War on Anonymous: British Spies Attacked Hackers, Snowden Docs Show - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/war-anonymous-british-spies-attacked-hackers-snowden-docs-show-n21361 <comment><USER2> You have to wonder, do the GCHQ agents involved _really_ think Anonymous is worth their time? Are the people actually carrying out these attacks convinced that their efforts are better spent on that than identifying and infiltrating terrorist networks?

I get spying. I get compromising and penetrating the networks of rival countries. I even get economic espionage, in the same way that I understand why the US Marines overthrew sovereign governments in service of United Fruit.

But DDOSing _Anonymous?_ Were they loading up LOIC and firing their lazors at freenode? That just seems fucking _pathetic_. It looks like a bunch of children got written a big cheque and were told to go play.

We're constantly inculcated with notions of spy agencies as supremely powerful, supremely competent cloak-and-dagger organizations that work in the shadows to guide world events. But this just makes them look like bratty kids with a rich uncle. It's pathetic.

<comment><USER3> Anonymous DDoS'd bits of the UK govt ([http://www.out- law.com/page-11476](http://www.out-law.com/page-11476)). Not critical bits but enough for them to take notice of the threat.

Much of the (UK) law enforcement response to potential civil unrest is to try to prevent escalation, this would seem to be in line with that.

Also the tactics and techniques used are frankly not something any of the other bits of UK govt outside the MOD would understand or be able to deploy.

<comment><USER4> That is certainly a clear headed and reasonable explanation of why it might be tabled as an option... but I can't fathom who thought deploying a nation state level intelligence agency (in a western democracy) against the communications infrastructure of political dissidents was proportionate. Or even a good idea.

I would love to see how the DDoS was argued as being "legal". Whose bandwidth was used? Where was the target server hosted? Is it legal for an intelligence agency to launch a denial of service attack against civilian infrastructure in another sovereign state to disable dissident political speech? And if it is legal for GCHQ to do it, then why is it not legal for MSS to do the same thing? If GCHQ can DDoS Anonymous, then MSS can DDoS Falun Gong. If GCHQ can hack Anonymous' laptops, then the PLA can hack Tibeten government in exile's laptops.

Allowing GCHQ to be used like this undermines the ability of the UK to be a force for good in the world. Losing the moral high ground for something as pathetic and petty as this? It is embarrassing to see Western Democracies behaving like script kiddies.

<comment><USER5> > That is certainly a clear headed and reasonable explanation of why it might > be tabled as an option... but I can't fathom who thought deploying a nation > state level intelligence agency (in a western democracy) against the > communications infrastructure of political dissidents was proportionate. Or > even a good idea.

Using special branch to infiltrate political groups is commonplace. So much so that there are recent scandals from officers living false lives having children with the people they are surveiling, and trials collapsing.

GCHQ have to obey the laws of England. They are usually mentioned in law to give specific exemptions.

I have no idea how they handle the laws of other nations. I'm guessing that they obey those laws where they align with English law.

It's not the first time they've done "script kiddie" antics. Hacking terrorist information websites to replace bomb making instructions with the recipe for cupcakes is another example.

<comment><USER6> I realize this sounds snarky, but I'm just a North American from the middle of that continent...

Who is deemed capable of deciding which political groups to infiltrate? It seems to me that there's a narrow line between manipulating politics the way you want them to go and observing threats.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you that it is fantastically problematic to infiltrate political groups.

In theory _all of them_ get scrutiny.

The UK has had considerable trouble with things like employers compiling blacklists of political activists and union activists in order to deny them employment.

Some of the police infiltration scandals have been bad - police either get converted and refuse to provide evidence (while still being paid to gather evidence) or they encourage law breaking amongst legal groups.

I can understand monitoring all political groups (although I don't agree with it) but the UK does this poorly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous > hacktivists by launching a "denial of service" (DDOS) attack – the same > technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – > making the British government the first Western government known to have > conducted such an attack

I remember when this idea was still pretty much seen as a "conspiracy theory" around the time when Wikileaks was getting DDOS'ed.

</comment><comment><USER7> I urge everyone here to read this article about Congressman Pike's fight against the NSA:

[http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to- battle-...](http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the- nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares)

This part especially stuck out to me:

> Pike was less interested in sensational scandals like Church's poison darts > and foreign assassination plots than he was in getting to the guts of the > intelligence apparatus, its power, its funding, its purpose. He asked > questions never asked or answered since the start of the Cold War: What was > America's intelligence budget? What was the purpose of the CIA, NSA and > other intelligence agencies and programs? Were they succeeding by their own > standards? Were taxpayers getting their money's worth? Were they making > America safer?

> Those were exactly the questions that the intel apparatus did not want > asked. The Church Committee focused on excesses and abuses, implying that > with the proper reforms and oversights, the intelligence structures could be > set right. But as the Pike Committee started pulling up the floorboards, > what they discovered quickly led Rep. Pike and others to declare that the > entire intelligence apparatus was a dangerous boondoggle. Not only were > taxpayers getting fleeced, but agencies like the NSA and CIA were a direct > threat to America's security and democracy, the proverbial monkey playing > with a live grenade. The problem was that Pike asked the right questions—and > that led him to some very wrong answers, as far as the powers that be were > concerned.

From what I've noticed, nobody is asking these questions today, and yet NSA and CIA keep getting bigger and bigger funding, with NSA having nothing to show for it and yet with expanding capabilites, and CIA wanting more funds mainly to operate more drone strikes in secret (i.e. covert wars). This is a path that's actually _dangerous for national security_ , either because they are collecting data on people that can later be hacked and gotten by rival nations, or because they're starting wars with other nations who knows for what selfish reasons, without the people knowing anything about it. We should have a big debate about it, yet no one seems to be starting it.

<comment><USER8> So he expected a government agency to track its efficiency and see if the money spent is really warranted compared to the effects produced? That's crazy talk. That would be running the government like a good business. Nobody does that. And yet less folks like CIA or NSA. They protect us from evil, so people should shut up, pay up and be quiet and trust them, they're the good guys after all.

<comment><USER9> >they're the good guys after all

Nothing could be further from the truth. The NSA, CIA, GCHQ - these are the _most_ corrupting influences on western society, and they are responsible for a great deal of terror, instability, and insecurity in the countries they operate.

The day we depose these people and put them in the asylum where they belong, will be a bright one indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anonymous channels existed in IRC servers around the globe, on million-user- plus networks and tiny networks alike. It's chilling to think whole networks of people completely unrelated to Anonymous could get taken down just because a few morons were using a channel to organize attacks.

(Also, am I missing something, or did they completely miss an opportunity to collect intel by taking them offline and making them move to more private channels?)

<comment><USER11> Freenode regularly suffers DDOS attacks. Scary to think that the British government might be behind this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to see more information on the botnet were or are operating. Is it fully theirs or did they rent it? If they rented it, how and from whom? If it is fully theirs, what did it consist of? Did they rent a bunch of servers, or did they use a collection of residential connections? Were these connections used with the consent of their owners, or did the GCHQ hack them? If there was consent, who gave it to them? ISPs?

The legality of this is interesting. I suppose it takes a peculiar legal structure to operate a botnet lawfully.

</comment><comment><USER13> The original documents, with some interesting logs.

[http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/snowden_anon...](http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/snowden_anonymous_nbc_document.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Related article: [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/sentencing-lulzsec-hacker-sabu- dela...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/sentencing-lulzsec-hacker-sabu-delayed-once- again-1432135)

"For the third time in less than a year the sentencing of Hector Monsegur (aka Sabu) has been delayed without explanation."

Subu as a founder of Lolzsec, organized "elite hackers" to attack a number of targets, until (and after) he was arrested and immediately turned informant.

Working for the FBI, Subu continued to recruit new hackers for new operations while feeding all information to his government bosses.

Read these chat logs. How is that not entrapment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We need a War on Politics.

<comment><USER15> Politics is not the problem, politics is essential for our lives, what's wrong is that it simply serves big capital these days, with growing disregard for civil rights.

<comment><USER16> I'm sure there are ways we could update the political process with more modern ideas of logic, science, election theory, and consensus.

<comment><USER17> look up Fair Elections. It's simple and promising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have no love for Anonymous (far from it), but some of this is disturbing.

</comment><comment><USER19> Has anyone ever done a kickstarter to bribe government employees to whistleblow on other government employees?

<comment><USER20> Bribery is illegal. That would be a very risky thing to contribute to.

Has anyone done a kickstarter to buy cocaine in bulk?

<comment><USER21> Yes. It was done on The Wire. They called it the Co-op and they bought heroin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anonymous failed because its members were systematically targeted, falsely accused and in some cases assassinated. The only thing the group stood for was the inherent right to information. Information should be freely available. This is the only route to true security.

The government says if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear. We'll wtf governments?! Why you so scared? If I were to apply the same logic, I could get the impression you're hiding something.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wish this had the whole title not just "War on Anonymous"

</comment><comment><USER23> Interesting that there are still services around that are vulnerable to syn floods.

<comment><USER3> With enough bandwidth everyone is vulnerable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is the lady in the video on this page reporting this from Russia even though she said they got the docs from Snowden before he went to Russia? Are ALL their pundits in Russia for the Olympics?

</comment><comment><USER25> Good read.

</comment><comment><USER26> So it was never about terrorism to start with; it was and has always been about retaining power & oversight by selling "security" to the cheap sheep. Was there a doubt on its true motivations? No, I don't think so.

But looking at how things have been in America for the last 10+ years (since the justification of WTC) I don't see much hope unless the citizenry rises to the occasion and fixes these rascals to their place. I sincerely hope they do, but I am given up on this already.</comment>


Broadband for Every California Household: One Gigabit or Bust - <AUTHOR> https://cenic.org/blog/broadband-for-every-california-household-one-gigabit-or-bust <comment><USER2> This is a very nice point of view. How one CEO says it can be done.</comment>


Ask HN: Tools to help in porting projects to other languages? - <AUTHOR>

Porting a project from one language to another is often pretty straightforward, especially if the two languages have similar syntax and features. However, once the port is complete and functional it can be difficult to keep it up to date with changes in the original. Do you have a favorite tool to help manage ports of projects in other languages? <comment><USER2> Emscripten!</comment>


The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/the-nsa-reportedly-has-total-access-to-your-iphone/ <comment><USER2> I know this headline generates traffic by being about the iPhone, but this is a minor point. The big message from Jacob's talk and the original articles in Der Spiegel is that the NSA can intercept anything. Period. Full stop. People have suspected such far reaching capabilities for some time. This talk and the articles demonstrate that it exists. I'm personally a little uncomfortable with this kind of disclosure. On one hand, the NSA exists for the express purpose of spying. That is their job. You can not like that the NSA is a spy organization and we can debate whether we should conduct spy operations as a society, but I'm not sure what exposing their methods in this level of detail does for advancing that debate. Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? A group that makes crappy and obvious listening devices stamped with "Designed by the NSA in Maryland"? On the other hand, the cases of potential abuses and dragnet surveillance capturing everything indiscriminately are extremely worrying. I don't know how a free society can do all this spying in support of legitimate foreign policy goals and at the same time not grow into an out of control, unaccountable organization ripe for abuse.

<comment><USER3> First off, I don't think anyone except "tinfoil hats" really imagined the scale of NSA spying. Who really thought the NSA would try to subvert the cryptographic standards they pretend to create to "secure systems"? Who really thought they'd go to US service and hardware companies and ask them to implement backdoors for them?

Also, there's a big difference between letting NSA protect US against Real Threats - real national security people-are-going-to-die threats, and spying not just on every single citizen on the planet (which includes corporate espionage), but on American citizens and companies, too.

Just like everyone has a little "evil" in them, without all of us being Hitler, the NSA can do a little bit of spying on important targets, without going 10/10 on the scale of evil spying.

So no, I really don't think "this is their job" or that "everyone knew they were doing this". I think the vast majority of people thought NSA would be _reasonable_ with their spying.

I also hate it when people say, "didn't you see when they passed the Patriot Act? You should've expected this." Perhaps, but if you go back to when they passed it, they did it in literally hours, and if you watch Bush speak about it [1], he makes it sound as if they are only going to use it to spy on the _terrorists ' communications_ \- not _everyone 's_. Going by how fast they passed the bill, and how few details were offered, you can't really blame most people for "not knowing".

Heck, it was even called the "anti-terrorism bill" on TV, so I don't think people imagined that meant all of their communications are going to be swept up, because they were now thinking everyone is a potential terrorist (which is what "collecting it all" means) until proven otherwise by their systems.

[1] - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfRcfTakhFo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfRcfTakhFo)

<comment><USER2> But my issue is that very little in the slides released by Der Spiegel talks about the actual _targets_ where devices were employed. There is the Internet dragnet stuff which is rightly worrisome, but the vast majority of the slides are similar to the one about the iPhone and detail targeted exploits: specific phones, specific servers, specific routers. Targeted spying on real threats requires those capabilities. Unfortunately, if deployed at scale they _could_ be used for large scale spying. But there is no _evidence_ here that these methods are used in this way (in contrast to stuff like PRISM). I think that's what makes me uncomfortable here. There is a bit of sloppiness going on where people are trying to conflate techniques for targeted spying with mass surveillance. I think it's important to be careful to make the distinctions.

<comment><USER4> Some of these items need to be deployed with "black bag jobs" and that has some natural limits. Still, we know that people like Martin Luther King were the targets of dirty tricks campaigns, and that the treatment of people like Jacob Appelbaum indicate such dirty tricks are still in play.

There are enough prominent technology and finance people reading this who back controversial and truly disruptive technologies like bitcoin, biotech hacker spaces, open source crypto, etc. that they may have a reasonable concern about being a target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "one question has been paramount for privacy advocates: How do we, as a society, balance the need for security against the rights to privacy and freedom? "

I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not.

Giving total control to Stalin meant hundred of millions of Russians got murdered in terror, giving total power to Hitler or Mussolini from democracies meant the total destruction of Germany and Italy with millions dead.

<comment><USER6> I don't even think you need to go that far, with extreme examples of totalitarianism.

I'm not American, so obviously I'm less emotionally involved. My view on it is that the US is not under any meaningful threat of terrorism. 9/11 was big, but on the scale of decades it is still far down the likelihood list of violent ways an American may be harmed. Murder, Rape and other assaults are a reality too, a far more likely reality.

The real "solution" is "ignore terrorism, it's not a big threat." That's contrary to human nature, but I think it is the most rational response.

<comment><USER7> Yes. Let's put the threat of terrorism in perceptive: In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms in America alone, reports CNN's Samuel Burke. [http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans- kill...](http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-killed-by- guns-than-by-terrorists/)

<comment><USER8> Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument.

Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizations. There are tens of thousands of people being killed every year in Syria, for example, at the hands of al qaeda or other terrorist aligned soldiers. There have been about ten thousand people killed every year in Mexico at the hands of drug cartels in what is effectively a weird kind of civil war happening there. During the Iraq war and during the war in Chechnya terrorists and terrorist aligned fighters killed tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians.

Moreover, very few people die every year from jet crashes. However, that low figure is due to a truly enormous amount of effort and resources put forth, probably in the trillions of dollars per year range, to keep air travel safe and reliable.

That's the danger of using naive statistics and straight death-toll comparisons the way you are doing. Sure, more people are going to die from cheeseburgers than likely will ever die from terrorism. But A: overall that's a _good_ thing, and B: it's not necessarily meaningful.

More importantly, there are much more direct and more substantive attacks against NSA surveillance effectiveness, TSA screening, etc.

For example, with regard to TSA screening it's notable that the TSA has not thwarted even one terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11\. However, there are many documented accounts of TSA failures to prevent weapons of various sorts (knives, guns, even bombs) from getting on planes. And there have been attempted attacks on planes which the TSA did not stop but which passengers did.

The case with regard to the ineffectuality of the NSA's surveillance efforts is even stronger. They put out a list of foiled plots where the NSA surveillance had some role and it is wall to wall bullshit. Most of the "plots" are little more than entrapment, and there appears to be no case at all where surveillance was the lynchpin that made the difference between shutting down a plot when that plot would have gone undetected without the surveillance data. Worse yet, there are several examples of cases, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, of outright incompetence where the FBI/NSA et al had a case handed to them on a golden platter and they screwed the pooch and let someone they were warned about end up murdering American civilians. And one has to wonder if those sorts of failures, which vastly outweigh the vast majority of phony "successes", happened because federal law enforcement agencies were too focused on this high-tech bullshit instead of actually doing their fucking jobs.

<comment><USER7> You're right of course. And even the label 'terrorist' can vary. I think if we ask the people living under the threat of predator-strikes they'd say _it 's the US_ thats causing a lot of the terror there.

<comment><USER8> "Terrorist" does not currently have a well-accepted objective definition. To me a terrorist is a guerrilla fighter who lacks popular support where they are fighting and specifically attacks soft targets for political (rather than military/tactical) goals. Regardless, the casualness with which "collateral" deaths of civilians has been handled for several of the US's recent military activities may be of a different nature but not necessarily on a higher moral standing. This is probably most true of the US's participation in the Yemeni civil war over the last several years, but there is much else worthy of approbation. The theory of arming surveillance drones was always that it would enable attacks on extremely high value targets of opportunity using precision guided munitions that would limit collateral damage. In practice it has resulted in an unprecedented expansion in the extent of the currently active battlefield and a weapon system which appears to be on the same moral level as the car bomb in the degree to which it causes deaths of innocent civilians.

<comment><USER9> Kofi Annan's definition seemed reasonable to me:

 _Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aren't we missing a critical point here??

> _" The initial release of DROPOUTJEEP will focus on installing the implant > via closed access methods." [2007]_

OK, we knew this much already. I remember seeing a number of stories on how law enforcement can pull data off an iPhone, etc. Not really much new here.

> _" A remote installation capability will be pursued for a future release"_

Here is the interesting bit. You don't put this in a document unless you have a good plan on how to do it. Obviously with iOS devices having ports closed and being behind NAT, the NSA can't exploit them remotely. However, the NSA is pretty clear that it will have the capability in the future. Note the date on this - 2007.

Since 2007, what has changed? iCloud allows Apple to install and run code directly on your device remotely. Is there any doubt that the NSA would request Apple give them full access to iCloud? So the real issue here is what that last little line hints at: the NSA was looking to get remote access rights to all iPhones back in 2007 and with the knowledge now that they will happily backdoor AT&T/Google/Microsoft to retrieve data, is there any doubt they are now using iCloud to gain remote access to all iPhones?

I'm sure NSA/Google does the same with Google Play Services.

<comment><USER11> " iCloud allows Apple to install and run code directly on your device remotely."

I dont understand this? so far as I am aware, apple has _always_ been able to install and run code directly on your device remotely.

what am I missing?

<comment><USER10> Features - iCloud is just an extension of the stuff that was on iOS already. Previously you had preinstalled apps as part of the rom that could run in the background etc, and you had apps that you could download that ran sandboxed and had to have an icon, etc. iCloud allows direct access to the filesystem remotely. iCloud also now has routing support to assign you to different Apple servers, etc. All of these features would make it trivial for the NSA to put their own special server in at the iCloud data centers and redirect specific people onto it without them knowing.

So while it would have been theoretically possible for the NSA to do it before iCloud, iCloud makes it actually practical to do it without subverting the whole iOS team.

<comment><USER11> I am sorry, I dont think that makes much sense.

Apple has had remote access to the file system forever - an early use of it was to remove apps that had certain kinds of legal issues from the phones of those who had purchased it.

iCloud is simply remote file storage, and not all applications use it anyway - if the NSA wants access to my phone, achieving access to my iCloud account is a pretty poor second best.

<comment><USER12> Providing an XML feed that lists banned apps does not equate to remote file system access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not only is the slide from 2008, but it also says it requires "close access methods" and "remote installation will be pursued for a future release." In other words, they need physical access to your device. If we think that the NSA can't compromise a device after gaining physical access, well then I think we should be scared about the competence of the NSA.

I don't have the patience to watch Appelbaum's hour long talk, but unless he has something far more impressive than these documents then he's just another activist who will willfully mislead in order to advance his cause.

<comment><USER14> > _I don 't have the patience to watch Appelbaum's hour long talk, but unless > he has something far more impressive than these documents then he's just > another activist who will willfully mislead in order to advance his cause._

The fact that you cherry picked a obvious example, and even downplayed its singificance -- plus fact that you were quick to call him an "activist" (nay, "another activist", how their pesky multitudes annoy you), tells more about you than about him or the talk.

<comment><USER13> I didn't cherry pick any example. I just used the example that the article was written about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Now the talk he gave was interesting, laying out some known and some new facts about the surveillance and automated attack capabilities of the NSA, particularity interesting is the targeting of infrastructure and their traffic injection systems. And he is right to make the point, that its particularly despicable that they actively sabotage infrastructure security, something everyone on this planet has to suffer from.

But.. I don't even know where to begin, its not only that we need to convince a large portion of the US population that living in a dystopian total surveillance state is actually not something to thrive for, we can't even begin to discuss those issues in any meaningful way when people have not the slightest clue whats really going on, even if leaks like this occur that outline frightening and utterly insane surveillance and attack capabilities nobody is going to explain it to them (not that anyone cares anyways).

The NSA developed and deployed a global system that enables them to do DPI on the whole internet traffic, analyze that traffic, inject traffic, attack every system through countless vulnerabilities and backdoors and all of that automated, not only against their "targets" but also against any infrastructure they are interested in.

They have secret laws, can force companies to work with them, force backdoors and not only are the US companies not allowed to talk about those things, they are legally bound to publicly lie about it.

So yeah they can hack every iPhone on this planet, and turn it into a silent listening device, among many many many other things, is that really what we should be talking about?

<comment><USER16> > force backdoors

unlikely

> they are legally bound to publicly lie about it

source?

<comment><USER17> [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/09/nsa- sabota...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/09/nsa-sabotage- dead-mans-switch)

<comment><USER16> Can you be a little more specific? Also, re: that article, is there any evidence that there are exploits placed by NSA or GHCQ that could be used by other adversaries? I hear this claim a lot, but haven't seen any evidence...

<comment><USER17> As far as I know, you're obliged not to divulge the fact that you're cooperating, including saying that you aren't if you're asked, if that's what you've been doing so far.

I don't think there's any evidence that someone has used an NSA backdoor, but, given how widespread exploits are, I wouldn't be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really see this working remotely, as long as you have control over a cell phone tower or you use a phony portable base station, both of which are within the NSA's reach.

The thing is phone baseband software (which is reused on different phone models and controls the phone's I/O including GSM, USB, etc.) has hardly ever been under attack. When the iPhone arrived with its new security model, baseband bugs became one of the major ways to jailbreak a phone. Those bugs have been fixed one by one, but they were mostly on the USB side - the GSM side has been impractical to attack. A carefully crafted GSM packet could in 2008 and probably could now cause a buffer overflow in the baseband and gain access.

An interesting presentation on the topic: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQqv0v14KKY)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is from a very old version of iOS (2007). We don't know if this is still true.

Regardless, I can say for a fact that there are exploits for all cell phone platforms. iOS exploits are by far the hardest to find. An iOS remote execution 0day will easily fetch $250k. I've seen one go for $600k. For an Android remote exec 0day, you're looking at closer to $50k.

Even if the NSA doesn't have these on hand, they can certainly purchase them.

<comment><USER20> Seriously? Apple fanboys feel the need to try to defend Apple by saying that their competitors are worse?

Wake the fuck up! This isn't about Apple. It's about an out of control military that's spying on all of us and threatening our way of life and our livelihoods.

<comment><USER21> That's the major issue at play, but the article is about Apple. There can be more than two things happening at once. Most Apple fans natural reaction to any negative article about them is "Why Apple?" and to work from there.

Because more often than not, the answer is "Because it draws clicks". Since that isn't the case here, the next step is typically "Is this unique or specific to Apple, and does the issue at hand pertain to other devices or OSes?" In OPs opinion, it isn't. His evidence is the high cost of zero day exploits relative to other platforms.

He's not "defending Apple by saying their competitors are worse", he's providing context to an article that provides none itself. If negative articles about Apple weren't such rabid click bait, this wouldn't be needed as it would be part of the reporting process. Unfortunately, that isn't the case.

"Wake the fuck up!" is an extremely patronizing sentiment. I can be both aware of the overall NSA situation while simultaneously defending Apple from knee- jerk reactionaries. They aren't mutually exclusive activities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Honestly, I don't really care. The NSA can read whatever they want of mine. I've heard the arguments about how you should care, even if you don't have anything to hide. And I find them persuasive on one level and simultaneously unengaging on another. By contrast, the parallels to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and living in a turnkey fascist state are most unpersuasive.

The one argument against what I've written that has been made that I think is worthy of highlighting is that there are people around the world who are risking their lives under totalitarian regimes. People's smug responses and ad hominem detract from this important point, which could be helpful to others outside of HN in better understanding the issue.

Your downvotes will not persuade me or anyone else with my views. They do demonstrate that some are committed partisans on this issue. I appreciate some of the clear, unemotional arguments that have been made, however.

<comment><USER23> The protection from snooping government for law abiders isn't for humdrum people like you. It's for people working to make the world better who come under fire through no illegal activity of their own.

Did you know the FBI put MLK under surveillance at the orders of Bobby Kennedy (then-Attorney General)? They didn't find evidence of crimes, so they threatened to publicize his extramarital affair if he didn't give up his civil rights work.

It's about preventing unchecked government power over those who aren't criminals who are working against the status quo.

OF COURSE you don't care if the NSA reads your email. You don't change anything, and consequently don't matter.

We as a society care if the NSA reads the private emails of the next important up-and-coming political party leader who will break us out of the corporate- owned two-party system. THAT'S the person we're trying to protect, not boring uninspired people who "have nothing to hide".

<comment><USER24> The MLK example is a great one. Also, it's still not 100% clear what happened with Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe or the Kennedys. I read recently that there was evidence of the NSA having dirt on a governor, which was used to blackmail him (can't recall the specific instance unfortunately). And of course, I'm sure everyone knows about what happened with the IRS and certain non profits last year, while not directly tied to the NSA gives an example of why this stuff matters.

So yea, it's not to protect people like us. It's to protect the MLKs, the politicians, the accountants, the journalist, the news anchor, etc... Everyone either has a skeleton in their closet or cares about someone who does. If one is so inclined, having this information can be extremely valuable when trying to prevent a "free society" from becoming a little too free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So here is a complete anecdotal suspicion:

I have had the iPhone since the first day of release. I have gone through 16 physical devices over that period (due to me breaking them a lot and going through several employers where I had never purchased my own phone since (well before) it was released). I am currently, for the first time in a long time, on my own personal device; an iPhone 4.

I upgraded it to iOS7 when it was available. The device is a slow POS and I want to stab my eyes out when I use it....

However; there is a behavior that I have only personally noticed recently: ___(Please tell me if you see the same thing)_ __

Whenever I transition between literally ANY screen, I see a quick __ _BLINK_ __of the screen - in the same anim that you would see when you take a screenshot.

So I am wondering "Is my phone taking a screen cap of EVERY switch/transition I make? WHY"

Now, I know that iOS does do screen caps of things so that when you are switching in various ways that it already has a cache of the last state of that screen in order to thumbnail the previous view... BUT I understood this to be limited to certain circumstances. Currently I am noticing it on pretty much ANY transition.

Even if this is the actual, ___" Normal"_ __, my suspicion is that this fact can be used to entirely rebuild an entire session of activity for a user through their entire interactions. Even if you just grab these screens which are used at a system level - a great deal could be inferred from just these workflow screen caps.

<comment><USER26> Complete bogus - but lets play: If you were the NSA; why would you even hint to the user that you were taking screenshots? Its not like the blink animation is tucked away from software control.

<comment><USER25> That wasnt my point: irrespective of any "nefarious interest" in said screen shots; IS the iOS device actually capturing every single screen change via a screenshot?

As I understood it - there were certain apps that were captured in the past. This was so that when the app loaded it had the previous state shown as quickly as possible, and it would then refresh.

My point was I am noticing this flashing screen cap anim on literally EVERY screen change... this does not make sense to me and I am wondering why the device does this.

Finally, I surmise that if it actually IS doing these caps, that if one COULD get access to them one could then build a pretty clear session history.

Again, I said it was a simple suspicion. I have no idea if this is actually happening; but the device seems to be revealing the caps happening... but I am not so sure.

<comment><USER27> If you were the NSA, would you be taking screenshots just as the target was /switching/ apps, instead of taking them while they're using it? Oh, he's opened Mail, take a screenshot of Mail's splash screen while it's loading, now don't do anything. Oh, he's done using the app, quick, take a screenshot of his empty inbox before the app switches to Candy Crush.

Not to mention that the screen flash while a screenshot is being taken is a usability feature and is there to help us know when a screenshot has been successfully taken. I know there are tweaks on Cydia that allow screen recordings, so why are the NSA messing about taking screenshots of some unimportant (no offense, i mean it in a national security sense) guy?

tl;dr your iPhone 4 is struggling with iOS 7 and probably has some redraw problems, most likely no one is taking screenshots of you while you're switching apps.

<comment><USER25> I am not talking about the "NSA taking screen shots" \-- I am talking about the iOS taking screenshots... this is just a "nice feature" that any phone tapper/hacker (like the NSA) could exploit.

My ___question_ __is: Does the iOS device, in fact, take a screenshot of every single transition?

everyone seems to miss my question, thus I must be posing it poorly.

What I said again, simply, was that:

I knew that some transitions had a screen capped to allow for a faster, subjective, transition to the user... a UX cheat.

However, I noticed that my iOS7 device ___APPEARS_ __to be doing this on EVERY transition... Is it really capping, or, as you smartly suggest; the iPhone 4 is a POS that struggles in the anims for each transition.

Finally, I was just surmising that should the device, indeed, take a screen for every transition; this could be a sweet exploit in rebuilding session actions for any user of the device.

<comment><USER27> Ah, i see what you mean. I think you are correct in that iOS takes a screenshot of pretty much every transition, but i'm willing to bet that it has nothing to do with the screen flashes as it should be automatic and in the background. The screen flashes are UX features for user controlled screenshots. I believe the screenshots of each application's state before transition has to be stored somewhere and if someone manages to access them, some damage could be done, but at the same time, not that much. I don't know exactly how the screenshots are queued up (is there 1 screenshot for each application? If i open the app again and navigate to another view and transition out, is the first screenshot overwritten?)

Apologies, your initial comment sounded like you thought you were being targeted by the NSA or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Spiegel source: [http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa- spies-...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on- smartphones-including-the-blackberry-a-921161.html)

<comment><USER29> Hm, now I'm paranoid re the little "special teams" that article mentions that intercepts the mail package and plugs in whatever doodad the NSA has into the phone, and then sends it along to the customer...my new iPhone had a fingerprint smudge on the screen plastic protector packaging that I otherwise attributed to some overworked Foxconn employee but now I have half a mind it was some NSA agent after 1 too many pizzas....

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The slide is dated in 2007 - i.e. either iOS 1.0 or some pre-release beta. Who knows what it does now with iOS 7? Also, its unclear what's needed - does one of those other ridiculous govt alphabet soup programs act as a trojan, or does Tom Cruise has to dangle from my ceiling with laser beams to plug in some wingding to do this?

<comment><USER30> IIRC Tom Cruise didn't have the laser beams - he was avoiding the laser beams. So the responsibility to set up a defense perimeter with laser beams is yours.

<comment><USER31> The GP is grammatically and textually correct. The lasers belonged to the ceiling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "Is the iPhone taking secret pictures of FaceTime users?" (2011)

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20051758-17.html#](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20051758-17.html#)!

> One person said that her boyfriend saw a picture of himself at work > displayed in FaceTime, even though he has never used the service in the > office.

</comment><comment><USER33> At least we know why Obama still uses a blackberry

<comment><USER34> Obama only uses a blackberry for show when he is in public.

The Whitehouse Communications Office is responsible for maintaining communications with the rest of the government, business and political contacts, and his family. In the event the president needs to take a call, an aide will direct him to a secure tent they setup nearby that is shielded against eavesdropping and electronic surveillance (see [http://www.theage.com.au/world/barack-obamas-portable- secrec...](http://www.theage.com.au/world/barack-obamas-portable-secrecy-tent- some-assembly-required-20131111-2xb0l.html)). If it is a conversation where they do not expect sensitive topics to be discussed, they might give him a Sectera Edge that is routed over an encrypted satellite link back to the Whitehouse switchboard where the actual call is connected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have an iPhone.

And when I read that the US government tracks mobile phone movements all over the world (generating a ton of other information about people), I turned it off permanently (flight mode) and use it only as a PDA.

Turns out, landline phones combined with email is more than one needs.

If I wouldn't have stopped using the "mobile call feature", my iPhone would have gone straight to ebay, right now.

</comment><comment><USER36> Couldn't this be accomplished simply by creating apps that deal with contacts, photos, camera, etc. and then having users download and accept the permissions themselves.

For example, imagine that any one of the contact or calendar management apps where you "Allow xxxxx to access your contacts" was produced by the NSA under the guise of an innovative startup.

<comment><USER37> Not quite: for example, iOS doesn't allow apps to access the SMS database.

In light of recent leaks, it's still pretty obvious: think a repackaging of OTA jailbreaks (like jailbreakme from the iPhone OS 3 era) plus Foxacid.

You could make jailbreakme not display a dialog or install Cydia, and the user wouldn't notice anything except their phone got warm for awhile and has a newly opened port for SSH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am waiting for a real GNU phone. The original free software spirit is not there yet.

<comment><USER39> Since explots can be done through hardware, firmware and software, how is a GNU phone better (genuine question)?

<comment><USER38> You can take into account initiatives like OpenCores: [http://opencores.org/](http://opencores.org/)

Vulnerabilities exists anywhere for sure but the community (whatever it means) should create a defense against those threads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

[http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html](http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html)

[http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom- of-t...](http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought- requires-free-media)

</comment><comment><USER41> One thing is true: whatever your phone is, the more complex, the more features, the more risks there are.

I really don't see the advantages of having a handsized computer, really. The performance/battery/usability/cost compromises are not really making it worth it.

Most people do a lot of text messaging, usual smartphones are not designed for it. Old school, classic cellphone do it pretty well.

Why would you need the internet while you're outside, in the cold, in the train, while not sitting ? You only need an iPhone for very unnecessary, unplanned, rich things.

For example, you need to locate something, like the nearest restaurant, or coffee place, in a town you know nothing about. The data transfer and costs to make a web search on such a low-powered device, will be ridiculous if you compare it to just asking somebody.

You're in a coffee place, you're arguing about something, and you want to know who's right, so you want to search it on the web. Why not just enable the wifi, and why not carry your 13 inch notebook ?

You want to read your emails. Even if you receive email, what's the real difference with text messaging ? Emails are for long message on which you can attach big files. Email is a very old protocol, and it wasn't really thought to work hand in hand with text messaging.

You want to read a digital document. If you're in for a long, comfortable read, use an ebook device, use the small screen of a classic cellphone, or just plan ahead and print it.

Smartphones are all-in one, expensive, software and hardware quirky solutions which are just not that much awesome. Computers are not entirely secure. A smartphone will create new technical challenges, but also many other risks, especially if you have a homogenous device like the iPhone.

Engineers should start to create protocols and software which are already designed for smaller devices, not create smaller powerful computers: laptops and desktops are already at the limit of tiny.

Apple created a market of an attractive, dreamy device, which sold, and the market followed, but the truth is, there is much more to do on the embedded software design.

<comment><USER42> "You know all those things you like having in a smartphone? You could do without them, you know."

I agree with your point that more software = more surface area, but your examples of alternatives aren't very viable for most people, in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Ha, I wonder what this will do to acceptance of Apple products inside DoD's (well govt in general). Many agencies and military branches love them some new cool toys and have been pushing for their inclusion. Now revealing that Apple security can so seemingly easily be compromised, will they still allow or advise use of Apple products on government's own networks?

<comment><USER44> I thought the largest take away from all these leaks was that various branches of government, even within the military and intelligence communities, routinely deploy solutions that are known to be insecure?

<comment><USER43> Well they do try to (at least on the surface) to protect their own sensitive information. NSA's other mission (besides spying) is and advising govt agencies and military on keeping their data safe.

Now this involves a lot of red tape security certifications, hardening 'scripts', monitoring, auditing and so on. They legitimately do not want sensitive information leaking. Projects employ air gaps with CDs being burnt and that is how data is transferred some times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> They cynic in me assumes that even tech savvy people would much rather rationalize away NSA access to their Apple products than give them up.

The easiest rebuttal is simply that every smartphone is equally at risk.

A last resort will be to simply say "meh, don't care"

That's how good/sticky Apple products are

</comment><comment><USER46> Is there more to the evidence for this than the slide? Because the slide says that the product is "In development." Just because capabilities are described in present tense on a slide does not mean that they are in fact available.

</comment><comment><USER47> All Your iPhones Are Belong To Us. Surrender to your iNSA overlords, while you're still alive.

</comment><comment><USER48> welp [http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57614604-94/president- obama...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57614604-94/president-obama-says- he-cant-use-iphone-for-security-reasons/) now we know why

</comment><comment><USER49> Humm... I was going to buy the new iPhone, this changed my mind. Maybe I should just get a feature phone instead.

<comment><USER50> All the phones are exploited. I doubt it matters.

<comment><USER51> Really any phone is exploited. When you've got a baseband with direct hardware access that the carrier can connect to there isn't really anything short of fully open hardware that is gonna save you.

<comment><USER30> If (as claimed) the NSA has hacked the major BIOS/firmware as well as encryption, is there such as thing as "fully open hardware" and would it help?

<comment><USER31> To my knowledge no, there is not. If there was, it would also require approval from the network operator. And if you believe that the network operators are aligned with the intelligence community anyways, you would never expect that approval to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> My TracFone is safe :-)

<comment><USER53> False. [http://www.cellebrite.com/mobile- forensics](http://www.cellebrite.com/mobile-forensics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I wonder if they are doing this with Android devices too.

Anyways, it's not of concern to me as I ditched my smartphone for an old school motorolla flip phone.

</comment><comment><USER55> Ok! Isn't this obvious?</comment>


Why port emulators to the browser? - <AUTHOR> https://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser <comment><USER2> People who don't know how to get an emulator working or find the Roms they need can click on the website and use the Javascript version to see what it was like on these old computers.

Some old software and operating systems were made free as in beer because they are so old.

Some Roms and disk images are still owned by programmers or the company that sold them or the underwriters who bought out the IP. You can contact them and see if they give permission to use them.</comment>


Pierre Lamond On Cerebas' New Deep Learning Chip - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Eclipse_Ventures/cerebras-e055074377b3 <comment><USER2> Note: Eclipse Ventures, of which Pierre is a team member, is an investor in Cerebras Systems [0]

[0] [https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/163733-59](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/163733-59)</comment>


70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-socially-acceptable-110228/ <comment><USER2> Three big caveats that the linked article doesn't sufficiently mention:

1\. The study was restricted to Denmark. It was part of a larger study looking at Danish attitudes towards economic lawbreaking: tax evasion, benefits fraud, copyright infringement, taking home company property, etc.

2\. The study asked people to rate how acceptable copyright infringement was on a scale from 1 (completely unacceptable) to 10 (completely ok). The 70% figure is everyone who answered _anything except 1_. But clearly a 2 out of 10 is still not very positive, especially since in context it could simply have meant that someone found it bad, but less bad than e.g. benefits fraud. Only 20% gave an answer >= 7.

3\. The study specifically asked about copyright infringement for personal, home use.

\---

From the report (rough translation):

 _Seven out of ten Danes accept to some extent the copying of music and movies without paying for them. So long, mind you, as it is limited to copying for one's own use._

 _Thus finds the Rockwool Foundation's study of Danish ethical attitudes in 2010._

 _In the study, a representative sample of people were asked to respond on a scale of 1 to 10, whether it is ok to pirate music from the internet for personal use. Those who believe that this act is acceptable under no circumstances, corresponding to a 1, total 30%._

 _The rest, i.e. 70%, accept pirate-copying to some degree. 50% give a rating between 2 and 6. They're probably skeptical in relation to piracy, but they seem not to think that it is totally unacceptable. The rest, around 15-20%, rate 7 or higher. This group mostly or fully accepts piracy._

 _The views are different however for making money on illegal music downloading. The population has a somewhat stricter view on that. In fact, three out of four respond that it is absolutely unacceptable to retrieve pirated music online and resell it to friends._

 _The difference between the two forms of lawbreaking is also clear in the average for all responses. Piracy for personal use has an average of 3.8 on the scale, while the score for selling to friends is as low as 1.7._

<comment><USER3> This sort of summarization (read manipulation) of scientific results by news organizations to influence viewership is extremely bothersome. Most people who read that article take it at face value, don't check the sources, and go on with life having been misinformed. I know I would have. Irritating.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, the TorrentFreak article does mention this rather important detail as well, but it certainly doesn't make a big deal of it and the headline is clearly editorialised to the point of outright falsehood.

Looked at the other way around, more than 80% of those surveyed did _not_ mostly or fully accept that pirate copying is ethical (7+ on a scale of 1-10).

<comment><USER2> Hmm, going back and reading it again, you're right, the article apart from the headline isn't too bad. I could've sworn some of these details were left out of it initially though. Any good way to check if the article has been updated?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As I've pointed out before piracy is a misnomer. Sharing has always been an integral part of the way people are exposed to and consume art. There are even institutions that have been built up to support such things for older media: libraries, used book stores, radio stations, museums. We treasure and value such institutions because they help to preserve and to spread our art and our culture.

However, when you take this incredibly vital and ingrained mechanism for spreading appreciation and knowledge of various works of art and you translate it to the limits (or lack thereof) and character of modern communications and storage technologies you get a phenomena which externally is nearly indistinguishable from piracy (at least without further context of individual behavior).

To put it lightly this is a very serious problem. Imagine if libraries and museums were as much legal pariahs as speakeasies during prohibition, how would the world be different? And yet increasingly the collision of outmoded legal frameworks (already bent beyond reasonable measure by the corrupting influence of large "intellectual property" institutions such as Disney and Sony) with technological advancement is leading to conflict and strife between ordinary people engaging in traditionally ordinary behavior and governing institutions who see that behavior as a dangerous threat.

P.S. Whether sharing in the digital realm is compatible with profit is an equally important question, but the onus is on producers to figure that out (current evidence seems to indicate that it's not such a big problem, given record box office revenue in 2010, for example). It's quite simply infeasible (technologically, legally, socially, and culturally) to demand that people stop sharing because the power of sharing and of stealing are too closely related.

<comment><USER6> Selling used books is not comparable with putting an ebook on PirateBay. Lending books and returning them when you're done reading is also not comparable to putting an ebook on PirateBay. You also can't display the same painting in 2 museums unless one of them is just a cheap copy and people don't appreciate copies in museums.

All cases of "sharing" the "older media" you describe are subject to the laws of scarcity. Even xeroxing a book is subject to it, as the cost of that can be even higher than just buying the book; and is mostly done for technical references for which you can't find the original.

"people sharing" is a romantic notion; in a perfect world there would be no problem with it, but writing a book / creating a game / composing a song / creating a movie - takes time, lots of effort and monetary cost that can be quite substantial.

Would people create movies such as Avatar (in the interest of sharing) if the movie industry would go bankrupted? I doubt it. Would people donate money if movies were released for free? Sharing is all fine for people, as long as it doesn't cost them too much. But few people give away their work for free and even fewer do it for altruistic reasons (it's like "spending other people's money" - how can you not be fine with that?)

          the onus is on producers to figure that out

And they have, with DRM and all that. Only problem with it is that it's a PITA for honest customers, but technology evolves and people always find ways to build better mouse-traps.

So the onus really is on all of us - if you don't like the current legal frameworks, think of something to reward the original authors; otherwise the situation is only going to get worse.

<comment><USER7> _But few people give away their work for free and even fewer do it for altruistic reasons (it's like "spending other people's money" - how can you not be fine with that?)_

Are you saying the main motivation to create art is profit and/or recognition?

Human history has many examples of altruistic behaviors for art's sake.

You argue people will stop creating because there will be no profit for them to do so (or "lots of effort and monetary cost that can be quite substantial").

I argue if someone is motivated enough and creative enough, that person will find a way to manifest their vision into physical reality.

James Cameron's life during the creation of the movie "Titanic" was not one motivated by profit for profit's sake...

<http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,290182,00.html>

<comment><USER6>
           Are you saying the main motivation to create
           art is profit and/or recognition?

No, stop twisting my words.

BTW, that article about the Titanic is in total favor of what I said. To break even, the Titanic needed ~ $400 million dollars.

I would totally love to see someone sharing that for free, for art's sake ;-)

          You argue people will stop creating because there will
          be no profit for them to do so

I'm not talking about profits; I'm talking about revenu. I'm talking about a book author that works on a book for an entire year, during which he has to put food on the table, pay the rent, pay for his son's tuition and live in a decent environment. In my country, the best poet we've had, a pure genius, lived in inhuman conditions and died at 39 years old because of syphilis.

Are you by any chance suggesting that they are paid too much?

<comment><USER7> Do you think the genius poet would have been inspired living in a mansion, every need catered to by servants?

You validated my point. The best poet was not motivated by revenue, and althought I do not know, was probably not worried of others disseminating their work.

Creating art for art's sake, not to pay for the offspring's tuition bills.

<comment><USER8> In the arts, like in any field, you only get better by immersing yourself in it and it's hard to do that when you have to treat it like a hobby rather than a job.

Ask yourself what level of talent you would have right now if there was zero money in coding or designing software, and you just did it on evenings and weekends, when you were not working your full time job in retail or food services to scrape by?

There is just something disturbing to me about this idea that people should be suffering so that others can read better poetry on their comfy 100k tech salaries.

<comment><USER9> "Ask yourself what level of talent you would have right now if there was zero money in coding or designing software"

That's actually part of the reason why I find it so delicious that there are people outside of Computer Science that are hitting it big in Web and mobile apps; it's a validation that anyone can do the work of a CS grad just as anyone can write a novel or paint a picture; it just takes time and effort and acquiring skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've just read this in "Against intellectual monopoly" page 296 ( [http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...](http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm) ) :

 _Social norms are not a topic in which we are especially expert. Still, it is a relevant topic: property rights are never enforced only by the law-and-order system, or even by costly private monitoring of other people's behavior. Broadly accepted and well functioning property rights systems rest also, one is tempted to write "primarily," on a commonly shared sense of morality._

Then it quotes another economist, Eric Rasmusen :

 _Video rental stores and libraries, of course, reduce originator profits and hurt innovation, but that is a utilitarian concern. What is of more ethical concern is that whenever, for example, someone borrows a book from the public library instead of buying a book, he has deprived the author of the fruits of his labor and participated in reducing the author's power to control his self- expression. Thus, if it is immoral to violate a book's copyright, so too it would seem to be immoral to use public libraries. Libraries are not illegal, but the law's injustice would be no reason for a moral person to do unjust things. The existence of children's sections would be particularly heinous, as encouraging children to steal._

 _To entirely deter copying would require a norm inflicting a considerable amount of guilt on copiers, since legal enforcement of copying by individuals is so difficult. To partially deter it would be undesirable for two reasons. First, it would generate a large amount of disutility while failing to deter the target misbehavior. Second, it would reduce the effectiveness of guilt in other situations, by pushing so many people over the threshold of being moral reprobates. At the same time, the benefit from deterring copying by individuals, the increased incentive for creation of new products, is relatively small. I thus conclude that people_ _should_not_feel_guilty_about_copying_.

<comment><USER11> So what do they propose to avoid the underproduction of "information goods"?

<comment><USER10> Well, they made a whole book about this :) They argue that the "first mover" advantage is actually large enough to take care of the problem in the case of both books and pharmaceuticals; music isn't actually a problem as people actually making it earn close to nothing from reproduction anyway; software wouldn't be so much different than it is now, etc.

They take the quite extreme point of view that _all_ intellectual property should be _completely abolished_. They make IMO a definitive point on the complete uselessness of patents in general; the case against copyright and trademarks is somewhat less clear.

<comment><USER12> What arguments do they make about patents that do not apply well to copyright? Do they take any position on trade secret protections?

<comment><USER10> Patents has been used exclusively to stifle competition and have a very bad record of actually hampering progress. Even the canonical case of pharma is debunked thoroughly.

For copyright, the case is quite clear too, though it may still be possible that a short copyright (14 years, for instance) may still be better than nothing at all.

Trade secrecy are treated page 188. Basically, it is much more used than patents, so suppressing patents won't change things much. Revealing secrets through patents is very inefficient anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are the AA's and their equivalents not shooting themselves in the foot? Framing the argument in the way they have done (piracy is KILLING art) might work for a while but sooner or later a thinking person will come to realise that it really doesn't. Home taping didn't kill anything. Of course, if everyone suddenly stopped buying and only used torrents then the system would collapse, but will that happen? If everyone stopped paying taxes the country would collapse too. No country has an army big enough to enforce that.

You smoke pot, you're a drug-crazed menaced. Except millions already do, they just keep it quiet (from the law at least). The more you push the drug-crazed menace part, the more anyone will any sense will push back as it's demonstrably untrue.

It might work great as a short term strategy and help you get favourable laws passed but I think they might be approaching the end of the line soon.

No need to be too sore though, Mickey Mouse has had a better run than virtually anyone in history.

<comment><USER14> Look at something like this:

[http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01eboo...](http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/03/01/business/01ebook_g.html?ref=media)

So $4 out of the $26 I pay for a hardcover book goes to the person who is actually responsible for the content? I submit paying $22 in rent is ridiculous, and as long as something like this holds true, thepiratebay looks pretty good.

I buy a lot of ebooks in the $10 range, and I would buy even more in the $5 range -- especially if the $5 went to the person who actually wrote the book.

<comment><USER13> I can understand that, but I can also see the other side. Editors, proofreaders, marketing, binding, printing, sales, distribution etc etc. The author doesn't pay for those. With ebooks you can drop the binding & printing but the rest still applies.

I'll concede there will be cases where the mark up is over the top, but you aren't just paying for the actual words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Something that's always irked me is that the recording industry, and artists themselves, seem to have this notion that every advance in technology should benefit them, despite them often having no effort in the development of these technologies.

Secondly, I imagine most everyone here has seen that picture of what its like watching a non-pirated dvd vs a pirated one.....the non-pirated one takes forever to get through all their copyright warnings, movie previews, etc. If they'd show their paying customers a bit more respect they might get some in return.

<comment><USER16> I doubt it. Most of these warnings and previews that you mention are the direct result of piracy. I also don't think the movie and music industry are going to play that game anymore.

in 1999 when Napster came out, everyone said music was too expensive (so they pirated it). Later, it was because there was no "try before you buy" and because the artists were getting screwed by the record companies.

Now that we have services like last.fm, pandora, and grooveshark to preview songs and you can buy songs for less than $1 (which is pretty damn cheap). Hell, you can even get DRM-less music and artists can easily sell their own music without a label.

Has piracy stopped at all? no. It's gotten worse and so have the excuses. Why can't people just admit that they don't give a damn about the artist and just want free music/movies?

<comment><USER17> > Has piracy stopped at all? no. It's gotten worse and so have the excuses.

Has it? I used Napster to download tons of music. Nowadays I use iTunes (and Amazon). I find it easier than poking around torrent sites or the awful gnutella junk and the music is reasonably priced and DRM free. Things are organized better and it makes my searching and downloading relatively painless.

I don't buy movies online yet because of they are laden with DRM. I don't buy blue-ray for the same reason. I'll buy DVDs only because the DRM has been thoroughly cracked--they go directly to my computer as I haven't even owned a DVD player in 5 years.

Make movies and TV shows downloadable and DRM free for a reasonable price and I'll start buying in a heartbeat.

non-pain = lack of DRM + ease of obtaining + delivery speed + quality + reasonableness of price.

If movie studios want to deal with piracy they _have_ to compete on all those points. And they have to consider the whole pipeline from the internet to my TV. These aren't excuses they're just the economics of the situation.

> Why can't people just admit that they don't give a damn about the artist and > just want free music/movies?

Because that's just not the case.

<comment><USER16> "If movie studios want to deal with piracy they have to compete on all those points."

Why should the movie studios negotiate with thieves? The music industry listened (as I stated in my post above) and piracy hasn't decreased. Piracy will stop when everything is $0 (which is really what most pirates want anyway, but refuse to admit).

"I don't buy movies online yet because of they are laden with DRM. I don't buy blue-ray for the same reason. I'll buy DVDs only because the DRM has been thoroughly cracked--they go directly to my computer as I haven't even owned a DVD player in 5 years."

You can blame the pirates for DRM. It was created as a direct result.

"Make movies and TV shows downloadable and DRM free for a reasonable price and I'll start buying in a heartbeat."

"reasonable" is relative to everyone. Since the pirates can download things for free with little effort, even a penny is too much for many people.

"Because that's just not the case."

The problem is that there isn't any way to prove the case either way. Pirates aren't going to admit they just want stuff for free.

<comment><USER17> > You can blame the pirates for DRM. It was created as a direct result.

That is untrue. DVDs had DRM well before movies were able to be downloaded from the internet. DRM was preemptive paranoia from the movie studios. It has never stopped piracy (only slowed it down temporarily) and it only increases the view that pirated goods are of higher value than the DRM laden legit versions.

> Why should the movie studios negotiate with thieves?

Theft is a strong word. Copyright infringement is a better term. And the movie studios have to compete with it because if they don't they will lose everything, thoroughly.

> Piracy will stop when everything is $0 (which is really what most pirates > want anyway, but refuse to admit).

You are casting an awfully wide net there. I've seen this attitude from people before and I don't get it. Why do you think that $0 is the magical reason for piracy? Can you not believe that people are more complicated than "OMG Freeeee!"? Trying to find people's true motivations and ethics and then working within those boundaries is the only way to stem piracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is anyone else sick of the use of the term piracy to try and make copyright infringement sound more threatening?

<comment><USER19> Yes, although alternative terms like "forbidden sharing" aren't quite as catchy and don't have the associated glamour factor from dramatic swashbuckling movies.

<comment><USER18> What's wrong with "copyright infringement"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Maybe that's because illegal copying violates no natural law and is in fact allowable under a common understanding of property rights. If I own a hard drive, I can store anything I want on it. Copyright limits that natural property right by saying you can't store certain media or images that have been designated as "copyrighted" on your own property. This idea is foreign to most cultures and nearly all ancient societies.

<comment><USER21> >This idea is foreign to most cultures and nearly all ancient societies.

Which partially explains why most cultures and nearly all ancient societies had little to no intellectual development.

Thinkers gotta eat or they won't exist.

Intellectual property feeds the families of most of the people on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I tried very hard to pay Oscars.com this year to get a stream of the Academy Awards event. They would not take my money. I tried three different browsers and two different credit cards. No go.

Then later I read that people who did pay the money were duped. They ended up getting not the broadcast stream, but a bunch of bullshit side-angle camera streams, not one of which was the broadcast. This after a build-up that strongly suggested (pretty much promised, the way I read it) that this was the ticket to watching the Oscars online.

This isn't the first time crap like this has happened. People get burned, and they learn.

</comment><comment><USER23> The term 'socially acceptable' makes the conclusion hard to pin down.

 _I'd_ say piracy is 'socially acceptable' - in the sense that not many people would bat an eyelid if you said you'd downloaded one of the latest movies illegally. But that doesn't mean I think it's _right_ or that people _should_ do it - it's just an observation on what seems to be "socially acceptable." What is socially acceptable does not typically match up with what _I_ believe to be right.

<comment><USER24> You could be of the minority that thinks X is wrong, but why should the law enforce _your_ opinion on X?

<comment><USER25> No one's suggesting that it should. He's just pointing out that if you ask people "is X socially acceptable?" then the results may be quite different from if you ask "do you accept X?", and they may well be less interesting or useful.

Imagine a society consisting of 40% Prudes, who disapprove of everything, and 60% Libertines, who disapprove of nothing. And suppose that people in this society are well informed about one another's opinions. Then if you ask "Do you approve of goat-fettling?" you'll get 60% yes, 40% no; but if you ask "Is goat-fettling socially acceptable?" you'll get 100% yes, 0% no, because everyone knows that most people approve.

Now suppose that the media in our hypothetical society aren't perfectly accurate and unbiased; they somehow give everyone the impression that there are more Prudes and fewer Libertines. This doesn't make any difference to the result of the "do you approve?" survey, but it may change the result of the "is it socially acceptable?" survey to 0% yes, 100% no because now everyone "knows" that most people disapprove.

(How relevant all this is to the present survey, I don't know, because my Danish isn't up to working out just what questions they actually asked.)

<comment><USER26> According to the article the question was something I would translate to: "To what degree do you accept piracy of music from the internet on a scale from 1 to 10. Not at all accepting = 1. Sceptical = 2-6. Accepts it = 7-10"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What happens when 70% of people are okay with something, in a country ruled by the people?

<comment><USER28> _"[...] in a country ruled by the people"_

Name one.

<comment><USER29> Switzerland

<comment><USER30> Snap :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> At first I saw the source (torrentfreak) and thought it would be a survey of their users... But it actually seems like it is a viably study with a good spread of the subjects. I am actually not that surprised. First of all, it's a Danish study. As I am myself living in the south of Sweden, I know that we and the danish have similar views, and that piracy is pretty well accepted here.

Even more interesting, would be a survey within a bigger geographical spread. Is there differences within Europe? What about the rest of the world? Are the opinions similar world wide? I would also appreciate a more detailed view into the selection of the group that answered.

The most interesting thing about the article is that it is spun very heavily in the direction of piracy... The actual answers about piracy for private use, is that less than 20% accept piracy, slightly over 30% not accepting it. The rest have answered that they are sceptical to piracy for personal use.

Accept is 7-10 on a scale from 1-10, sceptical is 2-6 and don't accept is 1 on the same scale. All from the linked report in Danish.

</comment><comment> saw-lau Sometimes I feel I'm the only person left in the world who a) still buys media; b) doesn't mind doing it; c) thinks it's wrong to pirate things; and d) doesn't consider it my right to be able to consume any media I want, and the only reason I'm not doing it is because it's priced too high - IMHO, DVDs, CDs, etc. are luxury goods.

Still, I realise I'm in the minority here - the 70% figure definitely doesn't surprise me. Just, for some reason, makes me a little sad.

<comment><USER32> You are not the only person; I buy when I can. But the emphases on can here; in Europe where I live, you get, via the web, news about every new tv show, movie, game and book immediately after it comes out. And then you have to wait for ages (depending on the popularity) before you can watch / buy it here. Digital products like ebooks, games, movies and tv shows should not have a geo limiting factor to them; they are digital. As long as they do, I don't see how copying can be prevented.

Take apps like Pandora; very easy to use, very nice to use. Doesn't work in the EU. Lame.

If 90% of the cool content you can buy online wouldn't be US only for such a long time after release _and_ if everything was easier to use, I believe copying would be less common. Why would you risk (viruses, the law) it or go to the trouble of acquiring illegal materials if you can easily get it at the same time US citizens get it?

(I'm using the US as an example here mainly because most content I like from other countries I _can_ immediately buy, but that might differ depending on your taste.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Everyone is copying media. _EVERYONE_. How can it NOT be socially acceptable ?

The other 30% just doesn't realize that lending a game or buying a game and selling it after you've finished it is exactly the same thing as what an internet pirate is doing.

<comment><USER15> Lending a game is not exactly the same thing as piracy, in that case there is one copy that is being shared. When you pirate something, two people have a copy and can use at the same time in different locations.

<comment><USER34> Thought game.

If I deleted my digital copy that I sent to someone, would that be okay?

If I download something from someone, am I responsible for verifying the copyright or is it the distributors responsibility?

If someone requests something from my computer, and my computer allows them to have it without my explicit intervention, am I responsible?

Am I responsible for distributing a file if someone downloads it after accessing an FTP server I setup using an anonymous account?

What if it required a password?

Note, I'm not trying to push the agenda that piracy is right. Rather, that piracy isn't as easy as saying someone copied a file.

Edit: I really want to stress I'm not trying ot make a point. Even I can't answer all these questions easily.

<comment><USER35> >If I deleted my digital copy that I sent to someone, would that be okay?

Ethically I believe this to be equivalent to lending a book/cd/whatever to a friend (this has been done, actually, as a protest/stunt. A guy attempted to sell an mp3 from iTunes on eBay).

>If I download something from someone, am I responsible for verifying the copyright or is it the distributors responsibility?

Distributor, generally. I feel this is similar to receipt of stolen property. In most places you are only liable if you knew it was stolen.

>If someone requests something from my computer, and my computer allows them to have it without my explicit intervention, am I responsible?

Yes, though how responsible you are is debatable. Intent is important but ignorance is rarely a successful defense.

>Am I responsible for distributing a file if someone downloads it after accessing an FTP server I setup using an anonymous account?

Why wouldn't you be?

>What if it required a password?

How is that any different? Or do you mean someone guessed the password?

Of course, most of these answers are just my opinion/speculation. Sometimes the line between "piracy" and "sharing" is blurry which I think is a huge part of the problem. There is (seemingly) no way have one without the other. If I want the ability to lend an ebook to a friend then I must also have the ability to give a copy to my friend. There are some systems in place to attempt to reconcile this, but they are either limited (you can lend it x number of times) or take away some other right (for example, it might take away the right to have a backup copy).

<comment><USER34> > Yes, though how responsible you are is debatable. Intent is important but > ignorance is rarely a successful defense.

Their was no intent. Someone was merely able to gain access to the computer without my expressed knowledge and download a file (hypothetical, of course).

> Why wouldn't you be?

I guess your assuming I've given them explicit access to the FTP server.

> How is that any different? Or do you mean someone guessed the password?

Sorry, I tried to state the conditions. In the previous question it was merely that, I setup an FTP server, I don't password protect it, but I don't publish that the site exists.

So, yes, in the last question: someone guessed the password.

> Of course, most of these answers are just my opinion/speculation. Sometimes > the line between "piracy" and "sharing" is blurry which I think is a huge > part of the problem.

Agreed, which was the point of the exercise. We infer so much from simple actions. Intention is important, as you mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If copyright laws were reasonable then people would not find it acceptable to break them.

<comment><USER16> If tax laws were reasonable, then people would not find it acceptable to break them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Piracy is socially acceptable, but politicians are passing ever more draconian laws in a futile attempt to prop up the music industry's obsolete business model.

If you want to stop this, and live in Scotland, you can vote for the Pirate Party this May. I'm one of their candidates.

</comment><comment><USER38> Interesting thought, if piracy did manage to put a big dent into say the profitability of books, would we then see a lot more projects popping up on sites like kickstarter which would probably be very popular given the diminished choice in the market for readers.

</comment><comment><USER39> Socially acceptable or not, anti-piracy advocates fail to realize that if i am pirating something, i had no intention to buy it. They really, really fail to see this. You can inflate the amount of money you are losing because of me all you want, the reality remains.

And it is this childish obsession that tickles my pirate nerves and makes me pirate even stuff i would gladly pay for. Because the industry is dishonest and thinks i sit on the far left of the IQ bell curve. They are lying in my face, and they know it. They don't deserve my money.

Go Minecraft.

</comment><comment><USER40> This reminds me of a quote from Penny Arcade[1]:

'I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.

Imagine what these people must think of libraries.'

The fact is that, scare-mongering aside, piracy doesn't seem to have nearly as big an impact on profits as the large content creators would have us believe. What worries me more is that they seem to be leveraging this fear campaign to chip away at the basic concept of "ownership," pushing for a world where products are "licensed" rather than "bought." This scares me because, being rather old-fashioned, I enjoy the concept of buying a book, rather than licensing the words in that book for reading.

[1]<http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/12/16/>

<comment><USER21> If you ever thought you owned the words in a book, you were mistaken.

<comment><USER41> in certain ideologies subscribed to by some anti-imaginary-property proponents, this statement applies to the author of those words as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This was a Danish study, does anyone know the size of their sample? Did it include other Europeans, anyone from North America, Asia? I would imagine it would make a bit of a difference in the results, and would be interesting to compare.

<comment><USER43> My Danish isn't too hot, but I make it N=1146, Danish only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> "best bet is probably to focus on lowering the incentives for people to pirate"

No. It's very hard to not get people to do something and esp to stop doing something they currently are and tripple esp to do either without some replacement. As this "study" demonstrated and should be common sense.

Instead they need to incentivize legal downloads / legal media consumption.

Of course, that's extremely hard cause they literally add no value. They actually have a huge anti-value hill to climb just to reach parity with downloading. Their middle-man business model is broke and requires ever more bizarre/ridiculous laws to keep it shored up.

</comment><comment><USER45> I hope this highlights the fallacy of using consensus to determine what is ethical:

"70% of the public finds rape socially acceptable"

Would we be having the same conversation?

<comment><USER46> That would be a reasonable counterpoint if 70% of the public did find rape socially acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Really? Almost none of my friends finds it acceptable. Maybe they are skewing the data to support their position. That never happens though.

<comment><USER22> Maybe you live in a bubble. That never happens though.

But more seriously, maybe none of your friends have had the experience of buying an LP, then later paying again for the same music on cassette, (and maybe 8-track and minidisc) and then again on CD.

And then maybe they weren't aware that the industry conducted a huge PR campaign to let people know that when they buy music, they are just paying for a license, not for the physical artifact. Of course they only did this after people had already switched to CDs. If we had known this before, we could have asked for crossgrades of the license from LP/single/tape/8-track/minidisc/whatever to CD.

And maybe your friends didn't hear about things like "Plays For Sure(TM)", Microsoft's DRM scheme that tricked millions of people into paying for music which Microsoft then decided would not play any more.

For those of us who did hear about these things, after paying for the same music three times, we're ready to just download our fucking songs that we already paid for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Wow... I didn't expect these sorts of tabloid headers to occur on Hacker News. That's usually a Reddit thing.

Shouldn't Hacker News be a cut above, where people first read and understand an article, and then post it to HN with a succinct, relevant, and most importantly TRUTHFUL title?

</comment><comment><USER49> Did Apple keep the other 30%?

</comment><comment><USER50> I really doubt that software piracy would be illegal if put to a public vote.

</comment><comment><USER51> It's not surprising that piracy is becoming more acceptable, since for much of the world the opposite of "piracy" is "giving money to the US".

(Independently of how much the numbers in this particular poll were manipulated.)

</comment><comment><USER52> How do you do a poll? I'd be more interested in:

X% of HN finds piracy acceptable

</comment><comment><USER16> The taxes are so high in Denmark, I'm not surprised. Most people don't have that much money left over to spend on things like music and movies.

<comment><USER53> Do you have a source on that? I live in Sweden, have an average wage, and we have pretty high taxes, yet I could potentially buy a lot of movies and CDs if I wanted to, and I gather Denmark doesn't have that much higher taxes than Sweden, so that is why I'm asking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Only 70%? In my social circle it would be 100%, and has been for years. Ironically I still spend more on media than anyone else I know, piracy or no ..

<comment><USER5> That's hardly ironic at all, it's merely counter-intuitive if you accept the notion that sharing == piracy (see my other post). If you reject that notion then the idea that greater enthusiasm for media by way of sharing should be correlated with greater media expenditures follows quite logically and directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I find it acceptable. eMule, PeerBlock, and verycd.com have always been my friends.

</comment><comment><USER56> piracy is the opiate of the youth.

</comment><comment><USER57> I hope it won't discourage people to become sailors…</comment>


Why Snatch Blocks and Pulleys Are Awesome [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2w3NZzPwOM <comment><USER2> I really want to like this guy, but he seems to slightly misunderstand every topic he presents. In this case, the pulleys work by dividing the work, making a ratio. Same as increasing the length of the lever on one side of the fulcrum. Simple. Instead we get confused ramblings about rope pulling and other verbose half-understandings of tension mechanics. Nevermind the dubious value of including your children in your video, a simple scale would have been much more demonstrative. A few more hours of preperation before hitting record would make these videos much more useful for teaching. Instead we are just left with his enthusiasm and some hasty examples, and patronizing 'explaination' not even useful for most children.</comment>


First job ad - how did I do? - <AUTHOR>

I've taken over the hiring process at Justin.TV and just submitted my first ad (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=292977).<p>There's been a bunch of discussion here about what makes a good job ad, so I'd be interested in any feedback on this one.  Is anything obvious missing?  Does anything in the ad turn you off JTV?  Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> I think its a nice combination of carefully stirring interest without overhyping expectations - and exactly the right amount of humor (a tiny bit!)

Well written.

I was most impressed with the flash question - that's the best way to find a flash person with a clue I've ever seen.

Dev questions are just OK though, the spelling one is fairly easy to google an answer to - maybe it would have been better to go domain specific? Or a real problem you guys have?

</comment><comment><USER3> It seemed straight-forward and compelling as necessary to me. I'm not sure if the test problems were yours, but they seem fitting as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of them was mine, yes. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No mention of Starcraft skills? :-)</comment>


Why Rent in New York City Is So High - <AUTHOR> http://metrocosm.com/why-is-the-rent-in-nyc-so-high/

<comment><USER2> Interesting! Thanks for sharing</comment>


Source code of StopCovid19 – French national anticovid's program - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19 <comment><USER2> This is not the full code: "A small part is not published because it implements tests or security critical blocks".

Even this published code is half proprietary and half free software. The Android and iOS apps are under a custom and restricting license. The protocol implementations and the Bluetooth SDK are made by INRIA and placed under Mozilla license. The server code, written by the CapGemini corporation, is proprietary and published as a big tar.gz.

On a side note, the Italian alternative solution has a much better documentation of the process, and a Affero License on the whole code: [https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni- documentation](https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-documentation)

Immuni clearly states that it leverages the Apple and Google Exposure Notification framework. StopCovid19 does not state anything like this, so it's unclear what its restrictions are. IIRC, iOS a limitations on bluetooth control.

</comment><comment><USER3> This didn't got enough attention, there are still companies marketing their own binary obfuscated ones.</comment>


Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture (1985) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA <comment><USER2> Happy to see these videos posted, they are exceptional. He clearly understood this stuff at a very deep level. I recall reading a story somewhere about his collaboration with Danny Hillis at Thinking Machines (I think?) and applying his unique problem solving skills to the issue of coordinating so many individual processors to perform a job. He wasn't a "computer scientist" but he apparently applied some unique ideas that helped significantly.

Edit: Here's the link: [http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection- machine...](http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I just love Feynman videos.

The way he talks, it shows how much of the subject he has _internalized_. I just love people who can flow with their thoughts. You know, at some level, that the discoveries he made, the math he did, the thought process he used, was effortless.

I wish the world encouraged and nurtured more such people.

<comment><USER4> _You know, at some level, that the discoveries he made, the math he did, the thought process he used, was effortless._

Probably in the same way that a great athlete makes something look effortless. It takes years and years of dedicated practice and love to make it "effortless."

<comment><USER5> Diligent in preparation, effortless in action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a related set of videos about the Quantum Mechanical nature of reality that are just amazing.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW_HsOU6YZRkdhFFznHNE...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW_HsOU6YZRkdhFFznHNEfua9NK3deBQy)</comment>