Google crawler tricked into performing SQL injection attacks   - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/google-crawler-tricked-into-performing-sql-injection-attacks-using-decade-old-technique/

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676859)

</comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't make any sense... why wouldn't the attacker just do the attack themselves? What is the advantage to this?

<comment><USER4> You don't leave forensic evidence of the attack. You don't have automated IDS systems blacklist your IPs. You get a one-to-many leverage on the backs of Google's prodigious crawler farm. You potentially goad the target into manual or automatic decisions which penalize Google, thereby inducing Google to automatically retaliate with decisions which inflict business damage upon the target, which may be a goal of the attack. etc, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> you can block areas of your site accessible to bots with the robots.txt

</comment><comment><USER6> > The only solution is to not be vulnerable to SQL injection attacks.

If this is your reason for fixing SQL injection vulnerabilities, you're doing something wrong.

</comment><comment><USER7> 's kinda ironic that Michael Zalewski now works for Google o_o</comment>


The Guardian launches open API for all content - but they still control the ads - <AUTHOR> http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/03/10/the-guardian-launches-open-api-for-all-content-but-they-still-control-the-ads/ <comment><USER2> I've been using webmynd recently, hopefully this means it can include guardian content now. Cool if it does.</comment>


Apple Pulls Gambling Apps Targeted by Chinese State Media - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-pulls-25-000-apps-from-china-app-store-following-state-media-criticism-1534731049 <comment><USER2> It's disappointing they are pulling VPN apps that might help with escaping the GFW. I find it funny how large tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple - try so hard to adopt a public image promoting western liberal values. However they all end up submitting to political censorship demands for a population of over a billion people.

I read earlier in the month even Google has caved in, despite being an example years ago by refusing to participate in censorship

But then I know their primary priority is to increase revenue/profits. Can't do that by being blocked out of such a massive market.

<comment><USER3> Your primary priority is also to increase revenue.

<comment><USER4> do you actually know this poster?

Or is this some sort of pseudo-intellectual libertarian assumption that functions as 'true' by eliminating all variables which disagree with it?

<comment><USER5> Can you please not post ideological battle-style comments to HN? They're not what this site is for.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sounds like a mirror image of the US ban on real-money online gambling?

<comment><USER7> sounds like they're cracking down on vpns as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apps including gambling element.

How they found gambling in a calendar app is beyond me.

Overall impression is that they were simply given a list of app urls and they had them block them without any right to question that.

<comment><USER9> Don't know about this particular incident, but in general gambling is very culturally integrated in Asia is found in many contexts you wouldn't see gambling in other countries.

The weirdest I've seen:

[http://www.motorscooterguide.net/Kymco/Bet-Win/Bet- Win.html](http://www.motorscooterguide.net/Kymco/Bet-Win/Bet-Win.html) A motorcycle whose model name is "Bet & win"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In China I often get spam iMessage texts from illegal gambling services advertising their apps. These apps are often disguised as something else. You download a calendar/video app etc hit the right button and it turns into a casino/sports betting app. During the world cup I was getting 4-5 texts a day.

<comment><USER11> I wish the App Store had a clear way for users to report apps.

</comment></comment><comment> le-mark > Apple Pulls Illegal Apps Targeted by Chinese State Media (wsj.com)

Illegal in what jurisdiction one wonders?

<comment><USER12> In China of course.

FTA: "In China, Apple said it removed nearly 700 virtual private networks, or VPN, apps from its App Store last year in response to new local restrictions."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://archive.is/BGO4G](http://archive.is/BGO4G)

</comment><comment><USER14> Apple censors app store to comply with authoritarian regime censorship laws

<comment><USER15> gambling apps are not exactly allowed here in the US either, are you insinuating that the US has authoritarian regime censorship laws too?

<comment><USER14> Not sure that outlawing gambling, which wrecks lives through addiction and has no measurable benefit, could be equated to outlawing letting you talk about the fact that your government slaughtered students in Tienanmen Square or simply that your ruler resembles Winnie the Pooh.

<comment><USER16> Most people in my country think that gambling is basically fine and handguns are a menace to society, so our laws reflect that. It seems bizarre to us that most Americans can legally own a handgun, but can't legally place a $5 bet on a football game. Our attitudes to guns and gambling aren't right or wrong, they're just different.

There are things I could say in this comment that would be a federal felony. No country has absolute freedom of speech. All countries draw a line _somewhere_. China draws that line in a different place to the US. It's not right or wrong, it's just different.

<comment><USER14> Being jailed for saying someone looks a bit like a cartoon character or stating simple facts about a government slaughtering students is definitively wrong. The only folks who might disagree are those brought up in brain- washy/authoritarian regimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The title deceivingly hides the word "gambling" and tries to make it sound like Apple censoring free press or something similar for the Chinese government.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. Gambling apps are also illegal in the US and Apple is coming under scrutiny here for "loot boxes".

<comment><USER19> _Gambling apps are also illegal in the US_

Gambling apps are not illegal in the US, it is decided at the state level like all other gambling.

<comment><USER15> No States allow broad gambling. Even Nevada only allows it in certain areas. So it's pretty safe to say that gambling is generally illegal, with a few exceptions.

<comment><USER19> _No States allow broad gambling. Even Nevada only allows it in certain areas. So it 's pretty safe to say that gambling is generally illegal, with a few exceptions._

By that logic performing surgery is illegal, should Apple remove an app that helps operate surgical equipment?

Also, many states allow private gambling anywhere as long as there is no house edge(vig/rake), which makes it more of an industry regulation.

<comment><USER20> > By that logic performing surgery is illegal, should Apple remove an app that > helps operate surgical equipment?

Yes? That would probably make it a medical device which is also regulated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Non Pay walled: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/apple-...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/apple- pulls-25-000-apps-from-china-app-store-following-state-media- criticism-1534731049)

<comment><USER22> I find that outline does a good job [https://outline.com/XK3BwM](https://outline.com/XK3BwM)

The story is pretty much no controversy, being that they are eliminating gambling apps</comment></comment>


Show HN: ScreenSlicer – automatic, zero-config web scraping - <AUTHOR> http://screenslicer.com

<comment><USER2> I have looked at a number of web scraping products and my largest client uses one of the established products pretty extensively. Your front page is very focused on using site searches as the starting point. Are there more full blown features available?

I note that the pricing page mentions an API but doesn't give much of a sense of what features are available programmatically.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the focus (at this point) is on finding a search box on the target site and executing a search there. The first version of the API is still being developed but would be a pretty similar mapping of the current feature set. Notable power of the API: paging indefinitely through the search results, searching multiple sites at once, clustering of multiple instances on VPSs, queueing of searches to pop the results back later, POST and GET requests (so you could bookmark searches).

Edit: for the API, also considering a feature to disable AJAX support for scraping per each request. Much time is spent in DOM parsing and timeouts for unknown async requests on target sites.</comment></comment>


Why Many Computer Science Programs Are Stagnating - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hackerrank.com/why-many-computer-science-programs-are-stagnating/ <comment><USER2> > _There's No Feedback Loop Between Industry & Universities_

Stuff the industry; CS isn't vocational training.

Most of the coding that goes on in the industry is mind numbingly dull from a CS perspective.

The idea that the industry should play fiddle, and CS should dance to the tune, is ridiculous.

This article fails to define what it means by "stagnating". "Stagnating" isn't a suitable single word for describing the memory of an experience (such as an undergrad program) which wasn't what one expected.

A CS department stagnates when it doesn't publish papers, I would think. Just like a political science department or English department. (An English department isn't said to be stagnating because it doesn't teach people how to speak English.)

As far as the undergrads go, they would be poorly served if the focus of the program was to teach them some application stack _du jour_. Even if that's what the industry wants today, that may change by the time they graduate.

<comment><USER3> There is no CS industry, there is a software engineering industry.

Why industry thinks CS grads are good software engineers is a little beyond me.

I certainly would never a hire a physicist to build a bridge.

<comment><USER4> Civil engineers have to take physics, and geology, and surveying... and crucially a PE exam after graduation. One is not really an engineer until that's out of the way.

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

<comment><USER3> Yes, testing the ability to do tasks related to the actual job is refreshing.

Similarly, fizzbuzz is generally massively more useful than whatever silly CS problems people are asking in interviews.

I use fizzbuzz and character counts (histograms) as my primary weapons.

If they pass that since i'm usually looking for iOS developers they get a simple app with poor table view scroll performance and are asked to improve the performance of it.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but I wouldn't ask anyone with more than a few years experience implementing parallel distributed file systems to tap out fizzbuzz in an onsite.

Edit: This is part of the problem - an Engineer is fundamentally different from a Developer, even if there is significant overlap.

<comment><USER3> Agreed fizz buzz is the "phone screen". App onsite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> CS has its fundamentals -- a queue is still a queue, a binary search tree is still a BST, a graph is still a graph, and it is useful to know how to traverse it. So those parts should stay there. Obviously there is exciting new work happening (distributed systems, CRDTs, others..) but a lot of those are still built on fundamentals.

But there are also classes tied to specific languages and technologies that are often not as relevant anymore. When I went to school in early 2000's we still had to take 2 assembly language classes for a CS degree. Those were very useful, but it probably could have been just 1 class and instead take another networking and/or protocols class.

There were other instances of that. There were almost a whole AI class wasted on Expert Systems. Those were cool but in 1980s not in 2000s. There was even a class tought in COBOL, it was an elective, but still... (I didn't know what it would be, signed up for fun, after the first class, almost half the people dropped it including me).

Another major driver for changes or lack of is faculty. Remember in US faculty is tenured for life. They can't be easily fired for not picking up the latest technology. They can still be teaching COBOL and Expert Systems. So that is what some do -- they just teach whatever they wrote their PhD thesis on, so you get a mix of whatever happened to be awesome anytime from late 60s up to 2010 (depending on how quick the tenure process takes). I personally saw some faculty do a fantastic job picking up latest interesting stuff, trying to stay relevent. Some, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER6> I went to two of the top 5 CS schools in the US for undergrad and grad. As a current web dev, it was a total waste of time as far as helping me be useful in the industry. It gave me some street cred on my resume with bigcorp & people who don't know how to recruit, but that was about it. I ended up learning most of what I needed on my own, and not through a formal structure such as that of a university. I still frequently go back to the same texts we used in class, but I get a lot more from them now that I actually have a pragmatic need for that knowledge, as opposed to cramming something really abstract into my skull in 3 months.

I'm sure academia would have been a lot more useful if I really needed specialized knowledge in some specific area. Even then I doubt I wouldn't have been able to teach myself everything, or find someone who could.

I did get a lot out of team projects though, those were the closest I got to real-world-like experience of working in teams.

Software engineering is a craft. At some point we need to ask ourselves if we aren't served much better by turning our education into craft schools / apprenticeships etc. over the current awkward model of trying to stuff vocational training into academician-training programs that were never meant for that in the first place.

A program like Digipen/Guildhall or some well executed long-term bootcamp is fairly in line with what would work best for creating productive industry contributors. I remember one of my program directors being very clear about it: "We don't make software engineers, we make computer scientists who can go into research". I don't think that part is ever obvious to people going into CS programs.

<comment><USER7> "We don't make software engineers, we make computer scientists who can go into research". I don't think that part is ever obvious to people going into CS programs.

It wasn't to me. The frustration I felt for 4 years is beyond belief. I couldn't stand any longer in my fourth year. Stupid for dropping out at the 9th hour.

Now I wonder why companies aren't pushing for programming over the science.

<comment><USER6> The claim you always hear is that "people with a CS background have much stronger fundamentals".

I question that claim and believe that people perpetrating the meme have never actually hired and mentored software engineers themselves.

There's in my experience very little correlation between being academically great and being highly productive in an unstructured environment such as that of an early stage startup. In fact if you didn't go to school, and still managed to learn a ton about your craft and the underlying principles, I'm much more impressed.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more, every time I'm asked to invert a binary tree in an interview I wonder exactly what kinds of problems this company is actually solving.

Like do they not have a general algorithm for this in a library?

Are they looking for more efficient ways of inverting trees?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, part of the problem is that computer science in a lot of schools (and I'm a bit familiar with both Rice and University of Houston here, having interacted a lot with students and teachers at both) is really some weighted sum of: computer engineering, software engineering, computer science (theory), vocational programming (lol game development), computational/applied mathematics and statistics, and maybe web development.

Depending on the program, these are weight differently--for example, Rice has some excellent computer engineering (compilers, networking) and (for a while anyways) software engineering projects (here's a customer, here's your team, organize and deliver this semester, don't fuck up but we'll guide you). It also had some good coverage on the purer CS theory as well as applied math (the robotics and graphics courses are pretty awesome for this). Next to no web development was covered (which makes sense to me).

As a result, you can take a Rice grad and drop them into basically any project and expect them to be okay--they could get up to speed on the vocational aspects or whatever weird algorithmic stuff you needed.

What I'm concerned about, though, is that a lot of programs seem to be adjusting to meet the gold rush mentality of the current software era, and are neglecting to teach fundamentals and theory that make the difference between a middling-decent junior/intermediate developer and somebody suited to really do senior and architecture work.

Our industry, incidentally, is doing nobody any favors. This is at least partly because of the number of well-meaning and excited amateurs who continually reinvent technologies and sharpen axes. This pretty much guarantees that any school trying to be merely vocational has its work cut out for it, and will be out of date rather quickly.

</comment><comment><USER9> Businesses and companies want and expect universities and colleges to train CS grads how to program in certain languages. But that's not the goal or purpose of a 4 year degree. That's what a 2 year associates degree in application development or programming is for from atwo year technical or community college.

What my 4 year CS degree have me was a better understanding of the macroview of computer systems. It makes me consider "just spend $$$ on more memory" rather than "spend $$$$$+ tweaking the code". It allows me to quickly find issues related to computer systems from hardware/server setups/designs, networking, specific hardware, and software interactions. Its viewing the forest instead of the individual trees.

<comment><USER10> Very much this. CS programs force you to look at the various theoretical aspects of CS, such as algorithm analysis, formal verification, type theory, etc. The idea is that you will come out of it with the raw tools such that if you WANT to go into industry, you will have the fundamental skills to be able to learn whatever it is you need to learn. Hopefully you learn some programming chops along the way.

4 years of web dev is useless. 4 years of iOS and Android development is useless. 4 years where you learn systems programming, functional programming, distributed systems, OO, concurrency, parallel algorithms, algorithm analysis, compilers, networking, that all pays off in spades. Not to say people without these degrees can't do that. Not at all. But having the fundamentals instilled in you helps mold your mind for when the next thing comes along.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord The quoted complaint that the CS curriculum didn't assist one with their startup is an odd one. Startups are meant as vehicles for rapid growth with an end goal of a high exit, and usually based on top of some form of end-user application that can be tiered, sold per unit or commissioned to advertisers.

In contrast, doing CS research (such as research operating systems), despite its high technical importance, frequently has no opportunity for direct end user monetization and is totally inappropriate for a startup structure. It can yield concepts that may lead to huge cost-saving benefits once implemented in the wild, but in of itself it has no market value, only possible utility.

In all honesty, I think the communication failure mostly falls on the industry's shoulders, not on academia. The industry has time and time demonstrated it values short-term conceptual complacency and having more of what they know, as opposed to any truly large paradigm shifts (in software, at least).

</comment><comment><USER11> Computer Science isn't software engineering. I know lots of good computer scientists that are terrible software engineers (and vice versa). So expecting a Computer Science degree to teach you to be a software engineer is like expecting an English degree to teach you to be a writer. It's useful, but not essential.

The key thing is that software engineering is a vocational skill. It can only be learned on the job working as part of a team (very little software is developed solo). So if your degree course claims to teach you how to be a software engineer but doesn't have at least six months working in the field, then it's worthless on that front.

If industry wants better software engineers it should invest in them itself rather than getting someone to do the job for them.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've always considered "Computer Science" and "Computer Programming" to be different things.

In school I hated the classes where I had to mathematically prove functions and algorithms. Felt like the biggest waste of time ever. That's CS. I wanted to learn how to make cool shit. CP if you will. Substitute another term if you like.

In hindsight I'm glad I took the CS classes. But I also recognize that a strict CS degree will not necessarily prepare someone for a job. While a strict CP degree (again, substitute the term if you wish) may not give everyone the theory and structure they aught to have.

</comment><comment><USER13> The assertion that a 20% of a random sampling of Carnegie Mellon professors have industry experience in the sense that graduating undergraduates "go into industry" is, IMO, questionable.

I'm inclined to wonder how much of that experience came in the form of internships or jobs in industry research labs (which is technically industry, but not the same "industry" their students are going into).

</comment><comment><USER13> "Java Schools" is what happens when you "close the loop" between industry and academia.

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html)

<comment><USER14> If that article were written today, I'm reasonably certain that it would be about Java _Script_ schools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wouldn't worry that computer scientists have had a hard time figuring themselves out. Academia is a kind of a dinosaur anyway, though there are a lot of smart people in it, cranking out good work. I just don't think Academia does them justice and it will be obvious very soon. Scholars who embrace decentralized teaching/learning will have such a strong information asymmetry advantage they will make the academic output of universities look like crayon drawings.

You can argue that the academics will adapt and reform their institutions in the decentralized space, but I would argue it won't really be Academia as we know it.

</comment><comment><USER16> this is a pretty naive viewpoint probably written by someone early in their career. CS programs should be teaching fundamental skills - algorithms, software design and engineering, computer theory. In industry it's much better to have a team member with a firm grasp on fundamentals than not, even if the later is an expert on framework du-jour. The one with with strong fundamentals will grasp the framework in matter of weeks. Not so much for the reverse ... additionally the poor-fundamentals programmer will pollute the shared codebase with bugs and performance gotchyas for years.

The greater problem for CS education is improving the curriculum and outcomes for incoming students who haven't already been coding since youth. Women and minorities often don't have that advantage. In my undergrad, I saw tenured research profs catering courses to top of the curve, mostly privileged males already with a strong background in STEM fields & programming.

</comment><comment><USER9> We should differentiate between computer science and software engineering. They are somewhat overlapping but SE obviously places more emphasis on software. And I be alright saying CS focuses more on hardware.

<comment><USER17> Is CS really more focused on hardware? In my experience that hasn't been the case or at least a key distinction. I've found CS has more focus on theory and algorithms where SE is more about dealing with code base complexity.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough. I jumped the gun. SE has much much less concern about hardware. CS applies algorithms and protocol design to practical uses in hardware, networking, computer systems, and software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hiring CS grads to create CRUD apps is like hiring EE grads to wire your house. Even if the EE grad could figure it out, odds are it wouldn't be up to code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Comp Sci != Software Engineering.</comment>


Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/nike-and-boeing-are-paying-sci-fi-writers-to-predict-their-futures-fdc4b6165fa4 <comment><USER3> Other posters have noted that this isn't new at all. One could almost say that what's been predicted by futurologists over time is what Sci-Fi can see.

To me, what's interesting is the ways the lens of Sci-Fi can distort one's ideas. The flying car is the most classic, wrong science fiction prediction ever (even if it should come to pass). The way that the flying car fails is that ground motion doesn't translate directly into flying motion - <USER2> transport has achieved some equivalence to ground motion but going from a "flying bus" (a conventional airplane) to a personal "flying car" turns out to be a vastly harder problem than going from a train to a car.

One might say, Sci-Fi involves extrapolation of experience, since the writer ultimately has describe the experiences of their characters. So what's missing overall, is "the dull parts", as least for "classic Sci-Fi", which has historically been adventure novels extrapolated into a new world (the novels of Robert Heinlein being the model).

Here, in a sense, dystopian and other novelist genres can give further insight a leg-up because they aren't constrained to make the future fun.

A really interesting story is EM Forrester's story "The Machine Stops", predicted many aspects of the Internet in 1909!

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

<comment><USER4> One of the most incongruous anachronisms I've read in sci-fi was in Asimov's _Second Foundation_ , Arkady Darrell is introduced writing in a diary with a device that (IIRC) telepathically reads your mind and converts it to text. She starts daydreaming, and as a result her daydreams are transcribed into the diary. Then she has to _start the entry over_ again because it's ruined.

It's ironic that 50,000 years in the future, when humanity is spread across the Galactic Empire, the future course of history can be predicted based on human psychology, and devices can mind-read to text, that they still hadn't invented word processing. As a kid reading it in the 90s, it was amazing that the main character would be seriously peeved off by something that was a solved problem to me.

<comment><USER5> In the Foundation series, at least the first books, people were smoking, using newspapers (as in physical paper) and coins; there are many things out of place in that universe.

<comment><USER4> As a teenager reading it in the mid-90s, I didn't find any of those all that incongruous. Back then there were still smoking sections in most fancy restaurants; I read the (physical paper) newspaper every morning; and my parents would frequently dig for loose change in their pocket at the supermarket cashier.

Shows how far we've come in just ~25 years.

<comment> rkuykendall-com Yeah, now everybody smokes out of a USB stick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how solicited sci-fi stacks up to unsolicited sci-fi, like:

"The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike" by Andrea Phillips: [https://firesidefiction.com/the-revolution-brought-to-you- by...](https://firesidefiction.com/the-revolution-brought-to-you-by-nike)

<comment><USER7> I assume the writing quality would be the same. But it's not necessarily going to be output in the same type of format.

For example, game designers are known to have been hired by government agencies and corporations to create games that will help them understand side effects of policy proposals (especially complicated ones). But you probably wouldn't just box it up and sell it afterword.

In the sci-fi case, they need to try to predict something like "If we invented an AI powered shoe, how would people react?" etc. If the writer is any good, they'll ask for info about the brand's values etc, and the brand would supply user surveys to help the writer predict better.

<comment><USER8> Do you have an article in mind about the game designers hired for policy proposals? I'm curious to learn more about the practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've noticed these stories on The Verge and all I can think is that this is the most cyberpunk twist of all: the very texts that might inspire a cultural shift against these entities are instead repurposed and weaponized by capital to support their continued reign.

<comment><USER10> For more along this train of thought, I recommend "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" by Mark Fisher: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism:_Is_There_N...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism:_Is_There_No_Alternative%3F)

I also highly, highly recommend "K-Punk" by the same author (now deceased, RIP): [https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mark-fishers- k-p...](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mark-fishers-k-punk-and- the-futures-that-have-never-arrived)

<comment><USER11> R.I.P Mark Fisher. I am still shocked to see people die like that out of no where. (Presumably suicide)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They should check anime and games.

Like Dennou Coil [0] with a nice vision of what life might be like when AR glasses and a persistent global "AR space" are as commonplace as smartphones today.

Numenera [1] that's set a billion (!) years in the future where science is beyond even our wildest imagining of magic.

And many more. They may not be relevant to Nike or Boeing specifically, but there are lots of really cool ideas for all kinds of fashion _and_ tech.

[0] [https://myanimelist.net/anime/2164/Dennou_Coil](https://myanimelist.net/anime/2164/Dennou_Coil)

[1] [https://numenera.com](https://numenera.com)

<comment><USER13> Dennou Coil definitely deserves more attention. Way more down to earth than Ghost in the Shell.

<comment><USER12> Even Adventure Time is pretty cool with futuristic fashiontech/techfashion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is nothing new.

I know a number of other SF writers who are professional futurists, with selling books as their side hustle; others who do consulting gigs for industry from time to time. In general, corporations pay more than publishers …!

<comment><USER15> A certain amount of cross-pollination is not unknown, either: [https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a21238129/seveneves...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a21238129/seveneves- neal-stephenson-blue-origin/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the novel _Footfall_ by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the government employs science fiction writers to help them understand the invading aliens and predict what they'll think and do.

<comment><USER17> The US Government convened Hollywood action film writers and producers to speculate on terrorist attacks they hadn't foreseen:

[https://www.foxnews.com/story/army-looks-to-hollywood-for- sc...](https://www.foxnews.com/story/army-looks-to-hollywood-for-scenarios)

[https://www.wired.com/2007/03/foiled-by- foia-/](https://www.wired.com/2007/03/foiled-by-foia-/)

<comment><USER18> That gives a new meaning to "security theater."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps shoes that don't explode and planes that don't nose dive?

<comment><USER20> Exactly. May be have good documentation, engineering practices and don't oversell a new model claiming "works exactly like the earlier model"?

<comment><USER21> Lol, I actually want shoes that don't have a manual, tbh.

<comment><USER20> Ok, my comment was in the context of airplane control systems/sensors/UIs, but yeah, more generally, things should fail softly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sounds kinda like this strategic forecasting group cofounded by Steward Brand, GBN had many awesome sci fi and cyberpunk authors in its retinue until 2013, both Gibson and Sterling if I recall but it's all described in the book The Art of the Long View [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Business_Network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Business_Network)

<comment><USER23> I thought the exact same thing reading this -- this sort of science fiction prototyping reminds me of the kind of Scenario Planning practiced initially by Royal Dutch Shell, GE, and various militaries. GBN had a big business doing futures work for Fortune 100 companies for quite some time. This kind of engagement is pretty high-end business strategy work, but can be very compelling to a leadership team or a board that is working on long-term planning.

Clearly articulated potential futures can help large companies identify signals that a particular future is coming to pass or plan responses should that scenario become true.

In a world where technology seems to be "disrupting" almost every industry, it makes sense to me that science fiction futures would be especially relevant.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, it's hard to sell this to anyone except c-levels with the most discretionary of budgets, but it's very important work. FWIW it's nice to find someone else who's heard of this.

A few years ago Bruce Sterling was calling his sort of sci fi inspired strategic forecasting 'diagetic prototyping', or 'design fiction'. Less defense- or tech- oriented than film and product development. But it works in a similar way. We hire the oracles to inhale the vapors and tell us what they see.

[https://www.wired.com/2011/02/design-fiction-diegetic- protot...](https://www.wired.com/2011/02/design-fiction-diegetic-prototypes/)

edit: I did work for monitor for a short time and my views don't necessarily reflect those of the organization

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the issues I see with looking at science fiction for inspiration is that they are stories first, predictions second - they seem to gravitate towards ideas that make dramaturgical sense. Future technological or societal developments that would not make for interesting or relatable stories tend to get much less attention than those that do, regardless of how likely they are to actually happen.

For instance, character death still seems to be treated as a huge deal in a large number of popular science fiction franchises due to their usefulness as a storytelling device; despite their worlds being vastly technologically advanced than ours, death carries the same finality and graveness. Worlds where death has been engineered down to a mere inconvenience aren't unheard of, but seem to be pretty uncommon outside of very "hard" Sci-Fi. On the other hand, "robots" and "AIs" that think and talk at a level indistinguishable from humans (but the rest of the world being disproportionately un-advanced) seem to be all-too-common in popular franchises, again due to how handy they come in when telling stories.

I understand it's difficult to write relatable stories with a setting that aren't necessarily friendly with good storytelling, but we should at least be aware of the bias.

</comment><comment><USER24> "capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic 'speculation' into an effective world-historical force"

"Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality"

[http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an- introduc...](http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an- introduction/)

<comment><USER25> Not sure about that whole link but I find the idea very interesting. I often wonder how much of these things are self fulfilling prophecy since these large corps don't exactly have a large imagination and take from where they can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> it's called a long term roadmap: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_roadmap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_roadmap)

</comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of the precogs in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

</comment><comment><USER28> ... not just their training materials?

</comment><comment><USER29> if they like the predictions, they will make them come true...

</comment><comment><USER30> Full circle.</comment>


Meet the new front page of the internet:fresh,open and personalized in your way - <AUTHOR> https://www.prisvo.com/+turkeywatch <comment><USER2> It would be nice if you could showcase some of the value of prisvo without requiring a signup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for your comment.!!! It is very difficult to get user feedback.</comment></comment>


Load Balancers need static IPs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pagerduty.com/2010/08/31/load-balancers-need-static-ips/ <comment><USER2> Here's how we solve this.

We host our DNS with DNS Made Easy, but you could also run your own DNS servers. (We actually have a pair of EC2 instances that we configured as DNS servers and then shut them down, so we're paying a minimal amount for them, but can spin them up very quickly the next time DME is hit with a DDOS.)

We query the ELB CNAME periodically and check its IP. If the IP changes, we update our corresponding A records with the new IP. It's a small amount of code and a cronjob that runs every 5 minutes.

Elegant? No. Get the job done? Absolutely.

<comment><USER3> Great, except for when your users DNS resolvers cache the DNS entry longer than they're supposed to (many resolvers ignore TTL), and are unable to reach your site.

<comment><USER2> No. Amazon gives you an A record and asks you to make a CNAME for it. So when they change an ELB's IP, they update their A record. So in our case, we just make sure our A records follow along. Either way, a DNS cache holding onto a stale record too long would cause a problem.

Which is why Amazon keeps the ELB active on both the old and new IPs for a period of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you could use a cname for your MX record, what are the benefits of using ELB over what's already in place (weighted mx priorities, with the ability to relay mail away automatically on failure from AWS) ?

Also there's additional cost involved in using ELB.

I would prefer having a good dns provider, low ttl, EIP, nginx w/haproxy.

<comment><USER5> (Blog author here) I totally agree -- I don't think there's ever a good reason to use a LB for mail, for exactly the reasons you mention.

However, the problem with using CNAMEs for LBs is that you can't both host mail and a site at the same subdomain. Ideally, what I would want to do is set up redundant MX records for .pagerduty.com to our mail servers, and also set a CNAME from .pagerduty.com to the ELB for to handle the web traffic. The DNS spec doesn't allow this though (it would be ambiguous).

I've thought about using round robin DNS with a low TTL instead of an ELB. Problem there is you don't get all the fancy auto-scaling stuff. I've also heard rumors that some ISPs have their DNS servers configured to put a floor on the retrieved TTL values...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think you are blaming Amazon for a problem that is inherent in DNS, or possibly your approach to handling your DNS based features.

Unless I've drunk too much AWS Koolaid, I'm fairly certain you can run wildcard DNS for just the MX records for your domain. That entry would look something like:

*.example.com. 3600 IN MX 10 mail server.example.com.

Your mail servers can take the DNS synthesized domain from there I think.

BTW, I agree serving naked domains is a bit of a PITA, (appengine problem too!) but you can solve that by assigning a few elastic IPs to a few web heads and use RR DNS for them, with some code to take them out if one fails. Zerigo, for one, supports doing something like this IIRC.

302 anyone using the naked domain to the www. I doubt it matters much load wise as it sounds as if your running subdomains for your app like we do at Loggly.

<comment><USER6> I just realized you are probably running CNAME wildcards for the subdomains as well, which wold conflict with the MX one. How about running separate records for each subdomain?

<comment><USER5> Even with separate records for each subdomain, I think you'd still have the problem.

You'd need to do: acme MX (mail_server_ip) acme CNAME (ELB hostname)

... but that isn't allowed. The problem is with the records conflicting, not with the wildcard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant I'd rather say "load balancing needs SRV records" <http://www.anta.net/nic/draft-andrews-http-srv-01.shtml>

Is it widely implemented yet? Why not?

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell There's no need to use a load balancer for MX. The protocol it's self handles the problem of machines being offline. I agree with your point about not being able to point the root of your domain at an ELB though... I wasn't aware that you can't use a CNAME at the root.

<comment><USER5> The problem though is that you can't put MX and CNAME records at the same point in the DNS hierarchy. So if you want to host a site on an ELB at acme.pagerduty.com, you can't then put in MX records for acme.pagerduty.com, because they'll conflict with the CNAME you need to put there.

This all happens because it creates ambiguity. If you want to look up the MX record of a name that has both MX and CNAME entries (say acme.pagerduty.com), should the name resolver:

a) Grab the MX record at acme.pagerduty.com; OR

b) Do what is usually implied by a CNAME record, and pull the target of acme.pagerduty.com, and search for an MX record at that name?

Because of the potential for conflict, the DNS spec simply forbids CNAME records from existing alongside most other records.

<comment> mike-cardwell Of course. That's a pretty poor oversight on Amazons side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not sure I understand the issue here. Sure, the AWS ELS offering is lacking and the issues re DNS are known. But just like any of their other offerings why try and shoe horn the product into your requirements. ?

Our service required a load balanced service and just like you we identified the issues and decided we could not live with the limitations.

So we brought up a small instance and run HAProxy on it to do all our load balancing. We assign an Elastic IP and we get to retain control, avoid the DNS issues, do https etc.

Essentially avoiding all the limitations of the Amazon offering.

AWS themselves use HaProxy for Elastic Load balancing and its solid.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does the IP of the AWS load balancers ever change over time? Does anyone know the technical reasoning behind the requirement?

<comment><USER5> Yup -- they most certainly do. I think they switch around the name -> IP mapping in response to traffic rates -- if you suddenly get a surge of traffic, they'll move your virtual ELB instance to a physical load balancer that is currently lightly loaded.

Basically, they are doing load balancing for their load balancers. :)

<comment><USER9> Does this actually cause a disruption of service though? It seems like it would be trivial to just keep the configuration in place for 72 hours even after changing the DNS entry.

<comment><USER5> They actually do that -- they keep the old IP live for a while to prevent problems with clients that might have cached the IP.

<comment><USER8> So could we not update the A records IP address every couple of hours and still get roughly speaking the benefit of load-balanced load-balancers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, Amazon have been ignoring this problem for a while now. Here's a post I wrote on their forum over a year ago: [http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?t...](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=32044)

</comment><comment><USER11> Is this a joke or irony? (The blog seems to be down right now).

<comment><USER12> The title may be a little broad (his concerns are mostly in certain use cases, not in general) but he definitely raises some real concerns.

<comment><USER11> Let me be clearer - the link does not load for me. <http://blog.pagerduty.com> is dead here. <http://pagerduty.com> loads fine though.</comment></comment></comment>


The Internet Might Kill Us All - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2011/06/22/the-internet-might-kill-us-all/ <comment><USER2> It seems the threat is more subtle, though. China wouldn't bring down America informational infrastucture because no one wants to exchange nukes. But what if it's a kid from Peru? It's important to remember, within all the promise of technology: The key to the gates of heaven, is also the key to the gates of hell.

 _Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, give every human on earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before – that we now have an option for all humanity to "make it" successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment._

\--Buckminster Fuller, 1980 _

<comment><USER3> > China wouldn't bring down America informational infrastucture because no one > wants to exchange nukes.

What if (say) Iran did it, and made it look like China. They don't care if both China and the USA are destroyed, in fact they might see it as getting two enemies to destroy each other.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like this...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_%28TV_series%29>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OFF TOPIC (slightly)!

"...partner Marc Andreessen (the founder of Netscape and author of the first commercial web browser on the Internet)..."

Just to be correct: The founder of Netscape was Jim Clark. He hired Marc as first (or one of the first) employees. Marc did not write Netscape himself. It was the effort of a large team.

Don't distort reality!

Whoever did not read Jim Clarks book about Netscape (Netscape time): drop whats in your hand, buy it and read. You will have a good time!

</comment><comment><USER6> This seems like a crazy 180 degree turn in comparison to Steve's previous 2 posts - which talked about the reasons we are in a tech bubble.

This third article starts out by saying "tech companies are expensive again" and then goes and talks in-depth about network and communication based warfare.

Is it me or is this not addressing the topic at all? _Very_ interesting read, but seemingly random when compared to the rest of the series.

<comment><USER7> Ben's challenge was to name the date of the collapse of the bubble, and suggested that without that, there was no meaning to the phrase that we're in a bubble. Steve gave a large range (5-10 years) and changed the subject.

Ben's point was that if the bubble burst is 10 years out, then right now, the right thing to do was to invest -- that there was still a lot of real growth coming before over-exuberance set in, and I think that Steve is implicitly agreeing with him.

<comment><USER8> Ben's argument is a bit odd, because you can't predict the end of the bubble.

If you say 10 years, people start pulling out 9.5 years in. But, knowing that, smarter people will pull out 9 years in, hoping to beat out the people pulling out 9.5 years in. Then...well, you get it. Game theory. And that's how bubbles become unraveled.

<comment><USER7> I think his point is that saying we're in a bubble should mean that the right thing to do now is divest, because you can't precisely pick the date that it will end. It might not be immediate -- you might want to ride the bubble a little -- but you should be basically assuming that at any point, the over- valued companies are going to pop, and look to getting out of them.

If the right move now is to continue to invest -- then that means that the valuations are not bubbly.

So, 10 years to a burst is way too far out to cause you to divest right now, if we are going to have 10 years of growth before then. Even 5 doesn't mean we're in a bubble now, so Steve saying 5-10 years is the same as saying, "we're not in a bubble" (according to what I think Ben means). I think Steve understands that too -- and that's why he changes the subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Logic bombs planted on those systems will delete all the backups once > they're brought on-line. All of it gone. Forever.

Almost had me convinced until this line.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does any company rely on the internet to run a national power grid or other non-internet utilities? If they do, they're idiots. Use packet based control systems, but not the internet. There are some idiots, like life support systems using Amazon cloud.

If facebook and twitter break, it won't bring down banks, governments or corps, it'll just bring down facebook inc. and twitter inc. This is y2k level hysteria.

</comment><comment><USER11> Even if everything Steve speculates actually happens (and that is HUGE if) it will be very, very, very inconvenient, super inconvenient. But nope, nothing nearly as bad as a real war.

Imagine all your electronic savings gone... that leaves you with all your skills, health, your physical assets, what ever IOU you and everyone else can agree on the day after all banks information is wiped.... all hugely stressful and super inconvenient, but nothing like getting shot or bombed and killed.

<comment><USER12> I agree that it's a huge IF, but the repercussions are much worse than "inconvenience." You have to follow the scenario a few steps further to figure out the full magnitude of things. "Civilization" is, in a sense, a massive and highly complex life-support system. You don't really need it to live in a small town, but the populace of a city or even a large town can't survive without it. There's a saying, "Any city is only three days away from a riot." Without a massive and sophisticated logistical system constantly bringing new supplies in and waste out, food and other critical supplies will run out very quickly, and then things get ugly fast.

After the financial system is zeroized, how do you get paid? The company you work for has no money with which to pay you. They have no way to make money, because none of their customers have money to pay them with. If you're not getting paid, what's your incentive to show up to work? _Everybody_ would be in that conundrum, so commerce would grind to a halt and cities would start to starve. The government would order law enforcement and the military to keep working even without pay, and they could probably force workers in key industries like power companies to keep going to work, but they couldn't do that for everyone. Even if you had cash to buy groceries with, the grocery store probably wouldn't have groceries to sell to you because they would have no money with which to buy them.

The government could magically set account balances, putting money into everyone's pocket based on some sort of guesstimate, but that wouldn't really work, either. Fiat money is based on trust: the assumption that if you accept a dollar in exchange for goods, you will be able to turn around and exchange that dollar for a comparable quantity of other goods. If the financial system is zeroized, that trust is broken. People would rather have tangible assets instead of money of dubious origin that has demonstrated the capacity to literally vanish overnight. Hoarding and hyper-inflation would ensue.

The punchline of all of this is that millions of people would starve to death in the cities within a matter of weeks. Millions more would pour out into the countryside, looting and pillaging. Law and order would break down completely in all but the most remote places. Remote places would probably degrade much more gracefully to lower levels of technology, and bounce back quickly as well after the dust settled, but the cities and suburbs would literally be wiped out. An event like this would probably result in a death toll comparable to a widespread nuclear strike, and would equally destroy the nation as a functioning political and social entity.

<comment><USER13> _Millions more would pour out into the countryside, looting and pillaging._

While we're on the subject of apocalyptic scenarios, it's important to remember that there is an abundance of guns in the countryside, so any of us "city folk" hoping to loot some tasty country cooking are in for a different sort of treat.

 _An event like this would probably result in a death toll comparable to a widespread nuclear strike, and would equally destroy the nation as a functioning political and social entity._

I'd like to think that a new system of logistics would evolve very quickly after a total financial disaster, so long as the food supplies didn't get so low that peoples' low blood sugar diminishes their ability to control their anger.

<comment><USER12> > _While we're on the subject of apocalyptic scenarios, it's important to > remember that there is an abundance of guns in the countryside, so any of us > "city folk" hoping to loot some tasty country cooking are in for a different > sort of treat._

While the ratio of guns/people is much higher in the countryside, the absolute number of guns in a big city is orders of magnitude higher than the absolute number of guns in any rural county. Even if there were no guns in the city, a mob of desparate people _will_ charge a smaller number of better-armed people if starvation is the only other alternative. Also, rural populations are, by definition, spread out, making it easy for large mobs of looters to pick them off one homestead at a time. Those well-armed country folk aren't going to fare so well unless they are _really_ far from the nearest big city.

> _I'd like to think that a new system of logistics would evolve very quickly > after a total financial disaster, so long as the food supplies didn't get so > low that peoples' low blood sugar diminishes their ability to control their > anger._

I'd like to think so, too. In areas with lower population density, it will probably work out that way, in large measure because it is possible in a small enough community to know almost everyone, making trust and barter a lot easier. In cities, where trade relies on cash because there are too many strangers, and where the logistical system is much more complex, I don't think it's likely for a viable alternative to evolve quickly enough to prevent mass starvation and the accompanying violence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [My comment on the blog post follows.]

Great post.

Dug is absolutely right in saying that our present difficulties in computer security lie not with brute-force flooding of pipes (i.e., DDoS), but rather with targeted, strategic attacks on smaller subsets of systems (think Stux).

However, I would disagree with the statement "users are the new target". Indeed, it is far easier to gain access to resources by attacking the users who control those resources. But I think it is far more damaging (and therefore lucrative to the adversaries) to attack infrastructure systems on a wide-scale. People may be the initial entry point of the attack, but I still think the greater target is technology behind our infrastructure. Steve, you have addressed the very important point that much of our infrastructure (economic, transportation, military, …) is based on on solid systems operating securely and reliably. Let us call these critical systems. These are the ones that are vulnerable to crippling cyberattacks.

I posit that our infrastructure should not be based on these systems at all.

Any critical system should have no connection to the Internet. In fact, it should have no _concept_ of the Internet. One might go so far as to say that any critical system should have no I/O with the rest of the world. (Recall that Stuxnet was thought to be propagated initially by USB.) This would help ensure that infrastructure-crippling cyberattacks do not propagate. Though preventing a system from communicating with the outside world will drastically reduce its value in controlling our infrastructure. This is the unfortunate nature of the security-versus-usability problem.

How do we secure ourselves? Let us hope that we will simply enjoy a "new spring".

</comment><comment><USER15> > In the 21st century, authoritarian governments still fear their own people > talking to each other and asking questions.

I loved this quote. Would "irony" define this construct or is there a more specific term that would apply here?

<comment><USER16> The word 'irony' is very much overused. No, it would not apply here. Nor would tragedy, although I'd like to use that one here.

I'd suggest the word pathetic. Although a bit extreme, I do find our progress to be pathetic at times. We are still barbarians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's an argument for internet-offline utilities. Didn't Stuxnet prove that's not good enough? Windows outside, linux controlling computer, and custom (Siemens, etc) utility machine controllers, all unable to talk to each other, including USBs - then we might be safe.

</comment><comment><USER18> The Internet is used to control the military's: "logistics to command and control systems, weapons systems and targeting systems"

I know Steve read all the top secret manuals when he worked for a military contractor, but is this true? Specifically the part about weapons systems? Doesn't the military have a proprietary satellite communication system for that stuff?

<comment><USER19> Probably. I think part of his point is that these days it's very hard to have networks completely isolated from the internet. If there is only one host connected to both the internet (or a network that connects to it) and that proprietary network, it can act as gateway when compromised and unleash mayhem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Didn't they make a movie about this starring Bruce Willis?

<comment><USER21> The difference is that in the movie, it is a single bad guy (well, a small team of bad guys anyway). The story is different when it is a country orchestrating the attacks. Do we launch nukes in retaliation? Do they follow up their cyper attack with a nuclear attack? Or even just a coup? I'm a lot less worried about loosing all my money to some crook than I am to the US being overthrown (even if the government is just full of crooks)

<comment><USER13> _I'm a lot less worried about loosing all my money to some crook than I am to the US being overthrown_

I'm a lot more worried about the US overreacting to a cyber attack, or reacting to a forged country of origin. That seems much more likely than overthrow of the government. The day the US government said that cyberattacks could be considered an act of war, I'm sure there were numerous smaller countries and non-state actors scheming ways to make it look like Russia and/or China wiped out the US financial, government, military, and SCADA computer systems, triggering a physical war. It's kind of like the supposed automated USSR doomsday retaliation scenario, except anyone can pull the trigger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> RE "The Internet Might Kill Us All"

Good read, good points, reasonable possibilities... but a bit hyperbolic.

Looking on the bright side...

Scenarios depicted could end in massive death and destruction...

But wouldn't kill us all.

Not much consolation, but at least leaves some hope for a later and better iteration...

Though it might take another few thousand years to get back to facing the problem again.

<comment><USER23> The killing comes from the disruption of the food supply that occurs when Internet logistics fail.

However, I'm more worried about an EMP attack than a devastating Internet attack. A couple of well-placed EMPs could take the US back to the Victorian period very quickly. _One Second After_ is a great read on the subject.

<comment><USER11> _The killing comes from the disruption of the food supply that occurs when Internet logistics fail._

Really? You can't imagine that people would fall back on their word and paper? And that after a huge shock we would shake it off and get back to work?

Imagine a trucker. All the "logistics" went poof on Monday, it's Wednesday. Imagine the trucker decided to drive anyway, stops at a gas station he frequents a lot, him and the manager agree on a handshake and he fills up, and truck on. Makes his delivery, the local store clerks are still working despite now knowing how or if they'd get paid and for how many hours. Imagine that despite the huge confusion and uncertainty and everything taking 100 times longer, life still goes on. Can you imagine that?

Or alternatively, OMG the internet's down, everybody starve to death!

<comment><USER24> Or perhaps the trucker, the gas station attendant, or both get nabbed by crazed mobs of people wanting to loot the contents of the truck and the gas station. Watch some videos of, say, the LA Riots. Here's a video of truck driver Reginald Denny getting beat by a mob. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc_SgpyJWRY> During the LA Riots there was a lot less reason for people to loot and go crazy than there would be in a food and money disruption situation. I admire your confidence in believing in the best in people, but personally I'm skeptical about that.

<comment><USER4> You do know the LA riots were not caused by lack of internet service, right?

Rodney King was beaten by LAPD officers and it was videotaped and the officers were acquitted.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King>

If anything, riots would be caused by people reading and understanding this article:

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real- housewive...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives- of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Let the cloning of Mark Russinovich begin in earnest!

</comment><comment><USER26> You know, we have every indication a lot of companies and individuals are vulnerable, but the NSA seems to be pretty on top of things, and the closest thing to a sensitive gov't organization being compromised that I remember recently is the defacing of the CIA website- and heavens, that's just a plain old website.

</comment><comment><USER27> > _Logic bombs planted on those systems will delete all the backups once > they're brought on-line. All of it gone. Forever._

I am wondering how this is going to work, considering most financial institutions have cold-standby back up systems, often off-site or in another country and you cannot just overwrite backups like that.

This sounds way too much like SciFi FUD bla-bla and anyone using "logic bomb" as an argument is automatically suspicious. One of the beauties of the digital world is that given sufficient precautions, you can wipe all financial data as often as you like, you can always get it back from backups and those messages don't just exist at one point-of-failure but at a lot of nodes, very likely around the world. Data that took a whole department years to gather can be erased, transferred and made available again in a matter of seconds.

Banks have existed LONG before the interwebs and have only started to use network infrastructure during the last maybe 20 or so years - and though very limited, they would still be able to function without it by simply switching back to pen and paper like they did 40 years ago.

Contrast this to blowing up major infrastructure nodes like bridges, airports etc. which literally took years to build.

> _At the same time, all cloud-based assets, all companies applications and > customer data will be attacked and deleted. All of it gone. Forever._

It will be a grievous day... without petabytes of porn readily accessible at the click of my mouse, without news on LuLzSec and without the ground-noise of twitter and facebook updates about pets, lunch or bowl movements but I daresay I will survive that, thank you very much.

And companies storing that kind of critical information only in "the cloud"? They deserve to be gone. Forever.

<comment><USER7> Imagine applying STUXNET style cracking to this -- they would not explode "logic bombs" immediately. Instead you might have months or years of penetration into the live systems, the backups, the recovery systems, etc.

Maybe they figure out a way to affect the paper systems too -- FAX machine infiltration, etc.

He's positing professional warfare and extreme secrecy of results -- not the lulz style hacks.

<comment><USER27> One more thing about this... you can use about the same kind of explosives on buildings and bridges just varying amounts and methods of application.

Whereas screwing over the whole banking system of north USA like that requires the kind of cracking you described but against maybe a few hundred different targets, likely all running different systems and posing different challenges - not un-do-able - but ultimately to not that great avail. So you have a lot of effort actually pulling the attack off to even make a dent and then it is probably going to be not much more than a scary headline in the newspaper.

Banks and governments are not the internet or in the internet. They are offering their services ALSO over the internet but not exclusively. And the really important backups need to be kept for years and years, off site. I doubt it is as easy and efficient to launch "cyber war" on the USA and then just "cyber nuke them back to the stone age" which is something this article subtly suggests.

Also, how many power plants, reactors, flood gates and traffic systems are controllable over the internet like that? At least here in Europe I have honestly no idea but strongly doubt they work like that.

<comment><USER28> Of course, you could equally well just sow doubt with a few precise surgical strikes. If random customers lose all their money often enough, the rest of the customers will withdraw theirs to have it in physical assets.

Which is enough to cause tremendous damage. And a way more likely scenario.

<comment><USER27> My point was: you cannot simply just like that loose money without any trace of what happened... it's not like you can just "DELETE FROM accounts" and it is totally un-tracably gone.

I would trust more in the people who design our SWIFT and other transaction systems.

<comment><USER28> I wouldn't. After seeing such tremendous security accumen from CitiGroup, I wonder how you can blindly trust.

But the larger point is, even if you can mostly undo the damage, you have a much harder time restoring trust. The money doesn't need to be lost. If you create enough of a panic to trigger a run on banks, you've achieved your goal, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Steve Blank is the ultimate tech orator, telling the story from all angles no matter the topic. If you read the book Super Sad True Love Story it does not discuss a hacker war, but it does discuss a world where nothing is accomplished offline. I don't see any country building a security infrastructure that can protect it's citizens from such attacks.</comment>


China drafts law protecting foreign IP and prohibiting forced tech transfer - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2179368/china-drafts-law-protecting-foreign-intellectual-property-and <comment><USER2> Funny how the constitution of China is not enforcible. You cannot sue the government against its violation of constitution. On the other hand no one believes in the political rights promised in constitution anyway.

Edit: I am prepared to be downvoted. Running China mostly depends on the use of administrative branches. The law enforcement agencies, the prosecution agencies and the the courts are all subdivisions of corresponding governments, under the direction of corresponding party committee. The people's congress should supervise the government, de jure. But that only happened in a parallel universe.

<comment><USER3> Not sure why you think this will be down voted.

We learn in junior (or senior highschool) China's legal systems has a few fundamental issues: 有法不依 (laws are ignored), 执法不严 (laws are not enforced effectively). Those basically cover the problem you mentioned about the government.

<comment><USER4> Then the real question is why such a seemingly negative statement is favorable to the CPC.

If we rehearse these lines as Westerners, are we repeating a piece of propaganda? I think so.

My feeling is that the important narrative for the CPC is, "Everyone has it bad." It keeps people from questioning why senior Party members have it so good and how.

<comment><USER3> It's not favorable

It's just that these statements are taught to students, but they are not following the spirit of these statements either.

Do what I do, not what I say. And people are not really having the mentality of behave according to rules and laws.

I just point out that OP should not be down voted, as what op stared is universally known as a fact, it's just not only apply to government or rich and powerful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't stress enough how broken the Chinese judiciary is. You'd think the bias has to do mostly with big cases involving huge corporations. Unfortunately I learned first hand how crooked the system is. The laws don't matter when the other (Chinese) party submits obviously fake documents as evidence and gets away with it. Don't ever under any circumstance expose yourself to the Chinese legal system.

<comment><USER5> And thinking of this given how common the problem of permissiveness towards lying and fraud in China is, I guess even as a foreigner you could play this game and get away with it. So there doesn't even have to be the most primitive nationalistic bias going on. Most simply won't do this because of how tough our cultures are on such behavior. And even if you do you're still disadvantaged because of your lesser knowledge of the system and/or language.

Couldn't edit so made a new comment.

<comment><USER6> Without trying to get too political, using similar styles of lying can get you to become the US president. It's not about the lie itself as much as the willingness to bend the truth to fit whatever the narrative is.

Again, not trying to start up political discourse, but just want to point out this is not an inherently Chinese thing. It's more of a totalitarian thing really. Do/Say whatever to get into power and then stay in power.

<comment><USER7> You don't want to get to political, but the US is a totalitarian regime with a president who lied his way into office? I think you missed the mark a little there.

<comment><USER8> You can say a lot about Trump. But he was the most honest politician during the campaign. He told America exactly who he was and exactly what his base wanted to hear.

<comment><USER9> Telling your base exactly what they want to hear doesn't make you honest. There were a campaign slogan that he later said during another rally was just bullshit but he said it because it played well. There was a Daily Show where they showed it but I cant find it now but I can find things like this which illustrate the point: [https://www.independent.co.uk/News/world/americas/jared- kush...](https://www.independent.co.uk/News/world/americas/jared-kushner- donald-trump-lied-base-stupid-voters-supporters-president-son-in-law-white- house-a7764791.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Although the government will still have the right to expropriate the property of foreign investors under special circumstances, the new draft law requires that the process must be done through legal procedures and include "fair and reasonable" compensation._

Reading between the lines: no guarantee of any legal or financial protections. Your case can be deemed a special case, or go through the same "due process" that foreign firms have been subjected to for decades that typically end up benefiting the joint venture partner or domestic industry. And, even if you win, good luck getting paid.

Business as usual in the PRC.

See also:

[https://www.industryweek.com/intellectual-property/what- coul...](https://www.industryweek.com/intellectual-property/what-could-be- done-about-chinas-theft-intellectual-property)

[https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-11-28/paid-in-china- bill-c...](https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-11-28/paid-in-china-bill- collecting-poses-big-challenge-for-foreign-firms-101352629.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> As someone that has had an embedded product completely ripped off in China (well, it means we've arrived!)...

Any and all talk about China reforming IP laws fall squarely into _"I'll beleive it when I see it"_.

</comment><comment><USER12> Give some, take a lot. Considering the latest actions of China, I think this is just a bait and switch.

If you don't believe me, read [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Swindles](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Swindles)

</comment><comment><USER13> Law in China is ridiculous. Don't forget Chinese government arrest more than 100 lawyers in last two years

<comment><USER14> With a population of over a billion, that's a really low number. The EU and the USA together have around 850 million people, and I'd be surprised if they didn't arrest a hundred lawyers within the last two years too.

One person in a thousand is a lawyer = a million lawyers in China. One lawyer in a thousand is a criminal = a thousand lawyer criminals in China.

The scale of the country boggles the mind.

<comment><USER15> We know China is a big country. Did you actually assume the issue was the commenter wasn't aware of that? Incredible.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia- china-42743961](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-42743961)

> A prominent Chinese human rights lawyer has been detained while walking his > child to school, his family says.

> Yu Wensheng, a vocal critic of China's ruling Communist Party, was seized by > about a dozen people, including a Swat team, after he left his flat with his > son on Friday morning, his wife said.

[..]

> It is not clear where Mr Yu is being held, and local police told the AFP > news agency they were not aware of his detention.

> His wife, Xu Yan, told Reuters news agency: "I have not received any legal > document about his detention and don't even know what crime he is suspected > of committing."

[..]

> Mr Yu, a former commercial lawyer, has worked on many sensitive cases, > including defending other human rights lawyers detained by the government.

They're criminals in the eyes of the Chinese government. It's a bit like declaring people murdered by drones enemy combatants because they were murdered by drones -- not good enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a saying in China:

Legislation is stringent, enforcement is selective, violations are pervasive.

<comment><USER17> Russian variant of the same: "The severity of Russian laws is compensated by optionality of compliance with them." This, and the lack of independent judiciary branch, actually gives the government total power over the individuals and businesses. Laws (including tax laws) are written such that there's really no way to live and not break any of them, which is why the government always "has something on you" if it wishes to prosecute you or just take your money because you don't "share" it with government officials.

<comment><USER18> "Do you really think we want those laws to be observed? We want them to be broken. There is no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking the law. Create a nation of lawbreakers and then you can cash in on the guilt." \--Ayn Rand

<comment><USER17> She was speaking from experience.

<comment><USER16> That's one aspect, the opposite side of it is if you don't violate the laws you can't survive coz everyone else is doing so, powerful ones even get free pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At this point, if any country or countries with cheap plentiful labor gets it stuff together this could cause a problem.

<comment><USER20> But then it would be those cheap countries stealing IP. Just like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China before them.

<comment><USER21> And the United States was notorious for IP theft before them.

Fun Fact: the word Yankee is Dutch for pirate - not a coincidence.

<comment><USER22> there was no world trade organization or global free trade agreements back then.

Not to mention the most common thing the US is accused of was a former worker bringing his knowledge to the US and recreating a factory from memory. He didn't get paid by the US government to steal blueprints like China does today

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A shorter and more concise article [https://www.dawn.com/news/1453299](https://www.dawn.com/news/1453299)

</comment><comment><USER23> If read the article well, you will see that really nothing changes

> When in place, the new law would bar local governments from restricting > market access for foreign firms and from forcing them to transfer > technology.

> This will ensure foreign investors would enjoy the same privileges as > Chinese companies in most sectors except those excluded on a "negative > list".

This is exactly how it is right now.

There are really not a single national law saying that somebody has to transfer technology to a joint venture partner.

The few cases of _local_ provincial and subprovincial officials instating any extra requirements are just their "administrative creativity," and Beijing really doesn't mind humiliating local level officials some more few more times.

<comment><USER24> China is build on this "administrative creativity", 27K km of high speed rail is a prime example. Nobody will seriously work to harm Chinese giants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Laws mean nothing unless they're enforced. And, people have a reasonable expectation - and confidence - via anecdotes and lived experience, that you won't be pressured via informal means to take actions prohibited by law.

</comment><comment><USER26> OK, so laws are generally not followed in China.

Is it not at least true that _if_ China was going to start following these rules, making a law would be one of the steps that would be part of the process?

<comment><USER27> One day, if the Rule of Law ever means something of quality, substance and worth to your average PRC citizen, sure, having a law on the books might be helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Foreign investment law", does that implies the "forced technology transfers by administrative means" is still OK if it is enforced upon domestic companies?

</comment><comment><USER29> Great first start, but talk is cheap. What happens on street level will be more informative, I wish there was a way to measure this ...

</comment><comment><USER30> Yay for China. Too bad 99% of the businesses and people there don't care.

</comment><comment><USER31> Good luck getting the law enforced fairly, though.

</comment><comment><USER32> Okay, so China continues to play the game of make believe...

The real news will be when the US empire stops trying to force the concept of imaginary property.</comment>


Breaking: Loopt competitor Amp'd files for chapter 11 - <AUTHOR> http://www.moconews.net/entry/ampd-bankruptcy-filing-verizon-wireless-largest-creditor-with-33-million/ <comment><USER2> No more breaking than any other news. Especially once this hits the front page in a day.</comment>


BricaBox: Goodbye World! (lessons learned from a failed startup) - <AUTHOR> http://innonate.com/2008/06/19/bricabox-goodbye-world/ <comment><USER2> I'd be pleased to chat with anyone about the fun of a failed startup! Seriously though, stay tuned for more posts and lessons I've learned.

<comment><USER3> Could you talk about how you guys decided on the design for the front page? Or, more generally, home much time/money did you spend on marketing and was it in house or an agency?

IMO, it's pretty shocking. Your target market general population, people that don't have tech skills, etc. and the background on text look isn't exactly, um. . . inviting.

<comment><USER2> Sure... We did everything in house. For most the time it was two of us working on the startup -- like many startups in general -- and the design was conceived of by the lead developer.

We were investing $$ in a new design towards the end, but ran out of cash before we could get it out the door!

<comment><USER4> "It's here. After more than eight months of development, we've finally launched our pride and joy, BricaBox."

That might have been a little on the longish side

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll be honest - I'm pretty techy and I just didn't get it. What is a "social content app"? Why should I care? Clicking learn more didn't tell me anything.

Sorry, not very helpful now, but I am intrigued to know what the "technical itch" you were trying to scratch was, and how you felt it might relate to everyday people...

</comment><comment><USER6> Keep your head up! Learn, make mistakes, and get up! Best wishes to your future ventures!</comment>


How long should your "trial" period run? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sethlevine.com/blog/archives/2009/10/how-long-should.php <comment><USER2> I agree that signup should be painless, maybe just an email and verification, but I disagree with the short trial period. Maybe if your application is really trivial, one or two visits will work, but if it takes a while for the value to unfold, say with a collaboration or enterprise product, then the trial period should be longer. I would even advocate 60 days. A group or enterprise product requires a first adopter, who then has to recruit collaborators, and finally has to sell management. You dont want to cut this process short.</comment>


Cassini will make its final close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan on April 21 - <AUTHOR> https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/3027/cassini-heads-toward-final-close-encounter-with-titan/ <comment><USER2> CASSINI'S GRAND FINALE

[https://vimeo.com/210782375](https://vimeo.com/210782375)

"Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defense each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace."

<comment><USER3> What happens if you spend all your self-defense money on 'feeding, clothing, and educating the poor', and then a despotic nation which was spending 25% of it's GDP on military rolls over you?

<comment><USER4> The poor, uneducated and subjugated people of this "despotic nation" are the first folks we ought to feed, educate and look after.

Despots are created and thrive on the backs of hungry and hopeless citizens.

<comment><USER3> Okay, so we feed and educate some other nations people, so that nation can now afford to put 45% of it's GDP into weapons and military. I don't think that will accomplish what we want it to accomplish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sorry to be off-topic, but I really do despise the "stressed" narration voice of STEM media these days.

Am I the only one here who misses the balanced, informed, steady and smooth narration of Carl Sagan et al of yesteryear STEM media? Now all I hear is this over-ambitious, over-animated, low-content, and stressed voice with absurdly long pauses. Almost like somebody is shouting at you.

BBC are terrible for it in the UK, it seems like a race to the bottom. Whoever can superficially appear the most terribly "passionate" about whatever they're talking about gets the job...

Cassini rocks though, what an achievement for mankind the whole saga has been!

<comment><USER6> People need to feel excited: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGUNPMPrxvA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGUNPMPrxvA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They're going to fly between the planet and it's rings - but how? I was watching a show on Voyager 1 where they had originally thought about doing the same, but were glad they didn't. When Voyager got close enough to image the rings, there was quite a bit of debris between the planet and the rings. Apparently, it was enough to ensure the destruction of the spacecraft. Do they now know enough about that debris field, and now have accurate enough "control" (calculated by astrodynamics), to avoid a collision?

<comment><USER8> Even if they're taking huge risks going through a debris field, they're destroying the craft soon after anyway. If it actually is risky, it's probably worth the risk.

<comment><USER7> They're going to do it 22 times over 24 days before the descent into Saturn. The only thing I can think of is that the 2,000 km gap is close enough to avoid the debris, and perhaps they couldn't have calculated that close a fly- by with Voyager 1 with the knowledge and technology of the day.

<comment><USER9> It might have been a trajectory limitation. A major goal for Voyager 1 was to fly by Titan, and it may not have been possible to both fly through the gap and fly past Titan given the limited fuel available.

They might not have known the gap was there, either. Much of what is now known about the structure of Saturn's rings was first discovered by the Voyagers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The amount of data and images Cassini has collected over the years is really something extraordinary.

Here's a collection of such images: [https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/images/index.html](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/images/index.html)</comment>


Ask HN: I need to specialize.  Web, or iOS? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software engineer, with equal years web, equal years iOS.  I've decided, I need to specialize, and that means choosing either:
-  Web
-  iOS -  something else?
In the opinion of the wise technologists of this forum, given equal interest in the aforementioned fields, what is the "best career move"
In other words, whats going to be more valuable in 10 years? <comment><USER2> I vote web, not because I'm not an iOS user, but I see the opportunities if you're familiar with web languages to be larger.

When I say 'web', I don't mean just a front-ender, though there will continue to be large opportunity for great front-end devs on the web. To be a great front-ender, you need mad css and javascript skills. Those javascript skills can lead you into back-end web dev with node.js or desktop apps with electron/node-webkit, etc. While you're doing that back-end stuff, does some algorithm stuff catch your fancy? There's some node stuff there too, but maybe you start toying with Python or who knows what language? Want to develop mobile apps, there's phonegap. IoT (going to plug my own library here [http://getfavor.net](http://getfavor.net)), real-time coms, there's webrtc...

So, you could focus on learning Objective-C/Swift and become great at developing apps for Apple products (don't forget within their walled garden), or you can focus on javascript and whatever new platform comes out, you'll likely get a seat at the table and be hated by all your peers who are 'real programmers'.

I don't mind a bit of disdain, but I clearly <3 js.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neither, bots will develop apps in 10 years. Now, assuming AI does not take over our jobs, I'd say it depends on the kind of apps that you develop. The current state of technology allows for web apps to perform very close to native and browsers are ever more willing to let web apps access phone features. However, for some apps like games, image manipulation, etc. native code is a better choice. I am a specialized web developer, I do mostly 'business-type apps' and so far I have managed to run in the phone's browser or on top of a layer like Apache Cordova.

<comment><AUTHOR> So from the sounds of it your vote is:

Web.

And your reasoning is:

Web could replace native Obj-C / Java, on mobile platforms, in the future.

My response is:

That makes sense. I don't have much experience building a mobile app with web technology, but it seems to be more and more common, especially in the startup space (because you can kill 2 birds with one stone).

<comment><USER3> You kill 4 birds not 2. Your clients/employer will appreciate a single codebase that costs much less, both to develop and maintain.

There are drawbacks though. For instance, Android is very limited when handling images taken from a camera activity which was called by a browser, in fact this is a documented still unsolved bug. But Google itself is promoting the concept of 'progressive web apps' so one would safely assume that the end goal is to allow web apps to be as feature rich (and as performant) as native apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> well for the start, no body can predict what will be more valuable in 10 years down the road, and who ever says so, it is just mere speculation.

The best road to take for you will be the one which is paying you more right now, personally me being a CS graduate degree and a CFA, i would advise you to weight in scale what will be more full filling to your needs at present.

the best course of action will be the web instead the ios, and the argument here is pretty simple one, first there was ios, then there was android, then came windows, what do you know will come next, but web has been the web, no matter if the bots make it or the AI takes it over, all of those things will also require skilled and smart people to make all the things happen.

We do not yet live in the terminator age (as i like to call it). yes the technology has advanced, and the advancing of it also need specially skilled smart people. iOS or android are just a piece of the pie, why settle for it, when you can have the bigger bite or even the whole.

</comment><comment><USER5> A. Do you work with either at the moment? B. Will your current employment give you the opportunity to switch?

<comment><AUTHOR> A. I currently professionally do iOS. But, I also work on side projects using modern web technologies (React, Angular, CSS3, HTML5, etc.)</comment></comment>


An Insanely Detailed, Hand-Drawn Map of San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/09/an-insanely-detailed-hand-drawn-map-of-san-francisco/380547/

<comment><USER2> From reading the title I thought I would get to see the map, but I was disappointed to find the page only tells you where you can go to buy such a map.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not that it's not a cool map, but _insanely_ kind of implies that it's at least as detailed as a real map.</comment>


Show HN: Comparaison of Payment Methods for Remote Workers - <AUTHOR> https://remotehr.co/compare/ <comment><USER2> Paypal is esay, but other players getting into this [http://ipaymentsystems.com](http://ipaymentsystems.com)</comment>


SoftBank-backed Zume Pizza to lay off up to 80% of its staff - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1Z5257 <comment><USER3> Yikes! I just interviewed at Zume Seattle less than 3 months ago and they had over 100 head count open with plans for an office move that doubled the space. Wasn't the right place for myself at the time and I seemed to have dodged a bullet. Seems they banked a little to hard on their relationship with SoftBank and the promise of future funding.

</comment><comment><USER4> HN discussed Zume a few years ago when they launched (106 comments):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11980694)

A more recent article that didn't earn discussion includes this interesting tidbit:

[https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/11/21/20974979/zume-pizza- so...](https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/11/21/20974979/zume-pizza-softbank- fundraising-four-billion)

> _The four-year-old company has largely pivoted to an enterprise model where > it works with restaurants that have no storefront and prepare their food in > shared centralized kitchens, or "cloud kitchens"; with delivery providers > like DoorDash and Postmates; and with existing pizza companies to build a > hub-and-spoke model for the entire delivery industry._

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of the YouTube guy who sold microwave meals on Deliveroo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47u9tduwb8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47u9tduwb8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hindsight is 20/20.

On a Pitchdeck it may have appeared disruptive (therefore right up Softbank's alley), and not very far from Travis Kalanick's Cloud Kitchen.

 _"Pizza was our prototype," Zume CEO Alex Garden told TC's Brian Heater back in April. "There's no reason why this technology wouldn't work for any restaurant or any food category. Any restaurant who wants to adopt our system can now easily do that. They don't have to be experts in technology or appliance manufacturing. They can just be restaurateurs, who have a more flexible offering for customers."_

Nov 2018: [https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/01/zume-reportedly- snags-375-...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/01/zume-reportedly- snags-375-million-from-softbank-for-its-robotic-food-operations/)

</comment><comment><USER7> WOW... $300 mil to deliver pizza.

Also wasn't there a company on SV that PP bought that had a similar idea?

<comment><USER8> IIRC their business model was "buy pizza from Domino's - repackage it - <USER2> money" which at least explains its failure. As usual the show is much more sensible than reality.

<comment><USER9> Also called the Theranos business model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can at this point SoftBank Vision 1 fund chance to be even a modest success?

A lot of failures at late stage. Most of VCs can afford many failures as they invest early and one home run can make the fund, though investing late at high valuation limit the payoff.

<comment><USER11> Guardant is an unqualified home run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Guess I'd better order one soon.

I find it surprising that a service that delivers better pizza than Domino's/Papa John's, at a lower price, in less than half the time, to college campuses would not be popular.

Perhaps the Zume name didn't help or maybe their promotion was poor. Or maybe they needed a better pizza app. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER13> What's the point if they can't deliver a pizza cheaper (or significantly better) than all of the places with restaurants and hand made pizzas?

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://archive.md/PJ8Qr](http://archive.md/PJ8Qr)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. CEOs have started fearing Softbank now?

 _CEO Alex Garden has restricted communication between his leadership team and SoftBank 's investment team and other outside investors. Some sources speculated that Garden was trying to retain control of the negotiations due to concerns that SoftBank might try to make him step aside as part of additional funding._

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sliceline from Silicon Valley show :)</comment>


Ask HN: Are you having issues with Google Cloud? - <AUTHOR> We're experiencing some major issues with GCE creating VMs in a few different regions/zones, as well as massive latency issues on GCS.
Anyone else seeing the same thing?
I'm getting a ~20% rate of 500's on VM creation and ~2-3 second response times for some of our GCS calls. <comment><USER2> I've been having trouble with their codelab which runs on the cloud. It keeps freezing either when I am downloading data from a cloud bucket or trying to run some specific cells. This was yesterday though and will need to retry</comment>


Reader's Dead and Google doesn't want us to remember that. - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20130702191815/http://www.google.com/reader/about/#overview-page

<comment><USER2> I expect their robots.txt blocks it because (a) Reader was useless if you didn't have an account, and (b) Reader was useless without the server-side components.

Why do people ascribe malice to everything?

<comment><USER3> But, but... this is clearly some Orwellian scheme by Big Brother Google to rewrite history!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They do allow:/reader/play though, which probably redirects to /reader .</comment>