Marketers are panicking over Google's plan to yank cookies from advertising - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/advertisers-are-panicking-over-googles-plan-to-ditch-cookies-2020-2 <comment><USER3> At this point I'm absolutely convinced that anything bad for adtech is good for society. Absolute profit driven evil.

An entire industry built around psychological manipulation for the sole purpose of convincing people to consume products that they likely don't need, while simulataneously setting the stage for an Orweillian surveillance state... No one with a conscience should be working in adtech.

And there are far more insidious consequences to adware. I'm just speculating, but I have a feeling that when non-technical society is bombarded by ads, its capacity for critical analysis of information is reduced. Given the ubiquity of ads, and the many decisions that humans must make personally and professionally every day, if this is true it has a seriously negative ripple effect which permeates much of human endeavor.

<comment><USER4> Who defines what people need? Buying a can of soda is not something people need when water is so cheap. Buying that soda (as a collective effort) keeps thousands of people employed, and keeps their families growing. Society relies on advertising. The Orwellian state has been growing for decades. Adtech is no unique villain in this story.

Adtech has been used to sell copies of 1984 and A Brave New World. Something people arguably don't need to survive, and enjoy reading anyway.

Bill Hicks had a great bit on advertisers. I think the argument for adtech's potential for evil can be better articulated. After all, ublock origin, adblocking tech has millions of users. How effective could the brainwashing be if people are choosing to leave it?

<comment><USER5> Why do I need to work to further someone else's goals just to earn currency to "pay my way"?

How does encouraging people to buy Coke help the nation more than just giving that money directly to the public utilities?

<comment><USER4> Because there needs to be something for 330mil people to do and providing each other with more options for having a quality life is a valuable pursuit. We need doctors, engineers and a life outside work. Soda has its place as an entertainment and socializing drink.

Arguing against adtech and work are two separate things. Distribution of resources will always be controlled. Currency used to buy things is a method of directing resources to people who behave in a way that continues the system. What system do you think works better? I don't know what your goals are, maybe they are achievable without working for the man.

<comment><USER5> > Because there needs to be something for 330mil people to do

I am sure people could find something to do that was productive and fulfilling if they weren't required to be debt slaves simply to put food on the table.

Manufacturing dietary diseases doesn't seem to be productive or fulfilling to me. The idea that manufacturing soda is meaningful and productive use of peoples' time is the broken window fallacy. That, or the very worst of fetishising GDP-as-a-measure-of-quality-of-life.

<comment><USER4> The diseases from an FDA approved soda come from lifetimes of over-consumption of an entertainment product. Exercise leads to injuries from overwork, eating too much asparagus has it's downsides, too much alcohol or sugar are problems. Nothing is pure and infinite.

You don't need to push meaning to it's extreme to prove it's existence. It exists as it is. Soda is a good party drink and sweet drink for restaurants. People drink a few empty and sweet calories to refresh themselves and socialize. That's all it is, it's not a demon, it's not a saint. It's just fizzy water. It keeps many people at soda companies employed, it keeps many restaurants in profit.

Advertising soda is a fine way to have people put food on their table. If you want to productive and fulfilling work, go do it. You can't erase the fact that food is a limited resource that requires a system of distribution and we use money for allocating who and who can not obtain food. In a world where food were truly free and magically appeared out of thin air then there would be no starving people and you could do eat whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted.

You would still "wage slave" for a house, or running water, or whatever else. If you want to live a zero-cost life, build a log cabin in the woods and grow your own food, install your own solar panels. You will be doing the same work you're paying others to do right now but far less efficiently and with greater restrictions. You wouldn't have soda, or anything you couldn't manufacture yourself. But you would have control over the distribution of resources, there you go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work in marketing. It's hard to anticipate the all the effects, but we have of yet no reason to be too concerned. Google is unclear on how it will affect the options of their advertisements, but we anticipate that however they implement the rules, their own network will come out on top, and we will have even less reason to use any other advertisement network (surprise, surprise).

I wonder if this will finally be the death of display advertising - the value is already insanely low. And for the most part we have moved on to other channels.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this a broadside against Facebook's trackers?

Does anyone believe for one picosecond they will block their own cookies? I switched to Firefox when I tried to block all 3rd aprty cookies on Chrome and found some (Google's) that just wouldn't disappear.

<comment><USER8> As noted in a recent (and very busy) thread, Chrome sends an installation- specific ID to Google domains in a special header. This can easily be used as an identifier for tracking in the absence of cookies, and it's an advantage that Google's competitors lack.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure, but it seems there may be a fundamental question being asked here. If I trust somedomain.com, does this automatically mean I trust advertisers on said website? In fact it becomes even clearer where the trust boundary lies when taking into account the fact that even somedomain.com is putting advertising decisions into the hands of a 3rd party.

So, how far should the infrastructure of the web go in terms of assuming trust boundaries transcend the immediate trust and obvious relationship between end user and domain?

<comment><USER10> > If I trust somedomain.com, does this automatically mean I trust advertisers > on said website?

And vice versa, if I don't trust advertisers on somedomain.com, does this automatically mean I don't trust said website? The answer for many people is yes and it results in them not visiting them anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So Chrome is getting something Firefox has has for years. I've had third-party cookies blocked for the last decade. Plus Privacy Badger.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is something safari has being doing by default for more than a decade (I think from the very first version).

Firefox has been doing it for a while now as well iirc.

Chrome only appears to be doing it now that they've got people logging into their browser, and even if not, sending a unique ID to googles servers - <USER2> far more powerful and persistent than anything a cookie ever gave.

</comment><comment><USER13> Amusingly, the paywall appears to be frontend-only. Stop the page from finishing loading before the modal appears and you can read the whole thing.

> The IAB Tech Lab this week called for publishers, advertisers, and adtech > companies to unite to create standards and a replacement for third-party > cookies on browsers like Chrome, Apple's Safari and Mozilla-owned Firefox. > Dubbed Project Rearc, the effort is eventually supposed to include a > consumer ad campaign to reach 2 billion people.

...bwuh?

<comment><USER12> IAB also wants things like safaris intelligent tracking prevention to be illegal.

In their ideal world every browser would be required to include a persistent unique per user ID.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tangent, it bugs me the degree to which Google is thought of, by people including this headline writer, as being in charge of the internet.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article is paywalled (or at least gated).

<comment><USER16> This extension is useful for bypassing sites that use 'article limits' : [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

<comment><USER17> so is the web button under OP's link.

<comment><USER18> Still paywalled

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Paywall

</comment><comment><USER20> TP;DR?*

        * Too Paywalled**, Didn't Read

        ** Although for some articles one might legitimately say 'Toilet Paper, Didn't Read'

<comment><USER21> [https://beta.trimread.com/articles/5241](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/5241)</comment></comment>


Evernote, I want this job - <AUTHOR> http://evernote.hire.pe

<comment><USER2> I am blown away at how Evernote is able to attract such incredibly talented folks, given the "vision" they've communicated publicly.

Good luck. I hope you're able to join the other true innovators at that company to steer it into something cohesive.

Also, it may help to offer some "what I can do for you" content on this site. It's a lot of "all about me." As a potential employer, I'd be interested in your insights on what you think would make the company better, not what you've done in the past.

</comment><comment><USER3> Beautiful website, not overproduced at all. Good luck!

<comment><USER4> I don't particularly like the replacement of native scrolling with links that do the scrolling for you. Usability > looking fancy.

<comment><USER5> While I would agree normally, I think for this very special purpose it's okay to replace scrolling. This is not meant to be a website, but rather a short presentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In fact, evernote looks like a very attractive start up. It's the first time i saw such a motivation. That's very nice ! Good luck

</comment><comment><USER7> Very nice ! so much motivation & style ! Good luck but I'm not too worried ;)

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think Evernote will find anyone more motivated than him. Nice job.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice initiative. The website is cool (assuming that it is original design - new to me), but the content needs work: I see some sucking up to Evernote, lots of praising yourself with adjectives like "rigorous" and "autonomous." (Remove all self-congratulatory adjectives. All of them.)

Employers want to know that you understand the job and that you can do the job. That's it. Your task is to convey that you can DO THE JOB - by describing the RESULTS that you have ACCOMPLISHED. Also, read _Ask The Headhunter_.

I also use Evernote. Powerful tool. Sucky marketing and training materials, though. They do need help, perhaps from you.

Good luck.

<comment><USER10> As i wrote, the design is not original at all. You can also check the source to spot references to the original tutorial page on codrops.</comment></comment>


The Era of Black Boxes - <AUTHOR> http://melikyan.blogspot.com/2010/01/era-of-black-boxes.html

<comment><USER2> _Thus a modern Windows computer or a Mac is a legally locked black box that you pay for and somehow agree to own without owning it in full._

Even back in the analog day, it was a top priority among manufacturers to patent their technology if at all possible and, in this sense, even the hobbyist was legally restricted by such patents. Patents, though, do not hide the technology but only restrict what you can do with it. You could learn away to your heart's content as you took it apart and tinkered with it. That is the nature of an analog world: you can put your hands on and physically inspect and manipulate real-world objects that in themselves constitute the heart of the technical innovation.

Reverse engineering prohibitions really came about as leading forms of technology began to consist more and more of proprietary software consisting ultimately of source code with binary implementations. The law accorded copyright protection to such code as soon as it took a fixed form of expression and prevented others from either literally copying it or paraphrasing it in ways that copied its substance while making minor variations. Those who had invested major effort to develop the code went one step further to protect it, however, because the binary implementations would be released to the public generally, leaving them open to inspection by any technically savvy person who might reverse engineer the product. Thus were born the modern forms of license agreement by which such software was licensed only (not sold) and by which licensees became bound by contract not to reverse engineer the software. Legally, then, one could no longer "tinker" with a product insofar as it contained such software, though nothing would stop anyone in practice from doing so (he just couldn't legally use what he discovered through reverse engineering). This reverse-engineering prohibition, by the way, has nothing to do with copyright restrictions; rather, it is designed to plug a loophole in trade secret law by which courts had ruled that software that is otherwise protected by trade-secret becomes publicly available (and hence is no longer treated as a trade secret) if it can be legitimately reverse engineered - because of such rulings, software vendors in essence said to the world, "if you license our products, you agree that you can't peek into our world of trade secrets by reverse engineering our code."

These legal changes came about to protect what early software vendors perceived to be their vital interests in guarding their proprietary advantage gained through investing their development dollars and are a default part of the landscape today.

In my view, though, it is not so much the legal barriers as it is practical factors that have turned the products of today more and more into black boxes. Leading technology today is much less analog and much more digital and the tiniest of contraptions today can contain mountains of sophisticated technological development in the most miniaturized of forms. Who, sitting in a garage, has any hope of figuring it all out in the sense of opening up the box and analyzing it without the aid of sophisticated tools that no average person can even begin to afford, much less without the aid of technical know-how that is far beyond the reach of even the average technically-savvy person?

Even when it comes to earlier forms of software, again, back in the day, many of the engineers I represented came out of the old mainframe environment and were quite technically savvy in working with miniscule resource levels by coding in assembly languages, etc. They worked much more closely with the physical machine resources than is either needed or desired today. As technology has developed over the years, however, the working level of knowledge has become more and more "abstracted" to the point where interactions with the machine-level functions are now a specialized niche with which fewer and fewer people are even concerned, much less proficient in dealing with.

So the black box is there owing to primarily practical factors relating to technological development. The Steve Jobs's of the world (or their contemporaries) might have learned from their Heathkits, but that day is gone forever. It is all too complex now at the leading edge of technological change.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a super piece of writing. The 'phones on the hook can be used to eavesdrop' is fairly well known, but the main point of the article I think is that you no longer stand a chance to figure out what is going on in consumer electronics.

When I was a kid I'd make a bit of money repairing TVs by cannibalizing a few other 'corpses', such an endeavor would be nearly impossible today.

I fixed a computer a few weeks ago, the motherboard was put together with el- cheapo capacitors that had all blown their tops until there wasn't enough of them left to stabilize the circuitry they were in.

Easy enough you'd think. What would have taken 5 minutes in the pre-smd time took me a couple of hours and it was still sub-standard work.

Now I've been 'out' of electronics for a long time, almost 30 years now, but in a way I'm really happy. I'd hate to be an electronics hobbyist today, the state of the art has advanced so far that you're probably best off buying an FPGA kit and using that instead of rolling your own circuitry.

Arduino seems to capitalize on that feeling, to allow people to take a small step back from those black boxes and to open them up again.

<comment><USER4> One thing that disturbs me is how incurious people seem to be about their hardware. I was talking with two people who make their entire living from iPhone apps, and they didn't know it is an ARM device.

Part of it is surface-mount components, part of it is that the hardware is being pushed down the commodity stack. But I wonder what kitchen innovations we are missing because few people tinker with the bare metal anymore.

For 30-odd years hackers built their own lightsabers. Now they've pretty much stopped. I can't decide if that's inevitable or not.

<comment><USER5> To some extent things are technology-limited now. Not many people are going to build a 45nm process in their garage.

<comment><USER4> People didn't build IC fabs in their garages either. But we knew the ins and outs of the hardware. Some things are beyond human ability, but there seems to be much less interest in homebrewing our primary computing devices than I think that should account for.

<comment><USER5> I think it bears mentioning that at one point in time the hardware _was_ the software for the most part. Now the hardware has grown powerful and general- purpose enough that it can largely be abstracted out of the picture for most applications (or at least abstracted to down to general high-level parts -- e.g. X Mb/Gb of RAM vs what type of controller chip is being used).

I think that most people that are interested in 'tinkering' with things are doing it in software instead of hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thinking about the laws and regulations making it illegal for anyone to fix something on their own, makes me think of the Harry Tuttle character from Brazil.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film)>

"...the real Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a renegade air conditioning specialist who once worked for the government but left due to the amount of paperwork."

I remember him sneaking into homes like a cat burglar in order to fix things without going through the arduous bureaucracy put in place to keep unauthorized repairs from happening. That is close to becoming a reality for anyone who wants to fix their own or their friends' stuff, with the DMCA, etc., standing in their way.

<comment><USER3> Brazil is easily one of the best movies ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great post. I also had a similar interest in tinkering. Fixing broken things and breaking working things. I remember opening old VCRs and reading the schematics glued to the inside cover. Although I didn't understand, completely, how electronics worked at the time (just basic I=V/R). I knew what a blown fuse, capacitor, or resistor looked like and could spot a cold solder joint. But eventually the devices got too complex and programming became easier.

I'd like to make a few additions: While schematics aren't included anymore for most devices you can still get the repair manual by calling the manufacturer. A pasted schematic can't hold all the information that goes into most electronics these days.

Apple didn't need to "borrow" opensource tech. The XNU kernel is designed and developed by Apple. They gave it away. The FreeBSD userland stuff is also free to give away. Borrowing, in quotes, implies that Apple has done something underhanded which is not the case. This is the big difference between the GPL and BSD licenses. Only one is truly free. Also, the whole modern OS thing is old now. They've owned NEXT technology for 12 years. If they didn't buy them work on their next OS would have carried on anyway. But I doubt they would need 12 years to complete it.

With the development or Arduino, Beagleboard, and Bugboard getting into technical development has never been easier. This is vastly different than 20 years ago when the most you could hope for was a box with some blinky lights from a 444 chip. Now, even novices, are creating some pretty cool stuff.

<comment><USER3> I think you meant the 555 timer, the 444 was an op-amp.

<comment><USER8> He might have meant a 444. You can turn an op amp into a oscillator pretty easily: just drive it with some RC circuit.

See p284 of Horowitz and Hill :-)

<comment><USER3> Except it wasn't :)

I agree, you can do that, but the description was fairly clearly a 555. Besides that an lm444 is a 14 pin dip and a 555 is 8 pins (see comment by yardie).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would largely disagree that there are no longer things that the curious individual can tinker with. Granted, a lot of consumer electronics are too complex for the average person to fix or figure out, but that doesn't mean there aren't things out there for the curious.

Arduino, and products like it, as others have mentioned, offers a great way for someone to get into embedded systems. You can get a decent setup for around $100US that offers way more potential than opening up an old phone or TV.

I've grown up in the era of the black box, and I was still able to find things to pull apart and figure out when I was a kid. Even better, technology had gotten to the point where things like LEGO Mindstorm allowed me to tinker with something without upsetting my parents by breaking something they used. Later, when I got into music and started playing guitar, I made some money by figuring out how to repair tube amplifiers, a decidedly old technology, but one that continues to thrive in the guitar world. I purchased several tube amps on eBay for ~$20 each. I reverse engineered them and turned them into guitar amps. I built a tube amp from the ground up, even putting together the turret board and drilling the chasis.

I do agree that there is value in keeping things open, but the argument that there isn't anything out there for the next generation to open up sounds a lot like another "Well, back in my day" story.

<comment><USER10> You are correct. There are still a plethora of ``things``, which can be reverse engineered. However, most of them, (in my opinion?), are not things which I, or any other normal person, uses daily (cell phone,digital camera, computer, a car key which only needs to be near the car to allow someone to start the car and unlocks the car when the person, or a person touching the person, touches the car, and ect.). I'm not trying to say that people don't use guitar amps daily- I'm trying to say that pretty much anything containing that green circuit board with little black chips and bumpy things all over it- will be next to impossible for a 13 year old kid to figure out. I mean. Of course there is google and the wikipedia, but I mean figure out on his or her own time like you did.

<comment><USER9> I do agree that the number of everyday things that can be reverse engineered has dropped, but likely if one was so inclined to reverse engineer something, he or she would find something to reverse engineer. I would go so far as to say that the number of things that can get a 13 year old into tinkering has grown, not shrunk. The internet has opened up communities that would otherwise be unreachable to our hypothetical teen.

For my own case, had it not been for the internet, I would've never gotten into tube circuits. I never would have been able to make heads or tails of even the most basic tube amp design, even given the schematics. On top of that, I probably would've either killed myself or caused serious harm to myself if I did try to poke around those circuits without having researched it. Tube circuits can have deadly amounts of electricity in them even when they're unplugged and turned off. The same is true for old (and new?) TVs, I believe.

I'm 20. PCBs were pretty much ubiquitous by the time I was old enough to really start digging into things. That never stopped me, and I don't believe it would stop someone that's 13 now and has the inclination to take things apart and figure out how they work.

<comment><USER11> I think part of the problem is people don't know they are inclined to tinkering. If you grew up around VCRs and they broke and you wanted to try to save some money, you open it and see if you can do anything. This seems to be a common way to first start off. Nowadays you open it and immediately close it because there is no reasonable way to approach an IC or PCB without prior knowledge.

Of course there are the more industrious (and more annoying to their parents) who go on opening things that weren't broken and mess around in them. Those people are the ones who will actively go out and by arduinos. But it seems the first group is a dying breed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A lot of old-school programmers seem to feel the same about software. I've been reading the book "Coders at Work" recently and many of the older generation programmers reminisce about the days where they understood (and many times owned) every single line of code from the hardware up to their applications. Some say that they wouldn't like to be a programmer today because they'd have to accept too much as black-box (OS, frameworks, etc).

I can certainly sympathise with the OP and the older generation of programmers but I can't help feel that it's more a case of standing on the shoulders of giants. If we're to forever tinker (even if it is fun) with basic electronics or low level programming we'd have a hard time making any progress. As painful as it is I find it best to accept that something is black-box and just work with it, warts and all. Having said that, it's really useful to have the source code for the frameworks/libraries you're working with. Delving into it is similar in ways to the tinking the OP speaks about.

<comment><USER3> I think it is in some ways comparable to working in assembly versus a high level language.

In assembler you place every instruction, every part.

A high level language that gets compiled (or even compiled twice by a jit) outputs _millions_ of instructions, many more than the largest hand coded assembler program.

Nobody in their right mind (or of a (in)sufficiently long lifespan) would even attempt to do such a thing manually.

Just like modern cpu designs could not be duplicated without a functioning computer make the masks.

So, 'old' programmers feel the same sense of being removed from the machine instructions and the complete knowledge as electronics people do from being removed from their components and visible, traceable wiring.

Not that long ago there was a posting here by a man who built his own computer, out of ttl logic circuitry from the ground up.

It's an excellent exercise in gaining control of the machine.

But as soon as you want to do something that is competitive in the marketplace then 99 out of 100 times you end up using that high level instruction grinder anyway.

Only guys like dark_shikari and people that are busy with smaller embedded systems get to enjoy that feeling on a daily basis. For everybody else that is just as alien as an electronics person that insists to build a complicated piece of equipment out of individual resistors, diodes and transistors.

When the first thin film circuitry appeared in the mid 70's (or at least, when I saw it for the first time, I must have been 10 or 11) the only thing other electronics hobbyists were wondering about was how they were going to repair them.

That's just as inconceivable to me today as it would be to perform surgery on in integrated circuit.

<comment><USER13> For those of you (like me) who suspect that one's programming education is incomplete without some taste of assembly language, the third edition of Jeff Duntemann's _Assembly Language Step-by-Step_ is out now, focusing on Linux and NASM:

<http://www.duntemann.com/assembly.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Regarding tinkering with electronics, I imagine microcontrollers are both cheaper, information about hacking them more readily available, and the choice of architectures more numerous than they were in your childhood [1]. So now you can tinker with things which have a network stack and an IP. Pretty nifty, if you ask me.

Regarding the IP issues: there is a lot more investment involved developing the software and chipsets which runs a modern cell phone compared to the rotary phone you took apart. Without the patents and copyrights protecting Apple's rights to the MacBook in front of you (and me), it would never have come to exist, because there would be no economic incentive for Apple to invest the billions that created it into R&D in the first place.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_microcontrollers>

<comment><USER15> Patents don't prevent you from reverse engineering something you buy -- in fact it should already be made public in the patent application. Neither does copyright. It prevents you from using that knowledge in a new or cloned product.

Its more the DMCA and maybe-enforceable licenses you "agree" to when buying something that try to prevent you from figuring out how things work. And that comes perilously close to "thought police" IMHO.

I also remember taking apart rotary phones and realizing that you could dial them by hitting the hangup lever at the right frequency and number of times. If that had been "forbidden", I think it's very reasonable that my natural curiosity had just been rejected at an early age. This story reminds me of the TED talk about how you can't buy a chemistry set anymore.

<comment><USER14> Except 13 year olds pay attention to maybe-enforceable license and the DMCA a lot less than the author cared about the KGB - at least he was aware of them. I doubt any 13 year old knows what EULA or DMCA stands for.

Chemistry sets are readily available, just as they always have been [1]. The big difference is that now, video games are a hell of a lot more fun than any chemistry set.

1\. <http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00007B8M6/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of Cliff Stoll ( _The Cuckoo's Egg_ ) giving a talk at the Dayton Ham radio Convention a few years ago about curiosity and how it seems to be dying these days. He went out to the flea market and bought bags of parts and dumped them on the overhead projector and said, with some drama, "you can build a radio out of these".

He gave an illustration of an application of such technology for his neighborhood. The street near a school had a speed limit that was often exceeded. He wanted to find a way to bring the attention of this to the city. Purchasing some parts from Ramsey Electronics, he built a radar gun (using licensed ham radio frequencies), attached it to a post near the street, connected the output to a macintosh, and delivered plots of the speed of cars over a period of time. The city then put speed bumps there, making it a safer street.

</comment><comment><USER17> I remember my father opening up our black and white vacuum tube TV to clean it from dust. He would tell me what each component did, how electrons flowed ... for me it was the best time in the world listening to him. And I really liked taking things apart to see what they are made of.

Nowadays I mostly work with software, the interesting components are algorithms and data structures. They are abstract and intangible but just as fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a software guy, I recommend the book "Bebop to the Boolean Boogie":

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1856175073>

...to people who want to demystify current generation electronics.

What we have now is not as simple as an early telephone, but it still might be in the realm of understanding.

</comment><comment><USER19> I had a Comcast cable box last year that produced a couple minutes of what sounded like a CB or phone conversation while not "on" several times. Any theories what could cause that or is it time to get a tinfoil hat? I'm not exactly a likely target for eavesdropping.

<comment><USER20> Lots of cheapo electronics aren't properly RF shielded, and will pick up radio transmissions. I once had a pair of speakers that came with a PC as a "free bonus". Those things could be used as a radio (except for only one station).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> That is one awesome article.</comment>


Tactical Tech: Exposing the Invisible – The Kit - <AUTHOR> https://kit.exposingtheinvisible.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> What this kit is for, quoting:

> "Our small team at Exposing the Invisible has been actively experimenting > with ways to promote investigation as one of the most important forms of > engagement – not only political engagement, but engagement understood much > more broadly, in the sense that every action is an important step toward the > goal of wider public participation. Our reason for doing this is simple. We > want to help people develop the ability to question information that is > false, find information when it is scarce and filter information when it > becomes overwhelming. We see this set of skills as a way to counter the > suppression of opinions, bypass censorship, combat excessive secrecy and > increase transparency so that people can rely on facts rather than opinions > and assumptions. We all need the ability to assess the weight and > seriousness of the narratives that are shaping our decisions and our sense > of justice, and we should all be capable of differentiating between > information that is misleading and information that we can rely on."</comment>


United States Sentencing Commission website hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.ussc.gov/ <comment><USER2> Dudes. This is not at all helpful. Website defacements just create more of an excuse for a crackdown. If you're going to risk your life and freedom hacking things; make it worth your goddam time. Hack the prison industrial complex and get the evidence that shows that crimes are being created so that prisoners can be kept at a profit. Expose the email trails of corrupt judges who put away kids for kickbacks. Dox the modern plantation owners who order up prisoners to work at slave wages.

Putting a press release on a website where it doesn't belong has been done; it's old news. We know you can hack a drupal site owned by the .gov, we get it. Don't blow your wad on something obvious, get documentation that would make Woodward and Bernstein cream their pants over how many pageviews it'd get and publish that.

Hack the FBI and find out who was talking about killing protestors at Occupy Houston; hack Corrections Corporation of America and find out what they talk about during their board meetings; get their financials and spill them to the foreign press. Any or all of those would change things, possibly for the better. But this, this is a waste of your time and ours.

<comment><USER3> Exposing emails, hacking the FBI? This is not at all helpful.

Murdering politicians, assassinating police officers and judges, freeing the wrongly imprisoned by force. A willingness to die fighting. Any or all of those would change things, possibly for the better. But this, this is a waste of your time and ours.

<comment><USER4> hernmannj314, this comment could be read as encouraging the ("helpful") deaths of a variety of civic officials. Even if there were an appropriate forum for such loathsome sentiments, hn is certainly not it.

<comment><USER5> > Even if there were an appropriate forum for such loathsome sentiments, hn is > certainly not it.

This behavior is the inevitable result of lynch mobs throughout history though. Rile up the people enough and stuff like this is a byproduct. Even in the American Revolution the people started off by torturing unpopular British officials by tar-and-feathering them. One can't have their cake and eat it too.

<comment><USER4> What's your point? hn is still not the place for such behavior to be framed as "helpful".

<comment><USER5> You're right, I wasn't very clear. My point is that HN has been kind of a rallying point for some of the more intellectual opposition to anything and everything regarding how Swartz's case was handled (at least, once he killed himself).

But all of the people calling for heads to figuratively roll need to be really careful about the effect of their rallying cries. Like "having one more drink" while carrying your car keys, decisions and actions made now can spiral out of anyone's control and lead to even more anguish down the road.

Mob rule is very much a package deal, you don't just get to keep the good parts and disclaim all the rest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The site contains links to 9 encrypted files, one for each of the current Supreme Court Justices.

The files are intended to be concatenated into a single file named: Warhead- US-DOJ-LEA-2013.aes256

(US-DOJ-LEA = United States - Department of Justice - Law Enforcement Agency)

aes256 is apparently the encryption scheme used to encrypt the files.

File names (and sizes): 1115 MB total

      Scalia.Warhead1 (150 MB)
      Kennedy.Warhead1 (108 MB)
      Thomas.Warhead1 (150 MB)
      Ginsburg.Warhead1 (150 MB)
      Breyer.Warhead1 (150 MB)
      Roberts.Warhead1 (23 MB)
      Alito.Warhead1 (150 MB)
      Sotomayor.Warhead1 (101 MB)
      Kagan.Warhead1 (133 MB)

Relevant quotes pertaining to the file contents:

 _The contents are various and we won't ruin the speculation by revealing them. Suffice it to say, everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public. At a regular interval commencing today, we will choose one media outlet and supply them with heavily redacted partial contents of the file._

 _Should we be forced to reveal the trigger-key to this warhead, we understand that there will be collateral damage._

 _It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated._

Summary: the file contains "various secret contents", the file has one encryption key to reveal all data, they intend to release previews of the data, they may not release the encryption key (although chances of this seem unlikely).

The encrypted data is almost certainly larger than the unencrypted data, my guess is the unencrypted data is closer to 600MB to 900MB (In the ballpark of the size of a standard 700MB data CD).

Initially I thought the 9 files may contain data about each of the SC Justices, or perhaps information intended for each of them. However, I think their names on files were simply chosen for effect.

<comment><USER7> There's something strange about those file sizes. If they were a split set, wouldn't they all be the same size except for one?

The only explanation I can think of is the data was `tar`d, then `split`, then compressed (to make the varying sizes), then encrypted, which seems more than a little insane.

The files are Base64 encoded, which means they are considerably larger than their equivalent binary.

<comment><USER6> Yeah it seems strange to me too, it's possible the server I was downloading from had incomplete files... it seems like Kennedy.Warhead1, Roberts.Warhead1, and Sotomayor.Warhead1 should be 150 MB... those are the file sizes reported by the server though.

<comment><USER7>
        $ curl --head http://www.easyseattleshortsales.com/Roberts.Warhead1 | grep -e "Content-Length"
        Content-Length: 23883776

They all return that size or a 404. It's either intended, or they borked the uploads to the compromised servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Only tangentially on topic (but more interesting that the actual content of the video I think), but I suspect no warhead reentry shield would actually be shaped as pointy as that.

Although you would think a more aerodynamic shape would reduce the drag and therefore heat of reentry, the reality is not quite so simple. In fact, the opposite is actually true. As you make the reentry shield blunter (increasing the drag coefficient as you do so) the heat load the shield needs to take actually _drops_. The reason for this apparently is that blunt reentry bodies form a sort of cushion of air around themselves that separates the shockwave caused by reentry from the reentry vehicle itself, insulating it.

I suppose sharp pointy warheads are more theatrical though.

<comment><USER9> It has to be pointy! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtahqXjFcxU>

<comment><USER10> Good one! Is it worth watching the whole movie?

<comment><USER9> IMO, yes. It helps if you're familiar with Sacha Baron Cohen's sense of comedy and aren't easily offended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat off topic, but this has been bothering me for a while now:

about the role of aaron swartz in all this... initially I read he was facing "up to 35 years" in prison. After his death people started speaking of "up to 50 years". In relation to the USSC hack I have started seeing 50+ years pop up.

I feel like these exaggerations do not do anyone any good. The actual facts are horrible enough - bloating them up like that does not support his cause, rather, imo might undermine it, as it reduces the credibility of anyone arguing his case.

<comment><USER12> 35 years was the maximum under the laws he was originally charged with. 50 years was the maximum after the supplemental indictment that added additional charges. Under the sentencing guidelines a judge shouldn't, but still could have sentenced him to the maximum.

If the goal is to change the law and the argument is that the penalties are absurd, the fact that the penalties are absurd is very relevant and not an exaggeration.

<comment><USER5> "Win the lottery and you could receive up to $200 million!!! Buy your ticket today!!!"

And yet we say the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math...

<comment><USER12> Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the sentencing guidelines based on the maximum penalty? In other words, the absurdity of 50 years in theory is what creates the absurdity of seven or ten years in practice. If the maximum penalty was one year or less then the guidelines would have discounted that to something entirely rational for cases like Aaron Swartz, but it wasn't, causing the disproportionality.

Buying a $1 lottery ticket would be a whole lot more rational if the rare case resulting in $200M caused the average case to result in $35M.

<comment><USER5> As far as I understand them, the sentencing guidelines group related charges into a single charge. E.g. the "computer fraud" and "wire fraud" charges that are for some reason separate under CFAA would count as just one conviction under FSG. So even if we was convicted for 1 or 5 charges relating to the same underlying accusation you should still get the same recommended sentence.

Since I'm not a lawyer I don't want to try to analyze further but there's also provisions about whether to make multiple sentences concurrent or sequential (which can also add time).

You don't have to take my word about the maximum sentence though: Jennifer Granick was very critical of the U.S. Attorney's handling of the case and her estimate of the FSG recommendation (based on trumped-up loss calculations) was 1-2 years in prison.

There _is_ a reason to add charges though: It can make the jury more likely to convict by helping along their sense of "splitting the difference", makes the court of public opinion turn that much more against you, etc.

<comment><USER12> >As far as I understand them, the sentencing guidelines group related charges into a single charge.

Even so, I believe the maximum penalty under the CFAA is still 20 years on its own. The fact that there are multiple possible charges with such disproportionate penalties for a single underlying action just underscores the need for systematic reform.

>There _is_ a reason to add charges though: It can make the jury more likely to convict by helping along their sense of "splitting the difference", makes the court of public opinion turn that much more against you, etc.

In other words there isn't a _legitimate_ reason to add charges but there are a number of cynical and illegitimate reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [Shakes his head in disgust.] Hackers, it's time for me to hack the discussion. You and your first world problems have NO IDEA how to fight for freedom. This is the wimpy way to protest whatever it is you are protesting. Unlike most people who post here, I have actually lived under a dictatorial regime that ruled a territory that later had a peaceful transition to democracy and legally protected civil rights. Anonymous or whatever the name of the latest Western hacktivist group is going about things all wrong.

If you really want to learn about effective popular action to bring about more freedom, point your Web browser to the Albert Einstein Institute publications

<http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html>

and choose your language for titles like _From Dictatorship to Democracy_ and _The Role of Power in Nonviolent Struggle_ and others. Note that the main author of these publications has consulted with freedom movements all over the world and has had notable success in the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, and other countries, and is credited with much of the mobilization of the two- year-old Arab Spring movement.

Going after the United States Sentencing Commission website is beyond stupid. The federal sentencing guidelines were a helpful reform. Before they were adopted, on the example of Minnesota's sentencing guidelines, federal sentences were just about wholly indeterminate, making each judge could make up his or her own law of sentencing at trial. The Minnesota reform, which was the example for the federal reform, set up guidelines based on a "severity score" of the offense--so that for the first time legislative statutes from many different decades were compared as to the actual social harm resulting from each offense, based on community standards as of the time of the reform-- and on a "criminal history score" of the offender, so that prison time was reserved only for the most dangerous repeat offenders. (Minnesota imprisons fewer convicted criminals than most states of the United States, being much like Scandinavia in this regard. Minnesota spends more dollars per prisoner but fewer dollars per taxpayer on its prison system than almost any other state.)

I know actual freedom fighters, that is publishers of opposition magazines and organizers of nonviolent protests, from Taiwan. Some of them experienced hard prison time while in the struggle for freedom, with family break up and ill health and the other consequences of imprisonment. But today they can look at a much freer country in their homeland than they grew up in. The biggest problem with website-defacing movements is their cowardice (no one in Anonymous seems courageous enough to go to prison) and lack of perspective (they complain about first world problems that they mischaracterize as important problems for the common people). It's time for the discussion on Hacker News to grow up and make more room for the real freedom fighters.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the aeinstein.org link. One thing: "no one in Anonymous seems courageous enough to go prison" - What use is it to go to prison? Maybe you will get some article produced about you generation some attention, but it really doesn't seem helpful. Courageous, I agree, but is it rational? Recently I read about a small protest in mainland China about an instance of media censorship. A bunch of people singed there names on some document complaining about it, and Chinese man who was speaking to some journalists got thrown into a van and taken away. It would not surprise me if some of those people who signed their names will end up getting attacked, so anonymity is beneficial here.

<comment><USER15> You are comparing apples and oranges.

This was not a protest in rural China where corrupt local communist party officials are going to come and disappear you.

This was an attack on a US Federal Government website. Whoever defaced the site might get prosecuted for their endeavor, but the only purpose for anonymity here is for the instigators to avoid official reprisal and prosecution (.e.g to get away with it).

Nobody in the US is going to persecute you because you think academic articles should be free (they'll largely just ignore you).

<comment><USER16> _"Nobody in the US is going to persecute you because you think academic articles should be free (they'll largely just ignore you)."_

What good is the belief without the ability ("freedom") to act on it? Aaron acted on it, which was arguably a more effective form of protest, and he paid a high price too, even if one doesn't attribute the suicide to his persecution (ehem, sorry, "prosecution")...

 _"Whoever defaced the site might get prosecuted for their endeavor, but the only purpose for anonymity here is for the instigators to avoid official reprisal and prosecution (.e.g to get away with it)."_

If I am reading your correctly, it sounds like you're saying the person defacing the site should volunteer his or herself for jail (albeit as an act of protest). That hardly makes sense in the best of scenarios let alone in the context of the CFAA. No sit-in protester _wants_ to be pepper-sprayed and hauled downtown, nor would I hold it against them. Suggestion boxes are anonymous for a reason too. (Mind you, one doesn't see many of those these days; almost as if noone wants to know when something's wrong.)

<comment><USER15> Well, i was responding to the notion that there is nobility in this particular use of the shield of anonymity.

I just happen to disagree that this is a noble use of anonymity.

And, yeah, if you're going to break the law in an act of intentional protest, yeah, i hope they have the strength of conviction to own up to what it is that they're doing. Otherwise it is sort of a cowardly act of opportunity.

The thing that distinguishes aaron swartz's case is that every one thinks it is insane that he was being threatened with jail time, and it isn't reasonable for him, or anyone else (save for the prosecutors) to consider 35 years in prison a proportional response for his circumstances and actions.

Attacking government websites solely for the purpose of defacing them, out of protest or not, is moving out of the grey area that aaron swartz was operating in (this information is supposed to be public anyway, and he had a means to scrape them), into intentional vandalism (even if you think they are a legit cause).

Anonymity in such a circumstance, again, is just a shield for people who are breaking the law. I'm not saying anonymity is a bad thing, or that we shouldn't have it, but imo, this is more an abuse of anonymity than a use.

P.S. Aaron Swartz is a lamentable and reprehensible aberration, but it is an aberration. Larry Lessig certainly agrees with Swartz's objectives (just not the means). Nobody is leading a crusade against Lessig, or trying to murder, injure or incarcerate him for what he believes, or the actions he takes to further his aims. That's persecution. Abortion providers are persecuted. Information activists are not persecuted.

<comment><USER16> _"a cowardly act of opportunity"_

 _"just a shield for people who are breaking the law."_

I would (naturally) call someone who disagrees with me, and acts on it, "abusive" too (or opportunistic, for example) even if he or she thought they were acting morally; moral arguements are hollow when the morality is what's being argued over. I'm not exactly disagreeing with you, just trying to say that moral judgement might be moot (except to one's self of course).

That said, we do seem to disagree on the definition of persecution. I do think people who believe in free access to knowledge, and who act on those moral principals, including pursuing transparency and accountability, are "persecuted"... Case(s) in point: Bradley Manning, Assange, and every other whistle-blower in history. I've said it elsewhere too, but to repeat myself: it does not feel like a safe time to develop network software, and even simple things that geeks do can easily be considered threatening or criminal. No, we're not talking holocaust or even abortionist-level persecution, but geeks still get treated differently. Ex: the very real possibility of 35 years for a nonviolent, technically simple, and arguably moral, scripted download indicates how discriminating IT laws are. As others have noted, murderers get less in most states. (15 to 25 years, typically, before time off for good behavior.) It didn't happen to me personally, but it's still pretty close to home and I guess I'm just not as convinced it's an aberration.

(I'm probably just thinking out loud.)

<comment><USER15> I suspect that I'm not making myself clear enough.

I don't disagree with you that computer crimes are prosecuted in a crazy way and that it's unclear that the legal community has a technical proficiency adequate to make the sorts of fine grained judgements necessary to identify "good guys" from "bad guys" (and all of the myriad shades of grey) so they tend just to throw the book at people. This is less a persecution than it is a lack of understanding imo.

Regardless of all of that, what I am saying is that the _sort of crime_ that Aaron Swartz was accused of is not the same sort of crime that defacing a government website is.

As a consequence the nature of the protest that Aaron Swartz engaged in versus whoever has hit this particular site are materially different.

So when people say that Aaron Swartz was persecuted, I am sympathetic, but I genuinely think that things got crazy out of hand and under other circumstances would not have (which is why MIT's role in this is one worth identifying and engaging with).

On the other hand, if someone were to say that going after the guys who hit the ussc.gov site is persecution? That's not persecution. That's going after someone who's trying to commit a crime and actual inconvenience (however negligible it is) to others.

<comment><USER16> _"This is less a persecution than it is a lack of understanding imo."_

The same could be said of the sentiment that AIDs is "God's way of punishing homosexuals"... The people "throwing the book" at geeks are coming from the same place, as you have said (lack of understanding), IMHO as the Westboro Baptist's who I would consider "persecutive" of homosexuals.

 _"I am saying is that the sort of crime that Aaron Swartz was accused of is not the same sort of crime that defacing a government website is."_

 _"if someone were to say that going after the guys who hit the ussc.gov site is persecution? That's not persecution."_

I felt that way a few years ago watching the start of the hactivism stuff, and I would have said it was pretty cut-and-dry vandalism then. Today I find it harder to view this as strictly vandalism in light of the larger developing context, only the most recent of which is Aaron Swartz killing himself (to name, sadly, even only the latest suicide); Aaron's case in particular stands out to me as walking the line between vandalism, copyright infringement, and information/civil rights activism, blurring the distinction (to me at least). The lack of understanding, as you put it, touches all these categories and when I compare the mandatory minimums in the CFAA to the lack of interest in banking and financial crimes, for example, it feels a lot like persecution, even if it's also (in part) vandalism.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, just following my train of thought all the way to the station...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The text to speech voice seems pretty good. Can anyone point out what TTS engine they might be using ?

<comment><USER18> It sounds somewhat like 'Brian' <http://www.deskshare.com/text-to-speech- voices.aspx>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In terms of effectiveness, compared to other Anonymous campaigns, I feel pretty safe in saying the visibility of this campaign is going to be very high.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link to video for when site is inevitably repaired

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WaPni5O2YyI)

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/8067849/Anonymous_Warheads_-_...](http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/8067849/Anonymous_Warheads_- _Operation_Last_Resort)

</comment><comment><USER20> For others wondering; the file names refer to the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Justices_of_the_Supreme...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Justices_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States)

</comment><comment><USER21> They blackholed the dns it looks like, but <http://www.ussc.gov/> is still up.

<comment><USER22> I was impressed when they hacked mit.edu, but geesh, how did they get a .gov -- that's pretty crazy.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Huh? Have you seen how the various .gov sites are being run? Their security is generally pretty pathetic. Most of their security comes from the fact that they will hit you like a ton of bricks if they catch you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the introduction from "Anonymous Operation Last Resort 101"

*1. Welcome to #OpLastResort-TwitterStorm!

You have been selected to assist this important Operation because we're pretty sure you know how to cut and paste. #OpLastResort is a long-term Op devoted to honoring the memory of Aaron Swartz and continuing his important work. Anonymous has prepared content that they would like shared with the world, and it's up to us to make sure it goes everywhere. Other Operatives will be spreading the news to major MSM outlets, YouTube, Facebook, and other websites while you participate in the push to bypass the bias and get the word out directly to the people via Twitter."

(Further details: <http://pastebin.com/d2nvt263>)

</comment><comment> grey-area The narration seems to be in the style of v for vendetta, quite amusing to see such a portentous message on a hacked site. They've also made entire site editable.

<http://www.ussc.gov/index2.cfm>

<comment><USER23> Don't know if you've seen any other Anon releases, but they almost always deliver the message in this style.

<comment><USER24> That's true, but they are one-upping themselves with every release. I find the packaging of their message this time is very impactful.

Topiary was the genius behind all the LulzSec antics, before him Anon releases lacked creativity. Topiary made anon realize the impact of PR.

Is this video part of some game CGI and they just reproduced it? Or did someone do this from scratch? How much time would it take to do from scratch?

<comment><USER25> >they are one-upping themselves with every release

This!

Also, I wonder what it's like to be 14 today and watch this. Anonymous would certainly make a strong impression on me if I was ten years younger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What exactly is the data in the warhead links?

<comment><USER27> AES256 encrypted files, apparently juicy stuff

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The site has been dropped from DNS but IP still returns. The mirrors are slow/down, and file keys are the extortion: [http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous- hacks-us-sentencing-commissio...](http://www.zdnet.com/anonymous-hacks-us- sentencing-commission-distributes-files-7000010369/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Gotta love the trailing: && rm -rf /

Classy ;-)

</comment><comment><USER30> The cool thing about hacking government sites. No one will be in the office on the weekend.

</comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone have a pic of what it looked like? It is down now. (DNS doesn't resolve).

<comment><USER32> Google cached page:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ussc.gov/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They made this tweet 10 hours before it went down -- <https://twitter.com/OpGJResisters/status/294901397147766784>

I wonder how this played into the hack...

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't want any reforms that come from blackmail and extortion. Any good that they would do would be wiped out once the really powerful extortionists show up.

By all means, though, let's see what's in those files.

<comment><USER34> I don't think they actually expect (or fully want, for that matter) their demands to be met before they release the decryption keys. They want to be seen as confident enough to present a deal, but their ultimate power trip fantasy is to see powerful people forced to resign from office, and then for the reforms to happen after the destruction has happened.

Also, would it have killed them to provide sha-3, or at least sha-1 or md5 sums? People are speculating here (and presumably elsewhere) that some of the uploads were corrupted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's been a couple of hours since the hack. How does a major gov website not have a plan to act on this quicker? I wonder if they even have an alert letting them know something happened.

<comment><USER36> Given the small time window for an attack to be viable I have to wonder why a more concise and succinct message wasn't used. It does make me wonder if the bark is bigger than the bite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What about the rm -rf / on the command line?

Tricky, but not a lot of people know how/where to use that command line in the first place.

<comment><USER7> You can't actually execute `rm -rf /` on most modern systems anyway. There's a flag to force it, but you'd have to be pretty determined to nuke your system.

<comment><USER38> Sure you can. (Just gave it a shot on a Ubuntu VM the other day while exploring shared library linking.)

Do some systems really have a flag more forceful than -f ?

<comment><USER7> Debian:

        # rm -rf /
        rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
        rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this fail safe

<comment><USER38> Huh, sure enough, I stand corrected. Must have entirely forgot that I added that option while rushing to play around while things were being removed. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Self-righteous idiots. Who made them judge and jury of the world? Do something positive.

<comment><USER39> Essentially it's a form of terrorism. They are saying do things our way or we burn your house down. They don't believe in democracy and so what's left? A world where the best people at malicious hacking rule? The same skills they used to do this can shut down power plants, bring down air planes, and wreck general mayhem. They are saying the people in power are corrupt. Some how we have to trust they will never become corrupt.

Before I posted my original comment. I had a moment of fear. What if I pass them off and they decide to ruin my life. Maybe as an exercise size for one of their noobs.

<comment><USER40> >> They are saying do things our way or we burn your house down.

No, they are protesting events that are generally perceived as a gross injustice of the judicial system.

>> They don't believe in democracy and so what's left?

Says who? To me, they seem to be the very embodiment of civil disobedience (and thusly of democracy).

>> The same skills they used to do this can shut down power plants, bring down air planes, and wreck general mayhem.

I don't understand how is that related to anything. Yes, a variety of things can be used for good AND BAD purposes.

>> They are saying the people in power are corrupt. Some how we have to trust they will never become corrupt.

In other words, let's not remove the corrupt people because the people who would replace them COULD be corrupt as well.

>> Before I posted my original comment. I had a moment of fear.

The thing about fear is that it's not necessarily rational.

<comment><USER41> The very embodiment of civil disobedience? I think not. They are anonymous thugs and vandals and nothing more.

<comment><USER40> Some examples of said thuggery would not hurt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Reminds me of <https://xkcd.com/932/>

</comment><comment><USER43> One hour since, they have not restored the website.

</comment><comment><USER44> BR and FONT tags? What kind of markup is this?

<comment><USER45> HTML6 ;)

But seriously, I think they were either going for maximum compatibility or didn't really care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I notice that justice.gov is down.

</comment><comment><USER45> This will end well :/

</comment><comment><USER47> "It is our hope that this warhead need never be detonated."</comment>


Ask HN: Urgent connection to Twitter support - <AUTHOR> HN,
For the past few hours Israel and Gaza have been exchanging rocket and missile attacks, with many casualties on both sides.
I am the admin for an automated emergency alert twitter feed that thousands of users depend on to receive alerts on incoming attacks.
Currently, we are approaching API limits and require immediate relaxation of some of the limits.Support tickets have been filed, but no answers just yet, and escalation is required.
Any connections to Twitter support staff that can help us expedite handling of this ticket would be awesome, and would be helpful to many who depend on this feed during this difficult time.
Thanks, @yuvadm <comment><AUTHOR> Success! Twitter @support just got back to me with news that the rate limits have been increased!

HN, you are awesome!

<comment><USER2> See, HNers, procrastination habits can be put to good use!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious, is this service service equally available/relevant to civilians on both sides of the conflict, or only one? I don't ask to be judgmental, I recognize that politically/legally it may not even be possible to serve both sides. I just wondered if the automated nature of the service allows for it to be apolitical.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, it caters mostly to the Israeli side, as it is in Hebrew and relies on Hebrew sources of information.

I would very much be interested in helping build a similar system for Palestinians in Gaza, but from past attempts to organize similar cooperations, help is not necessarily wanted.

That being said, I am aware of several Palestinian users in Gaza who do follow this account for various purposes.

<comment><USER4> Respect the intent to make a tool for peace, not a weapon. Want to point out that "Various purposes" might include the people shooting the missiles seeing if/where they land? These communications might better be conducted via bulk PM?

<comment><AUTHOR> Possibly, but most reports never mention specific coordinates.

Israelis already have complete drone coverage of Gaza Strip, they don't need reports on hits. Palestinians cannot possibly use coordinates to aim homebrew rockets being used. Hit radius is e.g. around 1km for far range rockets.

<comment><USER5> During the last flare up with Hezbollah, my friends in the Haifa suburbs told me that there were some gag orders on some rockets that landed near them to prevent Hezbollah from knowing that they had successful hits. But I suppose the rockets of Hamas vs Hezbollah would be different.

EDIT: Seems like their rockets are reaching Tel Aviv so I guess they aren't as crude as they used to be...

<comment><USER6> Those rockets have long range, not precision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the actual account you're posting these emergency alerts on? I looked at your @yuvadm account and couldn't see any retweets.

(Side note, I'd perhaps change your Archimedes joke in your Twitter description, given where you are and what you're doing)

<comment><USER8> [https://twitter.com/rotternews](https://twitter.com/rotternews)

Source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8007093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8007093)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is your twitter feed informing about the bombs falling on Gaza? (no sarcasm)

A link to the twitter feed? Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does, but only based on second-hand reports. See my additional response on the sibling thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a link to the Google Translated feed for @rotternews. (I used the mobile version due to formatting issues w/ the standard version)

[https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...](https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=iw&tl=en&u=https://mobile.twitter.com/rotternews&usg=ALkJrhihAUyj_ahsD6rMj4qEOBGq30-7eQ)

<comment><USER11> If anyone reads it, please don't mistake it for a mainstream Israeli news organization. Rotter News is a fringe right wing news website.

<comment><USER12> It is. It also happens to be very good at reporting live rocket hits fast, which makes it a valuable resource regardless of their politics (which I don't agree with).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think you mean, "Many casualties on the Palestinian side." Has ANYONE been killed in Israel? While Gaza is bombarded and dozens are dead, including children.

Don't try to equate the oppressor with the oppressed.

<comment><USER14> Nor is the oppressor the side with fewer casualties. Germany lost far more soldiers and civilians in the Second World War, yet that racist regime were clealy the oppressors, whose end came only by force.

So it is with Hamas.

<comment><USER15> It's annoying when people we don't like win elections isn't it? EDIT: Which countries weren't racist in the second world war? All the allied countries I know anything about certainly were.

<comment><USER16> It's more than annoying when said people proceed to summarily exterminate and/or expel all members of the democratically elected government belonging to the rival party, and bring about a quasi-religious violent regime which kills its own people for ideological ends.

Also, it is not ok to use your own civilian population as human shields, raise a generation of kids to become violent martyrs for your cause, and sacrifice their lives for your ideological war, which include things like the "elimination of a Jewish state in Israel".

Hamas killing Palestinians living in Gaza who are having a wedding, which wasn't Islamic enough: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEud- cEjwQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEud-cEjwQU)

Indoctrinating children to hate and "kill Jews" to "liberate Palestine": [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow's_Pioneers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow's_Pioneers)

By the way, in Hamas' view, "liberate Palestine" means to rid it of a Jewish state completely. If they took all that money to actually improve the education and quality of life of their citizens (which is what they are, essentially), they could be a legitimate government of a legitimate state. They already effectively have a state in the Gaza Strip. But their leaders would prefer to fight their ideological war and sacrifice their own people for it. As often is the case, it's the leaders of the people with their ideological ideas who are most responsible for the deaths of their own population.

<comment><USER17> > They already effectively have a state in the Gaza Strip.

I don't understand why anyone would say that. The things that differentiate Gaza and the west bank from a sovereign state are precisely the basis for the horrible conflict happening there.

<comment><USER16> Hardly. The goal of Hamas "armed resistance" as they call it is a united Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, no land swaps etc. This is an ideological position with zero compromise. Hamas' understanding of "occupation" is exactly that Jews have a state in the area.

Gaza could become a sovereign Palestinian state, it doesnt need a military to do so. No one is occupying it or attacking it, and it receives tons of American money. The problem is that their leaders are ideological crackpots, and many are corrupt on top of that, and they havent built up their economy, infrastructure, education etc in 7-8 years they controlled it. Instead they spent all their efforts on violent methods to advance an ideological agenda, and used their own people as human shields and used "state" funded TV and social centers to teach their kids to hate.

<comment><USER17> > Gaza could become a sovereign Palestinian state, it doesnt need a military > to do so.

A state with entirely benign neighbors could, theoretically, endure without a military (not that such a state really exists... even Monaco has a few soldiers). Not being _permitted_ to have a military does preclude a state from being considered sovereign.

In any case, you said "They already effectively have a state in the Gaza Strip." That's silly on a few levels, independent of the politics.

> No one is occupying it or attacking it

I know little about the conflict but I'm quite certain the people living there consider the blockade an aggressive act. I certainly would.

> The problem is that their leaders are ideological crackpots, and many are > corrupt on top of that, and they havent built up their economy, > infrastructure, education etc in 7-8 years they controlled it.

Gazans are definitely very badly served by the homicidal lunatics they've voted into office. I'd say the problem is a lot bigger than that. The lunatics are exploiting the situation but the conflict is a lot older than they are.

<comment><USER16> Yeah the Gazans are very badly served by Hamas as their leaders. Hamas could have taken the opportunity of having the entire area essentially self governed to set a shining example of Palestinian self government and focus on actually helping their people and grow the economy, develop things with thw money they get from the US etc. In fact they could work with Israel and other countries to do it. But they choose the path of violence which makes the US, EU, UN and others label them a terrorist organization, and that hurts the regular people in the Gaza strip.

As for the blockade - it is there to try and prevent arms smuggling into Gaza which has happened before (via tunnels, boats etc) from groups in Iran, Syria, Egypt. Iran as aa state actually delivered arms to Hamas and Hezbollah. It uses the Palestinians as a wedge against Israel being in the region (which it refers to as the Zionist regime). In fact, to many Arab states, Palestinian Arabs are often just a political tool but when it comes to helping them they have a worse record than Israel. Consider the relationship of Kuwait with Palestinians, 500,000 of which they expelled following the Gulf War with NO right of return, for siding with Saddam. Consider the feud of the Hashemite dynastry with the PLO -- look up Black September in Jordan or how 7000 Palestinians in west bank were summarily killed during the 1967 war. Not much outcry was going on when Jordan controlled the West Bank. But when Israel controls it, there is a great outcry about how they live there. I would like to say that the outcry should have been in ALL cases. The Kurds in Turkey and Iraq have been fighting for independence for over 100 years and hardly anyone talks about Turkey's "occupation" of them, or Saddam's gassing of the kurds with Mustard gas after the Gulf war for siding with the USA (short version: we betrayed them and left after we achieved our ends just like we did with muhajideen and others who helped us win wars against our enemies back then).

Anyway -- it's a complex scenario, and history is replete with violent leaders. Arab states originally wanted to see the Jewish state completely gone, and for it to belong to Syria! And earlier than 1948, Arabs would never want to work with any organized Jewish groups, to create one state. That was the conclusion of the Peel commission, which said the only way is to separate into two states. Look up "Al Husseyni" on wikipedia for example.

Today, the way out is to elect moderate leaders who reject violent resistance in west bank and gaza. This should be OBVIOUS. If gaza doesnt attack Israel it will mot be physically attacked. In fact if someone else attacks Gaza, Israel can help defend it. Furthermore, if they provide a great education for their children, increase economic ties with Israel, and actually ENFORCE normal laws like against stop smuggling qassam rockets into Gaza, or firing them, or killing people, etc. then the blockade can be lifted eventually and they can trade freely with other nations.

One thing is obvious: if Gaza lays down their arms Israel would NOT go in there or attack anyone. Gaza leaders can form a state of their own and go work with other countries to build it up for their people. But the current leaders have a stangelehold on Gaza. This often happens when an army leaves as suddenly as Israel. This happened when England left India after Gandhi (a civil war in which by some counts 1,000,000 people died) and it's happening in Iraq with ISIS now. It's unfortunate. But we havent learned how to do nation building properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is HN the new emergency technical support now? I thought twitter would have a redphone to handle request like these...

<comment><USER19> No, HN is not for technical support requests. We normally demote these, but didn't see this one on the front page until a minute ago. It's nice that it did some good, but we're burying it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Possible Work around?.... Create second twitter account, and announce it from the first twitter account periodically. Make new announcements on second twitter account.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd rather not fragment our content in this way, and even if we did, updating our automated scripts to handle this scenario wouldn't be trivial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You should probably include your contact, and twitter handle?

<comment><AUTHOR> Included, my personal handle is @yuvadm

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What account is this that's hitting the limits? Or what application?

<comment><AUTHOR> No app, just a simple feed that we post tweets to from various sources via API. Further details will be gladly discussed with @support staff.

<comment><USER23> Why are you being secretive about the details? You may never hear back from Twitter support, but in hiding things you may miss ideas, opportunities and resources that HN users can provide to scale your feed in different ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> No reason to keep things secret, it's just that the entire content is highly localized (specifically, it's all Hebrew) and wouldn't mean much to non-local users.

<comment><USER24> Because it's controversial I assume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This thread brings out a lot of partisanship. yuvadm can't warn others of incoming rocket attacks without being criticized for it? Are people upset that he could potentially be reducing casualties? Ridiculous. Spew hate elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER26> Messaged some friends who used to intern at Twitter and know people. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I understand the times are critical, and I apologize in advance for giving a suggestion at a bad time like this, but while @support answers you, why not check Faye[1] + HAProxy[2]?

This may not be as convenient as Twitter, but in case the answer from Twitter is negative, you can use these tools to broadcast updates in real time (I assume at this point, scalability is already an issue, and this is why I added HAProxy to the formula).

[1] [http://faye.jcoglan.com](http://faye.jcoglan.com)

[2] [http://www.haproxy.org](http://www.haproxy.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! Twitter is being used since many users already have it setup including push notifications.

I would love to build a push system of my own (it's also right up my alley), but onboarding users to a proprietary system would be significantly harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> To put things in context, Israel killed at least 24 people in Gaza today [1], including children. Did they have access to Twitter, let alone any telecommunication mean, let alone food and water? Sorry, but I really don't see how your twitter account being rate-limited or whatever has the slightest importance in this tragedy.

[1] [http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/08/world/meast/mideast- tensions/i...](http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/08/world/meast/mideast- tensions/index.html?hpt=hp_t2)

<comment><USER29> To put things in context, after receiving a warning call from the IDF that their building was going to be bombed, the head of the household ushered the children onto the roof as human shields.

[http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/08/world/meast/mideast- tensions/i...](http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/08/world/meast/mideast- tensions/index.html)

<comment><USER30> Shameful that you're being downvoted. FTA:

> _Official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that six were killed. Those > killed were forming a "human shield" on the roof of a home belonging to > members of Hamas' militant wing, Palestinian sources said. Two were > children, WAFA and Palestinian medical sources said._

<comment><USER31> Ah, same tactic Putin's bandits are using in Ukraine. Absolutely despicable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Problem has been solved, mods please backpage the rageful Israel-vs-Palestine debate.

<comment><USER16> what does backpaging mean?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have no contact in twitter, but you can try contacting twitter support via [https://www.linkedin.com/](https://www.linkedin.com/)

There are about 3k people from twitter on linkedin. I am sure one of them might be able to help you.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is probably relevant: [https://twitter.com/LTCPeterLerner/status/486203341622370304](https://twitter.com/LTCPeterLerner/status/486203341622370304)

 _" Peter Lerner

Israel Defense Forces Spokesman for International Media & Commander of the IDF Social Media activities.."_

        Download code red app to see what's happening in Israel & where rockets are landing
        https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/red-alert-israel/id873642097?ls=1&mt=8

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe you should think about putting up an rss feed, or throttling yourself the information posted to kind of sum them up in the meantime

<comment><AUTHOR> Good suggestion. An RSS feed sort of exists already, and twitter is just a better vehicle to deliver these alerts.

We could try to throttle ourselves, and better filter e.g. duplicates, that is true.

<comment><USER35> I think if the focus is mobile you can try setting up a very lightweight page with the latest events (with a cache in front, something that is updated every 1min or maybe 5min should be enough)

<comment><USER36> They need real time. 5 minutes is not "real time". Twitter is real time.

They need to meet their audience where their audience can meet them. Just about every phone nowadays can access Twitter in an immediate and obvious way. Twitter will meet their audience where their audience needs to be met.

<comment><USER35> Actually the definition of real time is: it meets the time constraint of your problem. It doesn't matter if this time constraint is 1ms, 1s or 1h. Of course it's harder to meet a 1ms time constraint so most problems fall into that category.

Hence, if their time constraint is 5min, fine by them, otherwise the question stands: what is their constraint.

And Twitter _is not real time_ (this is obvious if you ever used it - it is more visible in the mobile version), there's no guarantee that if a tweet was sent by an account A in time T and the timeline of someone who follows A is opened some seconds later that tweet will show up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not sure if it will help, but I've contact a few Twitter folks I know and alerted them to this thread.

</comment><comment><USER38> Keep up the good work!!!

</comment><comment><USER39> I prefer planning over firefighting...

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually contacted @support 3 months ago about this problem, and they dismissed it as a non-issue.

<comment><USER39> I mean not relying on Twitter on communicating your message...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "In the words of Archimedes, give me a long enough lever, and a place to rest it - or I will kill one hostage every hour."

Sure - that will get you priority with Twitter support!

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://xkcd.com/857/](https://xkcd.com/857/)

<comment><USER40> right - that really makes it fine. I get the joke, I just don't think that sort of comment will help their cause much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> just respect the usage limits like any other service being provided for you for free.

</comment><comment><USER42> No links to your service. Running 'emergency feed' that has thousands of users depending on it with API limits without factoring in rate limiting ahead of time.

Not to mention that Israel has active defense systems that alert your general area via sirens when missiles are coming.

Why is this on front page?

<comment><USER43> because it's not very common that this community can potentially pitch in to save lives on an immediate basis, and this happens to be one of those occasions.

those relying on the service should not be penalized by the software development practices of the person who wrote it with the best of intentions, and the opportunity existed for that to be avoided via community outreach (and it worked).

<comment><USER42> Why would anybody in Israel rely on such 'service' when they have fully automated missile detection system that sounds alarms within the region of possible impact.

Not to mention that twitter feed that gets it's news from another web site is a giant waste of time if you are trying to avoid rockets.

It seems to me you drank the kool-aid, without any fact checking.

If you want to do the 'lives' angle, if my life was at risk I would rely on billion dollar missile defense system. Not a delayed Twitter feed.

<comment><USER14> Alarm sounding isn't totally reliable. One rocket hit a northern city, Hadera, 60 miles outside of Gaza today. No alarm that instance, I'm told.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is horrible.

But you can be sure if the US were launching missles and a Twitter feed were used to warn the targets then the owner of the account would be an enemy of the state.

War is horrible. The internet brings us all closer to it. But you are basically asking an American corporation to supply a war effort with ammunition to your side.

<comment><AUTHOR> Again, I will not comment on the political aspect of this specific campaign. (Hit my feed to get a sense of my personal opinions if you are truly interested.)

I care about information dissemination and about helping humans on both side of a conflict to have better insight into the chaos that is occurring around them.

</comment></comment><comment> Link- What about the below stats live from Ghaza? I think these Palestinian's twitter API quota has already been reached and went beyond any limit too.

\- 447 heavy rockets, \- 374 air strike aggression, \- 39 marine bombs, \- 111 targeted homes, \- 17 homes completely destroyed, \- 95 homes partially destroyed, \- 2 masjids attacked, \- 1 hospital attacked, \- 1 ambulance car attacked.

I can understand war, I understand loss and fear, but I can't understand how such a silly thing has reached Hacker News's front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please, I completely understand, and trust me our views on this issue aren't very different.

My goal is to disseminate breaking news and alerts as quickly and widely as possible, to whomever needs it.

<comment> Link- As I do understand and empathize with your cause. And trust that I'm not looking for a political argument or the likes. The comment above is a painful cry out towards the absurdity of the situation in an attempt to shed some light on the colossal 'gap' between the worries of both sides..

<comment><USER11> Yes, the gap is certainly absurd (though I'm not sure about the validity of the numbers you quoted). But there are many absurdities about this conflict. This is what I posted here during the previous spat (exactly 600 days ago):

 _The mutual bloodshed is terrible, and, as a resident of Tel Aviv I 'm personally affected, but there is one thing that has always perplexed me a bit, which is the perception of the actual ferocity of the conflict. Obviously, every death is a terrible loss, but this forum is fond of numbers, so while we're on the subject, here are some numbers:

The total number of deaths in the entire Israeli-Arab conflict over the past 70 years or so, is - according to Wikipedia - under 100,000. Out of which, about 25,000 are Israeli, a similar number are Palestinians, and the rest, I guess are casualties of all the other fighting arab countries combined, although the total seems to me a bit high. That's the total for the past 70 years.

By comparison, in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, Wikipedia puts the number of deaths at about 30,000 in each country in the last year alone. And the Mexican drug war has claimed the lives of about 56,000 since 2006; some estimates go as high as 100,000.

So, not to compare suffering, but the entire Israeli-Arab conflict has claimed, over the last 70 years, more or less the same number of lives as the drug war in Mexico in the past 6._

In short, both sides are trying to recruit the world's support for what is, in reality, a very low-intensity conflict compared to just about any other violent conflict, anywhere else in the world.

<comment> Link- And Wikipedia is a credible resource for providing accurate numbers? How about you spend a couple of hours tonight monitoring #GazaUnderAttack ([https://twitter.com/search?q=%23gazaunderattack&src=typd](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23gazaunderattack&src=typd)) on Twitter, and let's both count the number of casualties (in the pictures) for the night. May I remind you these are human beings; children, women and young girls murdered, they're not soldiers @pron. Numbers are irrelevant in analyzing the situation or the conflict. Arab Leaders are to be damned for being so passive about all these atrocities (Libyan and Syrian civil wars included) and even contributing to some. That said, 'nothing' justifies 'Genocide'.

<comment><USER45> The irony of pointing out that Wikipedia lacks perfect credibility and then citing twitter posts as a source!

Those pictures under the #GazaUnderAttack are often fake (e.g. from other conflicts, such as Syria) as pointed out by the BBC [1] just yesterday.

Twitter posts are about as useful and hysterical (and in the literal meaning, not funny) as YouTube comments and for the large part do nothing to promote useful discussion or accurate reporting.

More to the point, why are you politicizing a discussion that so far has been thankfully apolitical?

[1]: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs- trending-28198622](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-28198622)

<comment><USER46> Anyone whom can be bothered to read the Wikipedia "talk pages" can see for themselves that Wikipedia articles are edited to be thoroughly biased concerning Palestine/Israeli affairs.

I find it strange that you created an account less than 20 minutes ago to take part in the "political discussion" yourself, unless you're working professionally as part of the "hasbara" effort?!

<comment><USER47> If they hadn't posted that link (to the BBC), I would have.. and if I didn't already have an account, I would have made one, just for that one post. _Someone_ had to point it out.

<comment><USER46> Well of course, "someone" has to post the propaganda, otherwise the public might find out the truth.

Which photos are the BBC referring to? They don't reference them so that calls into question the veracity of their claims.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How RIM Can Survive... - <AUTHOR> http://tawheed.tumblr.com/post/7240104343/how-rim-can-survive

<comment><USER2> I am continually confused when people write things like _"Blackberry...has the shittiest web browser, terrible apps, but an absolutely fantastic email experience (still)."_ I used to work on corporate IT managing and using RIM products from end to end, and I never found the email experience all that compelling. Sure the devices have fairly good keyboards, and, as a proponent of hardware keyboards in an era when they are all being relegated to software, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the RIM cause.

But the "email experience" on the Blackberry's I've used-- from older, clunkier models with the torturous side-scrollwheel to the Storm2-- was only ever as good as the Blackberry OS itself, which has consistently been pretty terrible. Who cares if it's easy to select an email if you have to endure an excruciating boot process before you can get to it? Who cares if the device has a fantastic keyboard if you have to wade through awful UI in order to launch the email app? (This is not to mention the horrible experience of _managing_ the server portions of BES, which I always found confusing and often deliberately crippled).

I think this "myth" stems from the legacy of the Blackberry, which was one of the first devices to really have _any_ kind of data/email capability. (Or, at the very least, was one of the first to be easy to adopt and fairly inexpensive to run with those kinds of capabilities). Of course the Blackberry was considered amazing when it was the only way to connect a corporate email system to a cell phone or other mobile device. But it isn't anymore, and frankly, I've found the "experience" of using and managing Google Apps and an Android phone _light years_ better. (Hell, I think the crappy IMAP client that comes with Android is better than having to use a RIM OS, although I confess, I got out of the game before the Playbook, and thus, QNX).

UPDATE: Grammer, and ending comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> 90% of your time is spent IN the email app. Not the boot process, nor the home screen and certainly not the IT administrative process of setting up servers (users do not care about that -- that is why highly paid IT people deal with it at Enterprises).

<comment><USER2> As a frontline helpdesk worker at a corporation that deployed hundreds of Blackberrys, I can assure you that the users frequently cared a great deal about the crappy UI of the Blackberry OS. When I left, the MIS (yes, we were _that_ old-school) department were beginning to research moving away from RIM because their end-user devices were consuming too much of our helpdesk resources. And because the executives, who all had iPhones, came to us and asked the question why we couldn't provide them a solution that worked as well as an iPhone's email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't put RIM into 'survival' mode just yet.

Sure they're are taking a beating right now. They were a powerhouse in the early smart-phone wars, and they don't seem to know what they are doing, which direction is up, and lack a clear vision.

But I believe they have a huge ace up their sleeve that is being somewhat ignored. QNX. Not as the operating system for their devices, though obviously that is important too, but as a popular embedded operating system 'in everything from in-dash radios and infotainment systems to the latest casino gaming terminals' (from the qnx.com website).

Blackberry has a history of making some pretty good hardware, and they have systems embedded in enterprise (BIS) and consumer devices (QNX). Those who are only seeing the currently mediocre products I think are selling RIM short.

I don't own a Blackberry but apparently I interact with RIM products everyday.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's get real though -- which would you rather have in your next car? A QNX operated system or an iOS system?

<comment><USER4> It depends on where. Controlling the entertainment system? iOS.

Controlling air bag deployment? QNX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cliff notes: RIM should port or license its email system, app and BBM to iOS and Android. They can "own" the mobile email market across all devices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and to add to that -- even if they don't -- that market is still ripe for taking and we're thinking hard about it at Tout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> People have been making relatively similar arguments for awhile about how RIM should just switch all their handsets over to Android, then rewrite BBOS as an Android skin akin to HTC Sense for the enterprise.

<comment><USER7> Instead they are taking QNX (a solid OS) but having to write tons of compatibility layers, developer tools, and bribing devs to stay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not trolling when I ask, because I have zero experience with it, but what advantage does BES email have over a properly configured Exchange 2010 server?

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on my understanding, most "properly configured" Exchange 2010 servers are inside of the corporate firewall sealed off. BES/BIS (whatever the name is) gives secured access to outside servers.

<comment><USER2> I think one of the salient features of Exchange 2010 is a Microsoft Sync technology that mimics some of the features of BES. Last I'd heard (I'm not in IT anymore, having instead chosen a career that actually matches my education), it was woefully worse than BES. Which is saying something.</comment></comment></comment>