Re: Obama on Fetishizing Our Phones - <AUTHOR> http://jonathanmh.com/re-obama-on-fetishizing-our-phones-yes-we-can/ <comment><USER3> A key promise of Obama's campaign for the presidency was to run the "most transparent" government- however the only person to really deliver on that promise was a whistleblower. Secret courts, secret domestic spying, and now calls for weakening of the digital equivalent of the safe shows that he either was not honest about transparency, or has radically changed his opinion since becoming POTUS.

Maybe it's that he decided to use his political clout to pick healthcare as his signature in American history, not wage war against the NSA, but either way it saddens me to have campaigned for someone who has empowered a surveillance state instead of fight against it.

Liberty literally means "freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control", and freedom in the information age means the liberty to communicate and store information. Anything to compromise that makes us all more vulnerable to control in all parts of our lives, not just those stored in zeros and ones. I believe America can be "Land of the free, home of the brave", but not without digital liberty.

<comment><USER4> I think Washington has changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. He's spent seven years in the craziest bubble in America surrounded by people being paid millions to distort his worldview one way or another.

A while back he advised some kids in College to never type anything into a computer if they want it to remain private. For him, it probably seems completely reasonable. I doubt he's touched a keyboard since he became president. His daughters are the only teenagers in America who've never been near Snapchat (the Secret Service will keep it that way). And he's literally surrounded by security officers and spooks everywhere he goes. They manage every interaction he has so you can imagine their worldview is going to affect him.

I'm not trying to make excuses for him. He's so completely off the deep end nowadays (between this and TPP) that it's heartbreaking as a long time supporter. I hope he leaves the presidency, leaves Washington and spends a few years thinking about what went wrong before writing his memoirs. It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity.

<comment><USER5> Let's take a moment of deep appreciation for President Obama's decision to not panic after the San Bernadino shooting, reinstate color terror alert codes, spark a ground invasion of Syria, or in any other way overreact.

For a brief interlude in American history, we had a president that didn't capitalize on terror attacks politically, or generally set a tone of paranoia and fear.

We won't always be this lucky.

<comment><USER6> I _am_ happy about that.

What does any of that have to do with the fact that he does not understand encryption technology?

I can appreciate some things about Obama and not others.

People aren't all bad or good. I support ideas, not people, just as I hate the game, not the player.

<comment><USER5> We almost never say it. I want to say it. As someone who first became politically aware during the post 9/11 Bush era, it's really nice to have an administration in the White House that isn't trying to scare us.

We wouldn't live like that in a Trump administration. We would live in fear.

<comment><USER7> hillary would do the same god damn thing. "but...terrorism!" "Iran is threatening _freedom_ ".

<comment><USER5> "SCOTT SHANE: Well, five years ago, there were—there was a question about what to do as Gaddafi's forces approached Benghazi. The Europeans and the Arab League were calling for action. No one really knew what the outcome would be, but there was certainly a very serious threat to a large number of civilians in Benghazi. But, you know, the U.S. was still involved in two big wars, and the sort of heavyweights in the Obama administration were against getting involved—Robert Gates, the defensive secretary; Joe Biden, the vice president; Tom Donilon, the national security adviser.

And Secretary Clinton had been meeting with representatives of Britain, France and the Arab countries. And she sort of essentially called in from Paris and then from Cairo, and she ended up tipping the balance and essentially convincing President Obama, who later described this as a 51-49 decision, to join the other countries in the coalition to bomb Gaddafi's forces."

[http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside...](http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside_hillary_clinton)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > So if your argument is strong encryption, no matter what, and we can and > should, in fact, create black boxes, then that I think does not strike the > kind of balance that we have lived with for 200, 300 years.

Mr. Obama, you are the one who upset the balance with secret, dragnet surveillance of nearly all communications. That's not the bargain the public has had with law enforcement for the last 300 years. Widespread, end-to-end encryption is simply the natural reaction to the arms race you started. We would have never come to this point if the government had kept surveillance within court-supervised bounds.

<comment><USER9> ... the programs that all started long before he was in office?

He's at fault for keeping them in place, but that's about it.

<comment><USER8> Obama has been President for 7 years, during which time he has consistently supported and expanded the programs started during the Bush presidency. In my view this makes him as culpable as anyone for the position that we are at today. George Bush may have started these programs but he isn't the one launching attacks on the tech industry today.

See: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/power-wars-how- ob...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/power-wars-how-obama- justified-expanded-bush-era-surveillance/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Obama has a meta-point however that proponents of the absolutist position don't seem to want to face. Democracy relies on transparency. Many of the progressives who are rallying in support of absolute right to privacy are some of the same people who constantly criticize Swiss bank accounts, Cayman island financial shenanigans.

But if companies were to implement the same sorts of impenetrable encryption, on every device, all the way down to the corporate desktop, in a way that not even the company executives themselves can read the email of their own employees, then lots of regulations the government applies to companies would be mooted.

Taken to the extreme, if all communication is digital, and 100% impregnable, and people maintain good OpSec, then it will be hard to impossible to execute lawsuits or regulatory investigations into malfeasance because they'll be no paper trail.

The end result of going full tilt on crypto is cryptoanarchy. This was pretty much well argued in the 90s among the cypherpunks community. Most of the libertarians and Objectivists were salivating over how strong crypto protocols would end fiat currency, end taxation, end regulation, and so on.

So how far as a society are we willing to take this? Does it just extend to private data? Does it extend to transactions? To payments you make for things? To transfers of money? To business transactions? Will Democracy be able to audit nothing of the interactions of citizens or our institutions in the future?

You don't have to agree with Obama's position to see that cryptoanarchy and Democracy are on a collision course, and it makes sense to discuss the possibilities openly without just plugging your ears and taking an absolutist position that demonizes anyone who disagrees.

<comment><USER6> This is not a debate about privacy vs. security.

It's about security vs. security. [1] [2] [3]

On balance, putting backdoors in phones will make us less secure, because criminals will just use other methods to communicate, and the public will be putting their data within reach of every hacker in the world through a government-imposed weakness.

The administration is unlikely to understand our privacy concerns. They _do_ understand economic and public safety issues, and it is the facts around these issues that we must share with them. President Obama himself told President Xi last year that introducing backdoor legislation would hurt his economy [4]. Let's make Obama's argument back to him

[1] [https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h35m52s](https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h35m52s)

[2] [https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h11m46s](https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h11m46s)

[3] [https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h19m39s](https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=3h19m39s)

[4] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obama-china- idUSKBN0LY...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-obama-china- idUSKBN0LY2H520150302)

<comment><USER11> "the public will be putting their data within reach of every hacker in the world through a government-imposed weakness"

You're reusing arguments about key escrow in a way that doesn't apply.

This isn't key escrow. It's about software updates, which use digital signing in the way it's supposed to be used.

Apple's software updates are guarded by a private key. Of course they need to keep the private key safe, but sometimes use it to sign releases. It's expensive but doable, and a good thing too, because the entire app ecosystem (not to mention https and Bitcoin) depends on keeping private keys safe.

If keeping a private key safe is impossible even for a well-funded company like Apple, public key encryption doesn't work. Game over.

<comment><USER6> > If keeping a private key safe is impossible even for a well-funded company > like Apple, public key encryption doesn't work. Game over.

Funny, FBI Director James Comey says the same thing [1]

And, the DOJ has suggested that if Apple does create the requested tool, then they can just give the source code and key to the FBI [2]

I think we know where you stand on this issue.

[1] [https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=2h43m12s](https://youtu.be/g1GgnbN9oNw?t=2h43m12s)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/11/fbi- could-...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/11/fbi-could-force- apple-to-hand-over-private-key)

<comment><USER11> Do you? Actually I'm strongly against anyone having to turn over a private key to the government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We're going to fight hard so our grandchildren have really secure email in a world where everything they do and every word they say is uploaded to the internet, transcribed and annotated in realtime by swarms of drones controlled by other kids that, only 50 years earlier, would have been at home doxxing people on Twitter.

Privacy will die, not because it's undesirable or a bad idea, it'll die like copyright and DRM - because it's technically and economically easy to defeat, and people will be motivated to do so. What's more, those people will be hard to catch - after all, the drones will be communicating over very strongly encrypted channels.

[Please refute - I genuinely have nightmares about this future]

<comment><USER13> I disagree - digital surveillance state will be gone within a decade, or twenty years at most. Already we see programs like Telegram becoming very popular (100 million users) where the opportunity for surveillance is massively reduced. Platforms are going to slowly transition towards encrypted content and data that not even service providers can decrypt (SpiderOak is a good example).

The biggest holdout will be operating systems - Google and Microsoft very much do not want to lose their backdoors (or front doors) into everyone's data. But within ten years, we will finally have a "year of Linux on desktops" in which both grandma and the young university student can both buy an Ubuntu computer and have it work how they need it to. And phones will run an OS that can't be maliciously updated remotely, and doesn't leak user data to apps and OS providers.

The final step will be near anonymous internet usage, which we are currently in the infancy of. There will be a shift to a more decentralized availability (but not necessarily storage) of data in most of the applications we use most often. Essentially Freenet, but without all the usability problems. The Facebook of the future will have open source (and encrypted) data where your info is only viewable to you and your friends. There are currently platforms that exist like this, but they are mostly in "testing" stages and are not ready for widespread use.

<comment><USER12> I'm not talking about the state exclusively, nor am I talking about your online activities. I'm saying you will have a camera and microphone trained on you, always. My personal AI assistant - smart but not nearly sentient - <USER2> to highlight the most titillating segments, which I have just captioned and published for all to see (anonymously, over an encrypted connection).

It's great that one's ISP doesn't know what porn site one is visiting, but 4chan are nevertheless streaming a video of one in the act.

I fail to see how this technology - small, cheap, highly capable and connected drones - will fail to come about in the next 50-100 years. And because of that, I seriously think we need to mentally prepare for living much more publicly than we do now.

<comment><USER14> This is why I strongly oppose the drone strikes. Nobody should be killed by the state (except I guess by soldiers in self defense). I especially so not like the idea of killing someone probably at home in pajamas eating Cheerios at five pm in the evening local time. I don't think there is any justification for that even if the person in question is a flight risk and has been the mastermind behind millions of death.

Such a killing with no attempt to detain runs afoul of my morals. This is worse than capital punishment which I also strongly oppose for any situation.

<comment><USER13> I think your concern about lack of due process should be more focused on the tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian bystanders the US has killed since 2001. We are killing dozens of women and children overseas every week and chalk them up as collateral damage.

<comment><USER14> I am honestly not worried about collateral damage. If someone is shooting at you, you shoot right back at them regardless of whether they are standing behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem.

When we talk about collateral damage in case of unprovoked attacks, we are minimizing the issue. If we are not willing to risk our soldiers to capture people who are not firing at us, then we should not try to capture or kill those people. I think it is pretty simple. If they are worth killing with a drone, they are worth sacrificing the lives of our soldiers in an attempt to catch them dead or alive. Whether there is any collateral damage is not the issue.

<comment><USER13> > If someone is shooting at you, you shoot right back at them regardless of > whether they are standing behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem.

You very well might be a sociopath.

<comment><USER14> I am not a very smart person so I looked up the definition of sociopath.

> Hare also provides his own definitions: he describes psychopathy as not > having a sense of empathy or morality, but sociopathy as only differing in > sense of right and wrong from the average person.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Sociopathy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Sociopathy)

Well, I might be a sociopath. Don't get me wrong. I think babies are very cute and would go out of my way to save an infant's life. However, I cannot command others to imperil their own lives to maybe not kill an infant.

Not to derail the topic too much but it bothers me that people think the collateral deaths of "innocent women and children" in an extrajudicial drone strike are worse than the death of the target. The collateral damage would not have happened if we didn't shoot in the first place. I am not saying we should be isolationist or even that we should not exercise restraint in use of force (even in self defense), far from it. I am just asking that we approach the topic as rationally as we can.

Now, we should be clear as to why we try to save infants and small children first in an emergency. Here is the article that made me think about this [http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/01/children- ar...](http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/01/children-are-special- but-not-particularly-important.html) but it makes sense what I read a while back. It is not because they are more important (far from it, society has much more invested in growing up a working adult) but because the infants and children are more vulnerable. It made a world of sense when I thought about it this way. When it comes to a fire, I can see how a healthy adult can survive longer suffocating in a smokey room as opposed to an infant. I think a trained fireman or a nurse can do triage pretty will without someone screaming in their face "why won't you attend to my baby first?"

In most situations, we would probably care for infants and young children before anyone else. However, like with everything in life, we should think about why and not just what. A person who has killed millions of people has the same right life as a newly born infant and we shouldn't try to sidestep difficult questions and scream "why won't you think of the children" just looking for an emotional response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the end, they are going to introduce laws that make it illegal to implement end-to-end encryption. This sucks, but it's going to happen. France is already moving to do it [1], and in the US, John McCain and others are also calling for similar laws [2]. They will all start off saying that it will be controlled carefully etc., as Obama keeps saying, and then it will be used with reckless abandonment.

What this essentially means is a move to Android for criminals, terrorists, and anyone that wants privacy (since Android allows installation of apps that have not been approved by a gatekeeper bound by the laws of the countries it operates in, whereas iOS does not by default). Open source Android apps with strong encryption will be built in countries without such laws. All of this will likely be the downfall of a few lazy drug dealers that don't want to give up their iPhones, but since the cat is out of the bag and apps with end-to-end encryption already exist and will continue to be built, the governments making these moves will not actually catch any reasonably intelligent terrorists that install and use these apps. They will, however, gain exactly what they want: the ability to conduct surveillance on most people in the world whenever they want.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2016/03/04/french-law-apple-iphone- encryp...](http://fortune.com/2016/03/04/french-law-apple-iphone-encryption/)

[2] [http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/senator-mccain- joins-...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/senator-mccain-joins-the- call-for-new-laws-against-end-to-end-encryption/)

<comment><USER13> I cannot fathom end to end encryption ever being made illegal. I tremendously doubt this will ever happen in any effective manner. At worst, they will pass from vaguely worded bill that makes it illegal in the sense that you are required to decrypt data on demand for any government agency. But since we are already seeing the trend of service providers being unable to decrypt user data, I doubt that will be much of an issue either.

We _will_ probably start seeing a lot more people getting locked up for decades for "contempt of court" by refusing or being unable to decrypt their personal data for a judge. Current record for contempt is 14 years - with no conviction and no jury.

<comment><USER16> If you're not willing to revolt over it then it is definitely a possibility that end-to-end encryption will be made illegal. Non-techies simply don't care, they have 'nothing to hide' (or so they think).

<comment><USER13> I don't think it will happen due to the impossibility of actually enforcing it, hence "effective manner" in my OP.

<comment><USER17> I think it's naive to underestimate a government's ability to coerce people into not using it. There are many surviving illiberal democracies and it really wouldn't take that much to get the U.S. to trend more toward illiberalism either.

Lavabit?

<comment><USER13> The Lavabit case was only contentious because of a very poor implementation of encrypted user data. It won't be long until there are established platforms and libraries that are used by most apps that fix the technical problems of Lavabit. Mega (the file uploading service) is pretty close to having a reasonably fool proof design, in that the most security conscious users are unlikely to have any external party be able to send malicious code that prevents the security and effectiveness of client side encryption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One strong point that comes out is reference to the transitory nature of governments, just because you trust yours now (!), does not mean you can trust future incarnations, don't give this kind of power to an unknown.

<comment><USER19> Also asserting that your government has the right to certain powers over its citizens establishes the precedent that any government should have that right. If it's OK for the US or UK governments to have the keys to its citizens encryption, then it's ok for China, Russia, Iran, etc.

Interestingly, the encryption system underlying WhatsApp was developed by the US government for people in oppressive states to use to avoid surveillance and restrictions on access to information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Rather than rhetoric, it would be nice to see more HN arguments based on the strongest possible counterarguments [ _].

_ [http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/)

<comment><USER6> I agree that being open to an alternate point of view is a good idea..

We need to share facts in this debate..

We know about technology, they know about law enforcement

Let us each bring facts to the table and resist coming up with conclusions from the outset. Obama is missing some facts, and in order to convince him that's true I think we need to be open to the idea that there may be some things we do not know

We're not going to find out about those things by conjecturing. We need the administration to share any relevant details as much as they need to understand encryption technology

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is akin to the politicians that don't want to believe the science around global warming. They believe that if they just deny it, they will turn out to be correct. Obama is doing the same with "golden key" encryption. It is not that the experts are correct and know what they are talking about, it is just that they are disengaged and being stubborn.

"I'm the President of the United States of America and if I say that there must be math that gives me what I want. If you don't invent it, you are disengaged."

<comment><USER6> Yup. But he doesn't understand that criminals will just change to use technology that _is_ encrypted. We just need to share the facts and let people make up their own minds.

What baffles me is that nobody has been able to convince the President of that simple fact. Surely, he must know about Signal and Snowden, and that Signal can easily be downloaded to any device...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A couple of other fun quotes:

"And what we realized was that we could potentially build a SWAT team, a world-class technology office inside of the government that was helping across agencies. We've dubbed that the U.S. Digital Services."

Yes, that's a great analogy! Go with that!

"And this was a little embarrassing for me because I was the cool, early adaptor President."

Cooler and adepter!

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/03/11/transcrip...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2016/03/11/transcript- obama-remarks-sxsw/6m8IFsnpJh2k3XWxifHQnJ/story.html)

<comment><USER6> Actually...

From his rhetoric, it sounds like he wants to appeal to technologists by arguing he keeps them very close to him in the White House. He's saying, "see? I have tech friends and I give them cool jobs where they feel appreciated."

He's also implying that they should count towards him being informed about technology. But we know that's not the case.

So he's trying to say he has trusted technology advisors, but he doesn't. It's scary. Join me in tweeting at them [1]

[1] [https://twitter.com/usds](https://twitter.com/usds)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Obama, our manipulating word artisan of a president yet again attempting to use strong language (i.e "fetishizing") to polarize our view.

<comment><USER24> Interesting choice too - there's clearly a demographic who go to the Folsom Street Fair who definitely don't have negative connotations to "fetishizing", and I suspect any porn site operator could give you some numbers that some people would not believe about the number of people for whom fetishes are a real thing.

I wonder if Obama and his speechwriters have research about how many people (and from which demographics) that phrase is going to be read in which ways? (I wonder if they've worked out that they've already lost the tech crowd on this issue, and there's a statistically significant crossover between the tech crowd and the people for whom fetishes are considered a positive thing?)

<comment><USER3> If they are not harnessing big data for writing speeches then the White House is less savvy than Netflix and House of Cards writer, Beau Willimon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is not a fetish. This is a conflict between a government that has gotten away from the "we serve the citizens" mentality, and gone to "we'll do anything we want, routing around the constitution whenever we want, and use "serving citizens" as the excuse, and the citizens who _should_ be able to specify, to any level detail that we want, exactly how those "servents" _will_ serve us. It seems to be sliding away from us.

</comment><comment><USER26> This interview with Snowden has been broadcasted tonight in Spain. Ended just minutes ago.

[http://www.lasexta.com/programas/el- objetivo/noticias/entrev...](http://www.lasexta.com/programas/el- objetivo/noticias/entrevista-completa-edward-snowden-objetivo-version- extendida_2016031300159.html)

<comment><USER27> Would be nice to have English subtitles for the questions...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> so they tell us that we have to arrange our private lives in such way that it would be easier for them to investigate/persecute us, if sometime in the future they decide that we are guilty of breaking their laws.

[with great sadness]: how low have we fallen if we seriously discussing this instead of grabbing pitchforks.

<comment><USER29> I think what it takes is a visible critical mass gathering with "pitchforks" and all the relatively-awake people in society would join in. Nobody wants to be part of the 10 or 100 or 1000 person "movement" that gets squashed and futures ruined. But if it seemed like most of (active) society was going to pile on too, people would.

However, most of society is simply not active. Most of society would never pick up any pitchforks one way or the other, without things getting REALLY bad. At some point a highly motivated minority of the population (but still a lot of people) basically needs to make the change for everyone. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, just saying what seems to be the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This has been the default position of US government across administrations at least since the 1976 Arms Export Control Act. Nothing has changed except that "the terrorists" have replaced "the communists".

It doesn't matter who says it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I honestly didn't expect this to be seen. /me is humbled and reading comments

</comment><comment><USER31> If law was adopted to require backdoors - those who are privacy conscious would simply move their data to countries that allow for strong encryption as well as deniability.

It'd still pose an issue for when people are accessing their data, however depending on your setup this will be very hard to prove from a third-parties perspective given ample security precautions taken (ie using an offshore VPN all the time, data never full accessed locally).

For larger tech companies, I'd assume setup of a new company structure offshore and sensitive data handling to be "outsourced" offshore too (ie parts of the EU, other OECD countries).

</comment><comment><USER32> I hate it when leaders get all upset when the balance is shifted away from them, and yet are perfectly fine when the balance tilts in their favor.

FTA: "then that I think does not strike the kind of balance that we have lived with for 200, 300 years."

200 years ago, it was not possible to cast a dragnet and catch everyone who was doing Something Bad(tm). The government had to get a warrant to open mail; today, the NSA can sift through billions of messages (metadata, they say) in a second.

Even considering US Mail: you could not keep track of who was sending whom mail, at scale. But today, _every_ letter that is mailed has its front and back scanned (for reading the address); but more importantly, these images are saved for future use.

All of this is possible thanks to technology. And when the balance was tilting in their favor, the Establishment was quite happy. But when the balance tilts the other way, suddenly they're crying like a spoiled child whose toys have been taken away.

You can't just throw tantrums when things don't go your way. If the technology permits E2E encryption, they'll just have to live with it and find other ways to catch criminals.

</comment><comment><USER33> Would like to see more detailed logic in the original post. For e.g. why specifically the parallel between physical world and digital is flawed.

<comment><AUTHOR> alright, will write a follow up

<comment><USER6> There's a lot of this online. Check out Sam Harris' recant of his original position against Apple in which he reads an email he received from a Google engineer [1]. The email is very well written

[1] [https://youtu.be/9HK4IBscfMQ?t=2m33s](https://youtu.be/9HK4IBscfMQ?t=2m33s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "You don't need encryption"

"You don't need a gun"

Oddly enough both are classified as munitions.

</comment><comment><USER35> Obama, the technology, sir, is absolutist. You can have it one way, with privacy, or another, complete lack of it. That's how things are, and you are, with all due respect, stupid for arguing otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER36> All this talk about "warrant-proof spaces" presumes that they're something new, when in fact they aren't. In the past, conversations in private tended to not be reduced to tangible form and were lost to law enforcement unless they had the foresight and the warrant to bug the location. Now that so many of our communications are mediated by technology, they are by necessity reduced to a tangible form. Secure end-to-end crypto merely takes us back to the status quo antebellum.

</comment><comment><USER37> Obama, like all the recent US presidents is just a puppet.

</comment><comment><USER27> I used to think that Bush was bad and Obama was good... I'm really upset that I was wrong and that now Bush appears to be the better of the two.

</comment><comment><USER6> Let's get the facts straight about encryption and security. The DOJ needs our help, and we need theirs

We need a grassroots movement here. I know we have the EFF and Apple and a slew of others. But we all need to be writing about this to have our voices heard.

I am in between projects and writing about this extensively online. Would anyone like to work together to organize facts and promote discussion in a concerted manner? The goal would be a) to make a concise message that is understandable by a non-techie, b) back it up with facts and primary source, and c) seek out public figures who can share our message. I have a running summary of events here which I will put in a github repo [1]

Dear technologists:

The task of educating the public and our government on encryption may be even harder than you think. Everyone needs to understand the issues at stake in order to make up their own mind, and it could take years to educate the general public about encryption.

We can expect to continue seeing terrorists attacks in the news regardless of what laws Congress passes. This much we know, and this is, of course, out of our control. However, uninformed law enforcement will blame encryption and they will blame technologists for not allowing them to catch these attacks. Unless all law enforcement truly understands the technology, then they will always blame citizens for fighting for their right to privacy.

Of course, we know this is about security vs. security, not security vs. privacy. Privacy is a secondary focus for many. But law enforcement believes our primary focus is privacy.

My primary concern is that law enforcement does not know how to keep us safe in a world where criminals can sometimes communicate with smartphones across the world in a way that cannot be monitored with a warrant. Regardless of whether Cyrus Vance, James Comey, Loretta Lynch or Obama truly understand this or if they are putting up a smoke screen, the fact is that law enforcement across the country trust them the most. Non-technologists will be more moved to understand the security and economic implications of forcing backdoors upon Americans and US phone manufacturers. For the most part, they are not going to see eye to eye with us on privacy concerns. Lindsey Graham has already changed his view. We can share facts with others and let them make up their own minds.

Some damage is already done. The fact that Vance and Comey have been fighting this for so long is going to make it difficult for them to go back and convince officers of the law that technologists were right, and they were wrong. Many officers will continue to feel snubbed by the tech community.

If we're to advance to the next level of our mutually trusting society, we must all understand encryption technology and its implications. To the extent that we do not all understand encryption, and the ease of which it can be used regardless of government mandates, we will continue infighting and not progress together.

The idea that technologists feel the issue is black and white or absolutist is absolutely incorrect :-). Math is black and white, but our public safety and security is not. It is a complex equation that must be balanced, and we have that focus just as President Obama does. The difference between us and the DOJ is we understand a few more pieces to the equation. I'm open to the idea there are pieces that technologists do not know about, and I encourage the administration to share these details with us. Until all the details are on the table, we won't be able to come up with a solution together. Let's focus on discussing and sharing the variables and their weights. Given information, people can make up their own minds.

If backdoor laws are passed, it's not the end of the world, but our industry will suffer while non-technologists struggle to understand why terrorist attacks continue to occur. It'll be another 4-8 years until we can dig ourselves out of that hole. Let's keep the great country we have and bring facts to the table for open discussion.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu/the_mass_surveillance_debate_kicked_off_by/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Fetish. Rubber hose "security". Coincidence?

<comment><USER3> Coincidence. Commenter SwimAway had a more likely argument that it is polarizing language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Obama always telling people what to do. Its just not a good look.

<comment><USER40> He's the President who forms part of the apparatus that decides the laws that govern the nation.

Everything he does involves telling people what to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is incredibly naive bordering on puerile. To suggest that POTUS' view on this is without nuance is to miss his point. POTUS went on to cite existing warrant mechanisms and their underlying principle:

"And we agree on that, because we recognize that just like all of our other rights ... that there are going to be some constraints we impose so we are safe, secure and can live in a civilized society."

I'm not suggesting that this means POTUS and the government have the right answers at the moment. Despite that, we can't ignore the important role law enforcement plays in society, the requirements in support of their role, and the complexities surrounding the right to privacy. We need people advocating for the right balance, not just getting each other frustrated.

OP may have worries other than US law enforcement being from another country. This is one of the /many/ complexities in this space.

<comment><USER42> but there is no "balance" when somethig is binary. You either have encryption or you don't.

<comment><USER43> That's wrong.

The government isn't saying that no one should be able to encrypt data. They just thing that, in some cases, it should be done in such a way that certain data can be read by use of a centralized master key.

This, of course, presents certain problems. What if that master key leaks?

But it's not binary. Data secured this way is absolutely safer than not encrypting something at all. "Is it safe enough?" is certainly a question that people can disagree on.

It's not binary.

<comment><USER42> wow, when you put it that way it's like saying "either I have the right to own a gun or I do not." So I guess if people except limits on gun ownership they should accept limits on encryption cuz it's just as dangerous?

<comment><USER43> Actually no. What I'm saying is that you do have the right to own a gun, but there are limits on gun ownership.

      * Minors cannot buy guns.
      * Convicted felons cannot buy guns in most circumstances.
      * There are numerous locations in which it is illegal to bring a gun.
      * There are numerous types of guns that you are not allowed to own.

It's not binary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think a lot of libertarians miss the fact that many of the communications monitoring aspects that the administration is proposing includes authorization by court order.

It's not like your communications are being monitored by random government employees at will for no reason. There's a specific safeguard here for personal privacy, and that's through a court order.

If government is monitoring your communications, then there's a pretty dammed good reason, as determined by a judge.

Sure, you might call that final safeguard as not enough or susceptible to corruption, but once you do that, you cease to be able to function in a society.

Judicial review is the "trust zone" that citizens are expected to have on society. If you don't trust judicial review, then there's no hope left for you to function in a normal society filled with other people. If you don't have such a "trust zone" in government, then you are basically forced to build your own army to protect you, since you don't trust government.

Since having your personal army is stupid, your best option is to make sure judicial review cannot be corrupted.

<comment><USER45> Communications are already being monitored by random government employees with no judicial review.

The FISA court is already a rubber stamp. Encryption is one of the only ways to non-passively protest.

Edit: Can't reply to my replies, likely because of the down votes on my parent's comment.

Re: FISA, yes to both. That anecdote may be truth but I am still hung up on NSA employee looking up ex-girlfriends' emails the day he got access to do so.

Re: Army, you aren't wrong but that's not encouraging. It's true, at the end of the day the most powerful military will win.

But it's an argument that only wins against those with something to lose, like people who care about their family or nation states with a future. I guess that's why the ultimate response over a long enough timeline to an unbeatable military force is terrorism.

<comment><USER46> I hear this a lot, what is the basis of considering the FISA court merely a rubber stamp?

Is it the approval rate? Is it the lack of transparency?

If it's the approval rate, in my experience the reason why court warrant approvals are so high is because intelligence / law enforcement are very risk adverse and will not submit requests that are likely to be rejected. Anecdotally, the officers I talked to considered it career poison to submit a request that got rejected by a court.

<comment><USER47> In 35,000 requests, they denied 12.

Either the NSA _is really accurate_ or something smells.

<comment><USER46> I think it shows that they have an excellent understanding of their authorizing legislation.

It also reflects that unlike other types of warrants the court can request revisions or additional information before making a decision and requests can be withdrawn before a formal rejection can take place.

Some estimates put the reject/withdrawal rate closer to 25%

Some more information: [https://newrepublic.com/article/115257/fisa-warrants- court-t...](https://newrepublic.com/article/115257/fisa-warrants-court- tougher-media-says)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140402093319/http://www.uscour...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140402093319/http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/courts/fisc/honorable- patrick-leahy.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Would you pay for a Google Enterprise-esque service hosted in Scandinavia? - <AUTHOR>

Forgive me as I post this from a throwaway account, but I have been a member here for a few years:
Given the recent rash of privacy-related concerns and the increasingly-concerning intrusive behavior of the US government in the affairs of its businesses and their customers, I have seen a growing trend of many US-based companies looking to host customers' sensitive data and private information out of the United States to avoid being forced to compromise the privacy and integrity of their users.
I am a "serial entrepreneur" with a successful track record that is seriously considering launching a "Google Enterprise"-like service hosted in one of the Scandinavian nations, with the twist of focusing first and foremost on the privacy of the client.
The core services would initially be similar to the basic hosted enterprise features (email/webmail, contacts, documents, calendar, etc.) potentially expanding into AWS-like territory, structured in a way where we would be able to guarantee the privacy and integrity of any information hosted with us. There would be a very strong focus on encryption and security in general.
While I do believe that this is a lucrative business opportunity, this would be a very big step for me as I do not live in Scandinavia; but I genuinely feel that this is a concern that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later as I have seen a shocking number of posts here on HN detailing cases where startups and businesses have been unable to offer or continue offering particular services given the current political weather in the USA.
Basically, if such a service were to exist would you as a business pay for such a hosted solution? And as an individual (a la Gmail)? <comment><USER2> Why would hosting in Scandinavia be any better/worse than another European country?

I speak now of Sweden. How do you guarantee that Saepo can't get access to the data, given the recent law which allows them to tap international connections without a warrant?

There's already cloud-computing companies in Sweden, like City-Cloud at <http://www.citycloud.eu/> . What do you plan to offer which is new? This is a country where high schools are moving over to cloud-based systems, as in [http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2011/06/swedish-high-schools- depl...](http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2011/06/swedish-high-schools-deploy- google-cloud/) so it's not an inexperienced market.

<comment><AUTHOR> The EU aside, there are various country-specific policies and legislations that make certain Scandinavian countries better than others for this kind of thing. I was actually thinking more along the lines of Iceland than Sweden, but haven't made the final decision.

Protection from wiretapping, etc. would be accomplished technically (no non- encrypted connections); the benefit of the location is primarily to prevent FBI-like seizures of datacenters and warrantless handovers of data.

The reason I'm considering this an untapped market is because to the best of my knowledge, there aren't any such companies _selling to American enterprises_ verses their individual local markets.

<comment><USER2> Iceland is a Nordic country but not a Scandinavian country. At least, that's the definition the people in the Nordic countries use.

Iceland is often mentioned as a site for cloud computing, given its mid- Atlantic location and access to geothermal power and cooling. For example, GreenQloud has Amazon-compatible APIs and offers 100% carbon neutral hosting. They've also been selling to American enterprises. I'm surprised you haven't heard of them since it's mentioned in many of the top search results for "Iceland cloud computing."

American companies are still required to uphold US law, so American data even hosted overseas is still subject to "warrantless handovers of data." Eg, if the FBI came with a national security letter to a US company, then that company would be required to present that data no matter where it's located.

The only advantage I can see for doing this is if the company itself was under suspicion (vs. customers of the company) then at least the company would know of any such investigation.</comment></comment></comment>


Top 5 Video Learning Resources From Tech Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.famousbloggers.net/video-tech-entrepreneurs.html

<comment><USER2> <http://startup-dna.tumblr.com/> It's new, but you might like it as well...</comment>


Can the West Learn from Social Media in China? - <AUTHOR> https://chanind.github.io/china/2019/08/24/learning-from-chinese-social-media.html <comment><USER2> Maybe the title should be "What can Facebook learn from WeChat?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Wechat has no ads because the government uses it to spy on almost everything you are doing from paying a parking ticket to purchasing groceries. It has replaced cash in many areas of China.

It's also tightly controlled and censored.

I would much rather have advertisers trying to sell me something than a totalitarian government using it to control my life.

<comment><USER4> Your life will not be disturbed until you use it to commit a crime.

<comment><USER5> Or maybe attend a peaceful protest asking for political change.</comment></comment></comment>


Loopt acquires GraffitiGeo - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/20/mobile-social-network-wars-loopt-acquires-graffitigeo/

<comment><USER2> Congrats to the GraffitiGeo team!

This would seem like a talent acquisition, unless GraffitiGeo had a large amount of active users.

<comment><USER3> Super smart guys, great tech, great product.

<comment><USER4> Congratulations to Loopt as well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats to both teams.

I just looked at Loopt's jobs page and was surprised to see they use a lot of Microsoft technologies. Do any other startups here use .Net, MSSQL etc?

<comment><USER6> Mine does. If you're interested: www.clearsky-systems.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Classic Google tactic of buying early stage companies with great technology and brains.

Is this the first time a YC company has acquired another?

<comment><USER7> There's one I can think of off the top of my head: Posterous acquired Slinkset. There are probably others.

<comment><USER8> Reddit merged with infogami back in the day.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html>

<comment><USER9> Baseshield is also the result of a merger between two YC funded startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any pointers on size/terms of the deal?

<comment><USER11> Why was medianama's innocent question downmodded? I'd be curious to know as well? Downmodding for just asking the question is just bizarre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Amazing amazing job guys! :)</comment>


Nonce misuse resistance 101 - <AUTHOR> https://www.lvh.io/posts/nonce-misuse-resistance-101.html <comment><USER2> Nonce-exposing high-level crypto APIs are flawed by design. Most developers believe that they need low-level crypto APIs - in fact they get a kick out of coding against low-level crypto APIs. This is a dangerous fallacy/hubris. Most developers, in fact, should never touch low-level crypto APIs, and should only use high-level crypto APIs (or not touch crypto at all, which would make the digital world a safer place).

SecurityDriven.Inferno library is nonce-misuse-resistant by design ([http://securitydriven.net/inferno/](http://securitydriven.net/inferno/)).

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link! I was expecting something not well thought out, but the front page has a good answer to "Why not NaCl?" ... the short answer is that Inferno is a bit more conservative with choice of algorithms.

My main criticism would be that it supports AES256-CBC-HMAC. Encrypt-then-MAC should protect against CBC padding oracles, but CTS mode instead of CBC mode would be more conservative. I understand using CBC instead of CTR mode if you're afraid you might possibly have a flaw that reuses nonces (CBC and CTS modes leak less information than CTR if you have a nonce reuse bug). CTS mode is a slight tweak on CBC mode that modifies the final two blocks in a way that makes it immune to padding oracle attacks. Encrypt-then-MAC should also protect against padding oracle attacks, but CTS mode fits better with the belt-and-suspenders philosophy of Inferno.

<comment><USER4> Encrypt-than-MAC _precludes_ padding oracle attacks, and if you're not checking MACs, you have bigger problems than padding oracles, so I do not understand what the win would be from CTS --- which is itself little-used, and something I mostly associate with bad disk cryptography.

<comment><USER3> You're much more qualified than I am, but I was talking about cases where there are bugs in the MAC layer. For instance, t's possible that the constant- time comparison code is well tested on a processor with constant time comparison of a 64-bit register with zero, but ends up being run on some oddball ultra-low power processor that uses one cycle for each leading zero byte in the register, or something. Using CBC potentially allows an attacker to leverage a timing attack against the MAC into a plaintext disclosure via padding oracle.

Granted, this scenario requires multiple cascading bugs, but that's kind of the point of Inferno. In general, one is well advised to use the most well- tested and standard algorithms, but CTS is very close to CBC. Have you specifically seen any CTS implementation bugs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found this useful, this not being an area of expertise for me [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce)

</comment><comment><USER6> > Nonce-exposing high-level crypto APIs are flawed by design.

No, and please don't encourage people to use bad crypto.

If you build an encryption (or authenticated encryption or whatever) function E(K, M) that deterministically turns a key K and a plaintext message M, you _will_ leak information. Specifically, if you send the same message twice, an eavesdropper can tell.

If you use a nonce-misuse resistant function E(K, M, N) where N is a nonce, then, if the nonces are unique, you don't leak anything but the lengths of the messages and, if it's maximally nonce-misuse-resistant, then, with repeated nonces, all you leak is the fact that repeated messages are repeated.

But if your non-misuse-resistant cipher function is streaming, then you unavoidably leak repeated prefixes when nonces are misused.

The strongest mode out there is AEZ (assuming it's as strong as the authors claim), and it still lets you specify a nonce as part of the associated data.

<comment><USER7> Nonce- _exposing_ , not nonce- _using_. If I understand correctly, the idea is to have the api securely generate nonces behind the scenes; that is, E(K,M) is not deterministic. In a high-level api for people who just need to move data from Alice to Bob securely, this seems reasonable.

<comment><USER6> I goofed with this comment -- it was supposed to be a reply to a sdrapkin's comment, not a reply to the article. Not quite sure how I did that.

Inferno, which sdrapkin cited as an example of crypto done right, offers this API:

public static byte[] Encrypt(byte[] masterKey, ArraySegment<byte> plaintext, ArraySegment<byte>? salt = null)

The docs suggest:

The "salt" parameter can include Additional Data (AD) or its hash - which will also be authenticated.

This is, in my opinion, not okay as a high-level easy-to-use primitive, as it leaks information if you don't properly use the salt.

EDIT: I read the source ([https://github.com/sdrapkin/SecurityDriven.Inferno/blob/mast...](https://github.com/sdrapkin/SecurityDriven.Inferno/blob/master/EtM_CBC.cs#L62)), and Inferno's primitive is randomized. This avoids the info leak, but it's likely to be a decent amount slower as a result, and the primitive needs a good RNG. As a result, it might be vulnerable to failure if the application uses fork(), it's awkward to implement on some embedded platforms, etc.

The point of nonce-misuse-resistant encryption is to reduce the damage from nonce reuse, not to give you an excuse to ignore nonces entirely for encryption of arbitrary data.

<comment><USER2> I've read the source too. You are strangely looking at EtM_CBC, which is not Inferno's primary mode. Inferno uses EtM_CTR for the "Encrypt" signature you cite. The raw CBC mode is already nonce-misuse-resistant (reveals common prefix), and thus is better than raw CTR from NMR perspective. If you want to critique Inferno's NMR properties, you should target its primary EtM_CTR primitive, rather than EtM_CBC.

"vulnerable to failure if the application uses fork()" \- I strongly suspect that your comfort-zone is c/c++/Linux/*nix, and not .NET framework and Windows. You failure scenario does not apply to Inferno.

If CSRNG is "awkward to implement on some embedded platforms" then it is a platform problem, not Inferno's. Inferno is designed to take full advantage of plentiful (ie. high-quality/cheap/fast) cryptographically-strong randomness available to .NET framework on Windows.

You question Inferno's speed - performance is in the eye of the benchmark beholder - but I doubt you have run any (ie. this is likely FUD). Based on the benchmarks I've run, Inferno is very fast.

Inferno does not ignore nonces - it force-randomizes them internally to the maximum extent (320 bits of entropy). This creates a nonce-misuse-resitant design which eliminates user-supplied nonces, and does not break even under a faulty CSRNG producing a lot less entropy than it should.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What site/app do you use for portfolio tracking? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I recently signed up for [https://wwww.alphatrackr.com/main/](https://wwww.alphatrackr.com/main/) and then by pure random coincidence, met the founder during a social meetup about value-based investing. I have no affiliation, but it seems tidy and might be suitable?</comment>


Zoom's encryption has links to China, researchers discover - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2020/04/03/zooms-encryption-is-not-suited-for-secrets-and-has-surprising-links-to-china-researchers-discover/ <comment><USER2> It seems like the root node of this article graph is [https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own- crypto...](https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto-a- quick-look-at-the-confidentiality-of-zoom-meetings/), which is being discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22768494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22768494)

Matthew Green's article is being discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22771193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22771193)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd recommend reading the original Citizen Lab article as well, which discusses the flaws more specifically. This Intercept article is good, but seems to be aimed at more of a general, less-technical audience.

[https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own- crypto...](https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto-a- quick-look-at-the-confidentiality-of-zoom-meetings/)

At the very least, they are validating TLS certificates. (Which I know is the true bare minimum requirement of TLS, but "goto fail" and all...)

>We set up mitmproxy to intercept the TLS traffic and configured the Zoom Linux client to route its TLS traffic through mitmproxy. Fortunately, the Zoom client did appear to warn us that the fake TLS certificates generated by mitmproxy were untrusted.

<comment><USER4> The CL article seems to be underplaying the vulnerability of ECB, with the "not recommended" description. Any cryptographer will tell you it's downright trivially broken, with textbook practical attacks taught to undergrads.

<comment><USER5> Is ECB any worse than any other deterministic encryption?

Deterministic encryption can be ok if the data that you're encrypting is already really random (high min-entropy). Compressed audio and video streams have a decent amount of entropy. Probably not enough to satisfy a cryptographer, but it's probably enough to make it very difficult to learn much from 128-bit AES ECB blocks.

Note that everyone's favorite ECB example with the picture of Tux the Linux penguin is not very realistic, because the plaintext is not compressed. If you ECB a JPEG or a PNG, you won't see the same patterns.

I teach the attacks on ECB in my network security class. It's bad, but AES is not the Caesar cipher. I'm not sure "trivially broken" is quite right.

That said, I am really curious what Zoom is actually doing here. Going to have to take a look today. My guess is that the real fail from using ECB mode is more likely to come from using it on audio/video metadata, or on other more structured parts of the protocol.

<comment><USER6> All this is technically true. As long as you believe that you will _never ever under any circumstance_ send the same video chunk twice under the same key, you get all the security guarantees of a real CPA-secure (=> non- deterministic) symmetric cipher. But 1. I don't think this is a reasonable belief, and 2. even if it is, why chance it when you can use CTR mode and a random nonce, with practically zero overhead?

<comment><USER5> > As long as you believe that you will never ever under any circumstance send > the same video chunk twice under the same key

Yes, that is the question here, and it's a really fascinating one. How often do you send two identical 128-bit chunks in practice? How much does it depend on the quality of your webcam and your lighting? If the video is grainy and splotchy in the background, you're getting a lot of randomness in your data. How much does that help? Any at all? Or are you still totally screwed?

> even if it is, why chance it when you can use CTR mode and a random nonce, > with practically zero overhead?

1000 times this. Crypto code should be like the safety components in a car or an airplane. You wouldn't buy a car with seatbelts or brakes that work 90% or even 95% of the time. In the same way, you shouldn't write network code that _probably_ doesn't let an adversary figure out everything you're sending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And another case of lying in marketing: "A security white paper from the company claims that Zoom meetings are protected using 256-bit AES keys, but the Citizen Lab researchers confirmed the keys in use are actually only 128-bit."

How do they keep doing this? Do they just put whatever sells best in the documents and implement something else? First the end2end thing, now 128 instead of 256 bits. How many more are we going to find in the coming days?

<comment><USER8> "We never meant to mislead people but we realise we don't use the terminology in the way it is normally understood. We added up the keys on both sides of the conversation to reach 256 bits." Is probably what they'll say

<comment><USER9> "128 bits, each bit can be 0 or 1, there you go, 256 bits!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The story here is that Zoom uses key distribution servers located in China (in addition to several servers in the USA) and that Chinese law might be compelling Zoom to disclose the encryption keys. I think it is a valid concern, but for me it also raises the question of whether this may also be required in the US.

In addition to letting the Chinese (and possibly US) government in on the encryption keys, the encryption scheme is also badly broken (ECB mode of AES). Prof. Matthew Green has written many articles about AES and encryption more generally and I recommend his blog if you are interested (even as a lay person).

[https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2011/12/01/how- not-...](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2011/12/01/how-not-to-use- symmetric-encryption/)

<comment><USER11> Who the hell still uses ECB?

<comment><USER12> That is truly amazing. I know precious little about encryption, but I assumed everyone knows that ECB is bad and that CBC is the only sensible way to do AES.

[edited for typo]

<comment><USER13> Your first point is correct, second is definitely not.

<comment><USER12> See how precious little I know about encryption? And yet even I know that ECB is a terrible choice!

(In minor defense of self, I should have said CBC or "later").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> _-___________-_ Maybe I've been sensitised by all the security flaws, privacy leaks and outright lies on Zoom's part, but I'm starting to really notice how much a lot of public figures are pushing Zoom.

Does anyone else find it really weird? Late-night TV hosts, I can understand - maybe they just get paid for it, or have Zoom shares. But for example UK government leaders repeatedly mentioning it by name, e.g. Matt Hancock saying that despite being unwell, Boris Johnson is still having "Zoom videoconferences", or saying Johnson addressed his "Zoom cabinet", just feels... weird.

Edited to add: thinking about it more, I remember "FaceTime" being used pretty similarly when it was new. So I guess all the bad news is just sensitising me.

<comment><USER14> Maybe they tried Skype first, which works horrible (tried twice, never managed connect all the participants at the same time), and finally relief over something that actually works. I have used Zoom successfully with 70 participants, and then breakout groups. The only alternative I can see that recently came to my attention is Jitsi Meet ([https://jitsi.org/](https://jitsi.org/)), which I will try next time I have the opportunity. But seems like it has at least one of the same weaknesses as zoom, with no end to end encryption ([https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/7syt0s/jitsi_meet_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/7syt0s/jitsi_meet_is_not_e2ee/))

<comment> _-___________-_ As far as I can find out, FaceTime is currently the only solution for "just works" (in the sense that your grandma could use it) videoconferencing that is e2e encrypted.

<comment><USER15> But it only works if everyone has Apple devices, so it absolutely does not "just work" if even one family member doesn't have it.

Most video chat apps are straightforward once set up on the phone.

<comment> _-___________-_ Are you aware of other video chat apps that support e2e-encrypted multi-party videoconference?

<comment><USER16> If there are no cross-platform apps which support e2e-encrypted multi-party videoconferences, then there simply is currently no solution at all for 'just works' secure videoconferencing, because part of just working is not requiring users to switch to a platform they otherwise would not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> OT: My kids school uses zoom atm. Been connecting using the web client at [https://zoom.us/wc/join/<meetingid](https://zoom.us/wc/join/<meetingid) without dashes>. Today however those links are returning 403 Forbidden (even tried multi) My knee-jerk reaction was that they have some way of capitalizing on installed software which they can't on the web-client. But of course it could simply be that the web-client requires more server resources and now have to curb its usage.

<comment><USER18> There is a maintenance issue up: [https://status.zoom.us/incidents/16ll08mmddk6](https://status.zoom.us/incidents/16ll08mmddk6)

<comment><USER17> I know, but my knee still jerked

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Original title: Zoom's Encryption is "Not Suited for Secrets" and Has Surprising Links to China

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I only kept the second part of the title when submitting it because it was a) too long and b) too clickbait-y.

<comment><USER20> It's using ECB mode. That doesn't even provide confidentiality. "Not suited for secrets" is entirely correct, and actually somewhat mild.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I always knew that the "zoom.us" is a dodgy name for an installation file. As if someone was going an extra length to make sure you think its a US company.

<comment><USER22> It is a US company and the founder is american too.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/ZM:US](https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/ZM:US)

<comment><USER23> Aren't most of their developers in China?

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure if/how that would even matter in the context.

<comment><USER23> You don't remember the whole Australia debacle when their government passed a law allowing them to secretly compel software developers to compromise whatever they're working on? This is basically the same thing, where we know the Chinese government is capable and willing to coerce anybody in their grasp to serve in their interests. Guess where software developers in China happen to live? China. Where can the CCP most easily wield their power and influence? Also China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well, that large majority of developers not is native-speaking seems highly likely if you only look at output of `zoom.sh` startup script.

No pun intended.

</comment><comment><USER26> "home grown encryption scheme" seems to imply Zoom is rolling its own crypto, which is tremendously foolish.

That isn't exactly the case, per the same article. More Zoom is choosing a poor choice among other choices, of implementing AES:

"Furthermore, Zoom encrypts and decrypts with AES using an algorithm called Electronic Codebook (ECB) mode, "which is well-understood to be a bad idea, because this mode of encryption preserves patterns in the input," according to the Citizen Lab researchers. In fact, ECB is considered the worst of AES's available modes."

Bad idea but not "rolling own crypto bad"

edit: agree it's bad. this is pointing out inaccuracies in language from tech journalism reporting on security. This continues to be an issue per the miseducation it creates for the general public in infosec concepts, which is already an uphill battle of misconceptions. Since these articles, or AG Barr, are the discussions that actually hit the mainstream, it's an issue that needs to correct.ed Tech journalism, a profession focused on 'getting the facts,' are the direct conduit of this version of miseducation/failure of facts, and should be corrected. See: NY Times Baltimore Ransomware = NSA Tool (false), Bloomberg Supermicro (false, so far), etc.

<comment><USER27> Even Wikipedia is stating ECB is a very bad choice. How can someone really use it nowadays without fraudulent intentions?

<comment><USER28> Many of the alternative modes are unsuitable for this case, as it is being used to encrypt UDP packets which may be lost. There are two commonly used modes which support the random access needed here:

\- ECB \- CTR

Note that CTR is still recommended for use and is often used for things like hard-disk encryption where random access is required. Furthermore, the only difference between ECB and CTR is that CTR includes an incrementing counter in the input to the encryption algorithm to ensure that each encryption is unique. Do you know what else starts with an incrementing counter? UDP packets intended to form an audio or video stream.

So yes: ECB _can_ be bad, but there's no evidence that Zoom are actually using it incorrectly. Using CTR when you already have a non-repeating data stream would only add overhead and potentially negatively impact the amount of useful data that can be streamed.

<comment><USER29> Is there a way to use ECB "correctly"?

Is there any non-repeating data apart from noise (if even)?

<comment><USER28> Yes, as I mentioned, if you include an incrementing counter within each block then the data does not repeat. The data only needs to be non-repeating within a single stream. Different streams will use a different IV and possibly different keys. This is how CTR works.

<comment><USER30> Including a counter in each UDP packet does not make ECB mode equivalent to CTR mode.

Let's assume the counter is at the start of the packet. An AES block is 16 bytes, so the counter ensures the first 16 bytes of ciphertext are unique across packets. But any patterns in the remainder of the packet are preserved, within and across packets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Keyservers in China may be a risk, but this sounds like a terrible idea: "The researchers also found that Zoom protects video and audio content using a home-grown encryption scheme"

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be good for the title to contain that the encryption they use is broken.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's hard to take the rest of the article seriously when they criticize Zoom for using 128-bit AES.

<comment><USER32> Downvoters: please name one scenario in which using AES with >128-bit keys adds any actual security margin, even in principle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why is it surprising ? I heard Zoom is China based dispute it's domain name has .us

</comment><comment><USER34> founder is Chinese, they have 700 employees in China, does anyone really consider this non Chinese app?

<comment><USER34> encryption keys issued in China, calls routed through China etc.

I see denial is strong or HN has already it's army of wumaos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've really grown to dislike the "China == bad" thing, yes, they're domestically authoritarian, without excusing any of it, I like to act on hard evidence, not hear say, I am stunned that after the Bloomberg fiasco these kind of stories didn't take a hit.

P.S. Personally, I don't consider the NSA having my data as being any better, thank you.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't think Zoom's encryption claims should be trusted, but it's not because CHINAAA, it's because they're misleading people into thinking TLS means E2E.

<comment><USER36> I've really grown to dislike the "people who presumably consider themselves ethical defending a regime that represses free speech and expression, brutally crushes dissenters, disappears ethical doctors, is led by a 'president for life' dictator, and has literally hauled off 1M muslims to internment campus where their organs are being harvested and their culture is being erased, thing".

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> OK, this makes things clearer. Zoom does in fact encrypt their streams from client to client but they have easy access to the keys.

In their recent post about this question they apologize for what they admit to be an incorrect use of the phrase "end to end encryption". They base this on the existence of things like the gateways used to the regular telephone network.

It seems like an odd way to spin this. Why didn't they just state that the data is encrypted "end to end" and then leave it at that? Apple supposedly has access to the keys used to encrypt FaceTime calls but they happily involve the "end to end encryption" marketing phrase. I don't see why Zoom couldn't do the same. The way Zoom has handled this could of been a lot better.

I think the world needs a consumer standard for cryptography. Something like:

* Level 1 for the case where any eavesdropper can get the plain text.

* Level 2 for when just the provider can get the plain text.

* Level 3 for when just the users can get the plain text.

Most of what is being described as "end to end encrypted" these days is really just level 2 even in the case where the provider does not have the keys due to the fact that the provider can trivially MITM the traffic. The general public should be made aware of the distinction without having to dig into the technical details.

<comment><USER38> Apple does not have access to FaceTime keys or iMessage keys for that matter. They are truly end-to-end encrypted, and I don't think there is any need to cheapen or muddy the term for the sake of marketers.

<comment><USER39> They can still write software to insert themselves into the key exchange flow and eavesdrop on a conversation. E.g. I don't believe there is anything stopping Apple from pretending a participant bought a new device.

<comment><USER40> That's a much less scary attack vector though, since they would also need to somehow impersonate the participants voice or image right?

<comment><USER37> Think of it as aiming a phone at another phone. Apple would decrypt everything and then reencrypt it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vectorized Production Path Tracing - <AUTHOR> http://tabellion.org/et/paper17/index.html <comment><USER2> This is one of my favorite graphics/rendering papers from 2017; great work from the entire DWA Moonray team! In addition to the main paper, there are some other materials that were presented at HPG and SIGGRAPH 2017 by the same team.

HPG Slides: [http://www.highperformancegraphics.org/wp- content/uploads/20...](http://www.highperformancegraphics.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/Papers- Session5/HPG2017_VectorizedProductionPathTracing.pdf)

SIGGRAPH Course Notes (the relevant part begins on Page 35): [https://jo.dreggn.org/path-tracing-in- production/part1.pdf](https://jo.dreggn.org/path-tracing-in- production/part1.pdf)

SIGGRAPH Slides: [https://jo.dreggn.org/path-tracing-in- production/MoonrayV3.p...](https://jo.dreggn.org/path-tracing-in- production/MoonrayV3.pdf)

Also, the actual shading system they used was also presented at SIGGRAPH 2017: [http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2017-shading- course...](http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2017-shading- course/dreamworks/s2017_pbs_dreamworks_notes.pdf)

<comment><USER3> It's interesting work but it does seem like the speedup they get is pretty poor (1.3x to 2.3x) when going from 1 to 16 SIMD lanes. It seems like the overhead from all the queue management and AOSOA transformation must negate most of the benefit of the parallelization?

They also mention the fact that programming the system is hard, and plugins must fall back on single-lane code paths until they can be coded into the system proper.

I would assume all the ray sorting makes it extremely difficult to use any bidirectional methods as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why aren't animation houses using GPUs for rendering? It seems like they could get another order of magnitude speedup with CUDA or OpenCL.

<comment><USER5> It's not that simple. The basic idea behind path tracing maps very well to GPU's, so you can get huge speedups there (10x-100x depending on the scene, geometry, representation, etc). For example path tracing signed distance fields (volume textures, basically) can be done extremely efficiently on GPU's.

Things get a lot more difficult when the scene becomes more complex, if it needs to be animated, etc though. You need much more advanced forms of visibility detection/object culling, track scene changes, need to have an much bigger working set (models, textures, metadata) in memory, etc. The amount of code that needs to run compared to 'just the path tracer' starts to far outweigh what the GPU can efficiently process.

Hybrid solutions are of possible and widespread, but it is not easy to implement those in a way that will not annihilate the speedup you get from the parts running on the GPU because of synchronization, copying memory around between CPU <-> GPU etc. I can imagine that the kinds of rendering pipelines animation studios use likely depend on hundreds of individual tools from different suppliers, so it would be next to impossible to integrate and the full rendering pipeline efficiently if it runs partly on CPU and partly on GPU. But maybe some parts could be?

<comment><USER6> Good summary. I don't think many 3D artists would disagree that 'Redshift' is slightly ahead of the small pack of GPU renders available, but switching has repercussions and limitations throughout the production. These CPU renderers will handle anything you throw at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The featured image looks incredible.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, this looks nice.</comment>


The Secrets of Street Names and Home Values - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/opinion/sunday/the-secrets-of-street-names-and-home-values.html

<comment><USER2> Wow, putting Martin Luther King anything in that box really causes a hit.

Edit: Hmm, the problem is that they are comparing values with the entire country, rather than homes in the same city or region as those streets. So if a street name is more common on the west coast, it automatically gets assigned a higher value, even if its relative value is diminished for every area in which it occurs.

<comment><USER3> It's important to note that MLK was not a street name before the 60s, so most every street with that name was renamed from something before that, often in a depressed part of town. My racist relative used to say "never live on or near MLK, because you know it's a bad part of town".

Ironically I used to live one block off of MLK in Berkeley, and it was quite lovely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> looks like zillow removed the cors headers from their autocomplete responses preventing it from working

</comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't seem to work in Chrome?</comment>


New White Hat Hacking Book of Examples - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/white-hat-hacking <comment><USER2> It's a shame that it is paying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I know - I did have a feeling of guilt applying a price to it but honestly, I've been putting a lot of work into it at the expense of other projects (I do free youtube tutorials too) and was hoping the price would help implicitly identify that.

Is there a specific reason you say it's a shame it has a price?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What project are you working on over Xmas? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Isn't it a bit late to ask that?

</comment><comment><USER3> I am working on a small project for freelancers/outsourcing teams to manage client relationship. It's currently in design. Hope I can get it done before March.</comment>


Gone - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/video/gone-the-paul-alexander-story

<comment><USER2> i initially thought this was an article about vice shutting down. then i imagined a universe where it was gawker shutting down, and for one brief moment i knew true joy.</comment>


North Korea's silent football matches - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22470430 <comment><USER2> I have to say, I am scared. Very scared actually. I am scared of the grumblings around North Korea, the overwhelming and consistent negative media. This has sprung up recently (country scale timeline), over the past 1.5 ish years i'd say off hand, maybe?

I really am terrified that this is the western nation creating a causus belli. A reason for war. I'm really scared that in the coming years, the graph of human population is about to take an unexpected dip. Another nightmare in human history. Someone tell me that's not going to happen :(

<comment><USER3> Very well, you get your wish: A war with North Korea is bad times for pretty much everyone involved. Seoul bombed into the dust, thousands of refugees crossing the Chinese border and a potential for a proxy war between the U.S. and (China/Russia/Iran). Nobody wants this, especially not the North Korean regime. For all their bluster, they are still begging for food from pretty much anyone who will listen to them.

According to experts on the regime, recent threats directed at Seoul and Washington were moves to shore up support from the military faction that was waning after Kim Jong-un came to power and fired a bunch of senior military officials.

Instead of war, you get to watch a country deteriorate into the seventh circle. Humans _bred_ for slavery in concentration camps, people below a certain height relocated to remote islands and left to die and mothers executed in front of their children for being 'enemies of the state'. Does that make you _any less_ scared?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As long as they don't nuke anyone, I believe North Koreans have every right to live as they want, no matter how strange/hilarious/unmeaning/suppressed their lifestyle may seem to us.

EDIT: Explanation-<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5694012>

<comment><USER5> A number of issues with your position.

First of all, people, regardless of country, don't start wars, governments do. The North Korean people will not nuke anyone, ever. If that happens it will be done by their government. Be sure to understand that distinction as you go forward in life. The hundred million people killed during the world wars died because of decisions and actions taken by governments, not farmers in Germany, teachers in Japan, taxi drivers in New York or restaurant owners in London. War is one of the most regrettable failures of our collective approaches to government.

As for the rest, read the Allegory of the Cave. Someone who only knows shadows does not know reality. You seem to imply this is perfectly acceptable. I think most of the negative reaction you are seeing is because, of course, this idea is deeply flawed and, at some level, really cruel.

I'll take this to an uncomfortable extreme. Suppose the town next to yours has a culture of child abuse. That's just what they do. Every home has a dungeon and kids are kept in there until they become adults. No education is provided at all.

You and I look at this from the outside. You say it is OK no matter how horrible this might look to us. I say it is not.

I know you've had criticism for being young. I won't go there other than to say that there are a lot of indoctrinated young idealists in the HN audience. In some cultures they come out of school indoctrinated and fail to understand the world and their environment until perhaps decades later. I'd venture to say people don't really get it until somewhere around 30 to 40 years of age.

Start by reading some of the Greek philosophers. I am not suggesting you take their writings as facts as much as I would propose they might teach how to reason and view things from many angles. I don't intend this to imply you are ignorant. Not even close. It's something from my own education I continue to find value in over the years and I thought I'd share that with you.

<comment><USER6> _First of all, people, regardless of country, don't start wars, governments do._

This is exactly backwards: There is no such entity as a government. It is a collection of people, appointed in some fashion (whether by others or by themselves), who make decisions on behalf of a larger group of people. It's people all the way down.

It's like a corporation in this respect. Google has never _done_ anything, nor has Microsoft, Citibank, or any of those big earners on Wall Street. There are not bad corporations or good corporations; there are only corporations run by people that make decisions and take actions to which we then assign a moral judgment.

Making the mistake of assigning that judgment to a faceless non-entity and not to the people who are running it is the same as saying "The North Korean people will not nuke anyone, ever." If a nuke is launched by North Korea, it absolutely was launched by North Korean people: Those who gave the order to launch it. This is why different politicians within the same government can continue to hate, disagree with, and rail against each other, and why it's never so simple as "country x did thing y, they're all evil, kill 'em all."

If it were that simple -- or even if many people believed it were -- we'd have all wiped each other out very quickly after the advent of the nuclear bomb (if not before).

<comment><USER5> Sorry, that's nonsense. Did the people of the US decide to attack Iraq? Nope. A few people in government did. Yes, they are US citizens. Still, it is a ridiculous stretch to say that the people of the US decided to go into Iraq. Nobody asked me. I would have said not to do it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Concurrency Glossary - <AUTHOR> https://slikts.github.io/concurrency-glossary/ <comment><USER2> I tried to make something similar, but more visual, specifically for Python (draft)[1].

Composability is what matters here, when you start to combine these par/async things into big programs, it can become a mess to reason about.

[1] [https://github.com/ptytb/pyroboros/blob/master/Pyroboros.pdf](https://github.com/ptytb/pyroboros/blob/master/Pyroboros.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks nice, but Python is an odd choice for studying synchronization primitives considering it has the GIL.

<comment><USER2> Thank you, especially for mentioning GIL, I should have added it there too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice resource! It explains the difference between parallelism and concurrency quite clearly.

Some things can be improved though:

 _> The difference between green and lightweight threads is that green threads aren't necessarily lightweight; an example of green threads is classic Java Virtual Machine threads, while Go goroutines are an example of lightweight threads._

Saying that the difference between green and lightweight is that green aren't necessarily lightweight isn't helpful. Some explanation on what they are and when they differ would be useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, and yeah, the part about lightweight threads stands to be expanded. Other missing parts are reactive vs interactive, linearizable vs serializable and push vs pull.

<comment><USER4> The main difference between a green and a non-green thread is that the scheduling of said thread is done in userspace. Also, JVM threads are not green since the early 2000s, there's a 1:1 mapping between Java threads and actual kernel threads, and as far as I'm aware, said java threads are never migrated between different kernel threads.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I qualified it with "classic JVM threads", but a less ancient example would be better; it's just not immediately clear which green thread implementations are also relatively heavyweight like JVM green threads used to be.

<comment><USER4> I believe the distinction between heavyweight and green threads here is not really the correct comparison. It's more of a comparison between kernel managed (non-green) threads and userspace managed (green) threads. One could argue that Goroutines are green threads that are executed on non-green threads. It's also not infeasible to imagine a system where kernel threads are actually lightweight - single address-space unikernels come to mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll rework that section; thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found only one occurrence of the word _task_ in the document. The entire paradigm of task parallelism is omitted.

The style is heavy. I consider myself skilled in the area but struggled to map wording to my conceptual framework or experience. For a novice, most of the text is probably totally impenetrable. As an example:

 _> Locking can have coarse- or fine-grained synchronization granularity, where coarse-grained granularity trades concurrency for deterministic execution while fine-grained granularity is more concurrent but less predictable._

That's a property of the program (or the programmer), not locking as such. Fine-grained locking is of course as reliable and predictable as coarse- grained but when an operation involves multiple updates that must appear as atomic (a transactional guarantee, f.e.), coarse-grained locking is straightforward and fine-grained locking is more difficult to get right. There is no way, however, the programmer should accept possibly incorrect updates on the basis that now the program runs faster.

 _> Declarative concurrency models reduce the need to make trade-offs between concurrency and correctness ..._

Now that's a huge statement. How can that trade-off be justified in the first place (it can be!)? Do we really have a need and accept that trade-off with fine-grained locking above?

I would not insist my interpretation is right but that's exactly my point.

<comment><AUTHOR> The trade-offs of locks are accidental locking like deadlocks; message passing removes this trade-off but is less flexible, and dataflow further constrains the use of explicit synchronization. It's part of the larger argument for declarative approaches enabling equational reasoning.

Task/data parallelism bear to be mentioned because they're common terms; thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Woah! 112 points and no comments. Has anybody actually read it? Or is everyone upvoting in hopes that someone knowledgeable will comment about the quality of the content?

<comment><USER7> It's mostly unstructured set of unrelated concepts. I have no idea why people would upvote that.

<comment><USER8> I know most of these concepts and the valuable part was to fill the gaps what I've missed. I would also like to read about work-stealing threadpools in a similar manner.

I liked the explanations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The internal vs external distinction also maps to other pairs of concepts > like synchronous vs asynchronous, pull vs push, direct vs inverted, opaque > vs transparent and local vs remote or distributed. This sentence is > superfluous, as none of the listed _pairs_ are mentioned anywhere else ever > again, besides sync vs async.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a major recurring theme; for example, anything that refers to implicit or explicit is part of it. The list you quoted is a placeholder to be elaborated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I personally prefer to call this asynchronous computing broken into parallel (execute at the same time) and concurrent (execution is interleaved) models.

<comment><AUTHOR> Asynchronicity is just how sequential models are extended to support concurrency. Parallelism and concurrency are orthogonal, so a concurrent model can be executed in parallel.

<comment><USER9> > Asynchronicity is just how sequential models are extended to support > concurrency.

Asynchronicity just means not existing or occurring at the same time, i.e. not synchronised or without synchronisation.

How you expand that definition to computer science is a matter of opinion. I personally take the opinion that an asynchronous operation could be either concurrent or parallel.

> Parallelism and concurrency are orthogonal, so a concurrent model can be > executed in parallel.

Completely agree with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dichotomous pairs! Sounds simple enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> The wording is indeed pretentious, hopefully improved in future iterations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Skaisti :)</comment>


The Voynich Manuscript Decoded? - <AUTHOR> http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_decoded/

<comment><USER2> Not really, at least, not this time and not by this person. If it was a set of anagrams, frequency analysis would have matched medieval Italian. See:

[http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods- an...](http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods-anagram- cipher)

<comment><USER3> Not if the text has an unusual character distribution.

<comment><USER4> Which is another way of saying, maybe the book is not in Medieval Italian. You can't write 35k words in a language, jumble the letters, and have it come out with such aberrant statistical properties.

Citing Wikipedia:

"the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. Firstly, there are practically no words comprising more than ten glyphs, yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section."

The link pvg pasted mentions other difficulties.

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby:_Champion_of_Youth#Lipog...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby:_Champion_of_Youth#Lipogrammatic_quality)

If you're _intending_ to be obfuscatory, you might come up with "aberrant statistical properties".

<comment><USER2> Not over any significant length of text and it's not going to be tremendously aberrant. The text of Gadsby is easy to google, try tossing a chapter or two into a letter frequency counter. The resulting histogram still looks a great deal like what you'd get for plain English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have the italian language skills to evaluate the theory, but it seems plausible. Attributing it to a young da Vinci just seems silly though. Much like how every interesting quote is attributed to Churchill, Twain and Einstein.

<comment><AUTHOR> The author does elaborate on that theory in a previous article: <http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_author_da_vinci>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an Italian speaker, I do recognize some of the words, and they seem to make sense. The spelling is in line with my scarce knowledge of 15th century Italian.

We're used to a very rational way of thinking, whereby one would devise a system and apply consistently throughout the whole text, but from what little I have seen and read of this manuscript, it seems that whoever wrote used lots of artistic license and was intentionally trying to conceal the content. So it could be possible that the writer(s) decided to do away with all manners of grammatical rules, and parts of the language, like article, propositions, and the letters F and Z (if that seems weird, imagine that there was no U in Latin). All the other missing letters are not in the Italian alphabet.

Though, it would be interesting to see how this theory works with the non- herbal sections of the manuscript.

Finally, I totally agree with muddylemon that attributing to Da Vinci is silly. Like he was the only literate Italian alive in 15th century.</comment>


Show HN: Touchless PC Control A.k.a JARBAS - <AUTHOR> http://www.instructables.com/id/Touchless-PC-Control-Aka-JARBAS/ <comment><AUTHOR> It is also on GitHub. What do you guys think?

Also, feel free and encouraged to fork it on GitHub!</comment>


Slow release of contextual search & advertising tools - <AUTHOR> http://victus1.victusmedia.com/site

<comment><AUTHOR> My buddy Tyler has been busy. If you have a twitter account please check it out. We're still working on other oauth handshakes (facebook, googlewave), and there is an rss input variant floating around.

You can read more about the first concept here <http://www.victusmedia.com> & <http://victusmedia.com/intelligent-advertising/>

The page: <http://victus1.victusmedia.com/> can be used as a blog plugin:

<iframe width="100%" height="600″ src="<http://victus1.victusmedia.com?associate=mycoolidnumber"> frameborder=0></iframe>

10% goes to me/or tyler (5% chance each), and 90% to the host at this time.

We're tracking feedback here: <http://victusmedia.uservoice.com/pages/32379-general>

<comment><AUTHOR> We've updated it so you have to setup your link the first time with an email address that gets added to our database. We'll see if that check causes any acceptance problems down stream.

Updated blog post/HN feedback here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930786></comment></comment>