trial plans?

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, I built something similar which supports almost all languages and is available as a free bookmarklet. Compiles your code using CodePad with one click. Do give it a look <http://akshayagarwal.github.io/EtheRun/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice site. :) I won AngelHack SF with a similar project last weekend (<http://coderang.com>), so there's definitely interest in this space.

JSRepl is super cool, I can't believe people are just now starting to use it in their own projects.

<comment><USER11> Pretty cool and congrats! Are you going to be charging for coderang?

<comment><USER10> There will be some sort of fee for the interviewing tools (question templates, interview invite emails, etc).

I'm hoping the tech screen income covers the costs of the site so I can make the applications for online tutoring and possibly classroom demonstrations free. The reason I made coderang was to help me teach my little sister how to code over the Internet without making her set up a dev environment (she's 12), so the potential educational applications are something I really care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you can figure out a way to get C++ working well in your silo'd environment, I will gladly shell out whatever you are asking.

<comment><USER13> It looks like everything is evaluated client-side (even the Java), so I believe you'd need a C++ implementation in JS ...

As far as I know, things like Emscripten (<https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki>) can compile C/C++ to JS, but the compilation itself doesn't happen in JS.

<comment><USER14> Has anybody managed to build Emscripten using Emscripten? I couldn't find anything with a quick search for terms like "nested emscripten" or "emscripten gcc".

<comment><USER15> Regarding Emscripten bootstrapping: <https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/issues/430>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like it. Could you add a keyboard shortcut to execute the editor code? Also another thing that I find really useful in code editors is the ability to surround text with parenthesis/quotes/whatever by just selecting the text and typing in the character. Right now it works more like a traditional editor where it just replaces the selected text.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems to me Google Spaces is better for this kind of thing. I don't need to see if code is 100% syntax correct much less compile to know if a potential hire is a good fit and a problem solver.

I want to see him, in his own environment, how he solves problem. With spaces I can observe via shared screen how the guy codes, how proficient he is with his tools, which references he uses, etc. This reduces any barriers. More importantly, I can interact with him as he codes a solution via microphone.

Google Spaces is free.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not convinced a tool like this is a good first-step in weeding out potential candidates.

Furthermore, as a candidate, I'd be leary of someone on the other end, not paying attention, trying to multi-task, etc...

AND, this would make me feel like someplace is trying to hire a MONKEY if they sent this to me as a first step in the hiring process.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wanted a tool like this to be used not only for interviews but for remote pairing as well.

Say I am stuck on a particularly sticky problem. I'd love to be able to load up some code and work through it with someone more experienced.

I know you can do this via Tmux but what if I don't want to setup Tmux and SSH keys?

<comment><USER20> Have you tried Screenhero? It allows sharing a screen with both users being able to use their mouse and keyboard at the same time.

There's also another startup that's a shared code editor with video chat on the right, but I can't find the link to that right now.

<comment><USER21> Did you mean us: <http://codassium.com>

<comment><USER19> Nice, still says for interviews but I feel like it is just marketing copy at a certain point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow. Your site is beautiful, and tells me what the product is very quickly. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER23> Hum, sorry to ask, but why would anyone accept to write some java code in such an environnement while it is so easy these days to allow screen sharing (join.me) and let the interviewee use the tools (s)he masters?

<comment><USER24> I think it's nice to be able to quickly run the candidate's code in your environment, without interrupting the candidate's flow. (It wasn't entirely clear to me from the demo, but it did seem like you could evaluate the code independently on your end without distracting the other person.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Please stop reinventing code execution sandboxes. This has already been solved. Just integrate this with your collaborative editor.

<http://ideone.com/api>

</comment><comment><USER26> This is kind of like Stypi, except with REPL, cool!

</comment><comment><USER7> This browser-based-REPL space is getting CROWDED. It also overlaps substantially with the browser-based-IDE space. Let's see the execution competition commence.

Time to start a comprehensive list, maybe, to make head-to-head comparisons. Some examples: <http://c9.io> <http://pythonanywhere.com>

\</comment><comment>--

So, aside from this, listen, if this tool helps your company run technical interviews, you're doing interviews wrong. (I assume the baseline is using Google Docs for your preliminary phone-screen for technical interviews, which in case you forgot, is free and ubiquitous). Let's go through coderpad's bullet points of User Value Prop, saving the craziest for last:

1) Companies waste less time and money. Tie with Google Docs.

2) Companies observe candidates' actual coding behaviour. If the candidates are IDE-dependant, no, so tie with GDocs. If they're not, tie with GDocs.

4) Interviewers spend less time nudging. Nudging is a FEATURE, not a bug. If you want the candidate to get it for free, give it to them for free. In any case, are syntax mistakes on line 12 REALLY WHAT YOU'RE INTERVIEWING FOR?!?

5) Interviewees demonstrate savviness.... by relying on auto-complete? Tie with GDocs, _best-case_.

6) Intreviewees look smarter. Well, maybe for some interviewees. I whiteboard flawlessly (such a useless superpower, except when interviewing), so this gives me less chance to show off. Also this highlights all your syntax mistakes, for those of you who make them, which arguably makes you look worse. Overall across all interviewees, I call this one a wash.

7) Candidates solve more problems, by not wasting time asking about API details.

GOD NO. WRONG.

Listen, candidates, when you're at the whiteboard, you should KNOW what methods the object should IDEALLY have, and you should have confidence that if need be you can re-implement those methods, and so you just say "I assume array has a max(), if you need it implemented just tell me." And in the time you took to utter that line, you plan out the next line of good code, and you look smarter. If the interviewer cares, show them. If they don't care, hand- wave past it. The way you figure whether they care or not is you make a reasonable guess whether they care, and tell them you're happy to be corrected.

Interviewers with a basic competence level should be helping their candidates out with this, by the way. Unless what you really care about is whether they know the syntax of max() by heart... in which case you'd better not use coderpad, because it's a cheat sheet! (Note: since I want to fail 100% of interviews that care about whether I know the syntax of some ruby array method, using coderpad works against me too in that situation).

3) Companies unambiguously know if the candidate has solved the problem.

Wow, this one's tough to even start with.

First of all, your interviewer is hopefully competent enough to over-solve the problem, given that they get to think about it in periods of non-stress, with colleagues, and they expect candidates to solve it alone under stress and time pressure. So hopefully they already know all the corner-cases that they care about.

Second, at the risk of repeating myself, if you're grading for precise syntax in an interview, (2a) you're probably grading for the wrong thing (but maybe not), and (2b) you don't want the candidate "cheating" by using coderpad. So who cares if they made minor mistakes that you wouldn't catch by hand?

And third, if the question is interesting enough to be a hard interview question (as contrasted with FizzBuzz, which does have a place in phone screens), then it's probably hard enough that _running it_ is not going to find all the important edge cases. Hard questions are usually hard for one of these reasons: they have crazy corner cases (running it on golden-set data tells you nothing), or they have a naive solution that's too slow and you want a fast solution (how does running it on coderpad help with this?), or both. They're rarely hard in the "can't get it to work AT ALL" sense.

Basically, if your interviewer can't reliably-enough determine, in his or her head, the correctness of the solution, in every dimension that matters to your hire/no-hire decision, you're lost. Hoping for an IDE to help you is... depressing.

With all that in mind, I question the honesty of trying to sell this product. Even if I think the product is pretty.

<comment><USER27> You could have just said "Why use this when I could use <http://collabedit.com/> for free? It's 'good enough'"

I'm personally excited to try this app out though this week on a candidate. There's no way in hell I'd use Google Docs. The lack of auto-indentation just kills it as a tool for writing code for me.

<comment><USER28> If you like collabedit give <http://www.stypi.com> a try!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Cool! How do you execute everything in the browser?

<comment><USER30> It's the same as <http://repl.it/> the source is at <https://github.com/replit/jsrepl/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Will you use your skill for good or for making life harder for colleagues.</comment>