Busy Being Born - <AUTHOR> http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.txt <comment><USER2> I mention this because I keep running into people who have never heard it, but the "infamous" Apple visit to Xerox resulted in a licensing agreement where Xerox was paid in pre-IPO stock for a license to use the elements that they had developed. (Xerox had not developed a "GUI" but had certain elements. AS this article documents, there were 6 years of work that led to the first GUI in the Lisa, though of course some of the innovations were licensed from Xerox most of it was not.)

By the way- When Apple did go public, it was a massive event, and big news. It was the biggest, most successful IPO of all time. It was bigger, for its day, than Google's or Facebooks were. (Though of course coming much later those were bigger in absolute terms.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I find the evolution of the menu bar fascinating. It's really interesting that the menu bar kind of started as command buttons attached to the windows.

It's interesting that over the last 30 years the Mac has been evolving back to the old version. Almost all apps now have toolbars that replace the functions of the menu bar. People have stopped using the top menu bar. As a software developer, I regularly get feature requests for functions that already exist, because there is no toolbar button to activate them, and people don't look at the menus anymore.

The latest beta version of OS X, El Capitan, even has a setting to hide the menu bar.

I've always thought that the menu bar at the top of the screen was so fundamental to the Mac experience, but it seems we've gone full circle, back to the original idea of command buttons attached to each window...

<comment><USER4> I wonder if some of the change is simply due to increasing screen sizes and resolutions

The original Mac had a 9" screen. The menu bar was 20 pixels tall, about 6% of the total screen height, and about a quarter of an inch tall. It was necessarily close and obviously related to anything on screen.

I'm writing this on a 30" screen with a resolution of 2560x1600, and the menu bar is _still_ 20 pixels tall. The menu bar is far away from whatever my attention is on at any given moment, and it physically takes more time to get the mouse cursor there if I'm going to actually use it.

<comment><USER5> NeXT fixed this problem by adding an extra mouse button (NeXT machines therefore had _two_ mouse buttons instead of one like Macs) and moving the menu to that button. Voila – the menu is instantly available at all times. Note that the right mouse button was _not_ used for anything else, it was exclusively reserved for showing the menu of the active program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bill still does a little programming. He's got an app in the App Store: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photocard-lite-by-bill- atkin...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photocard-lite-by-bill- atkinson/id356124208?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER7> Pity they dropped the proportional scroll bar, then everyone else copied them. Not sure how they reasoned it would confuse people.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would guess the confusion comes from this: the larger your document, the smaller the drag part.</comment></comment>


AI researchers allege that machine learning is alchemy - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/ai-researchers-allege-machine-learning-alchemy <comment><USER2> It feels like this is a natural consequence of the field gaining popularity very rapidly. A lot of unexperienced people come to it and simply apply off the shelf algorithms and methods to new domains in order to publish without understanding the details of the tools.

Not that long ago people where putting graphite or fullerenes into almost everything and publishing articles about "graphene/carbon nanotubes enhanced xyz" as well without doing basic verifications that the additions even made any difference at all, but still publishing because of the hype.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a link to the paper?

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm. I guess there really is no free lunch after all.</comment>


Get over Here! An Interview with Chris Casamassa, Mortal Kombat's Scorpion - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailyesports.gg/chris-casamassa-interview-mortal-kombat-scorpion/ <comment><AUTHOR> Pretty awesome guy with some really cool answers. Spoke about getting the role for Scorpion, why he wasn't in the second movie, how the martial arts in the movies hold up to real life (he's a martial artist himself), and he also spoke about an anti-bullying initiative he's working on.</comment>


Norway passes controversial new data storage law - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsinenglish.no/2011/04/05/noisy-protests-greet-data-storage-law/

<comment><AUTHOR> The law essentially states that the Norwegian government can store the telephone, e-mail and Internet use for up to six months.

Can the Tor Project be a solution to this government surveillance? <https://www.torproject.org/></comment>


Command and Conquer and the Herd of Coconuts (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html <comment><USER2> Joel's link to fastcompany.com about GE doesn't work

Here it is [http://fastcompany.com/37815/engines- democray](http://fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democray)</comment>


Douglas McIlroy - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"McIlroy is attributed the quote

"The real hero of programming is the one who writes _negative code_ ,"[31]

where the meaning of negative code is taken to be similar to the famous Apple developer team anecdote[32] (i.e., when a change in a program source makes the number of lines of code decrease ('negative' code), while its overall quality, readability or speed improves)."

<comment><USER2> The _negative code_ quote echoes the famous quote of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

"It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."</comment></comment>


Yukon Moose Hunting - <AUTHOR> http://theroadchoseme.com/yukon-moose-hunting <comment><AUTHOR> Over the years I've posted snippets of stories from my life in the Yukon.

I'm a Software Engineer by day, and learning to be an outdoorsmen on the weekends.

Many people expressed interest in the ability the North provides to hunt your own local, organic meat, and wanted to hear more about my experiences as a newbie hunter.

Here's a writeup of my first hunting experience in the North, I'd love to hear what you think.

<comment><USER2> Guess I'll be the first to comment :-)

I liked your writing, and your emotional honesty was refreshing.

I completely share your moral stance on meat eating, so maybe I'm biased. ;)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Smart email app Inky Mail now available for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://appstore.com/inkymail

<comment><USER2> You did a Show HN a week ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7824929)</comment>


Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive - <AUTHOR> http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/12/maintaining-independent-browser-is.html <comment><USER2> A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones.

Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which _you_ can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family to use it too, unless there's a deal-breaker reason they can't. Your vote (usage) counts, so use it!

<comment><USER3> ...and ideally, we should also encourage the use of the "lesser" browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, and all the text-based ones. They can't really run "web apps" and the like, but will be fine for viewing the "long tail" of content-focused sites out there (including this one.)

What has become quite obvious to me within the past few years is that the whole "move the Web forward" thing seems to be really about coming up with and implementing as many complex features as possible (and advocating for their use in new sites), making it harder over time for smaller efforts at creating independent browsers to produce anything useful.

<comment><USER4> I wonder: who could even feasibly introduce another browser today? The task seems almost impossible.

<comment><USER5> Amazon and Facebook could both launch entirely new browsers. Spotlight it constantly on Amazon.com or across Facebook's properties as with Chrome on Google.com.

Facebook already has far more cash and profit than they know what to do with. $38 billion currently, rapidly climbing. They'll add ~$20 billion to that in 2018. They could do a new browser just for kicks if they wanted to, and they have the vast global reach to generate some uptake.

Whether either could claw meaningful share away from Chrome is an entirely different question.

Samsung, Tencent and Alibaba all have the resources to launch entirely new browsers if it made sense.

<comment><USER6> Alibaba already have their own browser of a sort ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser)). As I understand it, it's some kind of thin mobile browser which renders on the server side.

<comment><USER7> There are multiple versions of UC browser. My understanding of it is:

\- uc mobile on Android now uses the blink engine, it used to use Webkit. \- uc mini ( I think that's the name) has server renderer but it's "uc engine" is a derivative of gecko (not checked recently)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My hope with HTML5 was that complexity would be _removed_ in the standard; reduce the platform to smaller generic components. Instead we have this ever- expanding feature set, a constant stream of new standards that have to be implemented. It's death by complexity.

This plays in the hands of Google; each new feature is another opportunity to fingerprint the user. If things continue like that, a new platform will have to emerge to replace the web.

</comment><comment><USER9> About three years ago, I decided that I was going to build my own browser from scratch, and I thought it would be really easy to implement as long as I strictly followed the web standards.

Within a few minutes, I got stuck with the fact that I could not get any performance out of even a simple attempt at a CSS engine.

After about three days of mucking with that, I gave up on the project, and gained a lot more respect for Mozilla.

<comment><USER10> You had a running css engine in a few minutes?

<comment><USER9> Heh, bad wording; I should say that I had performance problems within a few minutes.

I did eventually get something that kind of worked, but that took about a day, and still suffered performance issues, probably because I had no idea what the hell I was doing (and still don't, really)

<comment><USER11> You had a running CSS engine within a day?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, a really crappy one that parsed a CSS file using Bison, and could change text colors, background colors, and position things based on pixels (no em or %).

I never got around to implementing class support, but I did allow targeting an element via ID.

I did this in C++ for some reason, and used Xerces to parse the XML, and I used Allegro to render everything. If I were to try and make this now, I probably would not use a rendering system designed for games, but I was naive back then.

I'll have to look to see if I can find the old files on my NAS; if I can I'll put it on Github.

<comment><USER12> These kind of high-level overviews of prototype implementations are very useful, thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"

<comment><USER14> I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.

<comment><USER15> It's because there's so much competition for experienced people in Silicon Valley. If Mozilla wouldn't pay her that much, another company would.

<comment><USER16> Has anyone ever tried to hire someone requiring less than or up to max say 20k for such a job? I wonder which qualifications that are that you find only in people asking for >50 or even 100k/month.

I am from Europe so i might miss something that's different in US. But 20k USD would make for a very good living here. Ok you only can afford one house with that an no 1000sqm villa and no Ferrari... but i state you don't need either.

<comment><USER17> 20k USD/month is in the range that Google/FB/Microsoft pays for direct managers of ~10 person teams: basically that would be the level of credentials that you would be competing for in that pay area.

<comment><USER18> That's low for a manager. Many individual contributors make more than that at large companies.

<comment><USER16> What do they contribute that no one else could for this "low" amount?

<comment><USER18> It's not that "no one else" could do their job, but there's not an unlimited supply of people who can meet the hiring bar at Google/Facebook/Microsoft, and there are a number of employers with deep pockets trying to hire them. Google in particular is known to offer people with competing offers a lot of money to keep them from going to other companies.

<comment><USER16> If there are other people who are able to do the job, but not meet the hiring bar, what does that tell us about the bar?

<comment><USER18> Did I say that?

No interview process is perfect, but here's what would happen if e.g. Google attempted to use your strategy of "make the interviews easier and pay people less":

Many candidates would interview at both Google and Facebook (as well as other companies). The smartest, hardest-working candidates are all able to figure out how to game the interview process and get really good at solving algorithms problems on a whiteboard. Many of them get offers from both Facebook and Google. They all choose to work at Facebook because Google's only offering half as much money.

The candidates who are less smart and/or too lazy to study for their interviews get rejected from Facebook, but get an offer from Google since Google's decided that interviews are stupid anyway. They all take the Google offer since they got rejected from Facebook.

Now Google ends up with a pool of employees selected on the basis of being not smart enough and/or too lazy to get a job at Facebook. Do you see the problem here?

<comment><USER16> Haha.

You question that you said "It's not that "no one else" could do their job, but there's not an unlimited supply of people who can meet the hiring bar" Or what?

I didn't propose a concrete strategy. I just doubt the things have to be as they are and pose a lot of questions why they are as they are.

Then you build exactly one fictional scenario that would make things maybe(not necessarily - there are options... maybe there is a number of smart people who don't want to learn for artificial interview scenarios, maybe they don't have some university degree) go bad for one employer and imply the conclusion everything has to be and stay as it is.

Do you see the problem here?

<comment><USER18> I don't understand your point of view. You work in tech, right? Do you _want_ tech companies to pay their employees less?

<comment><USER16> We talk about the question if managers have to be that expensive.

And I'm open to a yes if there are valid points and my questions about it answered.

We don't talk about what I want to get paid.

You're steering away from the topic, right after questioning something that you said just exactly as cited, and dont answer straight questions. Do you wanna take part in a discussion or just confuse abd avoid it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wish the Mozilla store hadn't gone away. I've used Firefox for a very long time but it's been three or four laptops ago that I was able to adorn my machine with Firefox (or Thunderbird!) stickers. Yes, it's a small thing, and I tout Firefox whenever I can, but I'm also a sucker for something I can slap on something that I carry around.

(I suppose I could also just make my own or have someone print them up for me alongside giving money to the Mozilla Foundation.)

<comment><USER20> I totally forgot about the Firefox shirts I owned in college until I read this. I can't believe they closed it.

</comment></comment><comment> rlv-dan This begs the question: Is it healthy that one of the most important technologies today (web) is also very complicated (=expensive) and thus effectively limiting number of players.

<comment><USER21> It's not healthy, but unfortunately maintaining compatibility and staying abreast of modern platform features (so that apps and content don't fully migrate to the single-vendor platforms) just mandates a lot of complexity.

<comment><USER22> The reason why it's expensive is that no HTML5 proposals are taking into account the cost of development and maintenance. "Anything goes" as long as it competes with the walled-garden platforms. Spending without budgeting nor cost evaluation is similar to going to a casino spending your life savings thinking you're the lucky one.

<comment><USER21> Deciding just to cede applications and content to single-vendor platforms isn't that appealing for the open Web.

<comment><USER22> That implies a binary decision. The war is won in many battles. Deciding which ones to go into is the deciding factor. Bringing your men to each is a sure way to lose, and it's what is currently happening with the modern web.

<comment><USER21> If individual browser vendors decide that some feature is not worth the effort, they can just not implement it and not support those apps fully. Maybe change that decision if the feature gets popular. If the feature never gets popular it can be removed. This actually happens all the time.

But vendors getting together and saying "no, we're just not going to compete with native platforms in this space" seldom happens. As a proponent of the open Web, I think that's a good thing.

<comment><USER22> Browser vendors usually do not have this choice. Either they proposed the change themselves, forcing other vendors to follow, or a prisoners-dilema occurs where either all vendors act, or non at all. These are well studied problems in oligopolies and are the prime reason we need a certain amount of governance of (independent) standards bodies.

<comment><USER21> Browser vendors always have the choice not to implement, or to delay implementing, standards are are seeing little uptake. I know, I did this work for over a decade and made many such decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I feel like there's a golden opportunity here to have things like Firefox be broken up into more independent parts.

We've already seen this in the JS engine space, though it's still pretty hard to integrate alternate JS engines into browsers. Having more and more of the app broken up makes it _much_ easier for contributors to come in and for work to be shared.

We don't all need to write our own implementations of CSS style sharing, even if higher level strategies are different.

<comment><USER24> The CSS engine just got replaced with a Rust implementation. Isn't that a sign that it is quite modular already?

<comment><USER25> The CSS _style_ side got replaced with a Rust implementation (that matches selectors and computes the used CSS value of each property for each node). The _layout_ side is still all C++ (and Servo's implementation has nowhere near parity with what Gecko already has).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have so much admiration for Firefox. With the increasing market share of mobile I'd love to see a well-funded, independent, compatible variant of Android.

</comment><comment><USER27> Supporting FF then is a kind of participating in mass movement to fight against capitalism.

<comment><USER28> If you're supporting Firefox with money, it's still capitalism even if Mozilla is a non-profit. You're paying an entity to continue maintaining a product, and attempting to bias market share in favor of that product over its competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yes it is, because what we keep referring to as a browser has, thanks to commercial pressure, become a OS in its own right.

And rather than stop and ask if this is in any way sensible, they keep pushing more stuff, like USB and Bluetooth, into it.

Whenever i run into a site that is either just giving me a blank page or a error when i have JS turned off, i wonder when the train jumped the rails. And i fear it may well go as far back as the browser war between Microsoft and Netscape.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think this is just too many people. No matter how you spin this it's just too many. Do Google or Microsoft have half as many working on their browsers? I'd be very surprised if they do. It should also be interesting to look back and find out how many people Netscape employed at its peak. I would love to know the distribution of those 1.2k people ( engineers, marketing, whatever ). Of course, it's likely that I am too naive or clueless.

<comment><USER21> There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I suspect that may not be true now.

Comparisons with the past are meaningless because browsers are far more complex (and performant, and secure, and versatile, etc) than they used to be.

And sorry, but your gut estimates are not likely to be that accurate if you don't work in this area.

<comment><USER25> > There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that > Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to > make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's > still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I > suspect that may not be true now.

Scope differences make it incredibly hard.

Plenty of people on the Blink team work on things like Skia, which neither the WebKit nor EdgeHTML teams have equivalents of (because they just leverage OS- specific APIs), or on their HTTP/TLS stack (again, neither WebKit nor EdgeHTML teams have equivalents of), etc.

Gecko is somewhere in a middle-ground; they rely on third party libraries (including Skia—does that make that part of the Chrome team Blink/Gecko developers?) but not quite as much as WebKit and EdgeHTML do.

Core web stuff? The Blink team is larger, yes, but by how much is a hard question.

FWIW, I believe the Gecko team is nowadays larger than the EdgeHTML team, but they're certainly close in size. (And close to the size of the old Presto team, which admittedly had a scope closer to that of the Blink team.)

<comment><USER31> Gecko also has its own infra/productivity/etc folks, whereas I bet these folks are from a much larger shared team at the big companies

<comment><USER25> The Chrome team has a lot of its own infra due to policy that a lot of Chromium stuff be public (its bug tracker system now code.google.com is dead and its CI infra are all done by the Chrome infra team).

I imagine to some limited degree it's true for WebKit (though I suspect they don't have anyone whose sole job is infra) given Apple don't have any general public bugtracker or CI system, and totally untrue for Edge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How do Firefox and Chrome compare in respect of security?

<comment><USER15> With Firefox 57, they're now essentially equivalent in terms of the security architecture.

There's a small architectural difference with how tabs are sandboxed against one another. That is, Chrome starts a new process for every tab, unless it's on the same domain as another tab.

Firefox by default only uses as many processes for tabs as you have processor cores and then round-robins tabs across those. This achieves essentially equivalent parallelism with much lower resource usage, so overall better performance. If you'd rather have the security than the performance, you can set dom.ipc.processCount in about:config to a higher number. This is the maximum number of processes that it will use for tabs, so setting it to something like 1000 will essentially make it start a new process for each tab.

Then there's something to be said about add-ons. Mozilla does manual code reviews of most extensions and extension updates. (They have some criteria for when they don't do a manual code review and instead just an automated check, based on how damaging the extension is able to be with the things that it accesses.)

As a result, AMO has essentially no problems with malware, whereas on the Chrome Store you hear every other month of some trojan or adware spreading.

Mozilla also has a policy that disallows telemetry without user opt-in as a whole, so recognizing adware or a trojan is just a matter of observing network traffic where it shouldn't necessarily be going.

Lastly, Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default, only one password needed. Chrome Sync is not, you need to set up a second password for it to be end-to-end-encrypted. And Google will store and work with your Sync data, if you do not opt for E2EE, so that's another possibility for a pretty big data leak. Not a problem, if you are security-conscious and don't mind setting up that secondary password, but recommending it to average users on the merits of it being secure is essentially out with this.

<comment><USER33> I believe Chrome has for a while been using much the same model as Firefox has recently taken up, not a new process for each tab.

AMO's lack of malware problem is simply because it's not so popular—making addons was, before WebExtensions, decidedly harder, and the browser's not as popular as Chrome, so why bother targeting it when there are bigger fish you can catch more easily?

<comment><USER34> Hmm. `ps -A | grep -i chrome | wc -l` adds +1 per tab for me on Mac OSX as long as I navigate off the home. Does it cap eventually?

<comment><USER35> Yes, there's a cap. See [https://www.chromium.org/developers/design- documents/process...](https://www.chromium.org/developers/design- documents/process-models) for the detailed descriptions the "Caveats" section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Question: Is there actually a good Independent browser for Windows at this time? That is, not Firefox, not Chrome, not Chrome-Opera, not Vivaldi (alias Chrome-Opera-2), and also not based on Chromium, WebKit, Blink, Gecko, Trident, or any of the major bits of one of the corporate browsers? The closest that I can see is Pale Moon, but even they are just a "better" fork of Firefox.

<comment><USER37> There are exactly four major engines, each of which has a flagship browser: Blink/Chrome, WebKit/Safari, Gecko/Firefox, and EdgeHTML/Edge.

<comment><USER38> Wouldn't introduction of Servo make it five? Gecko is not going away yet, IIRC it's used in some browsers, like Pale Moon. [https://www.palemoon.org/](https://www.palemoon.org/)

<comment><USER15> Servo is not a _major_ browser engine. It's a small research project.

And Firefox continues to use Gecko. It has some bits and pieces from Servo in it and the Mozilla marketing team has dubbed everything "Quantum" for the Firefox 57 release to communicate that lots has changed, but it is still Gecko.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really hate it when things are not for sale to the highest bidder. Everyone knows that's the best way to go.... ;)

</comment><comment><USER39> So here is a question. If one was to undertake the challenge of building a new browser how would you go about doing it conceptually? What would at least convince a small group of technically advanced users to adopt it?

<comment><USER18> You would probably want to build a browser on top of Chromium, like Opera does (and also what Microsoft is doing on Android), and would want to try differentiating based on user-facing features. You could also build on top of Gecko, but this doesn't seem to be as popular. Building on WebKit probably doesn't make sense because its corporate backer (Apple) mostly only cares about supporting macOS and iOS. Eventually, if you become big enough that you think it'd be better to be independent, you can fork Chromium.

This is basically the approach Google took with Chrome: they built on top of WebKit (which itself was originally an Apple fork of KHTML), then forked it eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> and it's only getting more difficult because the browser is turning into an operating system

</comment><comment><USER41> I have been discussing the debt-based economy and Google and Mozilla recently with BrendanEich on Twitter, including a debt diagram.

</comment><comment><USER42>
       Annual salaries from 2015 (reportable compensation from IRS Form 990):

       Mitchell Baker, Chair $977,382 + $45,530
       Bob Lisborne, Director $92,000
       Mark Surman, Exec. Dir./President $170,699 + $40,602
       Jim Cook, Treasurer $934,526 + $45,530
       Angela Plohman, Secretary/VP Operations $121,322 + $30,342
       Christopher Lawrence, VP Learning $153,492 + $62,538
       An-Me Chung, Dir. Partnerships 154,946 + $72,672
       Daniel Sinker, Dir. Partnerships 123,630 + $64,215
       Hiram Paul Johnson, Marketing Lead 126,605 + 54, 903
       Andrea Wood, Online Organizing/Fundraising Lead $135,048 + $46,322
       Samuel Dyson, Director Hive Chicago $114,860 + $63,549

source: [https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en- US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Found...](https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en- US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Foundation_Forms_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf)

Perhaps the author is telling the truth. Consider the salary costs of retaining skilled "maintainers" like the above personnel.

Note I am not condemning Mozilla. They do good work.

However I am not quite sold on the idea that their purpose for existence is to "keep the web open" or whatever tagline they are going with.

For example, an "open" web would be one made for all browsers to access, not just a select few who have chosen to try to keep up with an arms race of recently-added, _non-optional_ "features" that carry serious costs to users. The key word I wish to emphasize is "non-optional". Users are not given choice and that is most likely intentional.

Many a web developer presents the user with a small selection of "acceptable browsers", the ones that will run third party code and readily show heavy, third party advertising. Anything else is "prohibited" and must be a "bot". Users are sometimes even shamed for not using the web browser or version that the web developer wants them to use, calling the user's software "outdated" when they have almost no information about the user's software except its behavior and some easily forgeable HTTP headers. In many cases, e.g., where the user is just retrieving some information, that is just silly.

Not every website needs to show advertising. Not all information is commercial. Not all information is graphical. I am not using one of the select few targeted browsers to read HN or post this comment, but I am getting the same information as the readers who are. And for some reason(s), web developers flock to this "outdated" website. Why?

Clearly the web can be _both_ accesible by simpler user agents, _and_ fully- functional for the most bleeding-edge features of corporate-sponsored browsers at the same time. The original web standards, e.g. basic HTML, still work, very effectively. The web as a means to offer basic functionality such as HN can be "backwards compatible" with user agents that are far more simple than Firefox, Chromium, etc.

The select few browsers that many web developers target overwhelmingly controlled by corporations and other advertisers. Netscape and the idea of corporations paying to use a browser may exist only as entries in the historical record, but I do not think we can say that browsers are truly separated from corporate funding (and influence). Browsers are still commercial, in a sense, IMO. While it might be viewed as "free software", the authors of these few browsers are well-paid by their corporate (or "non- profit") employers and the end goal is "market share", ideally a monopoly.

This is fine if the web is 100% commercial. But it did not start that way and it still isn't 100% commercial. Non-commercial uses are still alive and well.

It is not necessarily Mozilla's fault for the direction the web moves in, e.g., making content less accessible by simpler user agents. _However_ , if their purpose is to make the web "open" or some such "non-commercial" aim, then what could they do to enable and promote use of simpler user agents (and thereby promote their acceptability among web developers)? I can think of a few things. I am sure others could as well. There is no shortage of users who are dissatisfied with the (lack of) variety of user agents that are available.

[http://bitcheese.net/web_browsers_must_die](http://bitcheese.net/web_browsers_must_die)

The question is whether Mozilla really wants to listen to users who might criticize dismiss their browser as, e.g., too bloated.

<comment><USER21> The complexity of the modern Web platform is a problem. Mozilla developers feel this acutely, believe me.

The problem is that if the open Web platform does not expand to meet the needs of modern applications, then modern applications will simply be restricted to single-vendor platforms like iOS, Android and Windows, and over time the relevance of the open Web will atrophy. That is not an acceptable outcome for Mozilla.

If you can convince Web developers to build sites that work on cut-down browsers, great. I don't see any way to make that happen en masse though.

FWIW Mozilla obtaining a monopoly would be inconsistent with their mission and I don't think actual Mozilla developers are aiming for that. Partly because it's not a realistic outcome!

<comment><USER42> "The complexity of the modern Web platform is a problem. Mozilla developers feel this acutely, believe me."

I believe you. Do they want to take action to address it?

"The problem is that if the open Web platform does not expand to meet the needs of modern applications, then modern applications will simply be restricted to single-vendor platforms like iOS, Android and Windows, and over time the relevance of the open Web will atrophy. That is not an acceptable outcome for Mozilla."

I understand. Why does the "open Web" need to stay relevant? Honest question. The answer to this question is really the core issue, IMO.

"If you can convince Web developers to build sites that work on cut-down browsers, great. I don't see any way to make that happen en masse though."

Not sure where the "en masse" part comes from. That was not in the original comment.

The comment was meant to draw attention to denial of choice in user agents given to users. The illusory scarcity of browsers that will "work". (Thus web developers design for browser implementations instead of according to open web standards, which should be implementation-agnostic. Browser developers are the ones who are seemingly in control of what is and what is not a "standard" in the mind of the web developer. Too often, companies are the ones writing the "open web" standards.)

I believe in the antithesis of the "en masse" notion.

That users do not need to converge en masse around a small selection of known, complex web browsers because most sites, e.g. those that simply present information, already "work" with cut-down browsers.

I use a non-graphical user agent. Most sites work fine for me. I get what I need. And this is without the web developer even contemplating the software I am using. To the extent they are following certain open standards for HTML, it all works anyway.

On the same day as the OP was posted, it shared the HN front page with a re- post of a 2012 ACM submission by PHK.

In this ACM submission, PHK describes building Firefox on FreeBSD.

He cites something like 122 dependencies, and a requirement for some binary to run plugins.

I have build Firefox on BSD myself using pkgsrc. It takes longer than building kernels.

Is there a "Firefox Lite" where a user can opt out of various features at build time?

Why not?

"FWIW Mozilla obtaining a monopoly would be inconsistent with their mission and I don't think actual Mozilla developers are aiming for that. Partly because it's not a realistic outcome!"

Nor am I suggesting that providing options to users should result in any "en masse" behaviour by users or web developers.

It is not a realistic outcome.

The goal of the experiment might be to provide some software to users that the market share leaders will not provide. Is this realistic? Mozilla has taken risks before. Not every project it has sponsored has attracted a mass following of users.

For example, imagine a version of Firefox that optionally has no Javascript engine. This software would be less complex (and intentionally less functional). But believe me, as a text-only browser user, it would still work.

If a user complains about a major browser as "bloated", if she complains about ads and is forced to use NoScript or an ad-blocker, if she is pondering how complexity makes her browser more vulnerable to attacks, then it would be interesting if there was another option she might try, which came from a well- known source such as Mozilla. She might build Firefox without the features that lead to these problems.

What happens after that is anyone's guess. As it is with any experimental Mozilla project.

But at least one can say that an option was presented to move away a state of from increasing complexity in addition to the option of using Mozilla's full- featured Firefox browser competes for market share with the other major browser vendors.

Internet commentators sometimes reference a quote from Steve Jobs something like: users do not know what they want (until Apple gives it to them).

While this may be self-evident to developers, I believe that users _do_ know what they _do not_ want. These are programs features, modifications and behaviours that users are familiar with because they have been using the software for years. Alas, rarely do developers of graphical programs give users the option to remove features. As such, we can only guess what might happen if they had that option.

A large portion of the web does "work" when using user-agents that lack the latest features. It also works with the recommended browsers. The question is whether Mozilla can acknowledge this is true and release software that takes advantage of it. Mozilla can still pursue its mission, including keeping up with the Joneses.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the thoughtful comment.

> Do they want to take action to address it?

Within the constraints of the assumptions I've outlined, yes, and they have.

One example is the fight for asm.js/Webassembly against PNaCl+Pepper. We fought that fight in part because Google was fine with introducing a whole new platform API in the form of Pepper, and Mozilla instead wanted to minimize the additional complexity by reusing existing Web platform APIs.

> Why does the "open Web" need to stay relevant?

I want a platform that isn't controlled by any single gatekeeper, through which app/content developers can reach all users and all users can reach the apps and content they want. (A sort of corollary is that the platform should be implementable in free software.) The Web is by far the closest thing we have to that.

One problem with a niche browser is that when you have a browser with very low market share, Web developers don't test against it, and with the state of software development technology today, stuff that's not tested in a platform implementation tends to not work on that platform implementation.

Another problem with a niche browser is that by definition it impacts a small number of users, and therefore only a relatively small investment can be justified.

Fortunately there is nothing stopping you or some like-minded group from doing your experiment. Tor has already done something similar and that's gone quite well.

<comment><USER42> Our respective ideas of what constitutes complexity appear to differ. Both of your alternatives are far too complex for what I envision of less complexity. I envision a browser that browses hypertext, not a program that automatically runs third party code.

Further, I do not think of browsers in terms of "market share" nor testing for one browser or another. I guess I have done a poor job explaining the point about standards.

Testing input, e.g. a webpage, against a program, e.g. a browser, is backwards, IMO. A program should be tested against input. If the program fails given legal input, then if desired, fix the program.

The web contains plenty of legal input for a wide variety of clients. I am consuming it everyday.

This plain fact appears to be outside of Mozilla's purview. But to me, a user, this is what the "open web" means, much more so than a squabble between Mozilla developers working on Firefox and former Mozilla developers working on Chrome over some exotic feature to entice web developers.

The "open" web to me means I can retrieve information with a simple open source client I can compile, and without an overly complex web browser controlled by a corporation/organization that is by its complex nature unreasonably difficult to compile except for a select few people. That is not "open" within the meaning I subscribe to, which is more along the lines of "accessible".

The more complex the browser becomes and thus the more complex the input that web developers create for it, the less "open" the web becomes, because it becomes less accessible.

I do not expect anyone to agree with me, but I at least hope that these points make some sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Mozilla is only "independent" if you take an extremely loose interpretation of that word.

Follow the money:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliations)

I only dug into this after having a mildly unproductive run-in with what-wg. Mostly Google and Mozilla guys, and not terribly open. Asking them "why" typically gets very evasive replies, if any at all! The guy Phillip at Opera was a class act though. Been using Opera ever since!

<comment><USER44> Mozilla has many flaws, lack of transparency is not one of them.

I don't even know where to start with your comment. You're linking the Mozilla Corp wikipedia page, insinuating they're "not terribly open" (and putting Google in that basket), on a subject you give almost no hints about, but hey Opera is a thing? And somehow this comment means that Mozilla is not independent?

<comment><USER43> Read again.

I doubted Mozilla Corp's "independence" in the first sentence. "not terribly open" in the last paragraph was in reference to the WHAT-WG group, which is "[m]ostly Google and Mozilla guys". From the posts in that group, those guys seem more like co-workers than competitors.

For anyone who believes money to be some kind of motivating _thing_ , it isn't hard to come to the conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-proxy.

edit: And apparently I have to have "hits" to my name to state that getting 85% of your revenue from Google puts your independence into question???

<comment><USER45> Would you rather have people in standards groups to act more like competitors instead of coworkers? Cause that seems like a really bad idea.

As for:

> For anyone who believes money to be some kind of motivating thing, it isn't > hard to come to the conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-proxy > edit: And > apparently I have to have "hits" to my name to state that getting 85% of > your revenue from Google puts your independence into question???

You aren't bring its independence into question, you are stating its an easy conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-proxy.

The 85% was from 2011. As of 2015 Mozilla stop receiving cash from Google inpart to them changing there default searches (why google paid Mozilla). That may have changed recently with Firefox 57 as they change the default search back, but even then google announced a while back they were cutting how much they were going to pay, so I doubt it will be the same 85%.

<comment><USER46> Citations for "cutting how much they were going to pay"?

Mozilla revenue is up, they're making a LOT of profit, and the Yahoo deal was supposed to be 5 years so they're not likely to be losing money by switching to Google: [https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-revenue-jump-fuels-its- fir...](https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-revenue-jump-fuels-its-firefox- overhaul-plan/)

<comment><USER45> Well in all fairness the deal with Yahoo kind of went side wise. But yeah I would agree its probably around equal.

As for the source, I can't seem to find a source for this. I may have been mistaken, but it was something I heard several years ago on a google related podcast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Maintaining an Independent <Software Project> Is Expensive

</comment><comment><USER48> I wrote my own browser a few years back and it was quite challenging/fun trying to figure out how to do basic browser things. You can check it out here: [https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries](https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries)

Since then, I've been using Opera, then Vivaldi, and now Firefox, taking notes of how certain things are done. Lately, I've been thinking about using Servo as my base insead of Electron and doing a whole rewrite.

<comment><USER49> This article is talking about a browser engine, now a UI. Creating an independent UI is considerable less work (although it still takes considerable effort do to a good job of course).

<comment><USER48> Ah yeah, that's true. I was standing on the shoulders of giants.</comment></comment></comment>


Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45971538 <comment><USER2> If I read the article correctly, this wasn't about building a new 'Google campus' (i.e. a huge building to house a large number of Google employees as their main regional HQ). This was about building Campus Berlin, an incubator for startups like they pioneered first in London and then brought to other cities.

See [https://www.campus.co/berlin/de](https://www.campus.co/berlin/de) and [https://www.campus.co/london/en](https://www.campus.co/london/en).

It's easy to misunderstand this because of what the term 'campus' is typically associated with. I live in London, and when I say 'I'm going to Google's Campus', I often need to qualify that I'm not going to their main office complex at King's Cross.

There may still be very valid reasons to protest Google in Berlin, but I wonder if the people objecting understood the distinction: that this wasn't a hub for all of Google's employees, but rather a place that would help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to facilities and other resources.

The kind of smaller startups that would be home at a Campus style incubator would not be fueling high paid Google salaries and would be a lot less likely to drive up rents e.g..

<comment><USER3> > help diversify the tech ecosystem in Berlin and give them access to > facilities and other resources.

Another way of looking at that, is "gentrify the vibrant neighbourhood by trucking in techbros to displace the artists". It's not new (1)

I don't necessarily agree with that framing, but it is understandable and coherent, not a misunderstanding

1) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18282143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18282143)

<comment><USER4> The mutual exclusivity is naive at best.

To me, it shows haters' level of intellect. And perhaps explains why they feel left out. They're attached to an ideal of what 'art' (additionally, activism[1]) should be. An outdated, 20th century one.

I personally don't like Google. And I understand your framing is hypothetical.

But why is tech framed the opposite of art?

Why is tech equal to techbro?

Yea there are always bad apples. But I wonder what Da Vinci would think about holding art in the opposite category as tech?

I'd argue they're more synonymous than opposite. To me, there's creativity. Both art and tech are creative. Applied creativity pertains to both code or a paint canvas.

Either way, the best, most valuable work to society is often never been done before.

Can anyone name an art piece (or if I'm being generous, an art movement) in the last 15 years that's made the level of impact as Google? Or cryptocurrency?

Ultimately, to me, the 'artists' need to up their game. Big time.

[1] Protest city hall if you feel gentrified. Especially in SF where it's largely illegal to build housing. Also, regarding gentrification, you don't hear the positive stories of immigrant families whose businesses flourish because of increased capital in an area, or those who feel safer, or even those who cashed out and sold their 50k house for 1.2 million. Again you hear a largely misdirected, dated and one-sided argument.

<comment><USER5> The mutual exclusivity is valid. Being able to do stuff that requires a lot of time and doesn't make a lot of money (i.e. art) requires a low cost of living. Adding a bunch of people making $200k+ into a neighbourhood does the opposite of that, very rapidly and very predictably.

<comment><USER6> Most people working for tech _startups_ (as opposed to for Google itself) don't make anywhere near that salary, especially not outside the major US tech hubs. This campus would have been a startup incubator, not a regular Google office.

That said, yes it would have still contributed to gentrification in a less extreme way than a true Google office.

<comment><USER7> A low cost of living is also a benefit to bootstrapped software/web companies (small blogs, niche publishers, other online content creators).

But gentrification still happens without big dollar companies showing up. It's often a side effect of the success of the arts in the area. As the wealthy kids move in to be hip and cool, and the businesses that enjoy their money move in afterward, rents go up and creators are pushed out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm honestly kind of surprised at Google's complete lack of cultural or diplomatic knowledge about Berlin. Kreuzberg is/was the center of artistic culture in the city, and choosing to have a presence there, no matter how small, would clearly be viewed as a corporate American attack on local countercultural values. As another commenter stated, they could have avoided this entire issue by picking somewhere in Mitte or a western suburb.

<comment><USER9> I think arbitrary restrictions on groups that can purchase or lease space in a neighborhood is bad for a free society. I guess people say it depends on what group you're imposing. Now it's Google which you may or may not like, but other groups can be harmed in the future. This is part of the whole NIMBY movement.

As long as the group is following laws and zoning restrictions, there should be nothing preventing them from joining a community

<comment><USER10> Nobody is restricting Google from doing anything. They are expressing--in a way that is part of, and frankly should be expected of being a member of, one of those "free societies" you mention--that Google is _unwelcome_ , and no, nobody is obligated to make you feel _welcome_. There are cases where not making somebody welcome kinda makes you an asshole, but that does not, frankly, apply to anybody who's got a stock ticker symbol.

This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is downright mendacious.

<comment><USER9> > Nobody is restricting Google from doing anything

From the article: In September activists occupied the building it was to be located in for several hours.

That seems like the activists were preventing them

> This is "you piss in the pool wherever you go, please stay away from our > pool." This isn't NIMBY in any meaningful way and the comparison is > downright mendacious.

Saying you do [something I don't like] and I don't want you to do [thing I don't like] in my neighborhood is exactly NIMBY

<comment><USER11> > Saying you do [something I don't like] and I don't want you to do [thing I > don't like] in my neighborhood is exactly NIMBY

No, that's most definitely not NIMBY. NIMBY means you support something when it's farther away but oppose it happening close to you. It stands for "not in _my_ backyard", not "not in any backyard".

<comment><USER9> Presumably the residents there use Google services. They likely want Google to exist, but just not in their back yard

<comment><USER10> "You use the services that have functionally become required for daily life regardless of whether you like them or not, so it is in some way hand- flappingly hypocritical not to let them step on your community too" is not really the winning argument here.

<comment><USER12> What Google services are required for daily life? Don't they all have competitors?

<comment><USER13> > What Google services are required for daily life? Don't they all have > competitors?

Not really. It's sort of like RMS with open-source hardware: yes there are a handful of modern computers that can be made to work without binary blobs, but it's a lot of trouble and only a few people will actually do that out of principle. It's _practically requred_ to run proprietary binary blobs. Similarly, Bing, Duckduckgo, and OpenStreetMap exist, but Google services are _practically required_ for modern daily life.

For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.

<comment><USER11> > For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into > making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website > is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its > info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info > about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.

That's a great example, thanks for mentioning it. I'll probably use it from now on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Rightly so.

Berlin has an amazing start up scene, certainly unique for and unrivaled in Germany. That being said, Berlin hosts a lot of NIMBYism. Particularly by people who gentrified the city in the first place and immediately turned to become fierce gentrification enemies. Essentially locking in their gains.

<comment><USER15> Though presumably not financial gains? Gentrification usually implies skyrocketing property valuations, so early movers should stand to win big from the trend.

I used to know someone that bought a flat in Soho, central London, in the mid-90s. She sold it when she married 8 years later and made over half a million quid. No idea what it would be worth now.

<comment><USER14> It's gentrificators that become anti-gentrification activists once they secured their gain.

The "gain" in this case is:

1) Getting to transform a neighbourhood (that you weren't a part of before) however it fancies you, while simultaneously prohibiting those that come after you from doing the same.

2) locking in the low rents you have to pay. While keeping supply of housing artificially low you're thus increasing the rent-gap between what you have to pay and those that move in after you.

As the other commenters noted, Germany has a low home-ownership rate (good thing IMO but a whole different story). Because of strict laws on how to increase rents, gentrificators can secure themselves the low rents from before gentrification. It is not uncommon that one neighbour tenant in the same house pays two times your rent.

<comment><USER16> > It is not uncommon that one neighbour tenant in the same house pays two > times your rent

In the US, it is not uncommon that one neighbor homeowner next door pays two times your mortgage.

I would be interested in your story about home-ownership, but difference in pricing due to time of arrival doesn't seem like a differentiator between renting and buying.

<comment><USER14> if I get you right, you want to know the reasons why I'm in favor of low- ownership rates. On top of my head:

\- Economics of scale: housing companies provide more quality/ € than your landlord that owns one flat or even what most owner-occupiers can reasonably provide for themself.

\- Real Estate is a Commodity, yes. Owning that is an investment, yes. But living in one isn't. It's a product that you use. We should stop telling people otherwise. A house is not your retirement.

\- Austria, Germany and Switzerland are the countries with the world's lowest home-ownership rate. Putting them in that order, you also get their GDPs (Switzerland being the richest) as well as the lowest ownership-rate. That clarifies some myths: a) that low rate has anything to do with WW2 (it doesn't) b) that high ownership rates benefit the people (it doesn't, Third world countries have ownership rates topping 90%)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd be interested to hear the opinions of any Berlin residents. Vocal NIMBY minority driving away new jobs and beneficial development? Genuine victory in preserving local culture and character? Bit of both? Other?

<comment><USER17> I wouldn't call it NIMBYism.

\- Most residents in Berlin (and in Germany for that matter) rent their apartments.

\- There's a fairly good supply of newly built homes. It's still not enough to absorb the population growth, but it's much better than in many German cities.

People complain because they can see the downside of this influx of tech workers very clearly, while the benefits aren't obvious, at least not yet. Rents have doubled in some areas. Government offices are understaffed. So are kindergartens, schools, ...

While the government is partly to blame, a lot of startups haven taken advantage of Berlin's situation in questionable ways. The time where you could hire cheap developers is definitely over, but it's still very common to underpay and abuse people in non-engineering positions, who very often are interns and freelancers.

Kreuzberg is maybe too emblematic and Google is a scapegoat here, but I can understand the resentment against tech incubators.

<comment><USER18> Why can't local government use these techies' income tax money to pay for schools and development? This smells like classic blameshifting.

<comment><USER19> If you've ever been to the San Francisco Bay Area, you'll find that this never happens. Quite the opposite in some cases, the influx of thousands of upper middle-class young techies has priced out families (and teachers). This lowers enrollment, which results in school closures. Circularly, school closures reduces educational funding to the detriment of schools while increasing distance for children to travel to schools, encouraging more families to move away.

Logically you would think as these rich 20-somethings become rich 30-somethings they will start having children, but after 10 years they cannot afford SF either, so they also move away.

Sure, forcing out Google doesn't solve the problem, but it sends a very clear message: Profits are not more important than livable communities.

<comment><USER20> Exactly the same dynamic is happening in Amsterdam, where schools are closing down fast as less teachers can afford to live within the ring and move out to Almere and other satellites. Some local politici were even celebrating and advocating this displacement but were trounced at the last municipal elections, but the process continues and these schools are being refurbished and sold as elegant lofts in Hartje Hoofdstad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why not build in e.g. Leipzig or other beautiful but jobs-starved city?

Come to think of it, why no campuses in Italy or Spain? Those countries have kinda lowish expenses, good weather and people will pay a premium to be able to move there. Instead everybody is opening in London and Switzerland which are overpriced and kinda meh.

<comment><USER22> Spain and Italy currently have weakened economies caused by large unemployment and government debt.

Italy in particular is at risk of defaulting on its debts (which are 131% of GDP compared to 87.7% for the U.K and 64.1% in Germany as of 2017) and the ECB and other lenders are going to be reluctant to lend to them. This is turn puts the banks and all kinds of public services at risk.

<comment><USER21> I don't understand why it will be harder to attract software developers to Italy versus Poland. Weather and environment are much nicer and if this job ends you just move elsewhere.

I would easily move to a cheap locale even if tech scene there is not abundant. I'd not move to London or Switzerland since you will always be 2nd class citizen compared to e.g. bankers. Which is just non issue in southern europe.

Weak economic is a thing you _leverage_.

<comment><USER23> > 2nd class citizen

Huh?

Also, those places are way more international than most places in Europe, which makes relocation more attractive. Good luck attracting non-Italians to Italy, or non-Polish to Poland.

<comment><USER21> Is not it obvious? When you tell you do software in Perugia you sound important, when you tell the same in London you basically say you're a nobody.

I would gladly move to Italy with its amazing culture. I would not move to a place so diverse and full of recent immigrants that it no longer has any specific culture. Am I unique here?

And yes, people relocate to Poland a lot, from ex-USSR countries for example.

<comment><USER24> You don't want to immigrate to London because there are too many immigrants?

<comment><USER21> Yep! It's so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One viewpoint from those who didn't want the start-up campus in Berlin, from the Berliner Morgenpost [[https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article215652919/Nach- dem-G...](https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article215652919/Nach-dem-Google- Rueckzug-waechst-der-Druck-auf-den-Senat.html)]:

        Sehr viel drastischer formulierte es Ulrike Schneider, Aktivistin beim Initiativkreis "Google-Campus & Co verhindern", die den Konzern beschimpfte: "Google ist und bleibt ein Scheiß-Konzern, der seine Gewinne mit Überwachung, Ausschnüffelei, Zusammenarbeit mit Militär und Geheimdiensten sowie Steuertricks macht."

> Ulrike Schneider, an activist at the initiative group "Stop Google-Campus & > Co", criticized the company even more drastically: "Google is and will > always be a shit company, that makes its profit through monitoring, > snooping, working with the military and secret services, and tax [evasion] > tricks."

I'm sure most local residents mostly care about rent prices going up in that area, though, rather than a specific anti-Google sentiment. They probably don't want it to be gentrified as another district, similar to what happened/is happening to Prenzlauer Berg.

<comment><USER26> Berlin is going nuts in recent times, it's unbearable. There are literally billboards around the city agitating against Facebook and Google (sic!).

Somehow, the same activists with dubious motivations don't mind domestic entities like infamous credit rating agency or the debt collection agency collecting the public media fee. The public media debt collection agency has the most complete database of who lives where and with whom in the whole country, probably the most comprehensive database on domestic households that exists in the world, certainly in the EU. What about it, fraudulent privacy zealots?

<comment><USER27> > _the same activists with dubious motivations don 't mind domestic entities_

[citation needed]. The examples you mention are widely disliked and fought too. + of course conflating privacy activists and those protesting Google here likely is not very accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is a city called Hamilton in Ontario, Canada. Houses a good University called McMaster and is near Waterloo University - premier Computer Science university in Canada.

City (Hamilton) is fairly well developed with a functioning International Airport and since it was initially built around manufacturing, its prestige within Canada has suffered somewhat in last 20-25 years. If firms like Google would be so kind to invest there, the locals and the children of locals and other Canadians would welcome them with open arms.

<comment><USER29> Google already has an office in Kitchener/Waterloo (which they are expanding, afaik), and Toronto, so I don't think they would want to build an office in Hamilton, since it is pretty much right in the middle of those two offices.

<comment><USER30> This isn't about a Google office, it's about an incubator for startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The problem with "guess they don't want jobs" argument is that Google is not like Ford Motor Company. When they move into your town and your rents double you can't just be retrained. When a company that requires special skills moves in they kick people that do not have those skills out.

<comment><USER31> >When they move into your town and your rents double you can't just be retrained.

Why?

<comment><USER32> It's not a politically correct thing to say but most people aren't smart enough to work in tech. It's a fairly top tier field unless you're doing something really, really basic.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not about being smart enough. It's about time required to retrain and the cost to do so. Until Google, or PeidPeiper, have a on-job training program sufficient enough that they can walk into every Shop of Kreutzberg and say "here, we we'll teach you the skills you need just come work for us" \-- we should assume their setting up shop will displace a ton of people. Until those companies add to that "and we'll pay your cost of living until you transition" their movement into a neighborhood should perceived as a Tax by the state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting to see tech globalization increasingly at the crosshairs, used to be McDonalds, etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> As cool as Berlin art is, so is a Google campus for tech people and business in general?

If I picture a gentrification activist I think about a purple-haired kid that wouldn't get a job if his life depended on it, making people that might be interested and have the skills to work at Google miss an opportunity.

On the other hand, Google could have picked another spot instead of giving up?

How is it..?

</comment><comment><USER35> Google people want to work where there is culture because they don't have any. They just consume it with algorithms, extract the value, reprocess it and redistribute it. They pull everything out of context so it looses its broader meaning.

For instance, if I google image search for "women in bikinis" I get hundreds of thousands of women in bikinis, but not the broader narrative of their lives and personalities. It is completely decontextualized and drops all the other dimensions of the context in which these photos were taken.

In the same way, Google employees lack context because everything is a component, they moved from somewhere else and have been assimilated into the great corporate standardization. They crave things with context, but when they try and coexist with it, their enormous economic superiority draws the interest of the whole world to extract from that environment that which promotes their ability to decontextualize and conform the world around them and the decontextualization whirlwind grows around them.

<comment><USER36> You see the simple answer to your query because Google decides what to show based on what users will prefer, and most users just don't give a fuck about "the broader narrative of their lives and personalities".

<comment><USER35> Sure, but the people of Berlin do care about the larger context that produces the creativity. The woman in a bikini didn't generate spontaneously from a generative adversarial neural net.

She had to have good genetics, not overeat and workout. Thus, there was a bigger context that created that woman in a bikini picture that is lost by the algorithm. The algorithm extracts and decontextualizes.

The google algorithm for selecting property is the same. Consume culture, extract, decontextualize, strip mine all the culture off the top but let other people nurture it, until they are priced out of the market.

They should set up the next Google headquarters in the middle of the sahara in shipping containers, preferably one of those places without a lot of sand that's just flat with gravel in all directions.

Watch all the nerds walk back and forth to their shipping containers while looking at their cell phones and drinking their soylent unless the company pays for culture to be brought in.</comment></comment></comment>


Contrary to public claims, Apple can read your iMessages - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/contrary-to-public-claims-apple-can-read-your-imessages/ <comment><USER2> This seems a bit disingenuous to me. If I understand it correctly, they are saying that the messages are encrypted using an RSA key unique to the sender, and that this is not secure because Apple could, if they wanted to or were ordered to, replace the certificates with ones that were not secret:

> Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there's nothing preventing > company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by > Apple or other parties.

What is misleading here is that (if I understand it correctly) the cryptography is solid, it is the implementation being owned by Apple that raises the doubt. But this is NOT a statement about the cryptography used on the iMessages, it is a statement about the fact that Apple effectively has "root access" to their phones.

Imagine that you had a PERFECT and UNBREAKABLE code system. Perhaps it interfaces with angles who alter the laws of the universe to prevent anyone but the intended recipient from reading the messages. Such a system would still have the same vulnerability. All Apple needs to do is to alter the phone so that when you click on the icon to launch this perfectly secure messaging app it instead launches one that has the same UI but which actually sends a duplicate to the NSA (or whoever it is you don't want listening in).

ANY system where code can be deployed at will and the owner of the device is not in full control of the device will have this same level of vulnerability. Saying that a system is insecure because you could change the system doesn't tell you anything interesting about the system.

<comment><USER3> >(if I understand it correctly) the cryptography is solid

The issue is that iMessage outright ignores a long understood challenge in the APPLICATION of cryptography, namely knowing when to trust that someone is REALLY giving you their public key rather than being man-in-the-middled.

While this is a thorny challenge there are well understood, if imperfect, ways of addressing it that have been around for decades. At minimum it works like ssh, where you get a warning when an unfamiliar new key is presented and decide whether to trust it or not. More sophisticated is the certificate infrastructure around TLS/SSL where some effort is made to bring semi-trusted third parties into play.

These are all flawed solutions, the problem remains essentially unsolved. But any truly secure system based around public keys has some mechanism that addresses this challenge.

The issue with iMessage is that 1. Apple did not attempt to address the key exchange problem, which would maybe be fair enough on an "easy" consumer product with weak security claims but then 2. Apple made strong security claims very publicly and 3. even said a counterfactual, that it had no capability to intercept messages.

THAT is what is disingenuous: Apple implements public key cryptography, which since its inception and at its very heart raises difficult challenges around key exchange; Apple chooses to ignore these challenges; Apple then claims strong public key security. Either attempt to address the challenges like everyone else, or don't make the security claim, you can't do both.

<comment><USER4> I disagree.

The flawed systems are SMS and predecessor systems like alphanumeric pagers, where your messages are archived indefinitely in a database by the carrier. Remember the Wikileaks release of all of the pager traffic in lower Manhattan on 9/11?

In my mind, the NSA/PRISM stuff is a meta-problem that is just something that is hanging out in the background. I work in enterprise IT, I'm not a dissident, drug dealer or whistleblower, so I'm more worried about incompetent carriers and other hostile parties than the NSA.

So iMessage gives me encrypted message content that may be readable retrospectively by the NSA, and is almost certainly "tappable" by normal law enforcement.

The reality is, that's about as good as you are going to get outside of a defined community of interest. My employer has highly secure voice and text solutions available for key personnel, for instance. Perfectly secure communications won't be available to the masses, because the operators of those systems face liability.

<comment><USER5> Whats the liability difference between the systems at work and the systems for the general public?

Strong crypto is, and should be, available to everyone.

<comment><USER4> The law.

Common carriers are required to to have "tappable" systems if the system is deemed to replace phone conversations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This says that, yes, Apple can read your iMessages, but it seems to me that the protocol is pretty much designed to be as secure as one can make it while still being usable. Would you really expect people who used iMessage to call their friends and have them read hex fingerprints over the phone?

As anti-Apple as I am, I think we have to give them this one, especially when the alternative (i.e. making iMessage _completely unencrypted_ ) would have been much, much easier.

<comment><USER7> Well - to be fair, BBM over BES is as secure as it gets. The only people who can read those messages are sender and recipient, and the owner of the org keys. Neither cell provider nor blackberry can decrypt them.

<comment><USER8> I think it's established that there are backdoors in BBM. E.g., [http://www.zdnet.com/in/indias-blackberry-monitoring- system-...](http://www.zdnet.com/in/indias-blackberry-monitoring-system-ready- for-use-7000017937/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reads more like "Apple can't read your messages as-is, but controls all the iMessage key-exchange infrastructure, and thus could sabotage it if it chose to".

</comment><comment><USER10> So if I get this right, the vulnerability is that Apple could sit in between you and your friend, impersonating each to the other while relaying and reading your messages.

This seems about as vulnerable as the certificate authority/public key infrastructure system used for SSL, code signing, etc... We're always delegating to another party the responsibility of authenticating the person on the other side of our messages/web browser/signed software that we run. In the case of iMessage, Apple is responsible for authenticating your friend. In the SSL or signed code case, the certificate authorities are responsible. Seems that both Apple and CA companies might be subject to the same legal pressures to eavesdrop on people.

<comment><USER11> Not quite. A CA signs your _public_ key. You never give anyone the private key, because... well, it's private.

<comment><USER12> You're not giving anyone your private key here, either.

stellar678 is basically correct - Apple, like a CA, is vouching for the authenticity of users' public keys. The only difference is superficial: a SSL CA signs a certificate and the validation is done without needing to contact the CA, whereas with iChat the public key is validated by virtue of coming from Apple. Just as a CA can sign a malicious certificate, Apple can send you a malicious public key.

<comment><USER11> Except in the iMessage scenario, Apple generates (and keeps) a copy of the private key so you can recover a lost device by signing into iCloud on a new phone.

<comment><USER12> That's not what these researchers found. They found that each device has a distinct private key, and that the sender of an IM actually sends a separate message to each device, encrypted with the appropriate key. Do you have a source for your claim?

<comment><USER13> _While Apple boasts of "end-to-end encryption" it's pretty clear that Apple itself holds the key -- because if you boot up a brand new iOS device, you automatically get access to your old messages. That means that (a) Apple is storing those messages in the cloud and (b) it can decrypt them if it needs to._ From [http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130405/01485922590/dea- ac...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130405/01485922590/dea-accused- leaking-misleading-info-falsely-implying-that-it-cant-read-apple- imessages.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there 's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties._

Well internal controls could prevent that but since we don't know we'll assume they don't exist, print the headline:

 _Tim Cook is reading your iMessages right now!_

<comment><USER2> Well, being prevented by internal controls is outside the scope of the question. Apple had claimed that they were incapable of intercepting the messages, not that they had policies against it. And Apple is known to be subject to secret US government demands that come with a gag order.

<comment><USER15> What we know is that it seems possible, when looking at the system externally, for them to perform MITM attacks. What we don't know is if their system _internally_ makes it possible for anyone inside apple to intercept and read those messages, with or without an order from the NSA. They could very well have told us the truth!

<comment><USER2> No, what we know is that it seems impossible for them to perform MITM attacks at the moment, but they appear to have the ability to rewrite the app later if they wanted to perform MITM attacks. At least that's how I understood it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _[The researchers] went on to say there 's no technical measure stopping Apple employees, working under a secret court order or otherwise, from performing the same kind of attack and making it completely transparent to the parties exchanging iMessages._

 _Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there 's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties._

We have evidence of a secret court order for Verizon to hand over the meta- data associated with phone calls. IANAL, but this seems quite different from ordering Apple to perform a MITM attack against a user.

Under what kind of court order would Apple have to remove or compromise end- to-end encryption from a target's device?

<comment><USER17> The same kind of court order that told Lavabit to hand over their SSL key, one where the person of interest was communicating over iMessage. It would probably be accompanied by an NSL which would then prevent Apple from talking about it.

<comment><USER16> AFAIK, the Lavabit case is not legally decided yet:

      http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/11/lavabit-challenges-contempt-order/

I imagine Apple would put up quite a strong legal fight if they were issued the same order, especially considering their public stance.

A NSL can force Apple to not disclose it, but they can't force them to publically lie about it. And lying about that would be ridiculously stupid.

<comment><USER8> > A NSL can force Apple to not disclose it, but they can't force them to > publically lie about it. And lying about that would be ridiculously stupid.

I'm not sure they'd be put in a position to lie. It would have to be a very direct, specific question to _require_ a lie. Otherwise, dodgy language would suffice.

<comment><USER16> They didn't use dodgy language: "conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data." [1].

1\. [https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer- privacy/](https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/)

<comment><USER17> And per the article, that statement can be true at the same time this statement can be true:

"Apple can intercept the creation of _new_ conversations between users on iMessage or FaceTime if compelled to do so by a valid court order."

English being as fungible as it is, leads to this sort of mess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does that mean they can view private pictures sent via iMessage?

I've wondered the same thing about Dropbox. If I were to open my dropbox at work, could my employer view private things in the dropbox? Even if I don't open the file, an icon will still load in the browser view.

<comment><USER19> Your employer could MITM all your SSL connections just by installing their own cert installed on the machine, so yeah.

<comment><USER20> Indeed. This is why Apple sending your AppleID and password in the clear inside the SSL connection to Apple is troubling. That makes it relatively easy for the right IT people to steal those credentials. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Article's author is Dan Goodin. I'd take _everything_ he says with a quarry full of salt. This guy is symptomatic of all that is wrong with Ars these days.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there any commercially viable messaging protocol that is 100% defensible against any and all attacks?

<comment><USER23> i dont see how something like this could conceivably work for 2 parties that do not yet know each other. the problem of establishing identity/trust between strangers can't be solved in any 100% manner over any medium that can be tampered with.

if both of you rely on some intermediate authority for authentication (as HTTPS works), it's by definition not 100% because the intermediary can, in theory, be compromised.

if the two parties know each other and can authenticate via some basic questions, that may work. or you can just exchange symmetric AES keys in person or public certs through another channel.

<comment><USER24> How about physical trust creation protocol? Something like bumping phones to create key pairs and exchanging them via bluetooth. That might work fine in theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did anyone ever figure out how the iMessage for Android developer got his implementation to work?...

<comment><USER26> saurik said this on Twitter[1]

> A 3rd-party iMessage app was just released on Android; I believe all data > sent from/to Apple is resent to/from China for processing: beware.

[1][https://twitter.com/saurik/status/382387551144652800](https://twitter.com/saurik/status/382387551144652800)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't mind apple is able to it... as long as not the chinese government ..

<comment><USER28> Most likely, the chinese government can/does tell Apple to decrypt certain msg or don't do biz in China, similar to what India government told RIM.</comment></comment>


Are there any good tools for non-technical people to build a mobile-app? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Sure, they're called developers who turn your idea into a software product.

I'm all for encouraging people to learn how to program etc, but "how can I do X without learning how the professionals do X" is getting kinda old.

</comment><comment><USER3> The answer to your question is very likely no, but you offer no details so it's hard to say.

What is it that you do for a living, coffeebro? Do any tools exist that allow someone to do what you do, without any knowledge or experience beforehand?

</comment><comment><USER4> An IDE. The same as the technical people use.

(In what world can "non-technical people" build any kind of app?)

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant any good "app-builders" out there. I found a bunch of products that are for social profiles or content (like dwnld.me) but nothing that is more integrated with unique mobile functionalities.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What tasks do you regularly automate or use digital assistance for? - <AUTHOR>

Do you regularly use Siri or any other digital assistant (e.g. Jarvis) or automation services like IFTTT, Alfred and for what ? <comment><USER2> I use Zapier a lot for automation.

Auto sync my business contacts to Insightly, GitHub issues for an open source project to a Trello board,Gumroad contacts to my MailChimp list, to name a few

</comment><comment><USER3> The keyboard dictation feature in iOS is indispensable to me. It's about 90-95% accurate which is just enough for me to be able to generate any written communication faster.

</comment><comment><USER4> Client followups. Deliverables.</comment>


Age Distribution on Social Networks and Communities - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/social-network-age-distribution-1024px.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was interesting, figured maybe HN would want to see it if it hadn't already done so before.</comment>


Amazon, Palantir are aiding mass deportations of govt 'undesirables' - <AUTHOR> https://sociable.co/technology/amazon-palantir-deportations/ <comment><USER2> Lumping in a lot of categories without defining who these people all isn't helpful: "'undesirable' — immigrants, people of color, the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, activists, and others," There is a humanitarian crisis in Mexico with the drug war and cartels. People are going legally or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> The report cited in the article by Mijente, the National Immigration Project, and the Immigrant Defense Project definitely has an agenda of its own and does not like the Trump administration one bit. Saying it's part of a "larger white supremacist project" is a bold statement.

Humanitarian crises are happening all over the world, and you're right, downrightmike, people are going legally or not, and for many, many reasons.</comment></comment>