Designing Crypto Primitives Secure Against Rubber Hose Attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical-sessions/presentation/bojinov <comment><USER2> "While the planted secret can be used for authentication, the participant cannot be coerced into revealing it since he or she has no conscious knowledge of it." Quite interesting idea. But don't we now move from "rubber hose" to "Please sit down and authenticate here." territory?

<comment><USER3> Unless it somehow fails subconsciously when under duress, yes, so this has no practical applications I can think of. It's still fascinating research, though.

The problem with deniable cryptosystems that make it intractable to prove you've complied, like the old stegfs or the not-quite-as-old Marutukku (aka Rubberhose, which Julian Assange worked on by the way) is that it really sucks to be the keyholder! You can _try_ to secure a system against duress disclosure, but you can't safeguard the people as well - it is possible to make wrench-resistant systems, but unfortunately not wrench-resistant kneecaps. I don't think any good solution exists for that: that's a physical/political/legal/OPSEC problem, not a technical one.

<comment><USER4> It's also impossible for the key holder to prove to his assailants that he has provided the correct keys, so there is little incentive to comply in some situations, since you will likely be killed / tortured, either way.

<comment><USER5> The best of both worlds. Tortured until you reveal your password, then tortured some more!

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Valuable if you want to ensure the confidentiality of the data no matter what - but you'd better _really mean_ that "no matter what", because if the eventuality arises where the system's properties might be desirable, those same properties essentially spell your own doom.

That and the disk-space penalty for the compartments (either fixed or stochastic) meant that, even in areas of potential forced key-disclosure, these systems didn't take off and are as far as I know mothballed and unmaintained.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not this paper again. It can't be used for cryptographic usage and the title(which is the original title of the paper) is completely misleeading.

The device you're authenticating must have the secret you're authenticating with in it in a retrievable format. So it can't be used for e.g. disk encryption, etc, because the attacker can just get the secret from the device and decrypt.

All it can be used for is authentication, and for that they require a human security guard to ensure it's actually a human playing the authentication game. If you were to attach a computer, its likely it could impersonate you. So almost completely useless (except for getting people's hopes up).

More discussion here : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4266115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4266115)

</comment><comment><USER7> This paper is from a few years ago, but I think that for folks who aren't quite as in to the net/info security side of things, it's better to think of "rubber hose attacks" as a polite way to say "having to fight too many subpoenas from a more wealthy adversary".

Hopefully doesn't apply to your businesses, but it sure delayed a lot of things in the 80s and 90s before the EFF/CDT/and so on helped settle a lot of the law that we take for granted now.

(No I do not work for the EFF, CDT, or any other TLA. I just think that programmers and painters both need to be cognizant of copyright)

<comment><USER8> Nothing will save you from discovery in a civil case. You either hand the data over, perjure yourself and hope nobody has evidence the data existed, or get sanctioned then the court make an adverse inference that you the evidence must have been bad and can use that against you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that the finger-prick scanners from Gattaca are the future. We already have them in the form of diabetes scanners. They could look for matching genetic material to identify the user, and generate a hash based on the average amounts of hormones in the body, for example. It would only produce the correct hash if you felt 'normal', so a flood of fear hormones or an abundance of drugs would make it throw an invalid hash.

<comment><USER10> Do you actually need to prick for that? Both fingerprint scanners and thermometers (cf. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood_ring](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood_ring)) already exist; analyzing reflections of the finger may provide even more information.

A computer that doesn't work when the users is stressed is still going to get defenestrated, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This really has nothing to do with crypto primitives, but is all about memory. One would still use exactly the same crypto primitives and protocols as we have already, just the method of memorising secrets would be different.

It would be interesting to see how their approach does against attacks against _subconscious_ reactions that can nevertheless be measured by more sophisticated devices.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmm, training 30-40 min, authentication 5 min. That's a huge inconvenience. It's very interesting research but I don't see this being used in real life.

<comment><USER13> Well, one has to think of the contexts in which rubber hose cryptography might be used. If you're a political dissident or whistleblower, you might invest the time. Think Edward Snowden, etc. Clearly this is not meant to lock your phone. :)

<comment><USER12> Even if it was used for launching nukes. Do you want the president to play a game for 5 minutes to give consent? It's unrealistic.

<comment><USER14> > It's unrealistic.

I think you'll find this is true of most academic research :)

<comment><USER12> Yes but the commenter was arguing specifically for this method being applied in real life. While my opinion is that the research is very interesting but that's unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This might be useful for password recovery in some scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER16> yeah I fail to see how this actually defends against the `I'm going to hit you with this rubber hose until you login` attack

<comment><USER17> If you don't know the password to your system it can't be forced out of you.

For example, if you have a password algorithm that takes an input value (lets say a website name) and a seed that is stored on your system somewhere (that you don't have memorized), concats them together and then hashes the result to generate the password, the rubber hose attackers would to both beat the input value out of you and have physical access to the machine your seed is stored on to recover the password.

<comment><USER18> The trick, it seems, is to be able to convince the guy wielding the rubber hose that you don't have the information he wants.

"Give me the password!" "Password to what?" {whack}</comment></comment></comment>


More Details About Project Spartan - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/30/introducing-project-spartan-the-new-browser-built-for-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> It seems to me that one reason IE declined was because developers hated it. So we stopped using it, we stopped relying on IE-only features, we started implementing features IE didn't support, we threw our weight behind alternatives, and we labeled IE as uncool. Maybe I'm overestimating how big of an influence we were, but I don't think our influence was trivial, either.

That's why I'm kind of surprised that this preview of Spartan is not really developer centric.

You can talk to and write on web pages?

As an end user ... cool. Not really revolutionary, but cool.

As a developer, though, I don't really care, unless it is easy to build things in IE. For years, IE gave us headaches and heartaches. Give us something that makes up for that, please.

<comment><USER3> IE lagged behind other browsers. It did not implement the open standards that the others did. That has nothing to do with developers not liking IE. It has everything to do with how Microsoft had a monopoly on the browser market.

<comment> chao- To hear Brendan Eich tell it, Microsoft's mindset went beyond simply "We have a monopoly so we can do whatever we want." It was a conscious "The web isn't the future" attitude. From the JavaScript Jabber podcast:

 _" After IE6 they took the team down to a skeleton crew and they stopped fixing bugs. They had horrendous security bugs and page layout bugs and DOM bugs and networking bugs. And they just said, 'Ah, the web is over. We're going to do Windows presentation foundation,' which became Silverlight. 'We're going to do .NET. The web, that was a passing fad, sort of like television.' So…"_

Now whether or not Eich is the absolute authority or not on this, I can't say, but he certainly interacted with them enough to have a deeper perspective than the average, frustrated dev in 00's.

(Source: [http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of- javascript...](http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript- with-brendan-eich))

<comment><USER4> I interned at Microsoft when they were trying to ramp up from from the skeleton crew. The impression I got was that this was part of it, but also that Microsoft was averse to innovating on IE after the US antitrust case.

<comment><USER5> Microsoft didn't need to do any "innovating." They just needed to adhere to existing and emerging standards. Also, Microsoft needs to seriously stop using that word "innovation,"because the more they talked about it, the less they actually did. It got to the point that Microsoft fooled themselves into thinking that everything they did was innovation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm still very wary of this new browser. Microsoft keeps saying since IE9 that they finally delivered, but it's not the case yet. IE still lags behind and still has quirks.

I actually downloaded the IE11 VM from [http://modern.ie](http://modern.ie) the other day to give it another chance. A not very pleasant experience. After boot, I was greeted with a desktop background with some instructions, presented as a badly compressed JPEG. I'll be honest, and vote me down if you must, but I'd be ashamed to have delivered this kind of work. Make it a PNG or a BMP even, it's not going to inflate the 4GB download size noticeably.

As for IE itself, I cannot really judge its rendering because VirtualBox doesn't seem to run Windows 10 accelerated, and I think the font rendering in particular suffers from this. I can't say though.

It still has some quirks that need to be worked around. I noticed this particular JavaScript problem.

      var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest;
      xhr.timeout = 1000;
      xhr.ontimeout = function() {console.log('Error')};
      xhr.open('GET', '/');
      xhr.send();

This throws an exception in IE11. IE only allows timeout to be set between open() and send(). It's allowed to be set at any point per specs, even after send().

[https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#the-timeout- attribute](https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/#the-timeout-attribute)

Microsoft has documentation, from the time of IE8, which clarifies this. Apparently nobody at Microsoft cared to fix this since.

> The timeout property may be set only in the time interval between a call to > the open method and the first call to the send method.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ie/cc304105.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ie/cc304105.aspx)

So I tried to report this as a bug. IE doesn't have a public bug tracker, only what appears to be a way to send "suggestions" to the IE team. I read a few of them. There is little activity. You basically only get a formal PR-like response.

Microsoft still has much work to do.

<comment><USER7> Windows 10 introduced a major VM-screen-breaking bug a few builds ago. Screens can't be sized properly anymore. And acceleration seems to be broken (at least, I hope so, otherwise there's a huge perf regression). Users of VMware and VirtualBox are complaining. Posts to the forums get "answered" by idiot moderators that insist this is a VMware problem (despite VirtualBox not being made by VMware).

VMware says MS broke the APIs for screen resolution and they won't fix and hope MS does. OTOH, VMware Workstation is pretty much an end-of-life product with no real updates in quite a while.

Overall, it's bizarre. You'd think that in a beta, usage in a VM would be really high, leading to not having regressions on such common "hardware".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Marketing bullshit, 0 technical information. "More Details" = "First, be an amazing browser .."

</comment><comment><USER9> The software engineering process in browser development seems completely broken. W3C delivers only human-readable specs, and no reference implementation, and no complete test suite. How can we ever expect browsers to be functionally correct?

<comment><USER10> The W3C does publish specification tests:

[https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests](https://github.com/w3c/web- platform-tests)

[http://testthewebforward.org/blog/2013/02/20/testing-the- ope...](http://testthewebforward.org/blog/2013/02/20/testing-the-open-web- platform.html)

<comment><USER11> To be fair, until a few years ago the testsuites were mostly terrible and laughably bad — little more than skeletal things to ensure there was some basic interoperability (and not necessarily covering all the features of a spec). It took a huge push from a lot of people to get to where we are today; I remember pushing for the CSS 2.1 testsuite, which was one of the first to have a reasonable number of tests though it's still far too shallow, to be largely automatable and getting a fair bit of resistance (because of fear of delaying the testsuite and the spec demonstrating interoperability of implementations and reaching REC), and that was in 2010 (though, holy cow, that's almost five years ago now!).

As far as reference implementations go — I'm on the whole against them (you can end up having to implement bug-for-bug compatibility, which doesn't help anyone and if those bugs fall out of implementation details they can lock you down into specific implementation designs). It's better to have clear, unambiguous specs (preferably with next to nothing undefined) and multiple interoperable implementations — because it shows that the spec is clear enough for multiple people to implement it and come up with the same result. The machine readable route is a dangerous one — you don't want to end up in a situation where everyone just uses the same implementation, because monocultures aren't at all great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hmmm

First I thought Spartan was supposed to be a browser that embraced standards and got rid of years of IE non-standard workarounds.

Now they're extending that model with "Inking and sharing", and distraction free reading view. So the baseline browser is going to be different on different devices unless all of the devices are from Microsoft.

I think they're over estimating their ability to control the market's standard user expectations.

<comment><USER13> Inking, sharing and reading mode are user facing features. Standards in web browsers have to do with the APIs and rendering and such conforming to standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish they would commit to the name "Spartan." I don't think the full "Project Spartan" is a good name for a browser. And replacing it at this point with something completely different would squander the goodwill from all the prerelease buzz.

<comment><USER15> It's a pretty fitting codename, originating from the Spartan Program from Halo:

"...using performance enhancing equipment and augmentations to make them stronger and faster than previously thought possible..."

I think they should stick with it as well.

<comment><USER16> It's very interesting how much Halo plays an influence into the Microsoft world. It started off with Cortana and now we have a Spartan project!

(on a side, I thought it was ironic how the article said "Cortana is more tightly embedded into the new browser". Like what next? HUDs!?!)

<comment><USER17> I think halo is a good smart marketing move to associate future Microsoft consumer products with halo. The 360 is by far microsoft's biggest consumer electronic success, and halo it's flagship franchise. Kids growing up now with the 360 will know it, and it's not associated with the boring windows enterprise stuff. And if you don't know halo, the names sound okay anyways.

I mean it was that or resurrect clippy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Now with new inking capabilities, Project Spartan enables you to write or type directly on the page, comment on what's interesting or clip what you want – then easily share this "Web Note" via mail, or a social network._

I'm really, really not sure how this is going to work in an era of single page apps. Presumably it can only really send the URL, so unless a developer has been very strict about using pushState (and good on them if they have) I think we'll see a lot of broken experiences with anything other than article web pages.

<comment><USER19> I assume it's similar to how OneNote does things, which is to create a metadata-rich copy of the page you select (as opposed to a screenshot, which isn't searchable) while keeping as much of the formatting intact as possible.

It's probably very useful if you ever do web research or need to review web content (I do), but I'm not sure this is as big a deal as they're making it out to be. Might be some box-ticking for marketing ("make sure you find a use for the pen!!!").

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Three requirements for me to consider IE again:

0\. Fix the font rendering. Enough of this WPF/Metro blurry style crap.

1\. Give me an addon/extension system so I can get vim bindings and blocking systems.

2\. Fix the ugly, unfinished blocky UI around the tabs and address bar, and stop wasting so much space on the top window border. I know this sounds superficial, and it is, but IE just looks so ugly, or like an unfinished dev preview, and for some reason that bothers me.

<comment><USER20> I don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just include a WebKit or even Chromium fork right in the OS.

They could have > 90% browser market share again.

<comment> UK-AL Competition is good, it brings invocation. A monotone world would be very boring.

<comment><USER21> This is not a universal law of the world. There are times when using a common technology is better.

In this specific case why is "competition good" and who cares about boring when it comes to developer's productivity. Being able to code against one browser and being certain that it works properly in all browsers would be a tremendously wonderful thing for everyone.

To sacrifice that ideal vision so that things aren't "boring" doesn't seem worth it to put it kindly.

<comment> UK-AL Then you get no one trying different js engines, or trying different approaches rendering.

IE6 was pretty much a monopoly, how well did that go?

<comment><USER21> Webkit does not include the JS engine. And the different approaches to rendering is also incorrect. Google has Blink which is - for all intents and purposes - Webkit.

IE6 was closed source, and under control of one company. Webkit is open source with contributions from many major organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Clippy is back!

<comment><USER23> "going to a restaurant's home page will bring up a message, reading "I've got directions, hours, and more." Clicking the message brings up a sidebar with the restaurant's contact information, location, reviews and an OpenTable reservation link" [1]

More pay-per-click than paperclip?

[1][http://www.pcworld.com/article/2891948/project-spartan- leake...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2891948/project-spartan-leaked-heres- how-cortana-will-work-in-microsofts-new-browser.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So how about its speed? Internet Explorer on mobile and other devices (like Xbox) has always had horrifically bad canvas performance, rendering the majority of HTML5 games unplayable on those devices. Will Spartan be addressing that in any way?

<comment><USER24> Downvoted because you disagree that IE has awful canvas performance? Or just don't want to talk about it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The main thing that excites me is that it's not Webkit. Google has infested it's rendering engine into everything, even my favorite: Opera.

Having competition is great, I will give this browser a genuine shot.

<comment><USER26> WebKit doesn't belong to Google (Apple started the project as a fork from KHTML), and they don't even use it anymore, they forked it in to Blink, which is what Opera uses.

<comment><USER27> "They don't even use it anymore" is a bit of an exaggeration. "They made a fork of WebKit and renamed their fork Blink" is more accurate. It's still pretty close to the same thing.

<comment><USER28> They should be over 100k commits apart by now.

A lot happened in those 2 years.

<comment><USER27> Well, sure, but a lot more happened in the preceding 10-15 years. Blink still has more in common with WebCore than it does with, say, Gecko, Trident or Presto.

<comment><USER28> As a web developer or user, you can't really see the similarities anymore. The basic stuff like CSS 2.1 works the same everywhere. It's the new features where the browsers differ.

[http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+TP,firefox+39,chrome+44,safar...](http://caniuse.com/#compare=ie+TP,firefox+39,chrome+44,safari+8)

Chrome matches Safari in 57 cases. However, Chrome matches Firefox in 61 cases. So, going by the implementation status of those features, Chrome might as well be using a fork of Gecko.

Here is the script I used:

        for (let b = 1; b < 5; b++) {
          let r = [0, 0, 0, 0];
          [].forEach.call($$('tbody tr'), function (row) {
            for (let i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
              r[i] += +(row.cells[i + 1].className === row.cells[b].className);
            }
          });
          console.log(r);
        }

Output:

        [130, 35, 36, 48]
        [35, 130, 61, 36]
        [36, 61, 130, 57]
        [48, 36, 57, 130]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting they're saying 20 years and beyond. I wonder if other browser developers are thinking that far ahead.

<comment><USER30> They say that. 20 years ahead is way too hard to predict with any meaningful features. (Does Spartan ship with JavaScript events for brain interfaces?) Really it just boils down to the fact they're starting a big browser project with a fresh slate from today.

The most a browser can really do is make the architecture sufficiently modular and extensible based on a layered architecture. The web stack has always done pretty well at that anyway and even more so with the newer low-level standards like fetch and service workers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how they plan on overcoming the decade or more of stigma attached to Internet Explorer. A pig in lipstick?

</comment><comment><USER32> Looks like they're trying to scoop Genius (formerly RapGenius) with the "annotate the web" thing.

</comment><comment><USER33> _sigh_ if only either Spartan or EdgeHTML were open source

<comment><USER34> I actually asked the IE team about that. They said they weren't planning on doing that.

Which I think is a shame because I like being able to follow comments in Mozilla's/WebKit's/Chromium's issue trackers and mailing lists. It gives you a much clearer idea on what's being put into the browser's and when they'll be available (or why they won't).

Their are other reasons such as not having to worry about them trying to lock me into their OS because websites will only work on their browser and it's exclusive to their OS. Also, making everyone have to reverse engineer bugs to get sites to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> wow looking at that video you'd think software is no longer a male dominated field. problem solved.

<comment><USER36> Are you criticizing their video for having _too many_ women?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Wordmove 2.4 acts as a command runner, tight to your WP deploy flow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/welaika/wordmove/releases/tag/v2.4.0 <comment><AUTHOR> Run arbitrary commands locally or on the remote stage, before and/or after push and/or pull actions.

Test, build, do environmental checks, clean-up, send chat messages, add-your- flow-step-here, all withing your favorite WordPress deploy command line tool.</comment>


Too many classic films remain buried in studios' vaults - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20151025-column.html <comment><USER2> The description of these films and their value reads like a word for word explanation of why we have the public domain. The author described Warner Bros as the "Gold standard" \- making re-releases on protected media one at a time, just in time to extend their copyright.

No, the gold standard is the Library of Congress, digitizing thousands of Edison wax cylinders and putting them online for researchers, artists and curious people to use for free. The gold standard is allowing people to see and hear and reuse what these great artists created, because it's undeniably a part of our cultural heritage.

Almost a hundred years later, and the third party inheritor of the rights is drip feeding paid access to the world. "Gold standard" indeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are technical angles to this that weren't mentioned in the article. For example, we are constantly getting better at restoring and digitizing film. If we digitized a lot of these films 20 years ago, they wouldn't look nearly as good as today (and those digitized today will probably look like crap on our 8k TVs of the future).

Countering that is the fragile nature of film. Not only do they degrade over time, but they are also highly flammable. When you store thousands of them in vaults, it isn't unheard of for the entire thing to literally explode. We have gotten better at preventing that over the last few decades, but that was a consistent problem for much of the 20th century. If we don't digitize some of these soon, we are running the risks that they will be lost to time.

<comment><USER4> Scanning 35mm at 4K is likely to be as good as it's gonna get, right? This link seems to indicate so: [http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html](http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html) \- So it seems like the technical capacity is there to get nearly all the info out of 35mm film, today.

I do appreciate even 720p copies of film, as the quality just looks so, so, much better than stuff from the 80s/90s targeted at VHS/DVD. The biggest sin being the idiotic producers' idea to record Pink Floyd PULSE at Earl's Court for live transmission, and thus use low quality recording equipment. It's one of the best visually-amazing concerts, and there will never be a high-quality version, ever. (After a long time to restore it, they released a DVD version, but it's not even really DVD quality.)

<comment><USER5> From what I understand, 4K is about the right size for getting most of the detail out of the film. It's sort of 35mm's native resolution. But because it's an analog medium, it essentially has unlimited detail - doing it at a higher rez just means better detail on grain and so on, and also allows more latitude for future digital work.

In the same way, you could adequately document a painting with a 30-megapixel photo, but if you want to _completely_ document it, you'll be working with x-rays, depth maps, restorers, color technicians etc. It depends a lot on your goal. For a great-looking copy of a movie you'll watch happily, 4K is great. But there may be other uses or applications out there that require or benefit from more.

<comment><USER6> The thing is you don't really get better detail on grain. You just get different noise. There just isn't more detail on a 35mm frame.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I know, the grain is the limit of detail provided by the film. I mean that with a high resolution scan you will actually get better detail on the grain itself, the shape of the actual crystals. Probably a needless level of detail, sure, but like capturing an image of a painting down to a level where you can see the individual hairlines in a brush stroke... hell, why not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More disturbing is the refusal to make available movies that were incredibly significant culturally at the time of release but are now considered "offensive" to modern sensibilities. Disney's Song of the South is a prime example, despite the fact that James Baskett was awarded an Oscar for his portrayal of Uncle Remus... the first black man to receive an Oscar and only the second black person to do so (Hattie McDaniel won in 1939 for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone With the Wind.)

Try and encounter someone who doesn't know the song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah", then ask them the origin. Most people under 30 have never seen the movie, and those that have did so using unauthorized sources.

<comment><USER8> It's not ideal, but at least the VHS release of Song of the South is fairly easy to find in the UK. I had it as kid (I'm 25 FWIW) and there are plenty of copies for sale on Amazon.

It doesn't help that some people are very quick to claim something is offensive to them / a category of people, and can rather vocal about it, even if the thing in question is totally inoffensive (for example, I saw a forum thread this morning claiming that using 'niggles' to describe minor hardware issues was a 'borderline racist' term).

<comment><USER9> I'm floored that someone would define "niggles" as borderline racist. That's just ignorant.

I hope you pointed them towards a dictionary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would love to spend time watching these old films, it's a shame the restoration costs are so high. Is there any way they could be digitised in their current form, released without restoration on a streaming service, and then allow the relative popularity of the films amongst modern audiences influence the priority in which films are restored?

I'd rather have that than to let these films be lost forever. I enjoy the charm of films from the first half of the 20th century, I don't mind if I have to watch them at a lower quality.

<comment><USER11> I did not read the article, so I don't know if it was mentioned, but Warner actually has such a program: [http://instant.warnerarchive.com/](http://instant.warnerarchive.com/)

Lots of non-restored films (mostly from VHS/TV captures) are also circulating on BitTorrent, there are a few invite-only places that specialize in that kind of thing.

<comment><USER10> Thanks. Yes, the Warner program is mentioned in the article. Looks like the content has been restored though. I'm trying to find a way of accessing the content that is unlikely to be restored without demonstrating the demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of a very good read on film restoration focused on the Star Wars films. Lots of interesting info about how film degrades, what can and can't be done to save it, and so on.

[http://fd.noneinc.com/secrethistoryofstarwarscom/secrethisto...](http://fd.noneinc.com/secrethistoryofstarwarscom/secrethistoryofstarwars.com/savingstarwars.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> As for the great film that _has_ been restored, I'll repost what @sotojuan posted a few days ago:

"About film: If you have Hulu, watch the Criterion Collection films on it. Criterion is a company that releases and remasters some of the best films of all time (from all countries!), and about 600 of them are on Hulu."

[https://www.criterion.com/library/expanded_view?m=hulu&p=1](https://www.criterion.com/library/expanded_view?m=hulu&p=1)

<comment><USER13> Do the Hulu Criterion streams include extras like commentary and making-of interviews?

<comment><USER14> No, these are restricted to the discs. Don't want to give too much away :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My grandfather works for one of the studios. He's cleaning up and digitizing films that have never been released other than in theaters. They're slowly releasing these old films one at a time, I'm not sure where you can buy them though.

<comment><USER16> Can you elaborate what happens to the films after it has been digitized?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Equally frustrating is when well regarded modern films are unavailable due to rights issues.

 _The Big Fix_ [1] and _Joshua Then and Now_ [2] are two examples.

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077233/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077233/)

[2] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089383/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089383/)

<comment><USER18> Is there a summary of the rights issues? I did some basic googling but didn't come up with anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is the problem when copyright doesn't expire.

If the copyrights expired, the studios would have to release the films before that point in order to get any money.

<comment><USER20> Actually while I agree that copyright length is an issue, in this case copyright should actually encourage the studios to release these films. If they have the only copy of these films and they were out of copyright then they would have no incentive to ever release them. If you own the only copy of something then making it public domain does not allow the public to view it.

<comment><USER21> in that regard, i think that the copyright actually makes things worse. at this point, the films are likely a liability (being so flammable); releasing them to the public domain is unlikely, due to costs and potential costs.

spending the time and money to get a good transfer likely won't mean much money before the copyright expires, thus making it economically a worse proposition.

i feel this is a case where law/finance and technology don't intersect.

<comment><USER22> the transfer would be a "work" in its own right, and have its own copyright.

<comment><USER23> AFAIK US copyright law does not provide a "sweat of the brow" copyright[0]. For example, a faithful restoration/reproduction of a public domain image was still public domain in [1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#US_copyright...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#US_copyright_law)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).

<comment><USER22> That is damn interesting. US art photography books here I come.

And thanks for taking the time to cite it.

<comment><USER23> As always, consult a lawyer (I'm obviously not one) to be sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There's a fabulous amount of information in a single 35 mm frame of film. Do we have the technology to capture it all yet? What resolution is sufficient? It's not easy to answer this.

Perhaps the first complication worthy of notice is that not all film is alike. During the first half of the twentieth century, film evolved rapidly. First, there was the struggle to make B&W film more sensitive to light without massively increasing the size of grain. Early film required a _lot_ of light to capture a high quality image. It was costly and difficult (not to mention unpleasant for workers/actors) to use the amount of light necessary to get a high quality B&W image with fine-grained film stock. Color film initially amplified these problems as well as introducing it's own, which is why B&W film lived on for lower budget productions long past the broad adoption of color film.

Color film was there from the very start of cinema but, at first, it took the form of tinted stock, hand-colored film, and a variety of other labor intensive processes. Technicolor had a 2-strip color process by the 20's that captured flesh tones to a certain degree (e.g. "The Black Pirate" (1926)), but the three strip process of the late 30's and 40's is what most of us think of as the first _real_ color film, and it heaped even more demands on film makers. Technicolor 3-strip film only produced good results on certain limited ranges of colors, and Technicolor provided consultants to help film makers meet the stringent requirements of using this film. There was a scene in "The adventures of Robin Hood" (1938) where the grass was, famously, not the right shade of green to come out well and was therefore spray-painted the _right_ shade of green!

Finally, it's worth noting that editing, special effects, etc. and copying from this era were all done optically, typically resulting in significant image quality degradation by the final product. Theatrical prints typically had substantially less detail than the camera negatives. Today, we often go back to camera negatives, interpositives, answer prints, internegatives, etc. when transferring a film to digital to get the extra quality. This obviously makes life more difficult for film restorers than if they simply dumped a theatrical print to digital. There are occasionally unintended side-effects of this practice too. For example, "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940) features scenes with a flying carpet suspended by wires. In the theatrical prints, the grain size was large enough to hide their presence. However, standard definition DVD transfers from the internegative made them show up easily. As surprising as it may seem if you're used to the fabulous detail in well-projected modern 35 mm film, sometimes DVD video quality surpassed the 35 mm theatrical prints of the classic era!

Given how videophiles now view standard definition DVD's, it really is surprising that, for some titles at least, DVD's showed more detail than audiences would have seen when the film debuted in theaters. Digital technology has come a long way since then, but how much higher do resolutions need to climb if we're already past the point of revealing some flaws that film-makers never intended us to see?

An interesting parallel to this is the recent trend towards hidef remasters of TV shows. A great example is Star Trek: The Next Generation. The detail in 1080p bluray is far beyond what anyone could have had in mind when creating this series for TV in the 80's and 90's. It's a fascinating show to watch in hidef. Many of the costumes and sets are fantastically detailed and finely textured. Others clearly relied on the limited resolution of broadcast video to hide their short-comings.

Film deteriorates with time, so it makes sense to use the best technology available to create digital backups. Perhaps we're at the point where films, once scanned, will never need to be scanned again. Perhaps we're not. However, it seems we've passed the point where some judgement needs to be used when deciding how much detail to present to audiences. Perhaps sometimes, less can be more.

<comment><USER14> All of your points here are spot on. I was thinking of Star Trek: The Original Series as well when I read this article. I'm pleased that they included, on the Blu Ray, the original episodes as well as the "remastered" ones. I think in the future we'll come to regret our remasters because they make the product itself anachronistic. I'd much rather see the wires in "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940) and appreciate the film as a product of its time than to hide the work those effects artists did with other effects that themselves will eventually become dated.

My only addition to your comments here is to echo your sentiment about the diminishing returns of higher definition: putting more pixels in a display doesn't necessarily result in a better viewing experience. In my small apartment, the viewing distance from my eyes to the screen is about 10 feet. Consulting the Optimal Viewing Chart[0], I find that in order to justify a 4K TV I'd need to purchase a 75-inch TV.

I think 1080p restorations might be the final frontier, at least for me.

[http://www.rtings.com/images/optimal-viewing-distance- televi...](http://www.rtings.com/images/optimal-viewing-distance-television- graph-size.png)

<comment><USER24> One convenient thing about TOS is that everything was done optically and the prints that were scanned for broadcast were still available. They were able to go back to the film without being forced to redo all the editing and effects, as was necessary for TNG, which was composited and edited on tape. As you say, they were wise to include the unaltered versions on the Bluray releases. The "upgraded" effects are certainly interesting, but far from subtle!

If you want to see the unaltered version of TNG you are forced to go back to the DVD's. Fortunately, the restorers were meticulous in recreating the original special effects as faithfully to the original as possible, even to the point of bringing in a lot of the people who originally did those effects in the 80's and 90's. Practically nothing sticks out as being as out of place as the upgraded effects that were done for TOS do. Even though a lot of what we see in the HD release of TNG is entirely new, it blends in seamlessly. Extremely impressive work!

TV of the late 80's and 90's seems destined to be a bit of low-resolution dip for for the foreseeable future. The TNG restoration was expensive and CBS Paramount hasn't yet gone forth with restoring Deep Space Nine. It may simply be too expensive to give most shows the same treatment. An added problem of the late 90's was the advent of extensive use of CG effects in television. DS9's restoration will be complicated by this, and another great example is Babylon 5. The models, animation files, etc. for this show's CG effects were lost, so they'd need to be recreated from scratch if the show was ever to be restored in hidef. Even the DVD releases suffer from poor quality due to this.

<comment><USER23> Maybe future superresolution techniques will let us restore some of the old SD video, although CGI that was never rendered at high resolution probably won't gain anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's a film that I'd like to see released properly: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087817/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087817/) Nothing Lasts Forever (1984). It even has many major stars in it, notably Bill Murray.

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems like a great opportunity to set up a crowdfunding model. Put proposed film up on Kickstarter, if it gets the necessary backing out it comes, otherwise it sits in the vault for a while longer.</comment>


Make helping the needy go viral. - <AUTHOR>

Hello Friends. Imagine that you make a purchase this holiday season and your purchase does not benefit the seller but a total stranger - rather, your purchase benefits a needy person somewhere in this world.
That's the idea behind www.borue.org. We sell shirts and raise funds and awareness about world causes. We donate 100% of the net profits generated from the sale of our shirts towards a cause.
We need your help. We launched the project but the success of the project depends on our collective efforts. We need your help in getting the word out.
For our first organization we have partnered up with Watsi.org. Many of your might be familiar with Watsi, as some of their funds came from Y combinator.
Let's see how much positivity we can bring in the lives of those who are less fortunate.
Always remember that not everyone in this world can experience the joy of making a new purchase. But we can bring positivity and happiness in their lives through the sale of our shirts. We can raise funds and help the needy!!
Thank you for reading this and your help. This is a wonderful community. www.Borue.org www.facebook.com/borue.org www.twitter.com/borueusa
-Lastly, a lot of irrelevant stuff goes viral, let's make helping the needy go viral. <comment><USER2> This is the third time in the last week you've spammed HN with your link. It's obviously not working. Go somewhere else.</comment>


Hey Gmail, 1994 Called, It Wants Its Dial-Up Level Performance Back - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/help-gmail-is-slow/ <comment><USER2> I keep seeing this come up. I don't think Gmail has ever been noticeably "slow" for me. Which leaves me wondering, what do people mean when they say "Gmail is slow"? Searches take a long time? Delays in sending/receiving mail? Unresponsive UI? Would appreciate some clarification from someone who has this issue.

<comment><USER3> For me, it manifests as clicking a label and seeing the "loading" element appear at the top for 5-8 seconds before the contents of my <ahem> folder appear. It's never been a problem for me before this September, but now it's pretty consistent during business hours.

<comment><USER4> With 200,000 android handsets activated per day (a pretty large chunk probably never had a google account prior), I would expect them to have started having issues.

<comment><USER5> That is a great point. GMail has always been our little secret, but now that android requires one (I think), the userbase is exploding. I am wondering if Google was ill-prepared for this onslaught, never thinking that the popularity of android directly correlates with the popularity of GMail!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, looks like he's well on his way to a resolution. After Gabriel Weinberg wrote a popular blog post[1] about how slow his Gmail had become, it was fixed[2]. Now if only there was a way to fix these things without complaining about it to thousands of people...

[1] [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/gmail-has- become...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/gmail-has-become- unsuably-slow.html) [2] [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-gmail- is-fast...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/my-gmail-is-fast- again.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Empirically: [http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=gmail%20slow&cm...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=gmail%20slow&cmpt=q)

Statistically: <http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+slow>

Personally: browsing from London, UK, mail.google.com resolves to 18.104.22.168 (New york - NY), speed is inversely correlating with standard net usage (extremely slow at day, somewhat faster in the night). Currently, (1am, GMT+0), measured by stopwatch: (they make you code faster :P )

login: 3 sec (firebug says the last asset has finished loading 8 sec in)

search: 8 sec

search within label: 3 sec

which is by my experience the fastest I've seen it for months. Furthermore, performance does NOT change with the ?labs=0 param, albeit it becomes fast again (~1.5 second searches) in basic HTML mode. Try that before considering switching to a desktop client.

This is by no means within acceptable bounds. At this point in technology, there is no reason whatsoever for any e-mail provider not to perform at sub- second action level. What's even less acceptable, is Google's approach of sorting resolution by descending popularity. If hell-raising becomes a necessary pre-requirement of sorting this out, we ought to raise hell collectively.

Sort that.

<comment><USER8> um...the trends in both of those data sets can be attributed to increasing market share/user base of Gmail over that time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found it unusably slow way back in July, back around when Gabriel Weinberg complained about it.

So I filled out the contact form that they had set up for it: [http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=g...](http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=gtag_slowloading)

They never got back to me, but within a day I was running at full speed again. Good thing, as I was about to move to desktop email application. Based on the contact form, it would appear they DO know about the problem but at just not publicizing what the issues are.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am also experiencing these issues. I've heard this issue is usually limited to big and/or old accounts. I've had my Google account since it was in Beta, and it's 48% filled.

Gmail has been so unbearably slow for me that it forced me to switch from Firefox to Chrome on a Mac. In Chrome, it's much better, but still very slow.

In fact, I just got Office 2011 and trying out Outlook.. I've used to be a devoted Outlook user before I switched to a Mac and went 100% Gmail for all my personal & professional mail. But Outlook 2011 for OS X seems awesome so far, so maybe this will be the end for my Gmail experience.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have started to feel that Gmail is getting bloated with features. I want my mail to be simple and lightning fast.

<comment><USER12> I'm with you on that. One of the things that made me switch to Google's search engine back in the day was that it's page was free of garbage and bloat (versus Yahoo and MSN, in particular). I'd hate to see Gmail get lost in bloat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was perplexed for a second and thought MG had discovered nested tweets, but actually it looks like it was just too much to ask him to take screen shots consistently.

<comment><USER14> Someone ought to show him the wonders of embedding. <http://media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Keep in mind, you can access Gmail via IMAP. There's a difference between Gmail Web Viewer issues and Gmail as a mail service. I haven't yet had a problem with Gmail as a mail server.

At our school, we've had by-and-large great responsiveness when addressing specific issues with the Google Apps team. There's definitely a deep buffer between support staff and engineers, but Google also has some of the most knowledgeable support staff at a "tier 1" level that I've worked with. They're also working with people who literally switched to Gmail because their mail servers crashed and the schools had no way to bring mail back. This becomes frustrating sometimes when you have to wait for the mail to bounce back from the proper person when You've demonstrated competence in the area you're trying to troubleshoot. (The year prior to moving students to Gmail, we actually had a higher uptime when scheduled downtime is excluded.)

It is hard to pin down the recent slowness issues. The most easily repeatable issue is domain-based contact 'auto-complete' went from taking seconds (3s-5s) to sometimes completely timing out. Also, the Google Chat connector recently seems to be losing connection more regularly. It hasn't been bad enough to create a ticket, but we do have a conference call Monday.

As far as free, non-apps usage: I hate to pull the "what do you expect for 'free', but, well, what do you? I get more transparency and uptime from Gmail than I had when I was on Yahoo! Mail (not sure if that's still the case).

<comment><USER16> i use their imap server as well and rarely, if ever, log into the gmail interface. it's nice to know it's there if i'm on the road and without a phone and using someone else's computer. but generally the performance on imap has been great.

another benefit is that most of the time when the rest of the world is complaining that they can't access gmail from the website, mine access is just fine.

of course, if everyone sets their accounts up as imap this may no longer be the case, though i'm thinking that imap is likely a lot thinner of a protocol than what they gave going on with their web ui.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One more reason I use imap to access the various gmail accounts I have.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know any good alternatives to Gmail? I briefly looked to switch back when they released Buzz, but there aren't any good competitors that match Gmail's ease of use, spam protection, and (previous) speed. Seems like it'd be a good opportunity for young, hungry startup. I think I'd pay $3-5 a month for a really solid email service.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sometime earlier this fall, Google Maps became suddenly and totally unusable for me (Firefox, OS X). Whole-system stuttering. Strange thing is, only in the main Google interface to Maps (ie, searching from maps.google.com) -- embedded maps are fine, even full-window ones like on padmapper. And only in Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER12> My regular Gmail accounts seem unaffected by this problem, even with three accounts logged in at once. On the other hand, my email that is tied into Google Apps is definitely slow. Initial loading is slow, and then there can be some delays when actually reading mail.

</comment><comment><USER20> Based on a personal experience, it seems to be some sort of data fragmentation problem.

I had similar problems with Gmail a few weeks ago - sending a message would take ~30 seconds, accessing labels took up to a minute, messages were appearing in the inbox 30 minutes after they arrived, etc. The slowness persisted for about a week.

2 weeks ago my account went down for about 10 minutes. Accessing mail.google.com while logged into my Gmail account would return a 503 error; my backup Gmail account, which had now slowness, was accessible. 10 minutes later, I was able to access my account and the slowness was gone.

My guess is that Gmail took my account offline while my messages were re- indexed.

</comment><comment><USER21> Anecdotally, I remember other people complaining about this a few months ago, and Google was able to flip some kind of switch and make it "fast" again. Not sure what they did, but Gmail has different scalability issues than Google because with the web it's fine if there's some latency between when a site changes its content and when Google indexes it. In fact it's expected which is one of the reasons why people put so much time into SEO. With Gmail you expect all of your data to be instantly searchable as soon as it hits your inbox. Compound that with the fact that everyone has their own private inbox which is exclusive of everyone else's and you can see where it's a hard problem to basically build you a personal Google with real time search capabilities.

All that being said, I wish Google would hurry up and solve the problem!

</comment><comment> tim-robinson I heard this many months ago, when gmail was still super fast for me, but now it really has hit me. It's not just gmail either, it's also affecting google groups too. It's all been pretty sucky for at least a month now.

[edit] Google groups is probably using the same backbone as gmail, I'd imagine.

</comment><comment><USER22> Gmail recently restricted how many sessions they allow to a given account. I'm not sure what the technical details are here. I often have tons of tabs open and many of them have gmail in them. If gmail becomes unresponsive, say after sending something, the window will hang in perpetual loading state until I go hunt for other gmail tabs and close them.

Also I definitely don't experience the long initial loading times, could this be correlated with the amount of emails in the inbox? I currently have ~100 there and it loads in a second.

</comment><comment><USER23> We use the purchased version of Google Apps, and while it is slightly better than the free gmail we still get a lot of slow searches on the web interface or instances of "unable to load conversation" when trying to view mail.

One of the greatest selling points of Google Apps for us is having all previous mail archived and search-able so this is somewhat disappointing, but the total search time + time spent retrying is still less than the total search time would be using 10GB of mail in Outlook.

</comment><comment><USER24> Started looking at AppEngine last week for some projects. The day I wanted to look at getting started info and documentation it was down for a couple hours. A few days later I go to sign up and that process is throwing an error for an hour. Is that unusual? Didn't exactly make me feel confident in relying on them.

<comment><USER25> Honestly sign ups are the crappiest part of GAE. It is smooth as a breeze after that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article mentions nothing about labs. Personally, my experience with Gmail has been slower with every new lab feature I enable, which makes sense. Most of these labs are in beta. Disabling all lab features speeds Gmail dramatically for me, particularly load time. But, that's just my personal experience.

<comment><USER27> Around September I started noticing slowdowns and timeouts, and I haven't added any new lab features. Either Google is running into scaling issues, or they upgraded something (front or back-end) that was a regression as far as performance is concerned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I just enable the app in Labs that puts the "Beta" tag back on the Gmail logo and my anger instantly subsides!

</comment><comment><USER29> The one that drives me crazy is when I do something and then close the GMail tab and it tells me that an operation is in progress. By the time I see and read the message, I'm sure the operation is finished, so what option am I supposed to choose?

</comment><comment><USER30> wow, I thought I was the only one ;)

I heard that if you have certain enti-virus shields on (the ones that parses all sorts of network and HTTP traffic then it can cause this, but even with disabling it its slow.

It sucks because GMail is really the hottest thing since sliced bread.

Could Google finally have found a scalability problem they can't solve without it costing (comparatively) too much?

....and those graphs on <http://www.google.com/trends?q=gmail+slow> would be misleading because all they show is that more people are using GMail ;)

</comment><comment><USER31> I have a similar issue with google itself. on many days google.com just hangs. If i try google.co.in (India), i get instant response. However, my vimperator resolves "g" to google.com so I have to keep facing the hang.

<comment><USER27> Maybe due to the extra traffic that comes with something like Google Instant Search?

</comment></comment><comment> DifE-Q I experienced this at home and at work.I deleted my Mozilla directory (after backing up my bookmarks, etc.) and that cleared the speed problem up for me on both machines.

</comment><comment><USER32> Processing all your pseudo-private information takes a lot of cycles. Multiply by millions of users at peak times. Lots of private information, lots of sluggishness.

<comment><USER33> It's not as if they've had a massive influx of new users, though. It happened suddenly a few weeks ago to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Use HTML view for very fast performance. Also gmail/google apps on the iPad is crazy fast too. Otherwise it's very very slow. Maybe its a JS issue?

<comment><USER27> Why all of the sudden? Upgrade regression?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I concur it has been weirdly slow for a few weeks now.

</comment><comment><USER36> I also had the problem. I think it is because of one of the google labs features. Since disabling them, I don't have the problem anymore.

</comment><comment><USER37> it was already slow 6 months ago, so I created a new account. Now it's slow again, even worse than 6 months ago. Glad to see I'm not alone, but considering it's free, I think we can't really complain, however I'm considering yahoo mail, I've heard a lot of good things about it. Anyone using yahoo ?

</comment><comment><USER38> Hey TechCrunch, Penny-Arcade called and they want their burn back.

</comment><comment><USER39> Coming from the site with a 20-second page load :\</comment>


What is New in Angular 10? - <AUTHOR> https://volosoft.com/blog/what-is-new-in-angular-10 <comment><AUTHOR> Angular 10, the new version of Angular, has been recently released. In this article, we are taking a look into notable and breaking changes, deprecations, and migration tips.</comment>


SQL Injection Tools For Database Pwnage - <AUTHOR> http://www.darkreading.com/galleries/security/news/232900180/slide-show-10-sql-injection-tools-for-database-pwnage.html <comment><USER2> Safe yourself the click (or worded differently, don't give pageviews to this junk).

It is a 10 page slide show. Original title is "Slide Show: 10 SQL Injection Tools For Database Pwnage". There are not even links to the tools.

Here is the print view, all 10 slides in one page: [http://www.darkreading.com/taxonomy/index/printarticle/id/23...](http://www.darkreading.com/taxonomy/index/printarticle/id/232900180)

<comment><USER3> I found the sourceforge project page for "the mole" <http://sourceforge.net/projects/themole/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know a site which has sql queries inside its URLs. As this sounds scary to me and I would like to notify the site owners of their potential threat, can I use any of those tools to demonstrate what could possibly happen to them without actually causing any damage?

<comment><USER5> If you and the site are located in the United States, it is illegal.

<comment><USER6> Is it illegal to posses these tools btw?

I know some jurisdictions treat hacking tools the same as burglary tools, which is really dumb if you're just trying to test your own system's security.

<comment><USER7> No.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Withdraws Patent Claims Against Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130108/google-withdraws-patent-claims-against-microsoft/ <comment><USER2> I guess I've been living under a filtered bubble...I've used Google as my go- to example as the only big company not using patents offensively ([http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uplo...](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/10/tumblr.jpg))

<comment><USER3> I have no idea whether or not that image is accurate, but it's worth noting the image deals solely with mobile-related patents. This lawsuit was related to the H.264 on the Xbox.

<comment><USER4> Considering the chart doesn't even have Apple suing Samsung, I'd say is either very inaccurate or very out of date.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't have Motorola suing anyone either, which the OP sort of demonstrates is false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If my reading is correct, they only withdrew those claims in the ITC (where Moto/Google was seeking a _ban_ on the Xbox 360) but they plan to continue a lawsuit against MS over those same patents. This appears to be fallout from Google's agreement with the FTC to abuse RAND patents slightly less.</comment>


Japan's second highest volcano erupts - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-27/several-injured-in-volcanic-eruption-in-central-japan/5773890

<comment><AUTHOR> Good collection of photos in this Guardian piece:

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2014/sep/27/escape-...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2014/sep/27/escape- from-mount-ontake-in-pictures)

The last photo shows the erupting volcano with Mt Fuji looming in the background.</comment>


I wanted to help Google make AI more responsible - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wanted-to-help-google-make-ai-more-responsible-instead-i-was-treated-with-hostility/2019/04/09/cafd1fb6-5b07-11e9-842d-7d3ed7eb3957_story.html <comment><USER2> This is Kay Coles James's response to the disbanding of Google's AI Council. The fact that the vox story got so much traction and this has gotten 5 votes (probably all independent submissions) and no comments is a little disappointing.</comment>


1 minute VLOG from an Entrepreneur to Entrepreneurs! - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPMxFxOCNMo <comment><AUTHOR> Short (1-2 min) videos about tech, entrepreneurship and lessons learnt. Hope you like what I bring to the table!</comment>


Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most-productive-shortcut-with-vim/1220118#1220118 <comment><USER2> Well yeah, vim is just a bunch of niceties on top of vi, like syntax highlighting, scripting, and whatnot. Most of the actual commands I use also exist in vi, and I often don't bother installing vim for a one-off project on a remote server (on some systems, it's not just vim, like FreeBSD).

My only problem with vim is that it's just an editor, and scripting it kind of sucks. I don't usually need more features (I only have a few non-syntax plugins), but it's just not a good fit for opinionated platforms, like mobile development. I've tried vi mode on IDEs, but there are always missing features, and setting up commands in vim or scripting deployment is a bit of a pain.

Vi(m) is a second-class citizen these days because people don't bother actually learning the software they use upfront, but instead expect the software to be intuitive. This isn't a problem, it's just a different approach that limits the design space for highly productive tools.

<comment><USER3> >Vi(m) is a second-class citizen these days because people don't bother actually learning the software they use upfront, but instead expect the software to be intuitive. This isn't a problem, it's just a different approach that limits the design space for highly productive tools.

I don't really get that sentence. Software can be _both_ intuitive and lead to productive usage. There are all kinds of productivity enhancing tricks in Sublime Text or VS Code, _yet_ you can just open up an instance, start typing, save normally, and exit, notepad style. In fact, I'd argue that time spent learning about "modes" or how to actually type text (or even exit, see [https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/435555976687923200](https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/435555976687923200)) in a text editor counts as time not being spent productively. "Yes but you'll be so much productive once you've learned all the tricks", you retort. But why should I bother learn tricks in vi(m) when there are plenty of those in Sublime Text _and_ I can use it intuitively? They aren't mutually exclusive, and the benefits of being "super-productive in vi(m)" as opposed to "super- productive in ST/VSCode/Atom/etc." are murky at best. It's not like latex vs. Word or git vs. subversion where there are tangible benefits to using the former (i.e. superior design choices lead to your being able to to things in one that you wouldn't be able to do in the other).

<comment><USER2> When I was younger, you were expected to read the manual before getting into the software. The manual gave a lot of helpful tricks to use the software effectively, and users often had a better grasp of what it was capable of.

These days, people seem to have no patience for learning their tools. Many (most?) of my co-workers learn through someone else showing them some feature instead of learning it through a natural process of using the built-in help. People seem to assume that if it's not painfully obvious, the software probably can't do it. With him, I know it's probably capable of doing what I want, so I'm accustomed to searching the documentation to automate a repetitive task.

I'm not saying that being intuitive is bad, and it's certainly the right choice for the majority of software. I'm saying that for power tools, you can often end up with a more efficient tool if you require the user to put in some effort at the outset.

<comment><USER4> >These days, people seem to have no patience for learning their tools.

Time is short, and getting shorter. If you want me to learn something that you want me to use you'll have to pay me for my time.

<comment><USER5> Time is short, and getting shorter. If you want me to read your comment, you'll have to pay me for my time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using vi since 1992, and I _still_ learn interesting new things about it pretty regularly. That's what I love about it - you're never really finished learning it.</comment>


On Flying Balls, Cameras and GPUs: Anatomy of a Computer Vision App - <AUTHOR> http://www.tenniscamera.com/2015/05/26/on-flying-balls-cameras-and-gpus-anatomy-of-a-computer-vision-app/

<comment><USER2> Wow, I've been looking for something like this for ages. Definitely going to try it out the app. And great post too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for that beautifully written post with tons of useful information for somebody like me who enjoys exploring cv.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hope it was helpful! Cheers

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I couldn't believe that this app would have been so useful! it's amazing using it!

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks pretty amazing... Gonna definitely try it out next time on time on the court

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm one of the two developers... ready to answer your questions!

<comment><USER7> Hey, how long have you been working on the app to get it released on the Store? Looks great BTW

<comment><AUTHOR> 1 long year to launch it... :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it's true it's really amazing...

</comment><comment><USER9> Amazing, cannot play tennis without it!

</comment><comment><USER10> Did you use OpenCV?

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically no! All custom to boost performances!</comment></comment>


Jarvis: an Amazon Echo clone in your browser - <AUTHOR> https://iceddev.com/blog/jarvis-an-amazon-echo-clone-in-your-browser/ <comment><USER2> Yeah it's a clone of the trivial parts of the Echo, but not the difficult parts that are necessary to make it great, specifically:

* Beamforming microphone array (this is a real clone: [http://www.xmos.com/products/microphones](http://www.xmos.com/products/microphones) )

* Wake-word / hot-word detection ("Ok Google", "Alexa", etc.)

* Intent recognition / NLU

<comment><USER3> Even if true, not sure why you wrote such a snarky comment. This obviously is a side project of the author and just serves as an inspiration, it's not like he is asking money for it or anything.

<comment><USER4> I think it's probably because the headline called it a clone, which sort of implies 1:1 feature parity. It's neat, but it's not a clone.

<comment><USER5> Pedantic stupidity.

<comment><USER6> No. Wow. Clarification is not Pedantry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey, it's monteslu!

If you are unaware, OP runs the best coworking meetup(s) in Phoenix. If you're a Phoenix dev and not coming to coffee and code, then you're missing out!

Louis/Alyson (since Jarvis was her project, I think): welcome to the #1 on HN club ;-)

/me snark

<comment><USER8> I have to agree, it's nice that Phoenix has a pretty active node community... though it feels like everyone is too busy working to hit a lot of the meetings... I'd love to catch a coffee and code meetup, but I work too far away, and am in the office for morning standups etc, around that time.

Just the same, always get ideas from the Phoenix/AZ node user group meetings... it's also nice to see when someone demos an idea you had... such as routing redux at the server via websockets.

<comment><USER9> You should try and make it out at least once. I loved it when I used to live there and definitely regret not going more since moving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is the current state of offline, non-cloud-connected speech-to-text?

My phone has a voice processing chip, and it recognizes my speech pretty well, but I still can't figure out if it's completely disconnected from the cloud (despite intentionally not agreeing to the privacy policy)

His demo is just a shim for Amazon's API...

<comment><USER11> > My phone has a voice processing chip, and it recognizes my speech pretty > well, but I still can't figure out if it's completely disconnected from the > cloud

Does it work when you are in airplane mode?

<comment><USER10> It does.

There's an offline language pack installed, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious, anybody know if there's a simple way to wire this up to Home Assistant ([https://home-assistant.io](https://home-assistant.io))? My first thought was MQTT, but for some reason PageNodes doesn't have any MQTT output support, which is kind of odd for something claiming to be an IoT connectivity platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pure MQTT is done over TCP which browsers don't support without an extension. I'm trying to keep this purely web based as long as I can :)

Some MQTT servers tunnel messages via websockets, sever-sent-events, and REST calls which are supported by pagenodes.

<comment><USER13> Am I interpreting it right that Pagenodes basically aims to be node-red, but in the browser?

<comment><AUTHOR> The goals are similar. PageNodes does its best to leverage newer browser capabilites. WebRTC, WebUSB, SeviceWorker, offline support, etc.

<comment><USER13> Ok, so less "prototype in the browser, then offload to a server once it works", but more for local "app" type things? Interesting idea, has some limitations but also opens up tons of interactions that are harder for a server-based solution (webcam, ...)

<comment><USER14> Bingo! It's always evolving too. We do use a lot of experimental flags from the browser, this helps work with up and coming features as well for learning about new APIs very easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know how the Google TTS voices in the example are exposed by Google? Is there an API / service for these? I haven't been able to find it.

I was able to use them on PageNodes via the "espeak" output just fine, but would like to use them directly in my own apps.

<comment><USER9> This might help you: [https://github.com/monteslu/pagenodes/blob/7388ce58726836cf6...](https://github.com/monteslu/pagenodes/blob/7388ce58726836cf663499a4dd2f39ca2272c5fa/src/editor/nodeDefs/core/espeak.js#L8)

<comment><USER15> Super helpful. Thanks!

In Chrome the following works as a basic sample:

      speech = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance(String("生日快乐"))
      voice = speechSynthesis.getVoices()[80]  // use Google Chinese Voice
      speech.voice = voice
      speechSynthesis.speak(speech)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article is a bit out of my comfort zone (I'm not a web app developer), however it does link to a GitHub repository by Amazon, that I was unaware of, which shows how to configure a Raspberry Pi as an Echo clone in quite a lot of detail. This is something I _can_ do and have bookmarked it for a rainy day. So for that alone, thanks for the submission!

<comment> squeaky-clean Here's the previous HN discussion on that [0]. Keep in mind that the DIY Echo project doesn't support "always-listening" with a wake word, but instead you have to press a button to activate the voice-control. Not really that inconvenient though, and some people do prefer a button to something always listening.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11362460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11362460)

<comment><USER16> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny ad

</comment><comment><USER18> Hi Louie.

\- Rick

</comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately, I think my first chatbot that I wrote about a year ago, and named Jarvis (based on Hubot by Github) will be cloned by a million of these projects...

I admit, it's not the most creative name; I just thought it would be cool a year ago to feel like Iron Man as I asked Jarvis to deploy my application to production...

<comment><USER7> Are you trying to imply that this project is copying _your_ name...?</comment></comment>


IPv6 for consumers on DSL at last - <AUTHOR> http://revk.www.me.uk/2011/11/ipv6-for-consumers-on-dsl-at-last.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Am I along in finding it staggering that manufacturers are still so far behind the curve on this one?

And that some of them are still questioning why home users would want ipv6 - you'd think that communications companies would keep up to date with technology news...</comment>


Ask HN: Learn another programming language - <AUTHOR> Hi HN. I want to know how do you learn more programming languages. When I want to learn a new one I only find really basic pages, with stuff like int, strings, etc.. And if I try to learn with a personal project sometimes I have a bad time with code I can't understand. What I mean is that I know language A, but I want to learn B too, so I know how to program, but not in that language. Thanks! <comment><USER2> What I do is I look at either a new project I would like to do or an existing one I would like to refactor heavily. Every time I go over what the feature requirements will be and find a language, framework and libraries that will suit the project.

Sometimes I end up rewriting/refactoring from one language into another. This is great approach to learning a new language. However, consider that languages has different idioms, make sure you try to learn the best approaches in your selected language and refactor for those idioms. For example, it is generally a bad idea to write python like you would write C, etc.

If you do not have a project that would be interesting to refactor, take any other idea you have laying around do write that in your selected new language.

In the end, it is better to learn by doing.

</comment><comment><USER3> For me, the hardest part is not about learning the syntax of a new language (you can easily have a preview with resources like Learn X in Y minutes and then make analogies with others). The tough part is understanding the philosophy of the language and the kind of problems it's aimed to solve. I generally learn new languages when I try to solve problems i've never been in front of, and usually the docs help me a lot.</comment>