Europol chief warns on computer encryption - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32087919

<comment><USER2> So, encryption is bad because our doo-gooder international police forces can't read the messages of the terrorists?

I find it hard to believe that someone this high up the totem-pole would not be able to come up with better arguments about why the government (especially the UK one) has lost the 'hearts and minds' of its constituents and what could be done about it when it comes to encryption.

If you make _everybody_ a suspect without prior cause then people will start to behave as if they're under suspicion.

When in the past 'encrypted communications' probably counted as some kind of red flag the value of that flag has been diminished or even eradicated because the government has driven ordinary people to be worried about their conversations to the point that so many people use encryption now that just using encryption is no longer a signal.

So they're going to have to expend a ton of computing power on monitoring networks of ordinary people in order to catch a few miscreants. On the whole the only things they've achieved is that the haystack is now much much larger than it used to be and that people trust their governments less than ever before when it comes to privacy issues.

Well done! I'm curious what they'll come up with next, outlawing of encryption is probably high up on the agenda in at least a few countries.

The thinly veiled message to tech firms to give Europol and the likes unfettered access to un-encrypted messages will surely be received with open arms, I think all those companies whose logos featured prominently on Snowdens documents still remember those disclosures fondly.

<comment><USER3> Something should be said about the radicalization/brainwashing that security personnel in the GCHQ/NSA/&etc. services must endure in order to keep their jobs.

I'm familiar with a few folks in this industry, and what they have been through - in the form of an internal training regimen designed to condition them for their positions - can only be described, at best, as brainwashing.

They're given repeated exposure to highly graphic videos depicting the results of terrorist activities. They're exposed to extremely highly polished videos and presentations on the subject of attacks against Western society. They're expected to demonstrate that they can handle these artifacts and still maintain their position on posts that will be secret, and highly sensitive. All the while, they are expected to continue their embedded lives in these societies.

A great deal of psychological manipulation is required to keep these people in their positions - it is not nearly well enough scrutinized by the public, in my opinion.

Those who give themselves the right to psychologically program the security operatives who maintain that terror is the #1 reason for the usurpation of civil rights, _must be investigated further_ by the public at large. There is much radicalization occurring within the halls of GCHQ that is highly offensive to our western values and society at large suffers when these secret psyops are allowed to continue to occur within the inner circles of security power.

That it has become industrialized as a means of producing "qualified personnel" is something that must, without question, be addressed by the public at large - too much trust is being placed in people whose principle job is to manipulate the psychology, and thus the motivation, of the military- industrial security elite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We should all be really concerned given that a majority of the technologies being funded to fight terrorism are nothing but pseudoscience in addition to being contrary to respecting civil liberties. The inability to question the legitimacy of any of these programs is doing more public harm than good. Beyond that, we are putting an enormous amount of power in the hands of a few individuals who despite having the best intentions can still make poor decisions or even cognitively make decisions that knowingly jeopardize public safety. I am worried that there is now no economic incentive for these individuals to prevent violence if their failures and abuses are only awarded with more power and resources. Instead we will just continue to write blank checks for psuedoscience that will further promote a growing divide between the public and their governments.

</comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't bode too well for Europe having strong privacy protections.

</comment><comment><USER6> Should really read the Guardian instead: [http://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2015/jan/12/david-cameron...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/2015/jan/12/david-cameron-pledges-anti-terror-law-internet-paris-attacks- nick-clegg)

</comment><comment><USER7> Really, we need to be rethinking the legality of combination safes and deadbolt locks - they're being leveraged in terrorist operations as well.</comment>


Unlocked hut in a caravan park with no guards is all that protects internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6790751/Unlocked-hut-caravan-park-no-guards-protects-UKs-30billion-internet-link.html <comment><USER2> One wonders if the Daily Mail reveals these secrets so that someone attempts to sabotage them and they can get a story out. Mind you it would be a poorly written article as usual.

<comment><USER3> It's not as if this information wasnt already known.

[https://tools.wmflabs.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Hiber...](https://tools.wmflabs.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Hibernia_Networks&params=51_17_10.1_N_3_00_27.3_W_region:GB)</comment></comment>


How four Microsoft engineers proved that the "darknet" would defeat DRM - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/how-four-microsoft-engineers-proved-copy-protection-would-fail/ <comment><USER3> (I ran engineering for a DRM firm for several years about the same time as Peter put this out.)

It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet was very good for information sharing, that crushing Napster hadn't exactly stopped people from sharing digital media, and that trying to make media exceedingly secure and hard to use was not a winning strategy.

If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value - <USER2> it's both more expensive and harder to use, you've made adoption pretty unlikely. In '03, MP3 players were entirely prevalent, mostly didn't support useful DRM, and the music industry mostly sold little silver discs which came with no restrictions.

So it wasn't that the threat model to make music readily redistributable for free was "the smartest black hats out there figure out how to crack your crypto and DRM", it was "an average user rips a CD into MP3s and shares it".

As you might expect, it was frustrating to try to deal with the competing demands from Hollywood at the time. People mostly didn't bother attacking the DRM - they just went and created or file-shared to get the more usable files without the protection layer. But there was still a great deal of insistence that whatever content protection layer was put in could be a vault to keep media safe forever, rather than a speedbump to piracy. (Meanwhile, of course, CDs were raw bitstreams of high fidelity audio data...)

<comment><USER4> I used to pay for content: movies, games, and some music. I didn't spend all that much, but I did buy them.

Then, corrupted audio CDs were sold. My sister got bit by one. So we downloaded it where it wasn't sold as damaged: Suprnova.

During that time, stupidity was occurring with DVDs with rotating CSS keys and 'bad block filled with data'. I was downloading films I wanted to archive, but couldn't easily rip.

Games were not that bad, but soon became horrendous in terms of screw-user checks, up to the point of driver breaking installs of trash-ware and other nefarious garbage. I trusted the pirates more than the companies.

I've been burned enough times. Why pay for crap quality when free is better?

<comment><USER5> Because the people that sweated and risked their livelihoods to produce these titles didn't actually offer them to you for free; instead, they were coerced into accepting free distribution when their work was illegally copied by companies that fund themselves by viagra and Adult Friend Finder ads.

Meanwhile, almost universally, the offerings nerds entitle themselves to are luxury goods that no person can claim an inherent right to access, so, not only are content producers and financiers coerced into having their return on investment redirected to porn ads and porn ad brokers, but that's happening solely to provide nerds with access to luxuries. Most of which they could trivially have afforded anyways.

But keep telling yourself piracy strikes some blow for justice. I don't know the statistics but I'd have to guess at least 80% of nerds like us pirate content every single week, and nobody wants to think of themselves as an asshole. Rationalize however you need to.

<comment><USER6> You can rant about "entitlement" all you wish, but the way to getting people to stop pirating content is to provide an alternative method of distribution than the one currently in place.

Steam, iTunes, Netflix, and perhaps one day HBO branching off into their own content publishing business.

A season's worth Game of Thrones Blu-Rays costs what, $50?

To access a year's worth of premium cable content would cost ~$1000 to ~$1500.

"I don't know the statistics but I'd have to guess at least 80% of nerds like us pirate content every single week, and nobody wants to think of themselves as an asshole. Rationalize however you need to."

This is pretty much the antithesis of rationalizing. You're fine with the system in place. Others are dissatisfied with piracy and want to support the creators without the "luxury" of dropping more than a thousand bucks a year for the one or two great shows worth watching on television.

<comment><USER5> A season's worth of GoT Blu-Rays costs $50 1-2 years after the series has been released on HBO. Content is much more lucrative during its initial release window; it has a very definite time-value.

People aren't complaining and breaking the law to get access to GoT Blu-Rays (well, actually, yeah some of them are). They're doing it to get access to GoT episodes that aren't available anywhere but on pay TV, because HBO uses them as an incentive to get people to subscribe to pay TV, which, when you think about it, is the only way pay TV could possibly ever work.

<comment><USER7> You know, I made some socks for you to buy, to subsidize the production and distribution of my artisan bleu cheese. My cheese startup failed, you filthy pagan pirates, because you failed to buy my socks!

Come on. We're supposed to just suck it up when someone offers us something for sale? You're kidding, that's not how markets work. If HBO does something stupid, they get penalized for it in the market.

Beyond that, the debate here is about DRM. Institutionalizing DRM (legal mandates, DMCA style legal penalties for "reverse engineering") probably causes more damage to society as a whole than allowing some smaller monetary amount of piracy. Clamping down on the civil rights of the populace as a whole in order to prevent a tiny fraction of the populace from violating already outrageous laws on "intellectual property" really isn't a good idea. Stupid laws and stupid enforcement of stupid laws make people disrespect the law and law enforcement.

<comment><USER5> The DMCA does not criminalize reverse engineering; my field is based in large part on routine reverse engineering of all sorts of software. While there is some grey area and certainly some overreach in the DMCA anti-circumvention mechanism, what it essentially criminalizes is an attempt to build a business on devices that circumvent content protection.

As a sometimes-reverser, I'm ambivalent about this. I wouldn't howl if anti- circumvention was eliminated (it won't be, but still). I'll howl with all the other security researchers when it's abused to stifle research and disclosure of security flaws (for the overwhelming most part, it isn't, but still).

I don't understand your sock/cheese metaphor at all. People can in fact bundle socks and cheese. Nobody would in reality stick up for you if you stole the socks to avoid the cheese. But nobody does bundle socks and cheese, because that's moronic. It is manifestly not moronic to bundle Game Of Thrones with ESPN.

<comment><USER4> (I posted this a month ago)

How do you know, if you are that you are indeed breaking DRM vs just doing complicated stuff with a firmware?

It seems obvious if there's PKI in there somewhere. But aside that, how do you tell the difference?

Might I add that the old proposed "Broadcast Flag" would have been a bit in the HDTV stream to signal no_copy. Changing that bit would have broken the DMCA.

<comment><USER8> BnetD managed to violate the DMCA merely by being unable to emulate the authorization layer.

<https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm amazed this entire discussion here focuses on "DRM good" vs. "DRM bad".

The point is, it does not matter. We have entered a world where for pretty much the first time, the marginal cost of creating a copy of something is zero, for all intents and purposes. We don't have any economic theories (or business models) that can deal with that yet.

DRM is simply a symptom of that. The question is not "can (and should) people be prevented from resharing content", the question is, "what does content creation look like in a world where everything is shared"

<comment><USER10> Microeconomic models deal with negligible marginal cost products as a matter of routine. I don't mean to be rude, but you've been taking the wrong economics courses.

Another poster identified the issue: decentralized distribution, not low cost of copy, is the sea change. In past times governments responded to low cost of copy by legislating copyright. Now there's no practical way to centralize distribution of _convenient_ copies of data.

Honestly, nerds fantasize about a world where all data is free, but information creators just respond by making their data inconvenient to obtain. Institutions of content creation have a high demand product; economically there's no reason to expect them to roll over and give up on making money.

<comment><USER9> That might well be - thankfully, nobody pays me for my economics expertise :)

What I meant by my statement is that the marginal cost is near-zero for _everybody_. I've just learned that a better way to say that is "decentralized distribution". I do appreciate you clarifying this. (I really do. It's rather hard to say "thank you" over the Internet without coming across as the most sarcastic person in existence)

And I don't expect content creators to roll over, but I _do_ expect to see a significant shift in the industry. Because no matter how inconvenient the access to the first copy is, the second one is free. At some point, that'll need to be factored in, because it can't be prevented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just noticed that Microsoft has an opening for a "Privacy Strategist, Senior - Trustworthy Computing"

[https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&#... https://twitter.com/adamshostack/status/274589817776525312
I accepted a position at Microsoft a few months ago, and I'm feeling pretty happy about it. I've been a merciless critic of MS in the past, but it appears to me now that MS is one of the few large tech companies in a position to make the consumer's privacy interests a competitive advantage in their products.
One of my long-standing criticisms of the whole Trustworthy computing initiative matched what was described in the article: that all this research in computer security and TPM hardware on the motherboard was not being used well in the interest of the consumer. With the very notable exception of Bitlocker, "trustworthy" tended to mean that 3rd party interests could expect the computer to act on their behalf and against the demands of the system's actual owner.
If you are or know someone who can articulate good arguments on behalf of the user and privacy, please show them this job posting.
Thanks :-)

<comment><USER12> "Trustworthy" and "Trusted" Computing are different.

<comment><USER13> Specifically, in MS-speak "trustworthy computing" means having fewer security holes and "trusted computing" is basically DRM.

<comment><USER11> Yes, it's probably not directly related to TPM DRM per se. But this position reads like it would involve privacy advocacy and strategy in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the article:

 _"I'm now finding that for some kinds of content, the illegal is clearly outperforming legal," Biddle said. "That blows me away. I pay for premium cable. It's easier to use BitTorrent to watch Game of Thrones. HBO Go is trying very hard to do a good job," he said, but the user experience just isn't as good. Because HBO Go is a streaming service, he said, it's more vulnerable to network congestion than simply downloading the entire episode from the darknet."_

Fix this and you 'fix' piracy. Oh, and the fix isn't "shut down the darknet" it is provide a better service.

<comment><USER5> Piracy costs HBO less than "fixing HBO Go" would, since HBO is cross- subsidized by subscriptions to cable.

The fix for piracy is to create compelling content under the "superior" business models piracy advocates have so much faith in. Netflix is starting to do this; over the next 10 years, lots of media/creative/production people are going to get very rich figuring out how to produce and sell content online. In the meantime, people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones; they sound ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?

<comment><USER6> People aren't bitching about "how hard it is to get Game of Thrones", people are bitching because they'd love to pay for it, legitimately, but without subsidizing all the bundled crap .

I have zero interest in ESPN, Disney and "reality" television. I understand fully why HBO is making more money than ever out of the bundlers' desperation, and don't complain that they're "losing" money (which isn't the case) but I would certainly prefer to be given the option to buy the content alone.

"In the meantime, people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones; they sound ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?"

The exact content is as irrelevant as your dislike of it. Dislike for Cable television providers didn't originate with GoT.

<comment><USER5> In other words, people are bitching because they'd love to pay what _they_ think GoT is worth, and not what GoT is demonstrably _actually_ worth to HBO.

Pay TV will eventually lose in the market as people (again, like Netflix) figure out how to have compelling content created for the direct online audience. But it won't lose until that happens.

Incidentally: I'm not the one who keeps bringing up Game Of Thrones.

<comment><USER15>
      > I'm not the one who keeps bringing up Game Of Thrones

People aren't necessarily bringing it up because of the content. More because the logistics of how it's distributed have been talked about before. By bringing up Game of Thrones, the point is to discuss the issues around it, not start a thread on the merits of the content itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Once a popular piece of information—say, a movie, a song, or a software > title—"leaks" into the darknet, stopping its spread becomes practically > impossible. This, the engineers realized, had an important implication: to > prevent piracy, digital rights management had to work not just against > average users, but against the most tech-savvy users on the planet. It only > takes a single user to find a vulnerability in a DRM scheme, strip the > protection from the content, and release the unencrypted version to the > darknet. Then millions of other users merely need to know how to use > ordinary tools such as BitTorrent to get their own copies.

There are quite a few people out there who _still_ don't understand this, who believe that a "speedbump" will work. They see things like SatTV protection schemes that are intact because people want content and they're not going to take the hard way out until they have to. Like how the PS3 got hacked once there was an incentive to.

I even remember one specific conversation with a security expert here on HN telling me about how good the PS3's security was DRM working. I predicted it would get hacked when necessary. This was not long before the hack. But it's a fundamentally biased prediction: I only needed on lucky break in the security to be right while they had to be perfect for me to be wrong.

That fundamental asymmetry, however, is exactly what makes the part I quoted work.

</comment><comment><USER16> Loathe as I am to thank Microsoft (as a company) for much of anything, I'm glad to see that rational people actually work for them.

It's awesome to see sane-minded people shed light on the realities of what information ultimately is, and how and why we share it.

You can't keep clamping down on people for whispering secrets in each other's ears. To do so is to deny an individual of their own humanity. This is especially true, with regard to trivial pastimes, like reading works of fiction and experiencing the recording of music, sounds and abstract noise that we create with the hopes that people will actually listen to them.

Hopefully, these aspects of human behavior will be embraced as normal facts of life, rather than rejected as malicious and criminal. People who create content, after all, are really paid thinkers in the Greek sense, and that should be a truth that's understood by all these stubborn rights holders.

I hope the reaction to investigations like this will encourage tolerance of file sharing, rather than harden the resolve to purge it from whatever society we find ourselves living in decades from now.

Thank you, Peter Biddle, Bryan Willman, Paul England and Marcus Peinado!

</comment><comment><USER17> > Outside Microsoft, critics charged that Biddle's project represented the > beginning of the end for the PC as an open platform. They feared that > Microsoft would use the technology to exert control over which software > could be executed on Windows PCs, freezing out open source operating systems > and reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice.

Nope, it's Apple that got there first with iOS.

I think the thesis on how the darknet would defeat DRM was correct... but only assuming OS's and hardware that actually gave owners control of what software they ran on the devices they own.

In a world where you void your warranty and possibly make it impossible to upgrade your OS (_and_ possibly break the law in the US!), by 'jailbreaking' your device so that you can install software on it without that software having been given a stamp of approval by the device vendor... I'm not so sure. And I suspect DRM was the real motivation for setting up the ecology this way on iOS -- where Apple managed to succeed, both technologically and in the court of public opinion, where Microsoft had previously failed, in doing exactly what people were scared Microsoft was doing -- reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice.

And that's what looks like the future of consumer computing now, no? The idea that a device owner should have the right to install whatever software they want on their device... is going to seem a quaint relic of a bygone age in 10 years, and not just for 'mobile'.

<comment><USER18> I thought jailbreaking was legal now? [1] It seems to me that both jailbreaking and pirating iOS apps is a pretty common activity even among non- technical people.

Obviously OS level DRM like iOS makes it harder for people but people still seem very keen on doing it and the incentive to do so isn't going away. Piracy, just like Shrinkage [2] is a fact of doing business.

[1] [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone- jail...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone- jailbreaking/) [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkage_(accounting)>

<comment><USER17> jailbreaking _phones_ is _possibly temporarily_ legal, as an exception to DMCA by the Librarian of Congress which has to be explicitly renewed every few years.

Jailbreaking tablets is not legal.

Providing or distributing software intended to help you jailbreak is also illegal, even though jailbreaking may be legal.

See the EFF on this (and donate some money to them!): [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/2012-dmca- rulemaking-w...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/2012-dmca-rulemaking- what-we-got-what-we-didnt-and-how-to-improve)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yet we are moving towards an industry where "the fully re-programmable computer" no longer exists.

<comment><USER20> I don't see that. Sure - popular "computers" are not fully re-programmable, but to say they will go away entirely is probably not true. There will always need to be someone that "makes the magic" and, IMHO, this cannot be done on a locked down device (nevermind the fact that developers wouldn't put up with a computer they couldn't debug).

As long as there are folks like you and I that wish to have a computer (as traditionally known) there will be vendors catering to our wishes.

<comment><USER7> I agree: someone "makes the magic". But what if it's like hydroponics and gro- lights were during the worst Federal excesses of the "Drug War"? Anyone buying a real computer (not an appliance) needs some kind of licensing and/or certification. Manufacturing real computers requires certified and licensed manufacturing and a different certification/licensing for design? The pace of progress would slow dramatically. Since fewer and fewer people get into programming, we won't have wild and crazy folks who try new and interesting things all the time. No Moxie Marlinspike. No Jeff Bezos. No Marc Andreesen. IT would become like making airplanes, hidebound, rigorously engineered by crank turning second-raters. It would never ever change, except in terms of marketing, like cigarettes.

This would be ideal for the status quo, and maybe even for a lot of consumers. It would certainly be ideal for the corporate interests, the few that survive.

<comment><USER21> And yet the airlines move a huge volume of people from point A to point B safely, reliably and inexpensively every day, at speeds and scale which would stagger the airline moguls of the 1930s.

Does that make airplane nerds like me who think the DC-3 is a good approximation of The Perfect Airplane (rugged, reliable, beautiful) sad? Sure it does. But all those passengers aren't sad. A DC-3 trip from New York to California was a bumpy, sixteen-hour flight with multiple stops for refueling. The same trip on a 757 is a smooth ride above the weather that only takes a few hours and has no stops. And it's cheaper too -- that 1930s trip would have cost more than $4,000 in today's dollars. The 757 ride costs around $550.

This is what happens when industries mature: they become safer, cheaper, and boring.

<comment><USER7> You say "mature", I say "reached the limits of efficient flight in 1963" ([http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/10/12/can-we-build-a- more-...](http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/10/12/can-we-build-a-more- efficient-airplane-not-really-says-physics/)). We're nowhere near what we can do with computing, but we are with airplanes.

Safe, cheaper and boring may be an artifact of the physics of flight in Earth's atmosphere, combined with an intertwined US defense and aerospace industry. Why should we let corporate and government interests "unring" the general computing bell? Why should we let corporate and government interests stuff the genie of democratic publishing back in the lamp?

General purpose computing hardware got super cheap by way of the mass market, and mass production. General purpose programming got cheap and universally available by way of mass communication. In 1983 a C compiler on VMS cost some thousands of dollars. Today, GCC and Clang and Pcc are free, and they do optimizations that Tartan Labs could only dream about.

That's a hugely different path than the carefully-cultivated air travel industry took. I think you're underestimating the effects of the FAA and the DoD on how air travel looks today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> <http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt>

</comment><comment><USER23> Palladium - I remember that name. I only had my first computer for a year or two, but I remember how it freaked everyone out. I'm glad it died.

And isn't ARM's "TrustZone" pretty much the same thing, or does it have a more niche and different purpose?

<comment><USER24> Palladium didn't die. It's the granddaddy of UEFI/SecureBoot.

<comment><USER25> I worked on the Palladium/NGSCB team from 2002 to 2005 - ultimately the team shipped BitLocker in Vista, but approx half of the team were siphoned off in (IIRC) 2004 to work on Hypervisor so the engineering effort ended up contributing to two pretty important OS features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought this was an amazing paper when it came out, especially considering its source. And it's still amazing.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's time for industries to wake up and to ditch all kind of content DRM altogether.</comment>


Roberta goes open – learning with robots - <AUTHOR> http://mp-devel.iais.fraunhofer.de:7990/projects/ORA/repos/robertalab/browse

<comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any non-german project site yet: [https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.open- roberta.org%2F)</comment>


Show HN: My Hackfit Project - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone! Check out our project: getduo.launchrock.com  . We're at Hackfit right now and our group is building a dating app that connects people based on their value of health and fitness. We're still in the midst of building out our prototype but please check out our landing page, sign up for updates (you will definitely not get spammed and more emails will make us look awesome during the demo) and provide feedback here in the comments! I'd love to hear from you all :) <comment><USER2> Sounds like an interesting app!</comment>


The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code (2000) - <AUTHOR> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ <comment><USER2> In 20 years I think we can firmly cross #1 off the list. All the others are still open.</comment>


The Casio AL-1000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/casio_al-1000.html <comment><USER2> Cool website. I sometimes miss searching for a topic and finding personal sites like this, with interesting content and to the point.

<comment><USER3> Wow. You just brought me on a time machine. I had forgotten what search used to be like. I would remember likeing the old Internet for its wierd brutalist web design and anonymity but didn't think about how I found the wierd sites using search. It would awesome if a search engine existed that only found these niche sites and filtered out all the mumbojumbo. Don't know how it would work, maybe train it with a dataset of sites? Someone with more Internet know how should make this for us. Thanks

<comment><USER4> Try this search engine [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the Wiby link.

Million Short is a search engine that can remove popular websites from the search results. You can set how many sites you want to filter out when searching, for example, you can remove the top 100, 1000, 10k, 100k, or million sites. I find that using it leads to reaching a different set of, less commercial, low ranked sites that are usually hidden in Google search. This is good for explorative searches and to find opinionated POV writing but not always, sometimes you just get trash. YMMV.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My Sharp EL-5813, which I first acquired in 1981 (I think) is still in my desk drawer, and working fine. The most remarkable thing about this particular gadget (aside from the fact that its still working at all) is that in 37 years I have only had to replace the batteries twice.

<comment><USER7> Do you happen to remember how much you bought it for?

Just wondering if it was much more expensive (inflation-adjusted) than a modern one. As there are claims that products these day are made less durable in exchange for being more affordable/accessible.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I have no recollection of how much I paid. That was a long time ago. It's definitely true that devices are ridiculously cheaper today. I paid >$1000 in 1980 dollars for an Apple ][. Today you can get a Raspberry Pi Zero for $5. I also don't think that the hardware is that much less durable. I have an iPhone 4S that is still going strong. The real problem IMO is not that things are less reliable, but that they're built to be disposable rather than repairable and upgradeable.

<comment><USER8> > I also don't think that the hardware is that much less durable. I have an > iPhone 4S that is still going strong.

That depends on the price range. An iPhone 4s does not entirely consist of glue whereas I have seen _lots_ of cheap Android phones without a single screw. I hope no one ever begins to use heat plastic fusing like e.g. chargers do...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was the first calculator I used in my job, at COMASP, 1970.

</comment><comment><USER10> This looks like such a delightful piece of hardware, I wonder if there would be any interest in a faithful reproduction sold as a DIY kit? From my point of view, this sort of technology should stick around, as a hobbyist computing tool.

Roll my own core memory? Hell yeah I would. Work on a core memory assembler (physical) for thingiverse? Also fine idea.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't go this far back but I do have fond memories of the Casio Fx 501P (I think that was the number) that I bought in 1980. I agonised long and hard over the decision whether to go for that or the 502P (128 program steps versus 256 steps) but my poor student status made the decision for me. It was a beautiful thing and much much cheaper than HP or TI competitors. I fondly remember conceiving and implementing my first program, of any kind, on that thing. It was a dominoes game, and the "AI" worked by maximising the standard deviation (spread) of the tile values left in your hand to try and avoid being left without a play. Standard deviation was one of the built in functions. Man that was a lovely little machine.

<comment><USER12> >Man that was a lovely little machine.

Indeed. There even was a little dot matrix printer peripheral by Casio. It printed on silvery rolls of aluminium-coated paper, I think by electrically burning out dots from the coating. I did ASCII plots of function graphs on it. And some love notes to my girlfriend. Fond memories...

<comment><USER12> Also I admire the engineers having developed the firmware for these machines in the eighties under God knows what conditions. It was flawless.

<comment><USER11> Actually, the seventies :- )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The bits of core memory are so big you can count them --- there's 448 in total, arranged as an array of 28 x 16.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but there were no trigonometric functions - it was difficult to use!

<comment><USER14> That's when you pulled out your trusty slide-rule. I never used one but my EE teachers always talked about them.

<comment><USER15> My dad, a mechanical engineer passed his ruler to me. It was almost a mini ceremony of sorts. It was special to him , but by that time nobody used them, and aside for some playing with it a bit I never used it for anything else.

<comment><USER16> A similar thing happened to me, as a teenager 25ish years ago - an elderly relative gave me a slide-rule and told me it could be useful to me in my physics career.

Part of me wishes I'd kept it, but even at the time I was given it the thing was obsolete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> $900 in 1967 is equivalent to $6,776 today!! And this was considered "cheap"??

<comment><USER18> 3 years later the HP 35 came out for ~ $2300 in today's dollars, was pocket- sized and had trigonometric functions.

[edit] In 1968 the HP 9100A (which was programmable and had trigonometric functions) was $5000, or $35k today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That nixie tube driver board is incredibly sexy. I wonder what those black ... block(?)-type chips are? The caption mentions they're 6-pin, but I can't make out any markings on them.

<comment><USER20> Googling the board number returns this page [http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/al1kck9l.html](http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/al1kck9l.html)

> Blue and black devices are pulse transformers made by TDK, used to boost the > core memory drive signals

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I was in university, the calculator dream of many engineers was the Casio FX-850P, I got the follow up model Casio FX-880P instead.

I wonder which model is now being favored in Portuguese universities.

<comment><USER22> I wish they would still make calculators as beautiful as that one instead of all the cheap plastic we get today. All the Casio FX-880P would need is a slightly faster processor and a slightly more modern programming language with structures and hash tables. There is even a guy in Germany who still makes PC connection cables for them - although only as a hobby and he's booked out for months in advance.

<comment><USER23> The one guy I know about is actually from Spain, although he does sell worldwide both through his own shop and through eBay: [http://www.casio880.com/en/product/interface-cable-for- calcu...](http://www.casio880.com/en/product/interface-cable-for-calculators- casio-fx-880p-and-fx-850p/) [https://www.ebay.de/usr/javitopo](https://www.ebay.de/usr/javitopo)

I'm still deciding whether to buy it from him or build my own following this guide: [http://blog.damnsoft.org/rs232-ttl-adapter-for-vintage-fx- ca...](http://blog.damnsoft.org/rs232-ttl-adapter-for-vintage-fx-casio- calculators/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The internals were a lot more involved than I thought

</comment><comment><USER25> We can see all bits in this calculator.</comment>


Steam, PSN and Nintendo eShop are down - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/TheAlexLynch97/status/415958971116040192

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I just tried to access Steam, and it does not connect. I believe it is due to the huge influx of people trying to get free copies of Left for Dead 2.</comment>


The Kitchen Bladesmith - <AUTHOR> http://craftsmanship.net/the-kitchen-bladesmith/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an updated and longer adaptation (just published) of an article from The New Yorker in 2008. Previous HN discussion on the previous article here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017542)</comment>


Rejection letter from summer 05 - <AUTHOR> "We're sorry to say that we can't accept your proposal for the Summer Founders Program.  We were surprised by the high quality of the applications, and wanted to accept more.  But since this is the first year, we decided we'd better force ourselves to keep the program small enough to manage.
A lot of the proposals we rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the applicants.  For example, we were very reluctant to accept any proposals with only one founder, or only one who could come to Cambridge, because we think starting a startup is too much work for one person.  We also rejected a lot of proposals simply because we didn't understand the problem domain well enough to judge them, or because the project seemed too big to start on only three months of funding.
It's quite likely, in fact, practically certain, that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups.  If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email making fun of us; we want to learn from our mistakes.
If this summer works out, we're probably going to fund more startups. (Check our site for announcements.)  If we do, we encourage you to re-apply in the future.
Thanks
Y Combinator"
today might be a rough day for some. but if it's any encouragement, i was rejected in summer 05 and two years later (summer 07) applied with a different idea and more experience and was accepted. yc turned out to be mostly right about the problems with my first idea, and i learned a lot in the intervening two years.
so don't think it's the end -- hang in there! <comment><USER2> Is there a YCombinator for single inventors in their 30s or for senior citizens?

One of my concepts I submitted am I told by those whom I show it to, that it is an industry changing concept!

Though it maybe ahead of it's time & mobile Internet technology/sector need to be more robust - what I show only is only the basic concept. What do you think?

I use my site everyday driving to and fro work. I used to have satellite radio, but no longer have the need!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq_lkSRDFck>

<comment><USER3> Please take this as constructive, because I'm speaking from the voice of experience here.

"I told by those whom I show it to, that it is an industry changing concept!" -- this phrase is a red flag for me. (Another big red flag phrase is "if we only capture x% of the market...") I've had applications like that too. I would just be careful that you base how cool your idea is on one thing: number of active users. People can say all kinds of great and wonderful things about you and your app; and they will. But it all boils down to users. If you got 'em, doesn't matter what people say one way or another.

<comment><USER2> Thanks :)

Why is my phrase a red flag to you? I was just conveying words from those who have seen the YouTube video. Sorry if it sounded I was implying this is the best concept over anything, not my intent!

As for users that is a future milestone for YCombinator companies. Y assesses the applications to find the best of the bunch! This concept did not meet Y standards and that's great, I look forward to seeing the startups chosen and wish them good luck!

<comment><USER3> I had a guy once that spent 15 minutes telling me how great my invention was. Then I asked him to pay for it.

The room got very quiet after that.

Talk is cheap, that's all I'm saying. I would never judge a quality of a business model, good or bad, simply because of what somebody says about it. I'm sure you have a great application. I look forward to hearing how it goes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1 person startups would've ruled out Plentyoffish.com (Markus Frind) and Napster (Shawn Fanning).

<comment><USER5> I suspect they would have strongly disliked Markus Frind because he can't write using proper grammar and punctuation. And, even worse, his site is total Microsoft fanboy stuff. Windows, SQL Server, ASP.NET, scaling to tens of millions of users and more money per month than all YC acquisition sums.

<comment><USER6> Markus Frind is a moron who was in the right place at the right time. If you funded 1,000 of him, you'd lose on 999.

As we say in poker, even the blind squirrel finds an acorn some times. Markus Frind is a prime example.

<comment><USER5> I definitely wasn't defending him, I just think it bears repeating that you should build your stuff with whatever you're most comfortable with.

"What do you know about servers that Yahoo and Google don't?" Well, you'll probably never be Yahoo or Google and you don't have their same requirements, so if you get down with SharePoint 2007 Enterprise Solution Architect Server Plus Pro Home Business, go for it.

<comment><USER4> Markus says: "My short description leaves a lot out, but basically I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning. I picked out "enemies" and did everything I could to defeat them which ment being bigger then them. I refused to accept defeat of any kind, and I constantly forced myself to test new things. I never tried to perfect anything it didn't matter if things didn't work 100% as long as it was good enough I would move onto the next thing. In 2003 the dating market was growing 80% a year unlike the -10% in 2006 so growth was a LOT easier. When 2004 rolled around and word of mouth REALLY kicked in and as they say the rest is history."

[http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i- started-a...](http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an- empire/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious what motivated the change from "send us an email making fun of us" in 2005 to "send us an email telling us about it" in 2007.

<comment><USER8> It sounded somewhat arrogant in the original version. It wasn't arrogant, of course, it was serious, but it could certainly be perceived as arrogant or smug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You make it sound like this is the only way to go in life. "If you have failed, you still can live..."</comment>


Six ways to level up your nmap game - <AUTHOR> https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/11/25/six-ways-to-level-up-your-nmap-game/ <comment><USER2> NO! This is why I can't find anything on Google without getting n lists of m ways.

No one at all needs a list of ways to get better at nmap. They need a quality up to date tutorial or a book. They don't need an article with six random things they can try. There is no substance to that!

Please correct me if I am wrong but the entire purpose of this is ad revenue. Stop polluting the internet with your lists.</comment>


What Ignited Tinder's Explosive Growth? - <AUTHOR> https://growthhackers.com/companies/what-ignited-tinders-explosive-growth/

<comment><USER2> growthhackers seems to be down at the moment:

[http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/growthhackers.com](http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/growthhackers.com)</comment>


My carpooling website for primarily RIT students.  - <AUTHOR> https://wheelie.me

<comment><AUTHOR> Guys please take a look and let me know what you think.</comment>


How to Have a Successful Side Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilesort.com/blog/how-to-have-a-successful-side-project.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I used to have a lot of trouble switching between side projects and not really getting anything done - so I thought I would share what I do now to improve that. As always, I'm happy to answer any questions!</comment>


IBM: Open Source's Friend? Not So Much Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2891&blogid=14 <comment><USER2> > "One is that IBM is either a friend of open source, or it's simply an > opportunist, supporting some projects when it suits, and attacking others > when it doesn't."

Business exists to sieze opportunities. IBM is a friend to Open Source (eg, employing Linux kernel and Samba developers) when it helps sell mainframes and Power chips, but doesn't like emulators of it's proprietary mainframe firmwares. This sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

<comment><USER3> i.e., IBM is a hypocritical organization and is entirely driven by sales.

<comment><USER2> If by 'hypocritical organization' you mean business, and by 'sales' you mean revenue, then yes.

This isn't really limited to business either. I have a couple of OSS projects I maintain. I also have some proprietary bits and pieces. If I thought someone was ripping off my proprietary bits, I'd try and fight back too, regardless of their license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I suspect that the nastygram came from IBM's mainframe business unit, not one of the units which typically deals with Open Source.

TurboHercules should GPL their product & see what IBM does then...

<comment><USER5> Very good point. IBM is a _huge_ company. Thinking of it as a monolithic entity whose actions are all coordinated according to a master plan is tempting, but unrealistic.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good C++ Numerical Libraries - <AUTHOR> I'm starting my MSFE program this fall.  Since C++ is heavily used on Wall Street, I have decided to take this summer to build a significant numerical library for financial related applications.  Right now I am working with Quantlib and GSL to see how numerical routines are coded in C-style languages, but I am hoping to see a much broader code base as my project develops. I've come across several other numerical libraries, but I'm really not capable of judging yet what is considered to be a good library.  I was hoping HN could point me to some well-constructed numerical libraries, hopefully coded in C++. I'll share my code when I get a significant amount of work done.<p>I thank any posters ahead of time. <comment><USER2> I'm doing graphics research, and the numerical libraries is probably slightly different, but the ones I've found useful are: <http://math.nist.gov/tnt/> <http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page> <http://www.cgal.org/>

Also, I can't recommend "Numerical Recipies in C++" enough. This is a great book if you're not a wizard already, although the seriously good numerical mathematicians complain that it doesn't necessarily show you the absolute best way to do everthing. Its a great learning and example-code resource though! [http://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Recipes-C-Scientific- Computi...](http://www.amazon.com/Numerical-Recipes-C-Scientific- Computing/dp/0521750334/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241965399&sr=8-2)

<comment><USER3> "Numerical Recipies" is a good book, but you do have to keep in mind that it was mostly written several years ago, and this is a field where a lot of people are actively researching a lot of topics, and not just the obscure/niche ones.

I recently did a fair bit of work with matrix computations, for example, and while "Numerical Recipies" and "Matrix Computations" were both useful for background material, the technical notes that go with LAPACK were often far more up-to-date (and a source of the latest research papers behind the LAPACK implementations as well).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Boost.uBlas: [http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/libs/numeric/ublas/doc/...](http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_39_0/libs/numeric/ublas/doc/index.htm)

A good C++ library for high performance computing is going to be more than just C-style functions wrapped in a class. Read the paper on Expression Templates by Todd Veldhuizen: [http://ubiety.uwaterloo.ca/~tveldhui/papers/Expression- Templ...](http://ubiety.uwaterloo.ca/~tveldhui/papers/Expression- Templates/exprtmpl.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I gave up and used Matlab to generate C++ libraries.

<comment><USER6> Can you recommend any good resources/tutorials for this?

<comment><USER5> Sure, this PDF should give you all the info you need: <http://www.apc.univ- paris7.fr/~beau/IMG/pdf/cppmath_ug2b.pdf>

Scribd: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/15194614/MATLAB-C-Libraries>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.research.att.com/~bs/C++.html#libraries>

Also, __the__ templates books is very useful for several tricks for squeezing performance: <http://www.josuttis.com/tmplbook/>

HTH

</comment><comment><USER8> The Intel Math Kernel Library is decent, and very fast. It has disadvantages - not optimized for AMD processors, not free (but the student version is cheap, and the free trial does not really expire).

</comment><comment><USER9> The best modern C++ numerical library I came across is Eigen: <http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page>

</comment><comment><USER10> It really depends on what sort of numerics you're talking about and how you're defining good (performance? api design?)

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing I am interested in the most is accuracy and precision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Miracl is one.

</comment><comment><USER12> The best advice I can give you is: read Nuclear Phynance. It's a truly great forum for practitioners:

<http://www.nuclearphynance.com>

There you can read a lot about implementing numerical software in the "real world". My perception is that C# is starting to take C++'s place. But, then, it's just a perception. Moreover, take a look at LAPACK, LAPACK++, BLAS, and the like...</comment>


Ask HN: Who consults on tech content/documentation architecture? - <AUTHOR>

I've got an early stages project going where I'm looking at how we might refactor/restructure some of our product documentation and information.  Basically we have all the tech data/reference material anyone could ever desire, it's just not arranged and structured in the optimal way for how people use our software, nor is it indexed optimally for making it easy to answer questions.
Does anyone know of a firm or team that deals primarily with this sort of problem?  I'm not looking for just a couple of tech writers to clean things up, I want basically UX experts for documentation and support content.
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> I do that. I've done it as part of my private consulting business for over a decade. Find me on LinkedIn. Same username.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will do.</comment></comment>


A writing career becomes harder to scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-endurability7-2010feb07,0,4119789.story

<comment><AUTHOR> Just substitute "entrepreneur" (or really many/most challenging and rewarding things) for "writer" in the excerpt below:

Call it stubbornness, stamina, a take-no-prisoners determination, but a writer at work reminds me of nothing so much as a terrier with a bone: gnawing, biting, chewing.</comment>


Gabe Newell: Valve, VAC, and trust - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/

<comment><USER2> I sympathise with the position Valve are in here, which appears to be a "least bad solution" kind of problem.

Even so, I can't help feeling that the mere viability of userland software like VAC or DRM/copy protection schemes shows that we remain in the Dark Ages in terms of computer security models. For any normal application, it should not even be possible to read system-level information like what is cached within the networking stack, or to hide funny things in your file systems or mess with your boot sector, or to monitor and/or interfere with communications between other applications and the OS.

However, on a typical laptop/desktop/server OS today, we still usually determine authorisation at a resolution marginally finer than "Are you root?". On some mobile platforms, there seems to be a move toward a more controlled and application-specific model. However, in practice, apps frequently ask for everything including the kitchen sink anyway, and the more controlled installation/update/removal processes for apps seem to be more a (possibly unintended) side effect of locking users into app store models than an active decision to firewall each application for security reasons.

So, out of genuine curiosity: Is anyone actively researching better ways to model user and application permissions that might find their way into mainstream operating systems any time soon? By now, I really ought to be confident that even if I were silly enough to open a dodgy attachment in my word processor, it couldn't then scan my e-mail, load a couple of juicy system settings files, and upload it all to a server in Western Hackville without further permission. And if I have a problem with a particular piece of software, I really should be able to summarily destroy every trace of it with a simple and reliable procedure, without having to worry that it's left anything behind that I didn't want. We've obviously got tools that do parts of this job, such as chroot jails and checkinstall in Linux world, but for the average user this whole area seems absurdly underdeveloped given how many common attack vectors would immediately be closed down entirely or at least much better contained.

<comment><USER3> I agree this is highly desirable. However, what if it came to pass? A game can just say, "you must run me with super permissions, or you don't get to play me." How many people are going to decide not to install the latest Battlefield or Call of Duty or whatever the kids are playing these days, just because of that? I think they'll happily click through whatever prompts are necessary, and put in whatever scary administrator passwords are required.

An alternative would be to not let _any_ third party have these capabilities at all. But unfortunately that includes you, the user, because the system can't distinguish between things that the user actually wants to do, and things the user doesn't want to do but told the system he really really wants to do because he wants to go shoot some bad guys.

Neither outcome seems great, although the first is better than the second to me.

<comment><USER2> I certainly agree that there is a social/education angle to this as well, and in many ways that is the hard part. Just look at the usability problems with Microsoft's early attempts at UAC on Windows, or how many people give permissions for all kinds of things on auto-pilot when using mobile devices.

Still, you can't start to educate even sensible, cautious users about how to make informed decisions if you don't first have a robust technical security framework so you know what decisions need to be made. Also, we could tighten restrictions on applications without requiring any extra user understanding or interaction at all in quite a few useful cases.

For example, suppose we distinguished between installing general applications and system tools, with the latter meaning third party software that really does need unusual levels of access to system resources, such as security or disk management utilities. Suppose also that we restricted general applications severely in terms of low-level access to system resources. Now all a web browser or e-mail client has to do to benefit from improved security is initially install as a general application, which is presumably the default behaviour and requires no interaction with or notification of the user. Any malware that subsequently finds its way into that application and tries to access restricted system resources or APIs is assumed to be hostile and gets killed immediately, with no need for user interaction then either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a very "press-releasey" response, and it feels disingenuous.

He doesn't specifically address the weak hash algorithm, nor the privacy concerns of monitoring people's domain visit history. This is basically "Yep, we do that stuff, and we're going to keep doing it, because it's good for you".

Understood; cheating is a big problem for them, their players, and their business model. Also, it's unlikely that Gabe had any direct hand in deciding how to build this cheat detector; those decisions were made further down the org structure.

Finally, they probably aren't currently doing anything really bad with that data, but it's a slippery slope. They _have_ that data now, and they aren't going to stop adding new features. Over time it's likely that some smart developer is going to realize that they can use it in some other way, maybe cross reference it, etc. Gabe isn't asking you just to trust that they're not evil, he's asking you to trust that they will _never_ be evil.

His Q&A at the bottom:

1) Do we send your browsing history to Valve? No. (just the domain names in an easily reversible hash)

2) Do we care what porn sites you visit? Oh, dear god, no. My brain just melted. (We aren't specifically looking for porn, we're not that selective; we collect ANY DOMAIN we find on a cheater's system).

3) Is Valve using its market success to go evil? I don't think so, but you have to make the call if we are trustworthy. We try really hard to earn and keep your trust. (Don't be evil.)

The "You're either with us, or you're a social engineering cheat developer" part rankles a bit too, although there may be some truth to that scenario (I don't know either way, but that's one path that could lead to discovering the DNS interception).

</comment><comment><USER5> I am honestly not sure how to feel about this. On one hand cheating is bad, on the other hand vac having that much capability is scary. Even if it is using it to nuke cheaters from orbit with surgical precision.

<comment><USER6> How is this any scarier than running Microsoft Security Essentials and other removal tools like Spybot? At some point there has to be trust. Trust that the tool which is controlled by another party that it will do only what it's supposed to do. If someone don't trust anyone, then that person shouldn't even have their computer connected to the Internet so complaining about it is moot.

I trust Valve. They've given me no reason yet that they aren't trustworthy. They _have_ to go after cheaters because hacks and cheats ruin online games so quickly. So it's damned if you do/don't in many ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since this was posted on /r/gaming, I would _strongly_ advise that you do not read the comments.

<comment><USER8> Clearly you are unfamiliar with the caliber of comments on hacker news for the borderline-tech articles.

<comment><USER9> Clearly you are unfamiliar with the caliber of comments on hacker news for the tech articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why would it send my entire dns cache? Wouldn't a flag that says "this guy visited awesomecshacks.com" enough? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER11> In the post, it says that it sends hashes of DNS only after the cheats have been detected.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I read it too. But why the hassle? Why not the hash of the cheat site I visited. They probably want all my sites to find other probably unknown sites.

And even if I am cheater, does it really justify it? "Oh, he cheats so we can ignore his privacy". Read cheater's email and listen his conversations with steam's next android app while you are at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So if I'm a super cheater, what do I do now?

I distribute my latest cheat over a botnet, access from all over, and let Valve take the heat for all of the random computers they target. With innocent people affected.

Valve will not win this war.

<comment><USER13> It's a war they still have to play. If you re-read what Gabe wrote, it's really about driving up the cost of doing business. That alone is a significant deterrent.</comment></comment>


Deploying Containers in the Real World: Part 2 of Grammarly's Docker Journey - <AUTHOR> http://tech.grammarly.com/blog/posts/How-We-Deploy-Containers-at-Grammarly.html <comment><USER2> would be nice to see if this approach is applicable for deploying backend-less websites with static content only

</comment><comment><USER3> Great job! A real breakthrough!

</comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome!</comment>


YTS torrent tracker part of new anti-piracy scheme - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/yts-torrent-giant-is-part-of-a-bizarre-brand-new-anti-piracy-scheme-200823/ <comment><USER2> I saw the article refers to the Prenda Law saga, I just looked it up and saw the main protagonists had been sent to jail. This line from Wikipedia made me chuckle as sounds like the exactly like a game of the prisoners dilema

In 2019, Steele and Hansmeier both pleaded guilty in Federal court to a range of criminal charges related to and including extortion and fraudulent conduct, with substantial sums of their criminal proceeds to be reimbursed. Steele received a reduced sentence of 5 years due to his cooperation and Hansmeier, who had not cooperated, was sentenced to 14 years. [13]

<comment><USER3> Protagonists?

<comment><USER4> If you think the law is bad, that is what they are?

<comment><USER5> "Protagonist" doesn't necessarily have a positive judgment attached to it, does it? I.e. if the main player in a story is the bad guy, we still say "protagonist"?

<comment><USER4> Not sure, but in a good vs evil story I think it does. I naturally assumed due to the implucation of an antagonist a protagonist always meant the subject of the conflict (every plot has a conflict they say). But you might be right, I can see how it can simply mean the center of a story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have anybody discussed how this[0] could complicate things? The developer of the popular tracker, Opentracker, has built in a feature where it throws in bogus but real IPs when you ask for seeders.

It reduces efficiency for people who are trying to download from seeders that don't exist, but also introduces deniability because if you ask the tracker for a list of seeders your IP being on that list could reasonably explained as it being one of the bogus IPs.

To verify that your IP is actually seeding you have to connect and try to download from it, but does the act of downloading from a peer change the situation so it is actually some kind of entrapment or at least commiting to have done a crime as part of the investigation?

[0]: [http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/2007/02/12/perfect- deniabili...](http://opentracker.blog.h3q.com/2007/02/12/perfect-deniability/)

<comment><USER7> > _... does the act of downloading from a peer change the situation so it is > actually some kind of entrapment or at least commiting to have done a crime > as part of the investigation?_

No.

It certainly wouldn't be entrapment and it's not "a crime" for you to download files that you own the copyright for (or, in these types of situations, have been granted permission by the copyright owner -- whom you would typically be working on behalf of -- to download).

In my opinion, the addition of the "bogus IPs" is pretty pointless. Once you've gathered a list of seeders, it's trivial to actually connect to them and verify that they are sharing (portions of) the file.

In fact, I would think you'd _have_ to do that in order to be able to affirm that the file was, in fact, being "shared". You couldn't honestly state that it _was_ if you didn't verify that to be true.

I can't recall the name of it now but the firm that does this stuff on behalf of HBO (or did, when I worked at an ISP and received e-mails from them) connects to the "seeders" and downloads (part of) the file(s) from them to verify that they're _actually_ illegally sharing copyrighted content.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you in spirit but part of the reason copyright trolling even still exist is down to the fact that many judges presiding over the cases lack even a basic understanding of how any of it works.

An IP is a terrible way to identify someone and the judges who actually know a thing or two have already learned that.

The copyright trolling industry has worked its hardest to try and goose the legal process in their favor at all junctures and the reality is most judges just don't have the knowledge to properly adjudicate these cases so the technical nuance of bogus IPs just doesn't matter. In most cases the copyright trolls just make declarative statements about what their tech discovered. Some cases by more informed defendants have been tossed because they were unwilling to disclose how the data was collected.

Ultimately if you stand up to the copyright trolls, they usually stand down. It's not worth them to actually fight. They're hoping for the drive-by payout.

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately for humanity, and to great joy among trolls and three letter agencies, IPv6 is by construction (perhaps accidentally but that doesn't natter) an excellent way in practice to identify a device, household and therefore a person (or small liable group)

Non of the ISPs in my area are offering IPv6 prefix randomization - if I want not to be correlated, I need to switch ISPs. I am staying with IPv4 for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A tad off topic but it fits nicely, installgentoo wiki had a very nice article about private trackers: [https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Private_trackers](https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Private_trackers)

<comment><USER10> I think installgentoo has a few interesting things on it but hopefully you're not confusing it with the actual gentoo wiki: [https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Main_Page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The main question to ask her is why is YTS throwing their users under the bus? Were the operators of YTS threatened with lawsuits? Or is YTS being run as a honeytrap to lure unsuspecting users with the intention of eventually receiving copyright settlement money kickbacks?

Seems like the strategy here is to go after low hanging fruit (people who create user accounts and people who don't use a vpn) using scare tactics with no intention of actually prosecuting.

<comment><USER12> > Were the operators of YTS threatened with lawsuits?

7th sentence:

> The background to this 'partnership' appears to have its roots in cases > where YTS itself was sued by attorney Kerry Culpepper for copyright > infringement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there any evidence that this "YTS" that we're talking about right now is the _real_ YTS? Whoever was behind YTS got into legal trouble a few years ago and shut down his site, leaving the markets to lots of copycats with YTS- inspired designs and domain names.

<comment><USER14> There is no official YTS. YIFY-TORRENTS was shut down, the most popular and semi-professional site is YTS.(some domain), but there is no official one.

<comment><USER15> The original would still be the real one even if it has been shut down.

<comment><USER14> Well yes, but it wouldn't be YTS but YIFY-TORRENTS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The next generation tracker will have to be something like what doctors do with "assisted suicide" instead of "euthanasia": Different independent entities, each performing an action that is legal, that in the end lets the user get the link.

<comment><USER17> The real solution is to use Tor-like network where you're using multiple intermediate proxy-servers located in different countries with different laws. And make that network extremely popular for lawful content. So when you're downloading Ubuntu, some of your traffic will transmit encrypted parts of copyrighted cinema. You have no idea what are you transmitting, you're just obeying protocol (which you should, because otherwise peers will throttle you) and downloading legal content.

At this point US have to make that network illegal, causing huge collateral damage. Note that even torrents are not illegal, so it would be quite a precedent.

<comment><USER18> >The real solution is to use Tor-like network where you're using multiple intermediate proxy-servers located in different countries with different laws

There are a number of Tor like anonymizing networks already, and they're all slow as hell and unable to handle bulk traffic. This idea has been raised many times and it's never worked out. Compromises have to be made, and if you want good anonymity/privacy then speed is usually the first thing to go.

>And make that network extremely popular for lawful content

There are already plenty of distribution paths for lawful content that can be fast because they don't have to hide in the shadows. Where is the value add? How will you get media companies to buy in? Almost no one is going to willingly buy in solely on the basis of "we need your traffic to help cover our illegal file distribution".

>So when you're downloading Ubuntu, some of your traffic will transmit encrypted parts of copyrighted cinema. You have no idea what are you transmitting, you're just obeying protocol (which you should, because otherwise peers will throttle you) and downloading legal content.

That's basically how I2P operates (you have to contribute disk and bandwidth to the network to store and serve files, and you don't have the key to decrypt unless you happen to request a resource that's already locally cached), and it's extremely slow. Not to mention the risk that you end up storing and distributing the _really_ illegal stuff like child sexual abuse materials, not just pirated movies, which is far beyond most people's risk/comfort thresholds. You can't have a network like this "just" for pirate media without it being abused for darker purposes, and a lot of people are simply unwilling to support that.

>At this point US have to make that network illegal, causing huge collateral damage. Note that even torrents are not illegal, so it would be quite a precedent.

They don't have to make it illegal, just so unusable that the vast majority of people don't bother. Which it already is. Which is why we use torrents instead of already having a solution like what you describe. Not to mention that it doesn't have to be illegal for carriers to try and throttle/interfere with it under the guise of traffic shaping and fair use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if YTS users could go after the operator in court for its illegal conduct, or for its use of their personal data in particular. I'm guessing the site being illegal isn't relevant unless they personally have their copyrights infringed, but I wouldn't be surprised if this use of individuals' data without consent is illegal, especially if the shakedown letters turn out to be fraudulent.

<comment><USER20> Unclean hands doctrine. You can't sue someone when the complaint at issue is you doing something wrong. You'd have to find someone that didn't infringe on anything, and even then you'd have to fight an uphill battle. In the absence of a contract saying the data can never be shared, it's unclear what the cause of action would even be.

<comment><USER21> It would be up to the courts if you've done anything wrong though - downloading a torrent file isn't illegal, per TFA. Who's to say you followed through with a torrent client to use it?

<comment><USER20> If you haven't, what's the harm? Where are the damages?

<comment><USER19> The harm is your IP address and other information being provided to a company that's trying to extort you...

<comment><USER20> As above, what's the cause of action?

<comment><USER22> > The harm is your IP address and other information being provided to a > company that's trying to extort you...

If you get sued, you've suffered damages and you have a cause of action. You'd need to show that YTS _wrongly_ provided your information, but in the hypothetical where you in fact did nothing wrong, that seems theoretically doable.

<comment><USER20> You might have a malicious prosecution case against the party that sued you. I still don't see a cause of action or damages against a third party that provided information that they likely would have been forced to provide in discovery anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised there aren't torrent trackers that run on Tor available (or maybe I just haven't heard of them). Seems like it would be a perfect way to avoid both shutdown and the service's ability to identify its users. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER24> TPB has an .onion site.

But the real danger with torrents is when you're actually sharing the data. Any of the IPs you connect to could be a malicious peer who will later track down your IP through legal channels and send you abusive notices.

I guess the way to protect yourself there is to torrent only over a VPN or through a seedbox.

<comment><USER25> End game then is VPN providers get sued for piracy. So people use VPN providers in uncooperative jurisdictions. Then VPNs eventually get coopted into sharing user information as IP owners invest more over time in copyright enforcement.

<comment><USER26> Yup. I use ProtonVPN on account of its Swiss jurisdiction and no-logs policy.

It's not perfect, but puts up enough obstacles for me to feel better about it than some fly-by-night VPN

<comment><USER27> > Yup. I use ProtonVPN on account of its Swiss jurisdiction and no-logs > policy.

Can switzerland even be considered "non-cooperative"? I mean, most people probably think so because of their reputation as a an "offshore bank", but that's been eroded due to the passing of FATCA.

<comment><USER28> Switzerland is interesting from a copyright aspect in multiple ways:

\- Downloading copyrighted material, even from obviously shady sources, is perfectly legal.

\- Sharing said material with your friends, even if you obtained it from an obviously shady source, is perfectly legal.

\- Sharing it with random strangers (as happens while torrenting) is not legal, but hard to prosecute, because:

\- private companies collecting IP addresses to sue uploaders violate privacy laws, and thus commit a crime themselves (!) [1]

I didn't check, but I'd also assume:

\- That ISPs and VPN providers aren't required (and quite likely even aren't _allowed_ ) to disclose the identity behind an IP address to a private entity

\- That VPN providers (unlike ISPs) aren't required to maintain such logs, and thus typically don't.

For comparison, in Germany, downloading from "obviously illegal" sources is prohibited, further sharing a copy from such sources among friends is prohibited (and since breaking copy protection is prohibited too, having a DRM-free copy of the content is a pretty strong indicator that it comes from an illegal source - unless you got it from a Swiss friend...).

[1] [https://www.weka.ch/themen/it-technik/it-sicherheit-und- rech...](https://www.weka.ch/themen/it-technik/it-sicherheit-und- recht/informatikrecht/article/ip-adressen-es-gilt-das-datenschutzrecht/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> People seem to think this is some sort of betrayal, but anyone could have done it. The whole point of trackers is to allow anyone to get a list of peers who have the same torrent. If anything, this gives me a startup idea: archive.org, but for torrent swarms. Scrape public torrent sites, grab all their torrents, for each torrent connect to their associated tracker and grab their peer list periodically. You can even try connecting to them and grab a few bytes to confirm they're actually uploading. Now you have a list of IPs known to have committed copyright infringement. Sell this list to copyright trolls years/months later for $$$.

<comment><USER29> [https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/](https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/)

<comment><USER30> That says I downloaded ssni-845-C.mp4 7GB (XXX) three days ago, but I didn't. WTF is that all about?

<comment><USER31> Dynamic IP or CGNAT by your ISP.

<comment><USER30> Nope. DHCP IP, but they're effectively static. It hasn't changed for 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I was always curious why the website told me to register, felt very suspicious. Some torrents are restricted to users, weirdly.

Not to mention the occasional shady popup ads.

The weirdest thing about YTS, is the high quantity of very low-quality movies it has. I mean things you would not watch even if it was free. It makes it impossible to really pick anything.

So in doubt and in paranoia, I would say that I have low trust for YTS.

<comment><USER33> >I was always curious why the website told me to register, felt very suspicious. Some torrents are restricted to users, weirdly.

That was mostly to control ratios, and force people to seed torrents and stop them from leeching (downloading and delete the torrent/not seed).

If you had a bad ratio, your access to seeds was also limited therefore the speed at which you downloaded was capped.

Some trackers eventually started to monetize themselves by offering "premium accounts" that would bypass the ratio, and allowed users to leech.

Mind that this is my knowledge from almost 20 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> seedr.cc, bitport.io, zbigz.com, offcloud.com exist to solve exactly this problem. Downloading openly from public trackers is extremely risky. Even private trackers have been known to be monitored by DMCA agencies[0].

[0] : [https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/4iele6/empornium_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/4iele6/empornium_monitored_by_dmca_companies/)

<comment><USER31> How is giving your credit card to these companies any more secure? For all i know they could be selling the user registration data with payment info to some lawyer.

<comment><USER34> You can use privacy.com or pay using Bitcoin.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/05/1000-monitor-stand/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand why they announced the stand during the keynote at all. It's not something to be proud of and it isn't cutting-edge technology. They could have just put it for sale quietly and the outrage would have been far less.

<comment><USER3> I was somewhat surprised with their entire Mac Pro strategy. With a base tower configuration starting at $6k (about twice what I was expecting), they seemed to signal a shift in what they consider a "pro" user to be.

They're pretty clearly chasing after the commercial, high-end computing market, but they've kinda left the high-end consumer market behind in some ways.

Still no definitive fix to the fly switch keyboards, lots of complaints about other design issues in MacBooks, basic spec bumps in mainstay products like the iMac. All while they continue to (somewhat unjustifiably) raise prices.

The new Mac Pro is the coolest piece of tech they've built in a while, and it's completely unsuited for 99.9% of users. What's the point in mass- marketing it? It felt like watching a marketing video to buy an airplane or something.

<comment><USER4> > What's the point in mass-marketing it? It felt like watching a marketing > video to buy an airplane or something.

It's because sites like this have been complaining for years that Apple has left the Pro market behind. This was their response to that. And now this site is switching to complaining that Apple's definition of "Pro" is too "Pro" for us.

<comment><USER5> > switching to complaining that Apple's definition of "Pro" is too "Pro" for > us.

If by too Pro you mean someone using an 8 core CPU with 32 GB of RAM ...

The higher end models might be great, with some genuine innovation in the GPU interface that to some will justify high prices. But I don't know who the target demographic for a $6k PC with those specs is supposed to be.

<comment><USER6> It's the rich people who can afford not thinking more than twice to make the purchase. If that excludes almost everyone, thats fine. Apple is making a statement that they are still the premium of the premium

<comment><USER3> That may be, but their recent decision to no longer disclose per-unit sales for any of their products on earnings calls moving forward doesn't necessarily signal good times ahead. Their revenue for the last 2 quarters is down from the same period a year ago, and there doesn't appear to be anything on the horizon that's going to catapult their earnings back up. iPhone sales have been in decline for a few years now.

They're banking that the margins of these new, higher-end products offsets the sales lost by shrinking their market. The problem with this strategy is that it isn't very sustainable and leaves them vulnerable to losing market share.

Microsoft keeps getting more serious about Linux compatibility, and if they ship a surface pro or something similar that can seriously compete with the MBP, things will get interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> WWDC was the wrong place to announce the 2019 Mac Pro, period. It's not a developer machine, at least for people developing iOS and Mac apps.

A more appropriate venue would have been a special media event in, say, Los Angeles, amid all the high-end post houses and VFX shops that can actually justify investing in both the Mac Pro's pixel throughput and the Pro Display's reference accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a silly criticism, it's not a PR fail.

The monitor stand is like a $99 hamburger on the menu. For the people rich enough to never care about the cost of a restaurant meal it's a purchase, and for everyone else it's a cue that this brand is absolutely top end prestigious and expensive.

Im counting the days until I see one in a rap video or all over rich kid Instagram.

<comment><USER9> But the pricing needs to be internally consistent for the brand to be taken seriously, whether as a luxury brand or otherwise. In other words, a $1k piece of metal with a couple of moving parts undermines the rest of their portfolio. It's one thing to have a uniformly expensive lineup like a watchmaker, and entirely different thing to price your most complicated offering (phone) and the dumbest one (metal piece) the same. Like what's the message here ?

<comment><USER8> > Like what's the message here?

The message is that Apple shit is so top of the line that even our monitor stand is an uncompromising work of art.

It's really not that complicated, it's a textbook luxury branding and pricing strategy. Ever seen a Restoration Hardware catalog? They sell painted tree stumps for $1000.

<comment><USER10> > it's a textbook luxury branding and pricing strategy.

The problem is that this 10x overpricing strategy doesn't apply to their entire lineup, but that's not made explicit. As a result, people might mistakenly generalise it to their other products such as iPhones, leading people to think that their phones are also 10x overpriced and are actually only worth $100, thus diminishing its value.

<comment><USER6> Haha, no. The average person does not think that deeply or use that much math.

<comment><USER11> I think the average person who is an iPhone owner can look at their phone and to this monitor stand and think "why do they cost almost the same?" easily.

Price is one thing that most people are quite sensitive about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Might as well buy some Tellurium Q Silver Diamond Digital Streaming Ethernet Cables to go along with it. A snip at only £1200.00 per metre. [https://telluriumq.com/silver-diamond-digital-streaming- cabl...](https://telluriumq.com/silver-diamond-digital-streaming-cable/)

<comment><USER13> the HiFi world really is something else

<comment><USER12> In my darker moments I have considered designing things for it. Insulating layers made from woven hemp flax impregnated with powdered crystal, to avoid orgone buildup interfering with the latency, that kind of thing. Thankfully, I have avoided this impulse so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> PR fail? Everybody is talking about it.

<comment><USER15> Everybody and their mother knows that Apple has a new monitor by now. You can't buy that much publicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I imagine many will be using the Vesa mount in this market, so if they did what you recommend, then I imagine people would have been much more upset that they are paying for a 1K stand they will never use, which would have been even worse. From a PR perspective people might not have made that connection right away, but shortly after the event still would have been horrible reaction, since its one thing it itemized its another thing to charge 1K more for no extra value. Now what they should do is the same thing they do with iMac, is sell a version with the stand for 6K and one with vesa for 5200. Problem solved, no PR issue. The reason they didnt presumably is they have no idea how many want vesa vs not vesa so they may end up with a lot of unused inventory or not enough of one. And of course makes logistics for making and selling harder, etc, but I think had they known the reaction they may have considered it. They will probably ride it out but if it continues they will simply switch to that iMac method of selling it.

<comment><USER17> For that situation, i think they can market it as $6k monitor. For vesa, get the addon mount for $200. Basically, don't separately price the stand.

The way that its currently broken out is quite puzzling. As a fun conjecture, perhaps they are planning a range lower spec monitors and want to upsell the stand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The $200 VESA adapter seems worse to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's generated so much extra exposure for WWDC and their other announcements. Although they aren't pronouncing it, I'm sure their marketing department disagree.

<comment><USER20> I know any press is good press, but come on. You can't just excuse any too- expensive product this way.

<comment><USER21> Does anybody have to "excuse" the sticker price on luxury cars? You can obviously get cheaper (and likely more comfortable) 4-wheeled transportation instruments elsewhere, but that's hardly the point.

<comment><USER22> there is nothing luxury avout the stand, it's essentially identical to any other stand, which is not the point of the cars in your analogy.

<comment><USER23> > there is nothing luxury avout the stand, it's essentially identical to any > other stand

Some of the features that make it "luxury" in my mind are:

* Build materials / quality

* Small footprint

* Magnetic connector (no screws)

* Ease of adjusting height / rotating (according to Apple)

For a 32-inch, 16 lb monitor that may need to be moved around a lot and shared amongst multiple people, I can see how those qualities might be important enough to justify the price for some.

And if it's really identical to any other stand out there, can you show something comparable at a lower price?

<comment><USER24> They probably are also not be expecting to sell as many of these stands as other stand manufacturers, so their manufacturing costs could be significantly higher considering it uses a unique design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Apple isn't going to sell a cheap display. If you want a cheap display go somewhere else. From their page about the display[1] a use case for this stand is to have "one on set and one in the studio" and move your display back and forth. Additionally Apple sells a VESA mount adapter for people who have "unique mounting setups for their displays"

There is almost certainly no one who might actually buy this display who is complaining about the price.

[1][https://www.apple.com/pro-display-xdr/](https://www.apple.com/pro-display- xdr/)

</comment><comment><USER21> ITT: people who don't know how luxury branding works.

Without the stand, all headlines would have been on how Apple _finally_ listened and produced a great MacPro - something only us geeks care about. Whereas this $1k-stand trolling generates mainstream headlines which reinforce the luxury-brand image that actually makes them the big money.

It's entirely possible that people will now buy this monitor _even if they don 't need it_ simply so that they can flaunt the "famous" $1k stand.

<comment><USER20> The articles are about how this hurts their PR. The threads may be full of people who "don't get it", but the key point is that the threads are _full_ of them, providing strong evidence for the thesis. Your assertion is a little like Skinner blaming the children.

<comment><USER21> "People writing angry posts on the internet" is not Apple's target market, it never has been. People like us are like a bull to Apple marketing's matador: we run after the red flag so that the matador can do his job for public enjoyment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded > increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of > demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make > a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous > consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because > it is a positional good, something few others can own.

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

</comment><comment><USER27> All of you are seeing this from the wrong side! Apple is opening a new market. Premium monitor stands. ;)

<comment><USER5> I know you are joking, but this already exists. I can get a cheap table mount for two monitors for $40 from Amazon, or I can get a really nice one for anything from $500 to $2000 (HumanScale's configurator has some great options [1])

1: [https://www.humanscale.com/products/mflex-m10-monitor-arm- co...](https://www.humanscale.com/products/mflex-m10-monitor-arm- configurator.cfm?configuration=X1BCMSQTBPHN---12</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-)

</comment><comment><USER28> By itemizing the stand, they inadvertently(?) exposed how much they're fleecing the consumer.

</comment><comment><USER29> For those who never saw a NeXT computer, they effectively can't understand why their is a stand looking like this...

For me it is a A glimpse of rememberance from Steve original NeXT MegaPixel Display ...

</comment><comment><USER30> I predict something similar to the debacle with the AirPods and the lack of a 3.5mm jack in the iPhone. Everyone made fun of the decision at the time but the Veblen good effect asserted itself anyway and now it's a standard to be emulated and a product that insipres envy in many.

Likewise, this product will be hailed as a status symbol in a few months precisely because of its absurdity.

Apple will continue to be contemptuous of its consumers because it keeps being richly rewarded for it. I am not trying to be edgy by making this claim: it was all laid out more than a century ago by a cheeky Norwegian-American, and more recently by patio11.

<comment><USER31> Status symbols have to be visible to others, not hiding behind the monitor in private. It cannot be a status symbol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The PR was intention. Apple is the greatest marketing company in modern history. That stand and the entire Mac Pro now has a perception of super high end. Where it has no compromises on quality and price. Genius yet again from Apple. Look at how much press it is generating for them. Right when iPhone was getting a bit stale in public mindshare.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's like the Apple version of the Juicero.

</comment><comment><USER34> my personal take on this:

Apple did not want people to talk about other things introduced or not introduced at WWDC. With so much attention from non-developers for a developer event, they need to carefully handle expectations until the hardware event in fall, with its focus on the general public, will hopefully introduce the amazing new things everyone always expects.

This year was not a disappointment for sure but the things shown are incremental improvements at best. Putting that stand out there will give the public something largely irrelevant to complain about and at the same time generate more attention for a specific niche product: the new mac pro.

And in doing so they avoid real criticism for all the other products that are so much more important for their success. Apple does not lose anything here

side note: anyone else remember when Tim Cook thanked everyone involved in the end and emphasized the overtime and weekends they worked through? No idea what to make of this, does not sound like a normal thing to admit tbh as CEO. To me that sounded like a plea for something, perhaps to be more understanding and to wait until fall to see how everything plays out?

(timestamp 2:15:56 at [https://www.apple.com/apple- events/june-2019/](https://www.apple.com/apple-events/june-2019/))

> these guys have given up their nights and weekends from their families

<comment><USER21> To me that sounded more of a message to his own workers, to be honest: "I know you work unhealthy hours, but you get to be a part of this! Take a bow!"

Which is a troubling message, normalizing exploitation, but is perfectly in line with contemporary executive-think.</comment></comment>