Why British police don't have guns - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19641398

<comment><USER2> Last year I looked into the number of British police officers killed (on the mainland) by firearms. It was 68 in 110 years.

[http://blog.jgc.org/2011/08/number-of-police-officers- shot-d...](http://blog.jgc.org/2011/08/number-of-police-officers-shot-dead- in.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, if a policeman carries a gun and is obliged by law to use it when stopping criminals, then it automatically makes encounters with armed criminals into a Voldemort vs Harry "only one can live" situation. I can see policemen not wanting to go this route.

<comment><USER4> > Well, if a policeman carries a gun and is obliged by law to use it when > stopping criminals

Where are police "obliged by law" to use guns or any other weapon?

My car has a spare tire. I'm not "obliged" to use it.

<comment><USER5> > My car has a spare tire. I'm not "obliged" to use it.

But you probably would if you got a flat tyre.

Also, when the the police are given guns they will also be given training and procedures that will require them to use their guns in certain situations.

<comment><USER4> > Also, when the the police are given guns they will also be given training > and procedures that will require them to use their guns in certain > situations.

I've socialized and trained with various police trainers. I've asked them about when police are "required" to act.

With one exception (a pedant who talked about the supreme court cases that I mentioned elsewhere), they all said "never".

Where can I find out more about this "training and procedures that will require them to use guns"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If UK police had sidearms as standard, we would get a criminal arms race and far more police would get shot. And thankfully, most of the police know this, which is one of the main reasons they don't want guns. For the same reason, if they were brought in, it would be almost impossible to go back again.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for support docs on your website? - <AUTHOR>

I need to build out some quick documentation for a SaaS offering. What wikis, blogs, or other method do you use for your public documentation, and was it painless to install, set up and administer? I'm on ubuntu with phusion and rails. <comment><USER2> I know it's almost a catch all generic response, but I've been using <http://tenderapp.com/> for support and knowledgebase and it's worked out very well.

I'm going to be watching this question for better options though</comment>


Mini Mac Plus - <AUTHOR> http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus <comment><AUTHOR> Pictures of it are in the final page [http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus&page=7](http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus&page=7)

Here is a video too: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=oMH8GGEcqQU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=oMH8GGEcqQU)

</comment><comment><USER2> It looks cool.

What is this? A Macintosh for ants? Zoolander.</comment>


First scientific report shows police body-worn-cameras can reduce use-of-force - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2014-12-scientific-police-body-worn-cameras-unacceptable-use-of-force.html <comment><USER2> I remember reading about designs for guns that video every shot fired with them (IIRC, in relation to police violence in South-Africa) and only allow their owner to fire it (a la Judge Dredd)

I cannot find a good link, though. Best is [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/disruptions- smart-g...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/disruptions-smart-gun- technology-could-prevent-massacres-like-newtown/?_r=0), which discusses Gijs that ID the person holding the gun.

I also found [http://security-today.com/blogs/reaction/2014/10/sensor- reco...](http://security-today.com/blogs/reaction/2014/10/sensor-records-each- shot-fired-from-police-officers-gun.aspx?m=2), which doesn't do he videotaping and is aimed at protecting officers, not at protecting the public.

Anybody have a better link?

</comment><comment><USER3> 2 things: \- This is the same test / trial that got a lot of publicity 6 months to a 1 year ago. \- The body camera manufacturer paid for all the cameras involved. From the full report, "We collaborated with Taser Inc. to provide all frontline officers with their HD bodyworn-cameras."

</comment><comment><USER4> This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

If police body-worn-cameras had been the norm in the US, we wouldn't have the riots (or at least not for the same reasons). Either because there would be substantial evidence against the police officers involved in the incidents that sparked them, or because there would be substantial evidence in their defense.

Additionally, the problem with police cameras during protests (at least in my experience in Germany) is that they are routinely turned off just before the shit hits the fan.

At the least, recorded evidence of police brutality that then isn't prosecuted would substantiate the claims of those currently accusing the police of corruption. It's better to be outraged about factual evidence, than about wild accusations.

<comment><USER5> Let's not blame everything on "police brutality". Anyone who is stopped by the police is not stopped just so a cop can beat him up. In all cases, there's a reason they were stopped and in all, the person reacted violently except in the most rare, actual "bad cop" cases (the only ones you read about).

Before this, there was research to show that recording people at a scene, such as protestors, and letting them know they are being recorded, also reduced violence initiated by such groups.

It's often ignored that clashes with police are virtually always started by people who failed to comply with the law or orders given to them.

For example, I know someone who has a business where protestors had gathered. The police allowed this large group of a hundred, or so, to do their thing until they blocked entrances to the businesses. The police ordered them to stay to one side of the businesses but few complied.

After three such warnings, the group was surrounded. Some pushed back, threw rocks and bottles at the police, spit at them, etc. Some started throwing punches at the police as they were crowded out and that's when things went really bad.

You can guess what happened next. People started yelling about "police brutality" as they grabbed the rock and punch throwers and had to drag them out of the crowd. As things got worse, they had to use tear gas and the epithets really came flying out.

In the meantime, my poor friend, whose business barely survives, lost money on what is normally his best day of the week.

<comment><USER6> Last year we had huge protests in Brazil. They were sparked by police brutality against a tiny, routine protest in Sâo Paulo. That thing spread to every other major city in the country.

Some state governments decided to send the police to the protests, some didn't. Guess what: where there were no policemen, the protesters went, did their thing, and no violence or damage to property was reported. Where there was police, the protest always escalated, and always in the way you decribed: the police sets some random arbitrary limit, the huge mass of uncoordinated people do not follow their orders, police attacks.

Take from that what you will.

<comment><USER5> So you're saying that, when protestors have no police to fight, they don't fight with the police?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Run sudo -k, set your clock to 01.01.1970, run sudo su and boom you're root - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/hukl/status/307469987826761729

<comment><USER2> From the FreeBSD man for date

      Only the superuser may set the date, and if the system securelevel (see
      securelevel(7)) is greater than 1, the time may not be changed by more
      than 1 second.

EDIT: so you need to be root anyway or have root access to change the date.

<comment><USER3> Users on MacOS can change the time without root access.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure? If it is it sounds like a possible security issue. Time is pretty sensitive as soon as certificates are involved. Many auth systems assume the clock is properly synchronized across the system.

If that's true IMO that's the security issue, not the arguably strange behaviour of sudo in a situation that should never occur.

<comment><USER2> well from the terminal

       $ date 010101011970
       date: bind: Permission denied
       date: settimeofday (timeval): Operation not permitted
       [15:45:41][email@example.com:~]

From System Preferences you can indeed set the date back to 1970:

       $ date
       Fri  2 Jan 1970 00:56:44 BST
       [00:56:44][firstname.lastname@example.com:~]

but there is a little lock that you might need to unlock (with a user password).

This does seem like a security issue on OSX.

<comment><USER5> Changing back 01/01/1970 via Date & Time preferences doesn't need authentication, but the exploit still didn't work, at least for me.

<comment><USER6> > Changing back 01/01/1970 via Date & Time preferences doesn't need > authentication

This is not true but it can be confusing if you've authenticated at all recently due to a grace period like sudo's.

<comment><USER3> I've never unlocked that panel, and I've rebooted recently, and still didn't need authentication. Are you sure that's as right?

<comment><USER7> The authentication for changing things via the System Preferences system is independent of sudo and "sticks" across reboots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> CVE-2013-1775 [0] in case you're wondering.

[0]: <http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2013/02/27/22>

<http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-1754-1/> <http://cve.mitre.org/cgi- bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2013-1775>

<comment><USER9> From the openwall link: > The vulnerability does not permit a user to run commands other than those allowed by the sudoers policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see your wonky authentication bypass and raise you a local privilege escalation that is 100% reliable on every distro that's shipped a 3.3-3.8 kernel (last 18 months or so)

<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/260061>

bad times :/

<comment><USER11> Actually it is already fixed in many distros. For example in Arch Linux it took a day to fix since the CVE request: <https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/34005> <http://seclists.org/oss- sec/2013/q1/420>

On the other hand my system here still crashes if I type file:/// with one big letter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR: users in /etc/sudoers can run code as root with sudo.

<comment><USER13> An evil person with e.g. a stolen SSH key can escalate privileges on a machine without needing the user's password. It's not simply about sudo working as designed, it allows bypassing sudo's user authentication entirely.

I can think of a handful of corporate machines (e.g. web servers) I've had pubkey access on where sudo allowed the real admin to gain root from the same account via sudo.

<comment><USER14> How are they going to change the date without having a path to superuser access already?

<comment><USER15> They could potentially spoof the machine's NTP server.

<comment><USER16> You mean, all of the NTP servers the machine uses. NTP will detect and reject a single server reporting bad time (assuming you have at least 3 servers configured, which is the recommendation).

You'd also have to do this when the NTP daemon first starts up, as:

           -g      Normally, ntpd exits with a message to the system  log  if  the  offset  exceeds  the  panic
                   threshold,  which  is  1000 s by default. This option allows the time to be set to any value
                   without restriction; however, this can happen only once. If the threshold is exceeded  after
                   that,  ntpd  will exit with a message to the system log. This option can be used with the -q
                   and -x options. See the tinker command for other options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From the vulnerability announcement, it seems like this only allows a user to "set" NOPASSWD for that user's sudo regardless of what's in sudoers. It also doesn't seem to allow escalation beyond what's in sudoers. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER18> It sounds like you're overlooking the fact that software could do this without your knowledge.

<comment><USER4> Software that can do this could also just wait for you to run a sudo command and then install a rootkit before the timeout is reached. Or it could keylog your password.

On desktop machines getting root is almost useless, you have all the sensitive information on the user account. Unless the attacker wants to install a rootkit in the kernel or open raw sockets or stuff like that. But if they can run arbitrary code with your UID you've probably already lost anyway.

<comment><USER18> I suppose that's true, but ideally there should be no situation in which you give a program or script access to a terminal with sudo's timeout unreached. Compromising information not stored on the machine should ideally require root.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting! Does sudo somehow get confused about checking for a password at all when the current date is the UNIX epoch?

I wonder, does this require the user to be listed in sudoers with any privileges or is it just straight to root?

<comment><USER20> This gives you only the privileges that a successful "sudo" would give you, and requires a previous successful "sudo". It's a nice hack, but hardly the end of the world.

<comment><USER21> It is, however, the beginning of the UNIX world

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if it would be possible to walk back the date using an ntp mitm attack.

<comment><USER23> Very, very difficult, unless the host relies on a single timesource. Best and common practice is to use 3-4 sources from different organizations in the ISC pool. It also wouldn't surprise me if most implementations of ntpd would have further safeguards about going 40 years back in time; at the very least the skew factor would make the clock change take a longgggg time to happen.

There are much easier attack vectors.

<comment><USER11> Actually I had to write a ntp spoofer for an university class. With arpspoof it is easy to manipulate all ntp traffic. At least ntpdate didn't complain when you sent it some years forward or backward.

<comment><USER24> ntpdate won't complain because it's entire purpose is to set the time on a system that isn't synchronized with the rest of the world. So it is expected that the clock may have drifted by a substantial amount, and it is only meant to be used occasionally. It is especially bad practice to run it from cron.

On the other hand, ntpd is a daemon that is meant to be run continuously. _It_ will complain if lower-strata time servers start jumping around, and has a built-in mechanism for ignoring time servers that seem to be giving incorrect time (compared to both other servers and the system's own idea of the current time). Note that, if having accurate time is important, ntpd also supports using external reference clocks with a pulse-per second connected to, for example, a serial port.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can someone explain this a little more?

<comment><USER19> sudo -k resets the "needs a password to be entered" flag by changing the last- password-entered time to appear to be the UNIX epoch (time 0).

If you then change the date to be the same day (which can be done without root permissions in modern Linux distros by using polkit or similar things), then you can use sudo to run commands as root without a password.

Presumably, sudo checks the 'last-successful-login' entry alone before deciding whether to require a password. It ends up thinking you've previously successfully logged in even if you've never actually typed in the needed password.

<comment><USER26> So there are two ways I can see to fix this. Either make setting the time always requires a password, or, add a signal that time-sensitive processes can listen to that gets tripped whenever time is altered.

<comment><USER27> There's a much simpler fix that is local to sudo. Sudo has to make the decision of whether to require a password. Just change the line that says something like:

      if (current_time - last_password_time > INTERVAL) require_password();

to

      if (last_password_time == 0
          || current_time - last_password_time > INTERVAL) require_password();

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Set your clock to 01.01.1970" BOOM, you can't! "date: cannot set date: Operation not permitted"

</comment><comment><USER29> It may be worth noting that local privilege escalation vulnerabilities have always been dime a dozen, this is just a more egregious one.

In your planning always keep in mind that anyone with shell-access to your server can become root in one way or another, if he really wants to. There is little "defense in depth" after that point.

</comment><comment><USER30> After using sudo from the command line, just remember to run sudo -K (note the capital-K) and you should be protected. The -K removes the timestamp which makes it impossible to reset it to 1/1/70 with -k.

</comment><comment><USER31> It works if you set your time through system preferences in OSX, Gnome and KDE on some distros. Changing it on those desktop guis does not require admin password. Also see:

<http://www.sudo.ws/sudo/alerts/epoch_ticket.html>

<comment><USER31> Also be sure to set the date including timezone offset.

On OSX run sudo -k, open date and time prefs. Set date to 1970-01-01 00:00:00 including timezone offset (+1 for CET) then run sudo su

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Debian unstable got a fix for this last night:

[http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/s/sudo/sudo_...](http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/s/sudo/sudo_1.8.5p2-1+nmu1/changelog)

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm surprised an issue that high-level's been able to lurk around for so long.

</comment><comment><USER34> Tried it on Debian Mint and it doesn't work. I can't set my clock without sudo.

</comment><comment><USER35> It doesn't work on Ubuntu, the clock gets reset back to 2010, for some reason.

<comment><USER36> Automatic time sync?

<comment><USER35> I set it to "manual" to change the date, and wouldn't it go back to 2013, anyway?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why does "sudo -k" still exist, when it has obvious risks and is superseded by "sudo -K".

Why does 'sudo -k' not check to see if a timestamp exists, and avoid creating one if it doesn't yet exist?

</comment><comment><USER38> Previous discussion, with a better link than to a tweet: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5299326>

<comment><USER39> Doesn't look like a whole lot of discussion.

<comment><USER38> Well, ya. I should have said previous link.</comment></comment></comment>


Adobe angers Chrome users by bundling browser plugin with security update - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/adobe-angers-chrome-users-by-bundling-browser-plugin-with-security-update/ <comment><USER2> > The plugin seeks permission to do three things; "read and change all data on > the websites you visit," "manage your downloads," and "communicate with > cooperating native applications." [...]

> it's likely that the extension itself is harmless enough

That seems unlikely given Adobe's history of truly awful security flaws. It wasn't that long ago when they thought that it would be a good idea for their add-on to pre-render PDFs in RAM silently in the background, including executing any embedded code without any sandboxing. Combined with browsers' prefetching of urls in a page (so that it would load quicker in case you clicked it), this caused a number of rootkit and other malware infections - from links that people didn't even click in search results and URLs served up in advertising or in comments/forum posts.

The only permission needed by a PDF viewer should be 'display PDF document content'. It shouldn't need to read or change other data, manage downloads, or communicate with anything to display an e-book or document. If it does, it's probably not harmless.

<comment><USER3> I'm not saying the permission request isn't overbroad, but "manage downloads" seems potentially reasonable. I'd imagine that some permission along those lines would be required for a PDF viewer to start displaying a document before it is completely downloaded.

Now I don't know that that is what they were using it for, whether they could have made a narrower permission request, and so on, but permissions are permissions because we want to permit them some of the time. I think it is counterproductive to dismiss requests before evaluating them. That's the kind of behavior that leads to kitchen-sink permission requests from the start (when users are most motivated to try something) because a developer doesn't trust that they'll get a reasonable targeted request tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The extension also collects basic information and sends this to Adobe. This tracking appears to be on by default, though it can be disabled through the extension's options page."

Another company collecting telemetry that you have to opt-out of. This needs to be illegal because often, by the time most people learn of the option, their information has already been snarfed.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone know if they collect data for everything you do or just when you open a PDF file?

<comment><USER6> Assume it's everything, because why wouldn't it be? They can't upsell you if they only track your usage of existing products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At this point, browsers should block all plugins not explicitly installed through the browser. I can't think of any circumstances in which I would be happy to find that some software I installed has automatically installed a browser plugin.

<comment><USER8> Chrome, to its credit, doesn't automatically load extensions that are installed this way. (Or at least it shouldn't; I've seen enough malicious Chrome extensions in my tech support years that I suspect there's a way to bypass this prompt.) That doesn't excuse the practice though; no software update should install additional features without the user's consent, and this is a practice that seems to be all too common in the industry.

<comment><USER9> I'd presented a short talk on bypassing the prompts in both Chrome and Firefox a few years ago (2013), and it was possible by just recreating the appropriate registry entries for Windows and few changes in preferences.json.

Was slightly easier for Firefox (few entries in SQLite, iirc). However both browsers lock the data stored, so you had to force a restart as well.

<comment><USER10> How could a browser protect itself from being "infected" from the underlying OS layer? Given that the malicious installer has administrative access, it's a hole new set of challenges if they can't trust their own filesystem.

<comment><USER9> It really can't, at the end of the day, which was the major point raised during the QA. Also, you don't need Admin rights, seeing as Chrome installation works without admin rights, and all user data is maintained on a user-directory structure.

<comment><USER11> Which is why chrome is moving toward a policy of only allowing web store extensions, end of story.

It sucks, and nobody is happy with it, but at the end of the day it's the only thing that seems to be working.

<comment><USER12> I expect to see these same companies try ever more fragile and bad methods to bypass these restrictions. If chrome refuses to load extensions from disk, they'll inject themselves into the process address space somewhere, which as a bonus will likely introduce sandbox escape vulnerabilities. This is what the AV vendors are doing these days.

<comment><USER11> They already try to do that. Hell some have even gone as far as to remove chrome, and install their own "infected" chromium compiled with their extension whitelisted and updates disabled.

It's terrifying. And while you could make a case for this "not being chrome's problem", the fact is that it's really hurting their user base, so they can't not do something about it.

<comment><USER13> AIUI, many of the top crashes of Chrome are from code injected into the address space (or rewriting the binary on disk). So yeah, it _is_ hurting their user base and as a result it is hurting them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Meanwhile, in the same ethical bucket, Oracle as recently as a week ago is adding a Yahoo! toolbar to your browser when you update Java, unless you uncheck their pre-checked opt-in checkbox. Sigh.

<comment><USER15> The scary things that happen when as a company, "hey, it's not like our users could possibly hate us more!" is true...and you're doing well financially for long periods of time.

<comment><USER16> There's no contradiction when the overlap between 'users' and 'customers' is as small as in the Oracle Java situation.

<comment><USER17> Which is why I'm so glad openjdk for Windows has a clean installer now. Malware free installer, works identically to the Oracle version performance wise (according to me, no real tests done), etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My mom was a bit upset when I told her she couldn't install Adobe or Oracle software on her new computer (iMac) a few years ago, but today the thing still runs like it just came out of the box.

Do the right thing, and tell your family and friends to stay away from this malware.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have a vague recollection of an incident, years ago, whereby Adobe installed Macafee whenever you installed a flash update. There was a little checkbox to control this, but it was checked by default. Pissed me off, i had get macafee off my computer pronto as it didn't get along with the anti virus i had already installed.

<comment><USER20> Yup. There was a huge internal commotion about this on our employee only general mailing list. The person who reported it was very shrewd, reporting the behavior as an open ended performance question. Employees in the Bay Area inmediately hated it. A VP had to step in and stop the discussion because it was happening in spite of our collective objection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really wonder how it feels to create user-hostile software like that that is borderline malicious and barely adds any value.

<comment><USER22> That's an interesting question. There was a good thread here on exactly that ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11806739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11806739)) a while back.

It was a Backchannel story about an "adtech" company in Philly: "The Perks Are Great. Just Don't Ask Us What We Do."

Basically, a surprisingly large number of employees don't know or don't care about the ethics of what a small number of leaders in their company do. Others justify such actions to themselves in convoluted ways. Only a small number truly can't deal with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My current beef with Adobe is that they took a perfectly good mobile version of Photoshop for Android, broke it into 5 separate applications, that when combined, don't even reach the full functionality of the application they are replacing.

Oh and they're each the size of the original app.

Who signs off on this?

<comment><USER5> The management was probably given a bonus for expanding their mobile presence five-fold between 2015 and 2016 :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Isn't this against the chrome ToS?

Can Google retaliate by removing their extension from the store?

<comment><USER22> Perhaps they can be persuaded if enough people report it as abuse. There's an option to do that when you remove extensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Someone really really needs to fix browser plugin permission system so that control can be very very fine-grained, and it's easy to review what information has been passed back and forth.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, but only about 5% of users are going to benefit from such a feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Given that Chrome itself was often bundled with Adobe Flash and Reader security updates I'm not sure they've got much of a case.

[https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1053973](https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1053973)

</comment><comment><USER27> Jeeze adobe, try digging up.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, do the users know that Chrome itself sends a bunch of data to Google? On principle, I consider both Adobe and Google's practices to be abhorrent, but practically speaking Google definitely has the better record on product reliability and security.</comment>


Online life faking services exist now - <AUTHOR> http://lifefaker.com/ <comment><USER2> lol</comment>


Cryptocurrency will always be political - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-bitcoin-paradox <comment><USER2> Apropos crypto + political : excellent must read by Yanis Varoufakis, an economist that I greatly admire (but not always 100% agree with), on "Bitcoin and the dangerous fantasy of apolitical money": [https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/04/22/bitcoin-and-the- da...](https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/04/22/bitcoin-and-the-dangerous- fantasy-of-apolitical-money/)

<comment><USER3> I probably say this every chance I get but the cleanest insult I've ever seen on the world stage was when, as Greek finance minister, he called eu austerity measures "fiscal waterboarding".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My friend sent me a meme today that illustrated a view (not his) of what hardcore Crypto evangelists believe. In full disclosure I am not one, but believe there is probably some utility in it, I own a decent amount of BTC (not enough to make me quit working...enough to make me think about buying a house in the near future, depending on taxes), and I understand what the community is trying to do.

It was a meme of a scene from the Matrix.

>Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can trade my Bitcoin for millions some day?

>Morpheus: No Neo. What I'm trying to tell you is that when you're ready...you won't have to.

This view I think starkly disturbed me because it seems to signal that hardcore Hodlers really do think that on a long enough timeline the whole economic system collapses.

<comment><USER5> That you won't have to sell your bitcoins doesn't imply the "whole economic system collapses". It just means you can buy all the goods and services you need directly in bitcoin.

<comment><USER4> That makes no sense whatsoever. If I _can_ buy everything in BTC that demonstrates that something happened very wrong that makes USD untenable for basic, or any kind of, transaction.

<comment><USER6> That's a very American-centric view. The fact that Amazon UK accepts orders in euros doesn't mean that the pound is untenable for any transaction. Similarly, Amazon accepting Bitcoin (thus meaning you can buy almost everything with BTC) doesn't make the dollar obsolete.

<comment><USER4> Please. Normal Forex is not the same as a deflationary crypto currency being trusted enough for normal transactions. If in the future I indeed can buy everything with cryptocurrency then I stand by my feeling that something must've gone quite wrong.

<comment><USER5> Why is it not the same? It'll be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This cryptocurrency article misspells Bitcoin and Ethereum. o_O

<comment><USER8> Yes, lets dismiss it altogether. Crypto is adverse to the core culture of software engineering. Keep shunning it and it will go away. Lets not be disrupted.

<comment><USER6> This is only tangential, but I really hate everyone calling cryptocurrencies "crypto" (and Wikipedia "wiki"). These words had meaning before, you know, and it's really confusing if you start overwriting a term. "currency" was added to "crypto" to form "cryptocurrency" because the word meant something already.

<comment><USER9> urm, it did?

i thought it was just a shorthand for cryptography previously?

don't see a problem with shortening something else to the same string, as both are just terms you use because you're to lazy to actually spell it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since currency is created by consensus, it's inherently political. Currently the political system underlying bitcoin - in which formally, decisions are made by voting with hashing power and informally, the bitcoin core developers and a handful of large miners / pool operators have enough power to call the shots - is a disaster.

However, even deeper than this social/political structure is a value system shared by bitcoin users - there are some changes to the system that would not be accepted by users no matter how much hash rate or which influential community members backed them.

</comment><comment><USER11> It seems that the article is trying an artsy way to introduce cryptography and hashing:

 _Communication is easy, but it's hard to tell who knows what. Messages pass one another in corridors; conversations fragment. When A replied to B, had she received your message yet, or was she reading C's? Did she ignore what you said because she didn't like it, or because it had yet to be delivered? When D proposes a simultaneous attack on the wardens as they deliver dinner, how many people received it? When A confirms to D that she's in, will D see the message in time? Will D know that B saw it?

Here's one solution, if a strange one. Write a message with a very difficult mathematical problem on it—a problem so hard that it would take a month of concentration to solve. Now wait._

And I don't get the point of this. Is cryptography bad because it needs to ensure things are not intercepted in between?

</comment><comment><USER12> In the traditional economy, ledger or account are mapping real transaction, just like a shadow of the truth. We build a huge economic system to make it work. Whole economic system will be collapse when we use cryptocurrency.</comment>


How Aristotle Created the Computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/aristotle-computer/518697/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Great article on the philosophical and mathematical ideas that lead to the computer.</comment>


Non-stick mayonnaise packaging being developed - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33344955 <comment><USER2> I am 100% certain that I have already purchased mayonnaise in a plastic jar advertised as being non-stick.</comment>


20 Smartest Companies to Start - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/09/01/8384349/index.htm?postversion=2006102617 <comment><USER2> Becoming an SMS spammer is among the 20 smartest startup ideas? That would be pretty sad if it were true.</comment>


The BETA Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://cs.au.dk/~beta/ <comment><USER2> An oversimplified story is that BETA is the response from the creators of SIMULA (arguably the first object-oriented language) to the languages it inspired (e.g., Smalltalk and C++). More here: [1]

There are some interesting and unique concepts in BETA, but IIRC the most interesting is the "pattern":

>The abstraction mechanisms include class, procedure, function, coroutine, process, exception and many more, all unified into the ultimate abstraction mechanism: the pattern. In addition to the pattern, BETA has subpattern, virtual pattern and pattern variable. This unification gives a uniform treatment of abstraction mechanisms and a number of new ones. Most object- oriented languages have classes, subclasses and virtual procedures, and some have procedure variables. Since a pattern is a generalization of abstraction mechanisms like class, procedure, function, etc., the notions of subpattern, virtual pattern and pattern variable also apply to these abstraction mechanisms. In addition to the above mentioned abstraction mechanisms, the pattern subsumes notions such as generic package and task type as known from Ada.

[1] [http://kristennygaard.org/FORSKNINGSDOK_MAPPE/F_BETA_hovedsi...](http://kristennygaard.org/FORSKNINGSDOK_MAPPE/F_BETA_hovedside.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> As I learned on a trip to Denmark years ago, BETA remains relevant because of the students who worked on it[1], many of whom have gone on to do important work in languages and virtual machines. Don't be surprised to see some of their nostalgia should they happen to spot this thread!

[1] [http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/10/08/a-systems-software- do...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/10/08/a-systems-software-double- header-surge-and-goto/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Curious if anyone finds this language pretty to look at, a lot of punctuation :/

[http://cs.au.dk/~beta/doc/beta-intro/Quick-Reference- Card.ht...](http://cs.au.dk/~beta/doc/beta-intro/Quick-Reference-Card.html) [http://cs.au.dk/~beta/BETAbookExamples/BETAbookCode.html](http://cs.au.dk/~beta/BETAbookExamples/BETAbookCode.html)

<comment><USER5>
        (# Heavy: ^Syntax;
        do
          &NotBeautiful[]->ToLookAt[];
          &PleaseRemove[]->AllThoseRandomCharacters[];
        #)
        --- there must be another way ---
        --- and use spaces ---

<comment><USER6> Only needs a few tweaks to be valid strict/warnings compliant Perl :)

      (# Heavy: ^Syntax;
      do {
        &NotBeautiful()=>ToLookAt();
        &PleaseRemove()=>AllThoseRandomCharacters();}
      )
      ;sub NotBeautiful{};sub ToLookAt{}
      ;sub PleaseRemove{};sub AllThoseRandomCharacters{}

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Time to take another look...

...hey, for loops that take just a single integer and implicitly loop from 1. Interesting.

Just checked my (Objective-)C loops, and of the 500 with

       for (i=

440 start with

       for (i=0;

That's 88%. So looping on integers that implicitly forms a range starting from 0 seems like a reasonable addition for Objective-Smalltalk. "Looping" is already defined as higher order functions on collections and ranges, so all we need to do is map the number to the appropriate range and done.

       -(void)do:aBlock
       {
          [[@(0) to:[self sub:@(1)]] do:aBlock];
       }

Try it out:

       > 4 do:[ :i | stdout println:i ]
       0
       1
       2
       3

Nice. Thank you, BETA!

</comment><comment><USER8> A much better object oriented language than C++. I was not fond of its syntax but liked its uniform treatment of a number of different abstract mechanisms via "patterns".

</comment><comment><USER9> Heh, back in the 90s I designed a DSL for programming mobile robots called ALFA. It was an acronym: A Language For Action. I had planned to design a follow up language called BETA: Better Even Than ALFA. But it never happened, and now I've been scooped. Oh well.

<comment><USER10> You could go the other way with BRAVO

<comment><USER9> I could make it the same language: Bravo Recapitulates ALFA Very Overtly :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I own the language reference, which I got as gift for attending ECOOP'99 in Lisbon.

The language is quite powerful, sadly its concepts never managed to get into mainstream.

<comment><USER8> Is this "Object oriented programming in the beta programming language" by Madsen, Møller-Pedersen & Nygaard? ISBN-0201624303. It's available online now.

<comment><USER11> Yep.</comment></comment></comment>


Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it? - <AUTHOR> http://andreasgal.com/2015/03/30/data-is-at-the-heart-of-search-but-who-has-access-to-it/ <comment><USER3> Sigh, this is incorrect.

edit: incorrect is perhaps too strong, it is incomplete.

While it is true that click tracking can be used as a relevance signal, the people who were _really_ pissed off when the data stream got dumped were advertisers who wanted to buy AdWords. That was a very simple system, pay someone for clickstream data, extract trending queries, front those with AdWord buys to get your page on the top of Google's results, and profit.

Having built a search engine and run it for 5 years, we got to see what people felt was relevant and what wasn't in a very loose way with click stream data. Basically you have a query and 10 blue links you can split the results in quartiles and figure out if the thing they clicked on was top half, bottom half, top quarter/second quarter etc. And do A/B testing to see how that played out. But what we found was that the best indication of what a page was about, was the text that linked to it. If you have an in-link to a page which was "<href='page'>great radio site"[1] then "great radio site" would be a query that should return that page which might be titled something like "bob's electromagnetic spectrum imaginarium" or something equally unlikely to come up in a query string.

So the bottom line is that there are lots of ways to try to determine relevance, click stream data is a part of that but by no means the biggest factor.

[1] neutered html for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER4> The value of looking at queries is that it allows learning what questions users ask. The front end of the search process is to infer from the query what the user really should be given. That's a machine learning problem. The head of Google search remarked recently that "as the search engine gets smarter, the queries get dumber".

This is reflected in Google's search results. A Google query which can possibly be interpreted as related to a popular culture item usually will be. Google has become more aggressive about this over the years. Their "Did you mean" result tag once offered an alternative for a second search. Now, they return results for the more popular interpretation first.

The back side of search, page quality and ranking, is weaker than many think. Links are less useful than they used to be. Most links to business sites are now from "social" sites or forums, which are easily spammed. Using social signals was a disaster back in 2012, when, for a few months, Google went all- in on social signals. Google tried to recognize sites that "look like spam", but everybody knows that now and spam sites look better than ever. (The same thing happened with spam emails a decade ago.) Google doesn't recognize provenance, so they can be fooled by scraper sites. Google doesn't recognize the business behind the web page, so they can be fooled by marginal businesses. There are even SEO companies using machine learning to reverse engineer Google's algorithms, to find out how far they can go with keyword stuffing before a penalty kicks in.

Google does far more manual adjustment than they did two years ago. There's an army of people doing manual ranking, and a smaller unit handing appeals from manual penalties. There was a time when Google boasted they did no manual adjustments to ranking. The automation is starting to fail.

<comment><USER5> 1noon (Korean web search startup) tried to recognize provenance and was somewhat successful. But that wasn't enough to win in the market. Naver acquired 1noon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >In Germany, for example, where Google has over 95% market share, competing search engines don't have access to adequate past search data to deliver search results that are as relevant as Google's. And, because their search results aren't as relevant as Google's, it's difficult for them to attract new users. You could call it a vicious circle.

This is interesting because of the browser choice enforced by the EU on Windows. IE whose default is Bing lost share to other browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Opera which all had Google as the default. So an attempt to fix the browser market totally distorted the Web Search market. I wonder why MS didn't request to the EU that the alternate browsers in the browser choice screen had to have Bing as the default search.

I wonder if the EU will mandate that search relevancy data must be shared by Google with rival search engines like DDG just like they mandated that SMB shares and Office formats must be documented by MS and released to developers.

<comment><USER7> Ethics and morality aside, I'm curious what allows the EU to "enforce" laws on a US company. Let's say Google and Microsoft don't register entities in the EU. Can they do anything?

Can Microsoft and other US-based technology companies _theoretically_ just keep doing their own thing, tell the EU government "to hell with it, we're abiding by US laws, you have a choice to stop importing Windows and invent your own OS if you don't like us"?

<comment><USER8> The EU is the world's largest economy, do you really want to shut your _entire_ business out of that market?

What then happens if a competitor is established to take your former position in the European market - chances are they're not just going to stay in the EU. They're going to eat your lunch elsewhere too.

<comment><USER7> How would the EU shut you out? Would the EU actually dare to begin censorship?

<comment><USER9> No, of course not by censorship. Through: fines for monopolist practices (happened to Microsoft), general smear campaign (happens to Amazon in Germany over working conditions), poking with a stick (the "right to be forgotten"), or just plain old taxes (the new "internet tax" is a current topic in the EU). There is always a way if you are determined enough. Politics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Other than the index data, there's something even bigger.

Google's biggest PR success is convincing everyone that the quality of web rankings depends almost purely on algorithms. It does not. What allows Google to hold their monopoly is the $100s of millions (or more) they continuously pay to amass more manually created training data:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/27/google_raters_manual](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/27/google_raters_manual)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/11/27/is- google...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/11/27/is-googles- algorithm-really-just-1500-homeworkers/)

A new search engine could appear today with algorithms 10x better than Google, but without access to this scale of training data, their rankings wouldn't even be close to Google's quality.

Google maintains their position by paying cash for this monopoly on training data made by tens of thousands of $9/hour workers, not through superior algorithms!

</comment><comment><USER11> I think a problem that is happening here is that there is no competition in search just like there is no competition in social networks and operating systems. Not like there are for things like automobiles, electronics and clothing.

Computers introduce a means to lock people in that don't exist in other markets. In software products there are often ecosystems that tie directly in to the product/service which are not required to be shared with competitors unlike with road systems for cars.

Regulators ought to look into ways to enforce measures that require the companies to completely open their ecosystem to competitors. Or look into ways to standardize these ecosystems and require every service/application/website comply with them (similar to how media companies are forced to include closed captioning).

<comment><USER12> "Jobs did great harm to the world with his iThings: computers designed to be jails for their users. His genius was to find the way to make these jails desirable so that millions would clamor to be locked up." —Richard Stallman

<comment><USER13> What is more open, a Chromebook or a Windows laptop or a Macbook?

I would think a Windows laptop or a Macbook because the users and developers can install or develop any application, yet we have everyone singing the praises of heavily DRM'ed and locked up Chromebooks and iPads. Sometimes I feel it's more about Microsoft hate than about a free computing environment. At least RMS is consistent and is less prone to company fanboyism than the tech crowd.

<comment><USER14> Chromebooks are locked up now? I thought you could install your own Linux on them. Don't some even use coreboot?

<comment><USER13> You can install Linux on Windows PCs without even needing to developer unlock, doesn't that mean they're as open as Chroembooks. Not to mention things like if the battery goes completely dead on some Chromebooks, Linux is completely wiped along with the data and replaced by ChromeOS. Also have to press Ctrl-D past a vscary warning on every single boot on some Chromebooks or flash a new bios.

Can Mozilla make a Firefox for ChromeOS? How many Chromebooks that are being dumped in the education space are having Linux installed on them? Google has root on ChromeOS and the user doesn't. The whole purpose of them is to force the user into uploading all their data into Google's cloud. That's why even a $1400 machine has a paltry 64GB of storage but comes free with a few years of 1TB space on Google Drive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In South Korea, Google's market share is below 5%, and Naver gets more than 80% of search queries. I think this is the reason why Google's search results for Korean contents are not as good as contents in other languages.

</comment><comment><USER15> So the whole push for SSL/https from Google has been opportunistic rather than good practice. I mean why would a search engine go as far as to make SSL a ranking signal?

<comment><USER7> Sites that use or at least offer SSL probably also tend to be higher-quality sites. The combination of verified identity and payment means that it's a natural filter for people who are at least semi-serious about their project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It makes you wonder how many changes were made for "privacy" and how many changes were made for "protecting our business".

<comment><USER17> Is it necessarily an "either/or" situation here? This seems to me like an example of a "both/and".

<comment><USER16> That's fair. I just wonder which half was the selling point that made the change happen.

<comment><USER18> It's honestly hard to say. Privacy is a selling point, especially nowadays.

My guess is that the proposal probably included the cliche "win/win situation," had already been sitting in someone's back pocket, and the raising of it was either sparked by some privacy-related news story -or- a market event of some kind. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

I think there are a handful of techs that lend themselves to natural monopoly --basically anything where the expense of building sufficient infrastructure for a minimally-competitive product requires previous success in the market. This is true whether the infrastructure is copper lines or a body of previous searches.

That means you're either one of the first ones there with low cost of entry and building on your own successes (Google); or you're shifting to the market from success in an unrelated area (Bing); or you're essentially locked out unless you can somehow acquire access to that infrastructure.

My guess is search will eventually turn into an antitrust-regulated industry. Really depends on whether up and comers like DuckDuckGo can really stay relevant based on ideology and whether old players like Yahoo can really re- enter the market successfully.

But the most likely scenario really appears to be a duopoly between Google and Bing at best, and more likely simply a monopoly for Google.

The analogous solution to telecom would be forced access to search queries for alternative providers (a la CLEC/ILEC) but privacy concerns will make the situation interesting to say the least.

Possible it may eventually turn out that mainstream search engines simply have no specific privacy protection, at least for aggregate data. Since that's in both the corporations' (market leaders aside) and government's best interest, seems plausible. That'd be a lot of power behind it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting. I wonder to what extent this reasoning was behind executive support of the Chrome project, and whether it was a factor from the onset or something that Google stumbled upon after developing a browser.

<comment><USER5> I am 100% sure this is the reason Chrome was funded. (I don't doubt Chrome developers' goal was to develop the best web browser in the world, but business case for doing so is different matter.)

<comment><USER20> Chrome was also an insurance policy. You can't buy away Google being the default search engine in Chrome. Imagine pre-Chrome browser marketshares and imagine the impact the Firefox-Yahoo deal would have had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >In 2011, Google famously accused Microsoft's Bing search engine of doing exactly that: logging Google search traffic in Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser in order to improve the quality of Bing results.

MS didn't do that from IE, they did for users who installed the Bing bar, a huge difference.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the author's perspective is skewed in order to stay in line with the title. Here's an example of why I say that:

The author states that "For some 90% of searches, a modern search engine analyzes and learns from past queries, rather than searching the Web itself, to deliver the most relevant results." This may be true in some types of searches but overall, I think the statement is misleading.

Rather, it's better to think of it like this: One important part of the algorithmic process involves constantly crawling the web and updating the index with new information. (Important / frequently-updated web sites may get crawled all day every day, while ones that are less important may get crawled only weekly or monthly). Meanwhile, another part of the algorithmic process constantly analyzes new info discovered in the crawl and combines it with, as the author-mentioned, click-through data learned from past queries.

The answers to many queries don't change, while the answers to many other queries deserve freshness. For example, I'm quite certain Einstein's date of birth hasn't changed in quite a while, but his theory of relativity is in constant discussion and there is always new information and new queries pertaining to it. As a result, there is not much need for a search engine to go digging for the latest info on an "einstein's birthday" query, but it's to everyone's advantage that Google is able to identify which pages on the web deserve priority crawling and that Google has retrieved and incorporated the fresh info those pages contain into its index when it comes to a topical type of query like "diffraction of light with quantum physics".

In the end, the results to every query depend on info gathered from the web and user data helps refine the results. Info that is more static can be prioritized with more input from click-through data, while new information found on the web must rely more on Google's artificial intelligence to push it up in front of searchers.

Another reason that that "90%" statement sticks out to me is that there is a fairly often-used factoid tossed around industry experts that between "6% to 20% of queries that get asked every day have never been asked before." Google can't rely heavily on past query data for all of these type of searches.

<comment><USER10> You're vastly underestimating the uniqueness of search queries these days. Various sources within Google have said that 25% to 50% of queries entered into Google have never been seen before at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So does Mozilla's contract with Yahoo allow Mozilla to track query data and maybe feed it to underdog search engines like DDG or Blekko (oops)?

<comment><USER23> AFAIK ,the deal with yahoo was about putting yahoo search in the front. If it was about tracking Google search data - mozilla should have at least let people known, especially with their claim at protecting privacy. And if they lie ,they risk a very strong response, especially from developers they depend on.

Also ,if such changes we're to be made, there's a decent likelihood that someone would have noticed that data leakage and told us about it.

So since mozilla is a pretty decent company, we should currently give them the benefit of the doubt.

<comment><USER20> I don't see any reason to doubt anything or for that matter give anyone "the benefit".

Firefox is still open source, unlike IE, Safari and Chrome, so just look.

<comment><USER23> Yes you're right. They probably couldn't do those games even if they wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So that's why Google created the Chrome browser.

<comment><USER13> Not just created, but bundled and installed with default by Java and Flash updates some of which also install the Google toolbar into IE. Many folks that I had converted to Firefox from IE back in the day use Chrome now and have no idea how it ended up on their computer. This explains the steady rise of Chrome, not the few percentage of tech geeks that installed it by choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, since Google tracks the full browsing experience of chrome users, and hence gets more relevant data than for other browsers users, it has the theoretical ability to offer better search results to chrome users.

Has anybody noticed this happening ?

<comment><USER25> (Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employers. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google, not on chrome)

Google does not "track the full browsing experience of chrome users". Please read the privacy policy which is very clear on this subject: [https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/](https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/)

I particularly draw your attention to this paragraph: "If you use Chrome to access other Google services, such as using the search engine on the Google homepage or checking Gmail, the fact that you are using Chrome does not cause Google to receive any special or additional personally identifying information about you."

<comment><USER23> Maybe i'm reading this wrong, but this sounds like Google gets your browsing history:

"If you sign in to Chrome browser, Chrome OS or an Android device that includes Chrome as a preinstalled application with your Google Account, this will enable the synchronization feature. Google will store certain information, such as HISTORY, bookmarked URLs as well as an image and a sample of text from the bookmarked page, passwords and other settings, on Google's servers "

And this isn't that far from full browsing behavior.And that's from a few minutes reading this page - we don't know if they track deeper details - <USER2> how long the page was open.

Also - Google doesn't have to collect this data. The claimed purpose of this is that you could share history on multiple devices. But this can also be achieved by sending encrypted history to Google and decrypting the history on each device you use(i think browser extensions with similar functions implement this in that way). So it's clear the purpose here is collecting data.

<comment><USER25> Notice that this is a feature you have to turn on (try it!). Obviously in order to perform cross-device synchronisation, it's necessary to send this information.

I'm not free to discuss the details of how these systems work, but consider this: if both the statements "Google will store this information" and "the fact that you are using Chrome does not cause Google to receive any special or additional personally identifying information about you" are hard requirements, how would you implement this feature?

<comment><USER23> Of course "the fact that you are using Chrome does not cause Google to receive any special or additional personally identifying information about you." could be true.

But Agreeing to sign to the history sync feature is something different , not covered by "using Google Chrome".So now Google is free to use your history.

And let's be realistic here. Most people don't think about the implications of login into Google(even if it says sync of bookmarks , history etc) and probably don't read the instructions. Many even don't understand what it means. And realistically most people see a Google login box which they filled a million times, and fill it once more, as a sort of a pavlovian response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Training data is nice, but I think its important not to underestimate capacity for crawling. IMO one of Googles strengths is that they crawl large quantities of new content. Smaller operations like DDG can't crawl at that scale. If I want discussion new bugs, search the articles at my favorite newspage (where the inhouse search is unusable), or just want the newest blogpost on some subject - Google is hard to beat.

</comment><comment><USER27> At this point Google is not winning because it's search results are good (have you used Google recently?), it is winning because it makes almost 10x as much revenue as other search engines do per view -- at that rate any other search engine is running a charity.

<comment><USER23> It's really pretty weird. Google certainly has the capabilities to offer a great search experience, but it's very incosistent.

For example after learning i like the results of a certain journals ,their personalization engine offered me those in releated searches. and usually i chose content from them.

But somehow, after some time, Google's personalization engine forgot that i like them ,and stopped offering me content from them, so i'm back into drowning in shitty results. Why ? no idea why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seems like there is a business opportunity to build a plugin of sorts that allows users to opt in and share their search data with competing platforms. I'd be interested in donating my data to help a rival engine compete with Google.

</comment><comment><USER29> Only when user can own his data which means Apps are just logics and user can allow access to whomever whatever selectively we can suddenly find more genuine things reaching the user be it commerce or content.

</comment><comment><USER30> It is unsettling to read this kind of chip-on-my-shoulder opinion piece full of innuendo under the Firefox logo and the Mozilla name but on the author's personal domain.

</comment><comment><USER31> TL;DR - Yahoo! still exists and resents Google. But not for being better in their niche, no. Just for delivering a better _service_ , which is not at all the same thing. Somehow.

</comment><comment><USER25> (Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employers. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google, not on search quality)

This article makes a number of bold claims about the contents of data and code which its author hasn't seen, and is written by a company that is receiving a large amount of money from Yahoo. I would encourage people not to forget these details.

<comment><USER20> So just point out where it's wrong, instead of making a fairly disingenuous appeal to non-authority or however you want to call it?

<comment><USER25> I don't speak for the company, but I don't think we're going to respond to an attack piece by the Mozilla CTO by disclosing how our search algorithm works. ;)

In any event I'm not a person who can decide to release that information. All I can do here is to ask people to think about what evidence has been offered and the motives behind this article.</comment></comment></comment>


First-class environments. Discuss. ;) - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3861 <comment><USER2> I always though it would be cool for a language have a special array-like object called 'scope'. To test if a variable was in scope you would say something like "if 'a' in scope:". It could also be useful in debugging. You could definitely abuse it, like global variables or Javascript's arguments.caller, but with great power comes great responsibility.

<comment><USER3> What's the use case? Isn't this something the compiler can determine statically?

<comment><USER4> You could potentially manually/dynamicaly manipulate the environment to an advantage.</comment></comment></comment>


Voyager 1 Hits Rumble Strips At the Edge of the Solar System - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/508496/voyager-1-hits-rumble-strips-at-the-edge-of-the-solar-system/ <comment><USER2> Godspeed, Veeger. Godspeed.</comment>