Report: Facebook Monitors Your Chats for Criminal Activity - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/07/12/facebook-scanning-chats/ <comment><USER3> I'm not a criminal, I am a a pretty mundane guy actually, but of course we live in a society that every single one of us breaks some small law every day.

Which is why I stopped using Facebook.

I also stopped using Twitter to tweet. I still use it to follow news sources, I just don't actively tweet. I did that after the NYPD won a court case to see all the private messages you send on Twitter.

I also don't comment much at all on blogs, and social sites like this one or Reddit anymore. (I use to be a top 10 contributor over at Reddit. At least that is what some metric said a few years ago when someone listed the top ten most popular usernames. That account is deleted now)

I am slowly pulling out. I have a deep distrust of the current surveillance state in the United States. I remember reading a story about a guy who posted a quote from fight club on his Facebook status and a few hours later in the middle of the night the NYPD was busting in his door and he spent 3 years in legal limbo over it. (Might have been NJ police anyways, red flags)

You start piecing together these things, and you start to realize that your thoughts and ruminations about life, the universe, and the mundane, can be used against you at any moment and can completely strip you of your liberty and freedom, and any happiness you may have had.

I am gonna be completely honest, I am scared to express myself any longer on the Internet in any fashion. I don't trust it any longer. I don't trust the police, I don't trust the FBI, I don't trust the federal government, and I also don't trust, nor have faith, in the justice system in the United States.

<comment><USER4> I have never had a facebook account. Never have - never will.

I distrust everything they do. And while we like to think that other sites are not as bad, I was recently censored on Quora for asking about why a post was censored on Reddit.

They threw some "against policy" bullshit at me, and Marc Bodnick attempted to appear sympathetic and that his hands were tied and he didnt like the policy either - but it was a BS response.

They removed my question asking why the top LIBOR story on reddit was removed - I asked if Yishan Wong was directly responsible for such censorship etc...

After berating Marc for the BS excuse they stopped replying to me.

EVERY single thing you type online is viewed by the NSAs terrorbots.

Anyone that thinks anything is private online is fooling themselves.

<comment><USER5> > EVERY single thing you type online is viewed by the NSAs terrorbots.

Evidence? Did you program these NSA bots or something?

> Anyone that thinks anything is private online is fooling themselves.

No, they just don't know any better. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy> If you want your messages to be heard by limited parties, make it so. "My friends are too stupid to know how to use any form of encryption" is not an excuse, and might cause you to pause and consider whether you want to share anything important with such friends in the first place.

<comment><USER6> I would say this is close enough to warrant the hyperbolie.

<https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel>

Encryption is great, as long as the people you don't want to hear it can't decrypt it. Given the NSA's recent moves to build up computing power, and the way Moore's law works, your encrypted communications today are fodder for review tomorrow.

<comment><USER5> Oh, certainly the NSA is monitoring a lot and trying to monitor more, but my pedantic side had to call out the "EVERY single thing". :) Thanks for the link though, I had forgotten the details of that case and only vaguely remember hearing about the Obama administration's move to dismiss it. (Which is funny, because presently a common criticism is that Obama keeps blaming his predecessor for everything wrong. He doesn't seem very keen on prosecution...)

It's easy to future-proof your encryption, even in the face of exponential increases in computing power. The biggest danger to encryption systems that rely on integer factoring (i.e. RSA) right now is feasible quantum computing, but there are schemes that don't rely on factoring so there's hope on that front. For the trivial stuff I bother encrypting, I'm more worried about, in increasing order, being given the choice of decrypting something or getting shot or sent to prison for life (fortunately we have some precedent in the US and elsewhere against this), being tortured for a while without knowing why before being asked to decrypt something, and being tortured without having any information but being unable to convince the torturer of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's been clear in my mind for some time now that Facebook is desperately doing anything possible to stay plugged into our internet lives. Their attempted take-over of email, which will probably lead to some success, only reinforces this. I think they see the writing on the wall -- that newer services will take over older ones -- and are doing anything they can to stay top dog.

What we need is an abstraction layer on top of social networks. No matter what their TOS, they do not own my friends or my conversations with my friends. I have no qualms at all about having some other service handle my friendships and conversations in a way I deem appropriate.

We need to pry Facebook's greasy hands from our throats before it's too late. At one point they were cute. Then they were pleasantly time-wasting. Now they're crossing over the line firmly into evil territory.

<comment><USER4> Wrote this some time ago:

\---

It started innocently enough. Everyone is on it. Everyone. In the more than 20 years since it was founded - and now - daily life just could not be managed without it. Sure, it started innocently enough. Connect with your friends, post your pics, keep up with the fam. Yeah, that was then.

It wasn't too long before they started adding features. Adding value they called it. Extending your circle. Enabling you they'd say. Yeah, in the same way a spiders web is beautiful. The pattern and symmetry, glistening like shiny gossamer art. Its beauty pulls you in - you don't realize at first as you touch it, that it sticks. No, more than sticks - you become imbued with it. The more you move it wraps around you, encasing you... entombing you. For the data-mining black widow to come and suck the marketable value right out of you, your connections... every aspect of your life is now a product.

Classified, organized, tagged, sorted, tracked, pegged, followed, poked, monetized, labeled... owned is what you are. A commodity. A small spec among 3.5 billion in the user base of the book.

That's what it was these days... just simply 'the book'.

Everyone knows - everyone is aware. They are all in the book. Not even a page, or a word either... more like a letter. A single letter. An iconographic digital hologram of the total sum of your parts - all wrapped up real nice in a uniform singular profitable little package called your user profile. Displayed and viewed and consumed and tracked billions of times over. With more than thirty trillion page views per month, the cancerous blue and white digital encapsulation of the human soul was now blazoned across innumerable screens as nearly half the worlds population interacted on the book - <USER2> than 20% of the worlds population on the book at any given moment.

A study, one of the countless to be sure, said that now more than 90% of real human interactions occurred through the book. What does that even mean anymore... real? Real human interactions? Through the book? how is that even possible. It was no wonder that in the last few years the backlash has switched to resisting this unexpected strangle-hold on the human condition. Most never saw it coming... happily going along with every new feature update, privacy change, "enhancement". MZ was repeating himself a lot these days... except his frame of reference had gotten bigger... along with his security detail.... Where years ago, the book was likened to that which only came along to change humans interactions every 100 years... now his statements were 10 fold. MZ thinks of himself as the embodiment of the singularity... whatever that means. Some fucking fantasy of a long dead cybervisionary that couldn't recognize the makings of our current prison I'm sure. Fuck him.

Looking around looks a lot more like binary slavery than any form of singularity. None of our old problems have been solved - in fact the book has only made things worse. After it became a "platform for governance and outreach" we, people like - those who really see, knew. We knew what this meant. Game fucking over. This era of hyper connectivity and ultra social awareness was supposed to usher in some sort of Utopian orgasm -- one in which MZ would be carried on the shoulders of the masses to stand next to fantastical human saviors like Jesus. Fictional allusions to stellar bodies be damned!

The only problem is that most of the world is too busy. Feeding their attention into the black hole of the book to notice... or care I guess.

With ubiquitous access thanks to the assimilation of the largest global fiber network a few years ago, the book was now able to offer complete and total "free" access via the acquired goog-net.

Years ago, when Athena rolled out - it was a huge success. Welcomed into every neighborhood - direct, very high speed fiber access in every home was quickly made into a "right". The model was seen as our manifest destiny, held in a 62-micron translucent hair that fed us with more 1' and 0's to each person in a single day than the entire digital output of the globe in 1999. Such an umbilical cannot be bad right!

The only problem is we misjudged the direction of the flow! Now, with goog-net reaching everywhere, but the book being the only lens into the tubes -- our minds are warped. We are a most technically advanced - yet wholly dependent child-like civilization.

A mutant.

If its not on the platform. Not "in the book" they say -- how can it be trusted - how could it succeed? How can you expect to be relevant?

HOW CAN IT NOT BE RELEVANT!

Slaves! All of them!

This is why we act! This is what is needed. Who are we? Who the fuck were we? Not this! Surely not this. It is time.... We take action now. Rewrite this so called book.

<comment><USER8> What is this?

<comment><USER4> It is a fictional take on where I think Facebook is going, a cyberpunk short story.

<comment><USER9> Flesh it out, take on Richard Morgan. :)

<comment><USER10> Yes, this manifesto is worth echoing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This actually tripped up a friend of mine a couple of years ago. She left a comment on a photo of someone holding a toy gun saying "You look like <insert- name-of-well-known-terrorist>" followed by a smiley. Within hours, she got a message and a phone call from someone claiming to be working for FB's security who asked her some basic questions on why she left that comment. The whole experience scared her from using FB for a long time.

I thought the whole thing was adhoc and confusing. Anyone who saw the comment could easily see that it was a joke. Also, if it wasn't a joke, why is FB calling her and not someone from law enforcement?

Would love it if someone from FB here on HN could comment.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like your friend got trolled. We don't call users whom we suspect are criminals, and we certainly wouldn't call someone we suspect of being a terrorist. Especially on the grounds of a terrorism joke - believe it or not, we do have a sense of humor.

I work for Facebook's User Operations team and, as the Reuters article says, this specific tool targets the (thankfully) rare cases of adults trying to use the site for the purpose of grooming kids.

We use advanced technical systems to specifically identify grooming situations and strive for a low false positive rate. We have strong internal controls around these tools to prevent misuse or abuse, and stringent guidelines for the way we cooperate with law enforcement.

For whatever it's worth, I have been at Facebook for several years, and I am so amazed every time we're able to help a child avert an absolute worst-case scenario. These cases are rare, but they do happen, and I'm grateful we have the tools necessary to keep the worst of the worst from unfolding in the real world.

<comment><USER13> You shouldn't be striving for a low false positive rate, but for a zero false positive rate.

"Think of the children" doesn't rationalize even one wrongly accused person - especially in today's society where an accusation is enough to completely ruin ones life.

<comment><USER14> Maybe they live in the real world where a zero false positive rate simply doesn't exist.

And be serious. Getting asked a question from Facebook is hardly going to ruin someone's life is it now ?

<comment><USER13> OP said they aren't calling users but passing information on to law enforcement. Getting a call by Facebook for a bad joke is one thing. Getting the door busted in by police and subsequently shamed and fired from your job because of a bad joke you thought you made in private is another.

in case of law enforcement, the only acceptable false positive rate is zero.

<comment><USER15> The only way to achieve this would be to have no law enforcement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What I find interesting is, that now the _but think of the innocent children_ argument is also getting adapted by the corporate world to justify incredible privacy invasions.

Facebook's mass wiretapping and analysis of its users private communication seems almost like the post office scanning each and ever letter and postcard in the vague hope of finding some keywords related to bomb, terror and of cause "children". I wonder how long it is going to take until Google is going to send automated notifications to my local police station when I'm going to start googeling some water bomb tutorials for the summer.

<comment><USER17> This is a sincere question: Why would you think Facebook chat would be "private communication"?

<comment><USER18> Do you consider SMS private communications? Your cellphone carrier is just as likely to eavesdrop on your SMS history as FB does your chats.

<comment><USER19> I consider FB chats to be much less private because they actually get stored on a server somewhere by default. Also I can access them anywhere with an internet account. Neither of these things are true of SMS.

<comment><USER20> There is nothing preventing your SMSs being saved in a telco DB. I'm fairly certain they are.

<comment><USER19> Well sure it might be, but it doesn't have to. FB messages always get saved, no question.

<comment><AUTHOR> FB chat messages don't have to be saved either.

<comment><USER19> If I log in and click the Messages button I can see all my messages. To do that they have to be on their server. There isn't an off-the-record button I missed is there?

<comment><USER5> Ideally Facebook would use public-key encryption for chats and allow each user to individually save the history with their own passphrase they input encrypting it client-side.

But hey, auto-saving history without prompting you is worth it, right? (Also figuring out what to advertise to a user.)

<comment><USER19> It seems like you're describing something completely different from FB chat. anyway you could just encrypt the text, base64-encode it, and paste it into the chat box. still more convenient than email.

<comment><USER5> FB chat to me is basically real-time private messages rather than more traditional instant messaging, but everything I described except securely archiving the history could be done by FB transparently to the user. Of course you can do the work yourself, I just think it would be a nice gesture if FB provided the option to do the work for you, a way for the user to conveniently make sure FB keeps their parsers off the user's chat data. (It could also be extended to other data.) Also with how frequently Amazon prompts me for my password, I don't think users would be incredibly turned off by FB prompting for a password when they start chatting, and their browsers can be made to remember it anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm of the opinion that once enough people get fed up with a surveillance state, or even a surveillance society since private entities are involved, that the best way to "fix" the problem is by collectively generating noise that makes it too expensive and time consuming to find a needle in a haystack. Right now they probably generate very few false positives, however if many people went out of their way to actively generate false positives on a regular basis, you've effectively disabled such a system and manufactured reasonable doubt.

Generating deliberate false-positive inducing noise in communications deemed to be private between two or more individuals who know one another should be protected as free speech. To argue otherwise would be the equivalent of prosecuting an individual for yelling "Fire" in their own home among friends and stating that such an act is a clear and present danger to the US.

IMHO automated cooperative manufactured reasonable doubt will probably be one of the last bastions of civil liberties in a surveillance society.

<comment><USER22> If this privacy-invading-data-miners are using computers and mathematics they'll surely find better and better ways of filtering the false positives. But before it even comes to that they'll probably just scare people into submission by making examples of people who create false positives--probably by treating them as true positives.

<comment><USER23> there's a problem regarding false positives though. A portion of those may be guilty of other things.

There was this interesting article on this idea of terahertz lasers in airports. I think these machines are great because they are programmable and specific. You can program them to look just for explosives and this reduces the search issues significantly. But what of the fact that they would mean the TSA might be Constitutionally barred from looking for drugs? Would this retard adoption?

I think if you want to show you are doing a great job at law enforcement and minimize the warrant requirement, you want to have as many false positives as the courts will let you get away with. "Yeah they only found a few oz of pot, but they had probable cause to believe he was a sexual predator, so the evidence is admissible."

<comment><USER24> That sounds more like a good way to show you are doing a bang up job of incarceration.

Berating the legislature to eliminate as many unenforceable laws as possible seems like a better way to make law enforcement look more effective.

<comment><USER23> Have you ever noticed that at most companies, people compete for the best metrics, not the job most well done? Same thing here, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So what happens if Facebook's system flags a message, it is reviewed by their staff and then dismissed as non-actionable, but turns out to be the precursor to a severe criminal act? Does the blame come back on Facebook for failing to prevent this crime?

<comment><USER26> Possibly failure to properly notify will result in some sort of legislative slap on the wrist, but not for failing to prevent it. That isn't their responsibility.

<comment><USER25> But didn't they make it their responsibility the minute they began screening messages with the intent of reporting crimes? Selective enforcement whether by choice or mistake isn't an option they can choose here. And criminal legalities aside, I would be more concerned about the civil litigation from the victim or victim's family. Facebook pledged to prevent crime against its users, witnessed evidence that a crime would take place, and then failed to act. Tell me no one would go after Facebook's deep pockets in this situation given they could have reasonably prevented whatever crime took place, even if it meant reporting it to the proper authorities. It may just be professional paranoia talking, but I can't see how this doesn't release them from some sort of liability in a worst-case scenario.

<comment><USER27> Yes, and since they claim that nearly 1 out of every 7 people on the planet (900 million users!) are on facebook, I'd take the default position that if _any_ crimes happen they probably failed to report it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The Mashable article seems to be sources from a Reuters article. [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet- pr...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/us-usa-internet-predators- idUSBRE86B05G20120712) The program does appear to focus on sexual predators.

Mashable quotes Facebook as stating "where appropriate and to the extent required by law to ensure the safety of the people who use Facebook"

Can anyone speak to whether or not proactive scanning could possible be required by law? It seems entirely unlikely, but IANAL.

<comment><USER29> the problem lays within who decide who is a "sexual predator", who is not. I can assure you if this is left without governance, it will be very easy to slip in you and me and label as as predators as well. For example, you hold a hand of your 6-year old nephew when walking back from school when picking him up, per your sister request. In Facebook standards, you may already be a "sexual predator".

I hope you see where I am going with this...

<comment><USER5> When everyone's a sexual predator, no one is.

<comment><USER29> When everyone's sexual predator, EXCEPT the elite that decided on who's sexual predator, then everyone EXCEPT elite goes to jail.

<comment><USER5> Some sex offenders have avoided jail time. Florida has an interesting comparison of the terms[1]. How large is the pool of "elite" you're talking about? I don't think a size of over 10,000 deserves the term (so about 0.0033... percent of the US population if we limit to there) and I'd lean more toward a max of 500 (0.000166...%). It's at least a fun thought-experiment: how low can you go before the economy collapses and/or those in charge can't keep the prisoners or slaves in line or fed? Even back in the days of US slavery, only two states had slightly more slaves than non-slaves[2].

[1] [http://sheriff.org/faqs/displayfaq.cfm?id=54934ef5-c69b-4771...](http://sheriff.org/faqs/displayfaq.cfm?id=54934ef5-c69b-4771-9035-cd5d75b5554d)

[2] [http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_ratio_for_slaves_to_s...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_was_the_ratio_for_slaves_to_slave_owners_in1831)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> All the more reason to use encryption technology like Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging (<http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr>)! I've been working on an OTR- compatible iOS app called ChatSecure (<https://chatsecure.org>) that is capable of encrypting your Facebook chats (or any other XMPP service).

<comment><USER31> Also single view message services, like: <https://www.thismessagewillselfdestruct.com/> <https://onetimesecret.com/> <https://pwpush.com/> <https://whisperpassword.com/>

<comment><USER32> The problem with all of these services is you have to trust them as well. The most secure message is the one not sent.

<comment><USER31> True, but if you want to communicate you need to trust something at some point.

<comment><USER32> Right but why trust them anymore than the others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know a site where all of the scary things (civil rights and privacy violations) that are going on have been aggregated? I sometimes get people asking why I'm not on Facebook. It would be nice to have a place to point people to about why because it's quite difficult to explain normally.

<comment><USER33> [http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of- servic...](http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we- can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever.html)

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230477280457555...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html)

<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline>

<http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/09/facebook-privacy/>

[http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social- media/14...](http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social- media/147638/with-frictionless-sharing-facebook-and-news-orgs-push-boundaries- of-reader-privacy/)

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/canadian- gro...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/canadian-group-files- complaint-over-facebook-privacy.ars)

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/140182/facebooks_beacon_more_...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/140182/facebooks_beacon_more_intrusive_than_previously_thought.html)

<http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/>

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php)

[http://www.technologyreview.com/featured- story/428150/what-f...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featured- story/428150/what-facebook-knows/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It seems like the correct approach is for Facebook to do only what's legally required of it, and nothing more. That would allow society to have a transparent debate about what, exactly, should be required, leaving FB policy out of it.

As I understand it, FB is currently only required to respond to appropriately specific subpoenas and warrants. If the cops want more, they should petition for laws to require that and we can all argue about it like responsible citizens. And we could equally demand more protection.

But this thing where sometimes FB voluntarily sends law enforcement bits of information and sometimes they don't based on poorly defined criteria is just creepy. And why does FB even _want_ this responsibility? Isn't the simplest, most obvious model to say no by default?

<comment><USER35> > "And why does FB even want this responsibility?"

Maybe Facebook wants to cultivate the appearance of being a "safe place", as a precursor to opening its services to younger users? That would certainly be a way of growing their user base.

I agree that whatever the reason they're doing this is, it's misguided and creepy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I was once informed by an FB employee that federal agents are ensconced at the FB premises to monitor users' communications and shut down / censor FB groups and venues for "hate" speech and terroristic threats.

<comment><USER37> What position did this Facebook employee hold at the company? In which office did they work? Is it possible they weren't really a Facebook employee? What sort of censorship are you talking about?

I ask because I've never heard anything like that, despite working with the teams that build tools to fight spam, scams, fake accounts, and to assist the User Operations team to handle reports from people who encounter harassment, bullying, and other anti-social or criminal activity.

<comment><USER36> He was a recruiter from the Facebook MPK office (headquarters)

<comment><USER37> What position was he recruiting for, and roughly when (let's say, which quarter and year)? How likely was he a new recruiter?

I'm not sure I can express my skepticism about this enough - our security, safety, and site integrity teams are some of the most privacy-conscious people I know, and even a hint of something like this happening here would lead to very pointed questions asked at the weekly Q&A every week until it was resolved.

<comment><USER36> This was last year, and the recruiter was an old timer, so to speak; he wasn't new to FB. He was recruiting for the software engineering positions.

Really, are you surprised that there are federal agents on the premises, or just upset at the thought that FB users' privacy could be compromised in such a situation? To the degree that FB forum and groups ToS conforms with federal law and moreover seeks to go above and beyond the letter of the law then FB in this regard could be thought of as an extension of the federal government in such matters with regards to its own users. In this light it is no more relevant whether federal agents look at private or group communications, as opposed to bona fide FB employees. It doesn't matter. This is a private company; the first amendment doesn't apply. In any case, FB as a company isn't exactly widely respected for its position on its users' data, nor is it known to play nice with its users' privacy.

Let's not forget that of the companies whom the federal government sought to extract users' accounts' data from with regards to the Wikileaks issue 18 months ago, only Twitter publicized the compelled exposure of its users' data. Facebook happily gave the feds all the users' info they sought without telling us about it.

Although IIRC you have said that you've worked with the FB spam and fake account / phishing detection team, FB is a large enough organization at this point that the team responsible for complying with federal mandates and managing FB's relation with federal law enforcement is separate. Tao Stein and team have no bearing on this particular matter, nor should they care that real users happen to talk about and discuss real issues that federal agents think should be taken down. This is a separate matter entirely from what you've worked on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Someone should monitor Facebook for criminal activity.

<comment><USER39> Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

<comment><USER40> That's what checks and balances are all about.

In a fair system, there's no one custodian. It's not perfect, but it's reasonably workable. There are some prerequisites, however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I find this fascinating from a legal/political perspective.

Facebook is essentially using the same techniques to monitor private communications as the NSA supposedly does. This means Facebook has the power to report, for example, selected messages but not others. (I'm not saying they do, of course, just that they could be selective or discriminatory that way.)

The fact is that Facebook has taken upon itself a role similar to that of the police, but without any democratic oversight.

This is different from a bar owner overhearing a conversation about a crime and calling the police, because he wasn't specifically monitoring every single word said by every bar patron. But Facebook is casting a wide net by analyzing every conversation that happens.

Questions: should Facebook be permitted to do this? Should we ask for laws preventing companies from "eavesdropping" on their users' communications with the intent of detecting and reporting criminal behavior? Should this be the role of the democratically-elected government instead? Should sites be required to turn user communication over to the government for such analysis?

It's a fascinating area of law/politics with so much room for future development, and gets down to the heart of what values a society has.

</comment><comment><USER42> This looks like it's mostly targeted at sex predators, but I wonder if the system is also activated if you jokingly tell a friend that they are "smoking crack".

<comment><USER43> Indeed it does and is another case of "think of the children" without thinking of the adults.

Conversations of "what was that shit resturant you went to the other day" would probably get flagged as well once they replied with an address. Or indeed local phrased like "I'm hittting the bank first then we can meet up at the bar on 42nd street" were the term hitting is slang for nothing more than a harmless turn of phrase saying i'm going to the bank. Nothing sinister, though could easily be misinterpreted.

There are many others and also people have nicknames.

Still on the plus side, it will create alot of jobs were you get to read other people so called private conversations :|.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Never assume anything you send online is private. If the service isn't monitoring you, your friends are. And if not your friends, then the people who share your friends' computers, or anyone who comes into possssion of it, have he potential to expose your communications.

And while this has always been the case ever since letter writing, electronic communication is so much easier to parse and distribute and copy on bulk.

<comment><USER45> Yep. Google probably knows my address, phone number, email, and name, not because I've told the Internet _, but because I told a friend how to drive me home and he entered it in his Android smartphone's address-book. Or was it Apple..then Apple knows (I forget).

(_well, I did because I participated in GSoC, and they needed my address to pay me, which I decided was worth it for me! Etc. etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What if Facebook make a mistake, do they get done for wasting police time? Monitoring is all fine but it needs to be done independantly, anything else is a conflict of interest and something that FaceBook staff can abuse.

You know it would not supprise me one bit if FaceBook had staff monitoring this modding down every post that holds them in true^H^H^H^HBAD light.

<comment><USER43> I rest my case.

<comment><USER46> You might have lost some people when you said, "Monitoring is all fine..."

<comment><USER43> Maybe though given another post I had my doubts.

Thank you I appreciete the feedback. +1 to you for that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> FB has a terrible reputation with regards to privacy without real justification.

This is not supprising in any way.

If you don't like this then don't do FaceBook - realy that easy I have found.

<comment><USER47> I wish it was that easy. I took an online computer course last year, and the instructor setup a Facebook page to share important information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Somewhat related, apparently if you want to shutdown someone's paypal account and suspend their funds (and yours as well, be warned) just send them some money with the reason "drug money".

Apparently people have sent their friends money, rent, etc. and did that as a joke, boom, it's a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER49> This news made me lose my interest in FB more. They continually go beyond user's privacy.

</comment><comment><USER50> Now I'm pretty sure that my account was (temporarily) disabled for this reason when I posted a politically biased link about the refused Iranians at Apple stores.

</comment><comment><USER51> What if Google did this with its properties (search, gmail, gtalk, etc)?

<comment><USER4> They do.

<comment><USER52> Source?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Whilst FB have legal obligations in many countries I must say when I read "phrases that signal something might be amiss, such as an exchange of personal information or vulgar language" then the first thing that sprang to mind was nothing to do with crime. People swear, people exchange details. SO I guess alot gets flagged up to there staff.

Question is, do they warn you that your private conversation is not private and do they comply with the data protection acts the various countries have and more importantly who monitors FB? So many things can be taken out of context and acted upon in good faith at the detrement of innocent parties, this is concerning. But I don't do FB, nor do I have any immediate plans either. That has nothing to do with this, but more todo with concerns in general about there privacy and policeys they act out.

</comment><comment><USER53> Decades ago, a friend of mine (call him Mickey) was under a DEA investigation due to some bone-headed thing he did involving one of his acquaintances (call him Ken) asking him to receive a shipment from Colorado for him.

Now the fun part is another friend of ours (call him Jeb) was in the habit of making movie quotes when he started phone calls, so he calls up Mickey and leads in with a Lethal Weapon 2 line about "shipments", completely unknowning that the DEA was potentially tapping the call.

Because of the way the warrant was written, Mickey was able to wave off the tap on Jeb's call since it only covered calls from Ken. But it could just as easily led to all sorts of other problems since between friends, the level of discourse can go far afield of what a non-initiated 3rd party might consider normal.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is there any way to easily and securely encrypt Facebook chats? a quick google finds:

<http://abine.com/facebook.php>

</comment><comment><USER55> In the post-9/11 era this is _de rigueur_ and at some level socially sanctioned in the name of keeping us safe from terrorists and social deviants. And I don't think you can argue credibly against these operations w/o first interrogating the various pretexts that have set the stage for them: Oklahoma City, 9/11, 7/7, 3/11 etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> So, "cooperation with police" now entails creating their own criteria for crime and dragnetting the presumed private conversations of a billion people. I guess I better not confirm birthday parties or holidays with young relatives or friends kids on that site.

</comment><comment><USER57> Tailor your free speech for who is watching, or else you could get into trouble. Welcome to the new America that our fear of terrorism built.

</comment><comment><USER58> How come every time there's a post about Facebook the usually intelligent HN crowd goes nuts? I can understand the concerns but this whole thread is filled with alarmists and looks like something taken from reddit (or even 4chan).

</comment><comment><USER59> I once made a joke on fb on a friend and posted "you smoke doobies" and he was so shit scared that he took it down. Lol

<comment><USER60> You do realize that could very well be more about his Mom being is among his FB friends, than out of any fear of Zuckerberg and crew calling the cops on them for what would amount to misdemeanor possession, at worst, yes?</comment></comment>


Best Public IT Standard Operating Procedures - <AUTHOR> dear all,
I am working to standardize SOP into a big pharma firm. I would like to start from some point so to avoid hours of review. Does someone known any public available IT SOP? <comment><USER2> I would think that ITIL is one of the obvious standards here, but you have to pay for it. Since you are working for a big pharma firm though, surely you can expense the cost of some manuals?

Alternatively a quick search threw up this: [https://wiki.en.it- processmaps.com/index.php/ITIL-Checklists](https://wiki.en.it- processmaps.com/index.php/ITIL-Checklists)

You might have to do some deeper searching since you get mostly commercial stuff in the first few pages of hits. I guess this area has not attracted much open source interest.</comment>


The Bristol Chaotic Pendulum - <AUTHOR> http://maths.straylight.co.uk/archives/301

<comment><USER2> What makes it "chaotic" isn't just that it'll turn right if you start it leaning a tiny bit right and left if you start it leaning a tiny bit left. What makes it chaotic is that, if you start it in position X, it might make the series of turns RRLRLLLRL... while if you start it in position X+epsilon, it might make the series of turns RRLRLLLLR... or LLRLRRRLR... or some other completely different sequence. It may even make the first hundred turns exactly the same, and then diverge at turn #101.

In other words, any tiny change in the initial conditions, even if it doesn't change the first turn, can change the pattern of turns farther down the line. In chaos, _sensitive dependence on initial conditions_ doesn't just happen at a single point, but throughout the system. It's not just a matter of making or missing the train, but of talking to different people or having slightly different mannerisms because you were 3 minutes and 2.8 seconds early instead of 3 minutes and 2.7 seconds early, and those tiny changes eventually adding up to lead you to Boise instead of Miami.

<comment><USER3> Nicely put. I often consider this problem when I think counterfactually: "What would have happened if I missed the train? Where would I be right now if I hadn't lost my pencil two days ago?"

I have an instinct to just dismiss this kind of musing, because I think to myself that even the smallest changes propagate in wildly unpredictable ways, with potentially vast consequences -- think "the butterfly effect"-- and so it's pointless to even _try_ to reason counterfactually.

But of course it's _not_ pointless, and our minds do this naturally all the time: holding everything else equal, we're constantly twisting this knob and that one, imagining all kinds of possible worlds, exploring the space of what could have been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Chaotic behavior is surprisingly simple to generate. The equation:

x[n+1] = alpha * x[n] * (x[n] - 1)

is chaotic for alpha > 3.56. In other words, if you run this Python code:

       def chaos(alpha):
           x = 0.5 # The "initial condition"
           l = []
           for i in range(100):
               x = alpha * x * (1 - x)  # The logistic equation
               l.append(x)
           return l

then

chaos(2.6) yields [...., 0.615, 0.615, 0.615, 0.615, 0.615, 0.615, ....]

chaos(3.2) yields [...., 0.513, 0.799, 0.513, 0.799, 0.513, 0.799, ....] (a 2-periodic sequence)

chaos(3.8) yields [...., 0.649, 0.865, 0.443, 0.937, 0.221, 0.656, ...] (non- periodic --- chaos!)

When we say that chaotic systems are unpredictable, it means that small differences in the initial conditions get amplified. So, if I replace x = 0.5 with x = 0.50001, then the result of chaos(2.6) will be (almost) the same because it's not chaotic, but the result of chaos(3.8) will be completely different.

The diagram at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LogisticMap_BifurcationDia...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LogisticMap_BifurcationDiagram.png) is drawn entirely using the equation above, and it's the simplest example of funky mathematics that I know of. See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map>

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, from looking at it, it's actually very predictable.

Once one arm crosses what I'll call the lower bound (at roughly 80+ degrees from the bar being parallel to the ground), the water empties so rapidly that the tube filling up is not nearly fast enough, so the pendulum tilts back to the other side.

There is also an "upper" bound on each side, which is during the filling phase. If the arm doesn't switch sides and "stops" roughly within, say, 15 degrees from parallel, the water will fill up to the point that it will become so heavy at that side that it will tip, satisfy the lower bound, and switch sides.

Otherwise the "current" side will oscillate between those two bounds until it breaches (usually) the upper bound.

<comment><USER6> >Well, from looking at it, it's actually very predictable.

People are very predictable too. On the whole they walk on the surface of the Earth and don't deviate from it more than a few km.

<comment><USER7> I deviated from that 'few km' by 5,000km. I also regularly deviated a several hundred km to France with my family. My in-laws regularly deviate a thousand km to the east coast of Canada. One of my bosses regularly deviates to the southern USA.

It's a very misleading assumption to say people don't deviate far from where they live. I know here in Canada it's not only common, but considered abnormal if people don't regularly go to cottage country, frequently travelling a minimum of 100km to get there.

Just because city-dwellers naively believe the city has everything they need, doesn't mean the 4/5ths of the population that permanently live outside of large cities behave like those in the cities.

Even when I lived in the UK, it was rare to know people who didn't travel far frequently.

<comment><USER2> > I deviated from that 'few km' by 5,000km.

Reread what you're responding to; he's talking about people staying within that distance of the surface of the earth, not people staying within that distance of their home city. The list of people who have been more than ~25 km away from the surface of the earth is very, very small.

It was a good answer to the previous post: staying within 25 km of the earth's surface (with a few exceptions) means we're all "predictable" in some sense, but we're all very unpredictable in other senses -- much like the pendulum is predictable in some ways and not in others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember seeing that when (I think) I was sat in the church for a school service one year. I'd forgotten all about it, thanks for the reminder.</comment>


The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-gnu-manifesto-turns-thirty?intcid=mod-latest <comment><USER2> We've heard a lot about how inflexible or even terrible GNU/GPL is lately. Whether you agree or not, I think it is important to remember that we would probably be living in a very different world technology-wise if it wasn't for GNU & GPL.

In other words, open source in general, even including popularity of other licenses, would not have spread and become so popular if GNU and GPL wasn't there as an extreme, far out example. For those younger here, sharing software by big companies (Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc) was pretty radical and unheard of back in the day. Now they all share so much of their code which is great.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I don't understand the hate for GPL. Someone spends time and energy making something, and releases it for _free_ , and for everyone to use. That person has every right to decide how their software will be distributed. The GPL only ensures that anyone who uses and modifies the software has to give back to the community that spawned it in the first place.

<comment><USER4> > understand the hate for GPL

Here's an attempt, although before I start, I don't hate the GPL at all. I think it's a clever hack, and a good license for some situations. Sometimes, as a practical matter, it is annoying:

Sometimes, you work on proprietary code (as to why this is, here's one thing I wrote a few years back: [http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to- scarcity/](http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity/) but it's a long, involved discussion in and of itself!) and would like to integrate some small library that would make your life easier. If you can't use it, it's not really that big a deal, but if you can, great. Someone like myself, who greatly enjoys open source software will also be sure to be a 'good citizen', giving back any changes to that little library, even if we're not forced to.

But if it's GPL, you just can't use it. If this is the genuine intent of the author, fair is fair and you move on. Sometimes though, people just slap the GPL on stuff without particularly considering the consequences.

In some circumstances, BSD licensed code can attract more users, _because_ they are able to use it in proprietary applications. If they 'get' open source, they'll still contribute back, causing the code to actually be more used and useful than if it were GPL and excluded from use by a company creating something it wants to make money with. (Ok, yes, you _can_ make money with GPL stuff, but it's a lot more difficult than making money by simply selling something directly, and even that is not _easy_ , as anyone who has tried to start a software business knows).

<comment><USER5> > If they 'get' open source, they'll still contribute back, causing the code > to actually be more used and useful than if it were GPL and excluded from > use by a company creating something it wants to make money with.

It depends on the size of the contribution. If they only fix a small bug then there is no real reason not to contribute the fix.

The trouble comes when a company makes any kind of nontrivial improvement at all. In that case the proprietary version is significantly better than the BSD licensed version and any improvements made to the BSD licensed version can still be incorporated into the proprietary version but not vice versa, so the proprietary version will always be better and continue to gain users at the expense of the BSD licensed version.

Probably the most extreme example of this is iOS. Apple put a slick UI on BSD and now it runs on a billion zero-freedom devices while BSD is slowly dying. Compare this with Linux, which is much more popular in its own right and even more so if you include Android, which itself is much freer than iOS in no small part because the kernel is GPL'd.

The same thing can happen with any BSD licensed software. Anyone can do 25% of the work to create a proprietary version which is 25% better than the original and use it to cart off with most of the original's user base.

Ironically this is one of the things the BSD people complain about: Anyone can take software released under a GPL-compatible version of the BSD license, make some nontrivial improvements to it and release it under the GPL.

<comment><USER6> > Probably the most extreme example of this is iOS. Apple put a slick UI on > BSD and now it runs on a billion zero-freedom devices while BSD is slowly > dying.

This is a very incorrect association to make, as the existence of iOS has very little effect on the relevance of BSD. (Besides, Netcraft confirmed *BSD was dying long before iOS came out. :)

Sure, from the perspective of 20-30 years ago, there were dozens of proprietary forks of BSD Unix (including NextStep), and BSD looked like a lousy choice for open source distribution.

However that doesn't acknowledge the profound change internet distribution has had on how developers consume open source code. There is now a massive ecosystem of BSD/MIT/Apache licensed code and very few evil corporations sucking it up and turning it proprietary. (Much of this 'framework' code which was always problematic under GPL.) So we should acknowledge that BSD-style licenses are successful in their own right, and not keep relying on outdated FUD about Microsoft or Apple "stealing" code twenty-five years ago, because it largely is no longer happening.

<comment><USER5> > This is a very incorrect association to make, as the existence of iOS has > very little effect on the relevance of BSD.

Certainly Mac OS X has more relevance to the traditional BSD userbase than iOS, but that's because iOS _preempted the existence_ of a mobile BSD userbase. Linux has not only Android but also a slew of smaller players like FirefoxOS and Tizen. BSD has _nothing_. It's hard to have less relevance than non-existence.

> (Besides, Netcraft confirmed * BSD was dying long before iOS came out. :)

Of course it was -- it has been under the BSD license the whole time and before Apple it was Sun et al as you note.

> However that doesn't acknowledge the profound change internet distribution > has had on how developers consume open source code. There is now a massive > ecosystem of BSD/MIT/Apache licensed code and very few evil corporations > sucking it up and turning it proprietary.

That is almost a self-refuting statement. The primary reason to want a permissive license over the GPL is to use the code in proprietary software. In some cases that _does_ result in the proprietary software dominating the open source equivalent in the market (as with OS X or Safari/Chrome), and the remaining cases (the framework code you mentioned) are the exact use case for the LGPL, which allows the framework to be used in proprietary software without allowing the framework itself to be supplanted by a proprietary fork.

<comment><USER6> > iOS preempted the existence of a mobile BSD userbase

It's completely ridiculous to claim there anything like a "mobile BSD userbase", and zero arguments beyond that were given. There's no real reason why Android or any other mobile OS couldn't be based on a BSD. Given the IP constraints of mobile phones, it probably would be a better choice than a bastardized Linux.

Oh, and "*BSD is dying" is a troll. HAND.

> The primary reason to want a permissive license over the GPL is to use the > code in proprietary software.

The facts are that other than primordial forks of BSD Unix (e.g. iOS), 99% of the permissive ecosystem remains non-proprietary.

It's not like people are coding against "Ruby on Rails Professional" or "Angular.js Enterprise-Edition", all of this software is open and commoditized and free, and always will be.

> exact use case for the LGPL

I don't understand why BSD-style is much more popular than LGPL for 'frameworks'. Perhaps because it's because it's the "Lesser" GPL and the first link on the page is "Why you shouldn't use [this]".[1]

In the software industry, the FSF actually has a lot of moral authority. My guess is that if it doesn't look like they'll stand behind the LGPL, why bother?

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As much as RMS rubs many people the wrong way (including myself), the GNU project has brought an amazing amount of good to the world, and done much to enable and inspire the various other forms of open source software we enjoy today, which in many ways has driven the development of the Internet in a direction that would have been basically impossible without the software foundation laid by RMS and others who took up the GPL.

I'm glad to see the New Yorker covering a massively influential, but often invisible, force behind today's Internet.

<comment><USER8> I fear that you, as well as a large portion of the HN community, are prematurely marking GPL software and the GNU movement as an outdated idea that has less of a place moving forward. You look at society today and say, "well, tech has moved so much in the past 25 years, and it's far too developed to become closed now. The point has been made."

That's bullshit.

We live in a far more closed world than we ever have before. Most people (eg: those not on this website) use their phone as their primary computing device. They access software primarily through closed source app stores. They give their information to servers which are almost certainly closed source.

This industry is far too young; the war on general computing is far too powerful, to be able to have this opinion and think it does no harm. We have seen all the good that the GPL has done for us, and we've seen the damage that BSD licensing can do. I'm not saying that BSD licensing doesn't have a place, (I actually use OpenBSD on a daily basis, and I'm aware of many of the difficulties that they face with regards to GPL'd stuff [1]), I'm only saying that it is not superior to the GPL in all cases.

[1]: [http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070901041657](http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070901041657)

<comment><USER9> The way I think of it is that it's important to have a backup plan. Few people are prepared to give up commercial software today, but we can support the efforts of the activists who do try to live purely, in case we ever need it. Releasing software under GPL-compatible licenses is a way of contributing, even if it's not as strong support as some people would like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's nice to see GNU Manifesto get some love. I have a hard time seeing the ideals of RMS and Free software get run over in conversation so easily, even on HN, while almost every experience I have reinforces the idea that GPLv3 is the future.

For example, I made a bad purchase and bought a Samsung SmartTV. Now I have a TV with a quad core ARM in it but I can't put my own distro on it because even though they are running Linux and hence GPLv2, Samsung has made recent patches likely to brick the TV with any attempts to install your own OS...

I think too many people have bought into the idea that GPL code makes for complicated legal issues that isn't worth the trouble, but I don't think that's the case at all. Neither is it the case that you can't profit from GPL code. All you have to do is provide source!

Anyway, I'm just saying I think RMS is a man ahead of his time even today, and as corporations and governments extend their tentacles of power into the digital world the last bastion of freedom for hackers is going to be GPLv3+ and not BSD (which enables putting users in prisons, eg Apple).

<comment><USER11> > For example, I made a bad purchase and bought a Samsung SmartTV.

Is that one of those TVs that spy on your conversations as if 1984 were a fucking manual to be followed?

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/09/your-samsung-tv- is-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/09/your-samsung-tv-is-spying-on- you_n_6647762.html)

<comment><USER10> Yep, one of those... which is why I wanted to put something I could control on it, but alas I have updated too recently and am afraid of bricking a $3k tv...

<comment><USER12> _Always_ take software ownership of your devices as soon as you buy them, so you're well within the return period if it doesn't work out. You have a much better opportunity to assert your modification rights during the return period rather than having to beg the manufacturer to honor the warranty.

(I know this doesn't help you now, and your next chance is when the device is old enough that you're comfortable losing it. I'm posting this so others don't make the same mistake. I'd personally just forget about the computer in your TV, and setup a proper HTPC).

<comment><USER10> Thank you for this information, I wish I had thought about it in that manner at the time of purchase, and it is something I think more modern techlectuals should consider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good article, fair, factual. Proper use of the word 'hacker'. Balanced with comments from Tim O'Reilly and accurate distinction made between GPL and BSD/MIT. Good job Maria Bustillos.

Can't believe I just wrote that about an article in The New Yorker. :)

<comment><USER14> You and me both. I was prepared for an upper crusty profile making fun of his mannerisms or idealism. Instead I got a clear, concise summary of Stallman and the landscape of software licencing. This will be an excellent introduction for the average person.

<comment><USER15> The New Yorker is an amazingly humane publication. Not snarky, not haughty, not what many people (who do not read it) think it is. This piece is a representative sample of their journalism.

The New Yorker is like Burning Man - people who've never experienced it have strongly held, fiercely incorrect assumptions about what it is.

<comment><USER15> @matthewn (can't reply directly to you) - hah! You're right, Anthony Lane is hilarious. And the opera reviews can be boring if you (like me) are not into opera. But you know what I mean =)

<comment><USER16> I love the New Yorker, but the whole "goings on about town" section is obviously useless if you don't live in New York.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The GPL is a hack on copyright law.

If you disagree with the GPL then you disagree with copyright law. The GPL is only as powerful as current copyright law allows it to be.

Don't hate on the GPL, it's _satire_. Hate on the last century of corporate- lobbied legislation that has granted unprecedented levels of power to copyright: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Sta...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Major_amendments_to_federal_copyright_law). E.g. Mickey Mouse _still_ isn't in the public domain!

<comment><USER18> > If you disagree with the GPL then you disagree with copyright law.

Its quite possible to believe that existing copyright law represents exactly what government should do to manage IP in that domain and _not_ believe that the GPL represents a choice people should make about how to use the rights provided under copyright law. (Note: I am not saying, in this post that I hold either part of that opinion, only that it is not inconsistent.) So I disagree with your claim "If you disagree with the GPL then you disagree with copyright law."

Believing that government should permit something is different than supporting the choice to actually use that permission in any particular way.

<comment><USER17> It's possible but it's not logical!

If one supports the level of power that current copyright law provides for authors, then you must support the fact that any particular author wields it. If you think the author is abusing power, then that means the current copyright law is too broad, and if it's too broad you ultimately don't agree with the law.

<comment><USER19> Suppose for whatever reason (employer legal department, etc.) you can't use GPLd sourcecode.

You'll quickly find that GPL sourcecode is not just neutral to you, it's outright harmful. Why? Because if there's a strong project that's GPL'd, that disincentivizes anyone from working on a less restrictive open-source version of same. So now that funny "satire", as you put it above, is forcing you to reinvent wheels, when you could be using that effort to further improve the world.

<comment><USER20> _when you could be using that effort to further improve the world._

Except that by "improve the world", you actually mean "make a quick(er) buck for ourselves".

By the same logic, your company charging for their software (or not open- sourcing it) is "outright harmful" to people who want to use your company's software to make themselves a quick buck for themselves.

Except that you can at least read and learn from the GPL code when making your own implementation. Somehow I doubt your GPL-hostile employer is taking even that small step toward improving the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Every couple of years I make the same comment here: He's a curious character, but history will treat Stallman kindly.

</comment><comment><USER22> To those in Chicago, Richard Stallman will be speaking at Loyola tonight. [http://ccug.chicago.il.us/fsm.html](http://ccug.chicago.il.us/fsm.html)

<comment><USER23> And to those in the Boston area, RMS will be speaking at LibrePlanet at MIT on Saturday. [http://libreplanet.org/2015](http://libreplanet.org/2015)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > he found himself unable to adapt a new Xerox printer with a program he'd > created to alert users to paper jams

And still I can't go to an average computer store, buy a printer which is powered by free software so I could customize it like this. We have a long way to go. First to mind: the respects your freedom campaign needs to grow to more hardware.

<comment><USER23> >the respects your freedom campaign needs to grow to more hardware.

Yes, we'd like to do that. If you know anyone producing hardware, please encourage them to seek RYF certification.

We may not have a regular printer certified, but at least we have two 3D printers. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Stephen Fry (of Top Gear infamy) speaks about his usage of GNU/Linux - [https://youtu.be/P_mS4CIXcLY](https://youtu.be/P_mS4CIXcLY)

<comment><USER26> > Stephen Fry (of Top Gear infamy)

As others have mentioned, I'm surprised you'd associate him with Top Gear of all things. He's better known as the host of the british quiz/comedy show QI (Quite Interesting) [1], and before that one half of the comedy duo behind "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" [2], the other half better known in the US as the actor who played Dr House. Fry also played Jeeves in a television adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves & Wooster series, and dare I say incarnated the perfect humble and effective butler, again alongside Laurie as Wooster. [3]

He's one of the top living british comedians, which is why him outing himself as a geek and explaining the importance of the GPL has so much weight.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QI)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bit_of_Fry_%26_Laurie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bit_of_Fry_%26_Laurie)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves_and_Wooster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeeves_and_Wooster)

<comment><USER27> I feel like Philangist is probably showing his US roots here: the most popular of Fry's works on this side of the pond is _Top Gear_. As an American, the only reason I ever came across _A Bit of Fry and Laurie_ is because of a British friend, and I hadn't heard of _QI_ or _Jeeves and Wooster_. And I've some exposure to British culture (I've watched _Doctor Who_ , _Allo Allo_ , _Black Adder_ , _Black Books_ , _Orphan Black_ , _Black Mirror_ (you guys like your black names!), _Monty Python_ , and others that don't immediately spring to mind).

I'm somewhat surprised to find what didn't make it over to the UK from here, though. Someone recently asked me why Americans call her "Willis" and ask what she's talking about, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think the irony is that open source is empowering developers, not users. All the new walled gardens wouldn't have been possible without open source.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter .. you name it.

<comment><USER23> >I think the irony is that open source is empowering developers, not users.

And that's why copyleft is still important! We, as developers, have an abundance of awesome free software to build applications with, but rarely do those freedoms make it all the way to the user. Open Source gives developers freedom. Free Software gives users freedom, too.

Consider using the (A)GPLv3 for your next project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As a side note: it was Stallman's birthday yesterday, who turned 61 himself.

</comment><comment><USER30> Damn it is younger than me :(....

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _" Richard's sort of like an Old Testament prophet, with lots of 'Thou shalt not,' and BSD is a more Christian approach, saying, 'Love your neighbor; make value for the world. Let the people do with it what they will!'"_

Such a dud on O'Reilly's part. The analogy is totally confused from a theological and sociopolitical perspective, in its treatment of the Old Testament and New Testament as being mutually exclusive/opposed sets in the Christian religion, and the implicit assumption that most interpretations of Christianity are from a libertarian/anarchist perspective.

<comment><USER18> > in its treatment of the Old Testament and New Testament as being mutually > exclusive/opposed sets in the Christian religion

It doesn't treat them as being mutually exclusive or essentially opposed, it treats them as different areas of potential focus within the same overarching tradition where focus on one vs. focus on the other produces a very different "feel" even when the overall values aren't all that different.

> and the implicit assumption that most interpretations of Christianity are > from a libertarian/anarchist perspective.

I would agree that it is an error to present "more Christian" as an alternative to "Old Testament", but its clear from your preceding complaint that you got the intent, which was that "Christian" here stood in for "New Testament" and that both alternatives were, in your words, "in the Christian religion". So your first criticism makes your second seem disingenuous, as the two criticisms require _different_ readings of the text.

FWIW, as a lifelong Christian, I've seen this kind of "New Testament" vs. "Old Testament" focus distinction -- one that aligns with detailed proscription based vs. a more personal and situational approach -- made frequently by Christians, and by Christians whose personal preference is on either side (ones who criticize the other side of the relative focus divide for focusing too much on the NT without critical OT context, and those who criticize others for focusing too much on the OT without attention to how the NT should inform the application of the OT.) So I don't think that analogy is inappropriate or poorly chosen, even if the precise wording ("Christian" vs. "New Testament") is less than ideal.

<comment><USER27> > I would agree that it is an error to present "more Christian" as an > alternative to "Old Testament"

On what grounds?

Neither the Old or New Testament aligns with modern Christianity particularly well, but the New Testament definitely aligns more closely.</comment></comment></comment>


New Amazon EC2 Instance Type - The Cluster Compute Instance - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/07/the-new-amazon-ec2-instance-type-the-cluster-compute-instance.html <comment><USER2> This new cluster compute instance size is essentially a variation of the m2.4xlarge instance (2xX5550 Nehelem - 27ECUs) with the following changes: 1\. Faster X5570 CPUs 2\. 10G Network 3\. HVM

I think the most noteworthy feature is the 10G Nic which is more conducive to clustering than the standard GigE Nic for other instance sizes. I'm not aware of any other public IaaS provider offering 10G network currently.

In terms of raw performance the x5570 will probably perform very well relative to other IaaS providers. EC2 is one of the few IaaS clouds that utilizes a heterogenous hardware environment to enable better scalability between instance sizes. Other providers like Rackspace Cloud use homogenous environments (Opteron 2374 in the case of Rackspace) and rely on Hypervisor CPU throttling to enable CPU scaling between different instance sizes. On the low end homogenous clouds tend to offer better value but are not well suited for HPC application on the high end (e.g. a 2GB Rackspace Cloud server kills an EC2 m1.small, but the largest 16GB instance lags far behind EC2 m2.* instances). In fact in some homogenous clouds CPU performance is fairly constant from small to larger sized instances (you are essentially just paying for more memory).

I recently wrote a blog post comparing CPU performance of 20 different IaaS providers including EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. In it I used a compilation of 19 different CPU related benchmarks to produce an ECU metric for about 150 different cloud server configurations:

[http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu- benchma...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2010/05/what-is-ecu-cpu-benchmarking- in-cloud.html)

<comment><USER3> _I think the most noteworthy feature is the 10G Nic_

The NIC is not the most interesting part, but the network is: not only do these new instances offer 10 GigE, but they also offer full bisection bandwidth to all instances in a placement group (=> no oversubscription of core switches). That is pretty unusual, and a big win for network-intensive applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Each Cluster Compute Instance consists of a pair of quad-core Intel "Nehalem" X5570 processors with a total of 33.5 ECU (EC2 Compute Units)_

Aha, we finally have another EC2 Compute Unit comparison than the vague "1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor."

The X5570 is basically a server grade 2.93GHz Core i7 and it equates to 16.75 ECU (since the "pair" is 33.5 ECU). You can then do very vague and imprecise extrapolation and assume a regular 2.66-2.8GHz i7 is in the 12-15 ECU area (which makes most EC2 instances look rather anemic and probably explains why the Redis benchmarks on EC2 seem so poor.)

<comment><USER5> Yeah man, Ive been telling people for a while that ec2's offerings are high priced and low powered. Never would have thought a single i7 would be more than 12x the power of a ec2 standard unit though. crazy

<comment><USER6> if you're hosting a website, makes more sense to rent dedicated servers. ec2 is great for off-loading peak traffic though

<comment><USER7> I don't agree. I've ditched almost all my dedicated servers across all kinds of apps that I run. I now use Rackspace cloud servers as my universal tool for everything I can.

I used to use EC2, but I've found I get significantly better performance (and of course support) at Rackspace for the same price. Also avoid Rackspace cloud sites, performance is pretty awful.

Anyway back to the dedicated server point. If you use virtual servers you can very easily replicate images, spin up copies and scale your computer power on the fly. Case in point, I was running one of my apps on a $10 pm instance on Rackspace. We got a Techcrunch article out of nowhere and the site instantly died under the traffic. I resized the server on the fly and boom, * straight back up. Once the peak died down I scaled the server back down. A couple of months down the track we get near Techcrunch traffic every day and I haven't had to scale the code base at all - I just keep it running on a larger instance. Much, much more cost effective.

* ok not straight. Unfortunately when resizing a Rackspace cloud instance under heavy load it takes _ages_ to run (30+ min isn't unusual compared with 5 min under light load). I've found that the best solution is to spin up a copy on another instance and change the dns to point to the new one. I wish Rackspace would add some way to temporarily block traffic to a server to it can scale. Some kind of "panic", scale me up, button would be great.

<comment><USER8> You actually helped make his point.

<comment><USER7> Not at all. If you start with a dedicated server you can't offload peak traffic as easily. Always going with a virtual server allows you to scale on the fly and cuts costs when not in use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My research group has been doing HPC type stuff on EC2. In fact the press release copy for this sounds almost exactly like what we've been writing when trawling for cash. Of course Amazon also gave us a grant (in AWS credits), so maybe we shouldn't feel bad if any of it was directly lifted...

</comment><comment><USER10> With 880 Cluster Compute Instances (7040 cores):

> This result places us at position 146 on the Top500 list of supercomputers.

And $1408 per hour.

<comment><USER11> Using extra large high cpu instances is actually cheaper per compute unit. You just lose io and memory.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. All that compute power may not be useful if you need the io/memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> hmm.. AWS is evolving relentlessly, GAE engineers should work harder (and faster) to catch up... It will be an interesting battle (and let's not forget about Microsoft, or even Apple)

</comment><comment><USER14> It is interesting that the new Cluster Compute Instances use HVM instead of paravirtualization, does it mean AWS is moving away from Xen?

<comment><USER15> Xen supports both PV and HVM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The post is signed quite ambiguously "Jeff". Given that it's Amazon making a fairly large announcement here, they could do to include a last name there...

<comment><AUTHOR> That's me...

<comment><USER14> Hi Jeff, can you say something why Cluster Compute Instances use HVM instead of paravirtualization?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> With so many different options, it makes me wonder if they could do a choose- your-own setup and pay by the core/memory/disk you select.

</comment><comment><USER18> Any good ideas what you could use this for?

<comment><USER6> crunching numbers (such as estimating where the oil spill is expanding, weather prediction, etc.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Moving to Dublin without a CS degree - <AUTHOR> Hello fellow hackers!
I'm Brazilian, my girlfriend is European and is living with me for about a year now, aside from the language barrier (her portuguese is not fluent yet) she also has a visa that doesn't allow her to work here.
We've been thinking of moving to a place that will allow her to work and also will be closer to her parents, after some research we found out that Dublin seems to be a pretty nice place that fits all our criteria. However I don't have any sort of CS degree, I started studying CS but had to drop out.
I have working experience though, I worked as an intern developing software for a major multinational company for one year and then later got hired in the same company where I worked for almost 3 years before switching to another development job where I'm still employed. I also started making some small contributions to open source projects on Github. Is the lack of a degree a problem or will I be able to get a job counting solely on my experience? <comment><USER2> I would say you'll do fine. To start out, you might have to do what Dubliners call, "Nixers". That is to say, a cash in hand payment for a small touchup sort of job. Dublin has a pretty fertile tech ground and if you honestly and truely try to give more than half a shit, you'll do well enough when you meet enough people.

Definitely check the viability for legally having a job in Ireland as a Brazilian. I've met many Brazilians in Dublin, it does seem a popular destination. All very young too. Only tonight I was at a design talk and godblessthem, the only post to that Facebook event page was a very optimistic guy saying Hi and hoping to meet people at it.

No idea of your background. Is your girlfriend from the continent? Don't mind rand0mized too much. While his comments on transport infrastructure and housing costs are more than true, his ideaz about scammers and arrogance is most likely a communication breakdown of a thing called the craic ;)

Give us a shout if you move here and need a hand with anything. Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> She's actually from the UK, we considered trying there as well but Dublin seems to have a better technology scene (don't know for sure if that's the case, but it's what it seems from here!). Thank you for the input, I really appreciate it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was working there in Dublin - be prepared for a lot of scammers visitting you every freakin' evening at home, amazingly huge house rental fees and spoiled landlords thinking how to cheat you on the rentals, houses/appartaments full of shitty infrastructure, awful wheather, terrible public transportation and waisting your time on registering yourself to get PPS number from the depart of Social Welfare. Without that you will be forced to pay 41%of taxes etc... Go find the job in UK or somewhere else, keep far away form Ireland. Also - Irish guys are most of the time arrogant, thinking they are the most intelligent people on the Earth. Wouldn't go there anymore...

</comment><comment><USER4> You right well be able to get a job but I am not sure how you would do on the immigration side when you are not married. I'm Irish and sadly it is quite a bureaucratic country, so without qualifications you could have quite a difficult time getting a work permit, so you might just have the same problem in reverse.

Now if you were a corporation, you would be welcomed with open arms and also given the lowest tax rate in Europe :-/

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I always thought that if I manage to score a job offer the work permit would be more or less easy, back to the drawing board it is then. Thank you for the input!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> visa is your main concern. I am Brazilian as well and you can't work in Ireland (legally) without a VISA sponsorship from a company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, my plan is to try and get a spot in some company that's willing to sponsor the whole work permit thing. My biggest concern is that the government will deny the permit because I don't have a degree, but I guess it doesn't hurt to try!</comment></comment>


Möbius Bagel - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/14/07/mobius-bagel?fk_kk

<comment><USER2> I don't see that this adds anything new - is it effectively block-spam? It's fun, it's fascinating, it's confusing for many, but it's been around a while, and submitted and discussed previously

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5569014) <\- most comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967930) <\- many comments

Other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8093337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8093337)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7748608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7748608)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3529355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3529355)</comment>


Bill Gates warns on future disease epidemic - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.com/news/technology-31956344 <comment><USER2> For more, [http://fusion.net/story/57515/darpa-thinks-it-has-a- solution...](http://fusion.net/story/57515/darpa-thinks-it-has-a-solution-to- ebola-and-all-other-infectious-diseases/)

Premise is fair, though more details are needed to discuss the validity of any particular approach.

</comment><comment><USER3> _" Nato plays war games to check that people are well-trained and prepared. Now we need germ games," he said._

It's actually a bit surprising that NATO or the UN don't have practice runs for disease outbreaks or natural disasters.

<comment><USER4> How do we know that they don't? I'm sure they have procedures for biological warfare responses.

<comment><USER3> Anything is possible, but I couldn't find anything with a quick google, and I'm assuming Bill Gates has more time and resources than myself to verify that statement before making it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Guardian (yeah, I know) had a very in-depth look at how the current progress in fighting Ebola from the viewpoint of Prof. Tom Solomon: [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/14/meet-the-man- le...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/14/meet-the-man-leading- britains-fight-against-ebola). Long read, so make sure you have a cup of coffee handy.

<comment><USER5> Not a brit, so I'm curious: what's wrong with The Guardian?

<comment><USER6> I'm not actually sure what his specific criticism is. Some people don't like it because it's quite leftwing. Possibly, though, he just said that because no newspaper is going to have great scientific content.

<comment><USER7> I was under the impression that Guardian was one of the last remaining British news outlets that wasn't completely morally compromised?

<comment><USER6> Exactly as blumkvist replied: immorality and neutrality are quite different things. In fact, I'd argue that the Guardian's political alignment is strongly linked to its integrity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google tracks Flu-related search queries to give indications of current flu outbreaks:

[http://www.google.org/flutrends/](http://www.google.org/flutrends/)

I'd imagine that they track other possible trends indicating an epidemic, and share the result with government health departments and NGOs.

Does anyone know if they actually do this, though?

<comment><USER9> I would imagine this would be something that Google would be skittish to get into. Flu symptoms are a) common and b) well known. Tracking symptoms of arbitrary potential epidemics could be very difficult to design, let alone verify, and there's little benefit to Google. Not even PR if they raise a false flag.

<comment><USER8> _Tracking symptoms of arbitrary potential epidemics could be very difficult to design_

Does it need to be terribly precise, though?

If, for example, lots of searches spring up for vomiting or sweating in a small radius, I'd imagine that'd raise a "Hey, you might like someone to look at this flag," which could be useful - just as long as the computers aren't shouting all day long.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Highly recommended If you're interested in this sort of thing: This Coming Plague, by Laurie Garrett. It's a very good book about, in a nutshell, how easy international travel is, and how lower investment in medical infrastructure and social services affect us all.

</comment><comment><USER11> How about to try to cure the proprietary software disease?

<comment><USER12> The time to criticize Carnegie is when he is monopolizing the steel industry; not while he is building thousands of libraries.

<comment><USER11> I have one question: is it right to destroy a whole culture just to be the good guy afterwards?

<comment><USER13> The PC was the greatest tool given to man in a long time, the Internet would have been impossible without it. What is your beef? That Gates was a fierce competitor in a competitive business?

<comment><USER11> He shouldn't have made his software closed source. Too many business men followed him, leading to a vast amount of bullshit software no one can easily relay on to make something better.

The free software culture slowly recovers. But we are still far away from the good old and worthy traditions for commercial software developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

― Mark Twain

</comment><comment><USER15> Bill Gates, diseases, large contributions to pharmaceutical companies.

Me thinks I see an association here that adds up to making lots of money using scare tactics.</comment>


Australian firm Meriton fined $3M for misleading consumers on TripAdvisor - <AUTHOR> https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/meriton-to-pay-3-million-for-misleading-consumers-on-tripadvisor <comment><USER2> I occasionally wish the ACCC had some more teeth but this is a good result. As a citizen, on the whole, I'm as proud of Australia's strong consumer protection laws as I am of our gun protection laws.

<comment><USER3> The ACCC and strong consumer protection laws are something I didn't realise I took for granted until I moved to the US recently. I had a pair of pants develop a hole within a few weeks of purchase so I took them back to the store and it was difficult to convince them that pants should last longer than that and get a replacement. This is in contrast to my Fitbit, for example, which I had replaced about three times in two years without question in Australia because of a fault in the band.

It's interesting that capitalism comes into it somewhat, insofar as companies like Amazon and REI have consumer-friendly return policies as a sort of competitive advantage. I know I've bought things from REI despite a higher price just because I know I won't have any problems returning it for any reason within 12 months.

<comment><USER4> That is interesting. In my case, I have had the best consumer-friendly experience when it comes to returning or replacing items in the US. Returning electronics, clothes etc. to Wallmart, Target, BestBuy was totally hassle- free. When compared to Germany, the overall experience in the US is much better. Although Germans have "stronger" customer rights protection, in reality, you get less customer satisfaction. For example, a few days ago I purchased a pair of sunglasses from TKMaxx in Germany. After wearing it a couple of times, I realized that there are tiny scratches on them. I then took it back for a replacement. I was denied the replacement, because "the item didn't have the original price sticker on it". It was such a ridiculous excuse. I tear the price sticker the moment I buy the stuff. How am I supposed to test it to see if I like it without using it at all? There was another friend of mine who wanted to get a replacement for a malfunctioning smartphone he bought in MediaMarkt. He was also denied the replacement in the first place. After a long "negotiations" he was finally given a new smartphone, which, again, would not happen in the US at all. All in all, I find shopping experience in the US to be way better than in Europe.

<comment><USER3> You'll find that replacements for change of mind in Australia (and perhaps other countries with strong consumer protections) are less friendly. I have definitely noticed there are more stores in the US (especially big box retailers that are competing with Amazon) that have flexible return policies in the short term for changing your mind, while my expectation for any store in Australia is that you are likely unable to return something for change of mind if it has been used.

The trade off for that is that you get very long periods of fitness for use, where you can comfortably buy something that is advertised for a purpose and know that you can return it after a reasonable time if it isn't actually fit for that purpose. A good example is smartphones and laptops, where Australian- sold iphones effectively have a two year warranty and macbooks have a three year one iirc because of these strong consumer protection laws.

It's these kinds of faulty goods returns to smaller retailers that I've had most trouble with in the US (and where I think consumer protection makes the most sense). In Australia the consumer would simply file a complaint online to the Department of Fair Trading (or whatever it is for their state) and these are usually resolved within a couple of weeks or less and usually in the consumer's favour. I'm not aware of any equivalent in the US, and if it does exist I'm sure it varies significantly state-to-state.

<comment><USER5> >> How am I supposed to test it to see if I like it without using it at all?

Test it in the store. Nobody in north america expects they can buy something, walk away with it, and then have a right to return it simply because they don't "like it". A store may take it back but only because they are kind, not because they are under any legal obligation.

Remember there is always a flip side to returns. Either the seller eats a loss, or they put the now used object back on the shelf as new. That is why safety-related products have a zero-returns policy. Rock climbing gear is generally non-returnable. I probably would not buy climbing gear from any store that did returns for fear of getting used gear with unseen problems.

<comment><USER6> > Nobody in north america expects they can buy something, walk away with it, > and then have a right to return it simply because they don't "like it".

What are you talking about? Many refund agreements have exactly this in mind. It's a competitive advantage for the store to be lenient.

When I worked at Walmart and Target during summers as a teen, we were encouraged to get the customer to buy a few different options (curtains for example) and tell them to just return the ones they don't want. Especially clothes.

I encourage you to check out the terms of refund for the places you shop instead of assuming you're stuck with a product you don't want.

<comment><USER5> >> Many refund agreements have exactly this in mind.

Agreements, contracts between willing parties, not legal rights coming from law. I expect that I can return something, I don't pretend that I have a legal expectation that I can do so at any and all stores.

<comment><USER4> Well, the fact is Germany has neither. At least in the US customers do get higher quality customer service and that is what matters. I would rather have a satisfied consumer experience than a useless set of laws and regulations that does no good to anyone.

As @always_good pointed out already, a flexible return policy is actually a competitive advantage for the company if they know how to conduct a retail business properly. I, for example, would always prefer Amazon to any other German online store simply because the confidence Amazon gives me when shopping. I can easily go on a shopping spree on Amazon knowing that if I don't like something I can easily send it back, although, during the last 3 years, I haven't sent a single item back to Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meriton is run by Harry Triguboff who is one of a generation of migrant financiers, industrialists and corporate heads who defined postwar Australia. He has a pretty strong involvement in the Australian housing bubble and some people have said online he's propping up the price boom, as Chinese investors duck out of the market.

I've also read that he retains substantive control of the apartment complex body corporate, to milk it for post-construction fee income, which can be a long, long tail of money. And, he can stop the BC voting to reduce management fees, or stop it forcing the developer to fix post-construction minor slipups.

<comment><USER8> As someone who has a few contacts in the high density housing market in Australia, I can say that I've heard similar rumours regarding Meriton. I've also heard horror stories about their actual construction quality and the expected life span of their apartments etc. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be doing anything illegal, so it's really up to the Australian public to push for stronger regulations regarding these practices, or just not buy into high density housing in most of Australia as it seems there has been a race to the bottom amongst Meriton and it's competitors.

<comment><USER9> At least in terms of the body corporate issue, the owners corporation does have a legal duty to act in the interests of _all_ owners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The precedent this sets is interesting. From my interpretation, a business must request reviews from all customers, via all methods, for each platform, in order to not be considered 'manipulating consumers'.

This will have impacts for all the saas review management products, as their key selling point is usually: get more reviews from your happy customers, or stop your unhappy customers posting reviews. Which is usually done by targeting or omitting either group.

Any Australian business using such product would now be on the hook.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I'm hoping there was just some info missing from the article, but this decision seems all sorts of fucked up.

All Trip Advisor Review Express really does automate the process of requesting reviews on Trip Advisor. It's not much harder to just email out requests to guests yourself. So is this decision saying if you only emailed requests to people who thought would give you a good review, but not a bad review, that you are guilty of something?

If so, literally 99% of businesses would be guilty of this. When someone calls to complain, every business tries to handle it in house. It's not like they say "Oh, I'm sorry you had a bad experience, let me get you the contact info for BBB so you can complain to them, and be sure to post a bad review on our Facebook page!"

What about all those apps that pop up a dialog that says "Do you love our app?" and if you say yes it takes you to the app store, and if you say no it shows an internal complaint dialog?

<comment><USER12> I don't see what's so bad about this. Just because 99% of businesses do it doesn't make it ok. Encouraging happy people to leave reviews and discouraging upset people means the reviews aren't accurate, and you turn them from a useful tool for getting outside opinions into a marketing tool that just benefits businesses at the expense of their customers.

I don't see this as being any different from, say, getting a passing inspection from the health department by manipulating them away from the room where you keep all the cockroaches and rat feces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The original judgment can be found at [http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi- bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/FCA/2...](http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi- bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/FCA/2017/1305.html) (this doesn't include today's decision about the penalty)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is so interesting! There are so many apps that request reviews, I'm sure a lot only do it when the user seems happy to be using the app. Could they be fined?

I mean - it's good that they have been fined, but I'm concerned about the precedent it sets!

Another thought - how did ACCC find out about this? Someone internal reported it to them?

<comment><USER15> The judgement indicates that the issue here was that Meriton was actively preventing people from being asked for reviews in certain circumstances. Very different from someone being asked for a review and choosing not to give one.

<comment><USER14> What I am talking about is when an App will sometimes have a popup saying "Love this app? leave a review" with a link. Does this fall under the same issue if the app selectively chooses who to display this pop up to?

<comment> T-Winsnes My gut feel on this, is that if you use a metric to infer if you will get a positive review and only show the popup in those cases, you might be in conflict of this ruling

<comment><USER14> This is my feeling too - it's crazy how easy it is to break this law. It will also be very difficult to enforce though.

<comment><USER16> If you have enough annoyed off customers that you're running analytics to determine whether they're likely to leave a negative review, and interfering with their ability to leave that review on a third party site - then perhaps you should focus more on fixing your business instead.

If you're asking a customer if they're satisfied with the service/product, and then following that up to try and resolve it - that's not misleading or deceptive, that's normal customer service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to work for Cogent Communications, this was common practice in customer service. Comstat scores are 100% gamed.

The Global Director of customer service has his managers change ticket parameters for two weeks around ticket closure so that only 'happy' customers get review emails.

</comment><comment><USER18> $3M seems way excessive for a company that owns 15 properties. However it seems this is a big company: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meriton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meriton)

<comment><USER19> Just an idea. Why not penalize by percentage? If the goal of penalties is to prevent companies from breaking laws that are equally valid for everyone. Otherwise, companies holding most capital will be practically above the law.

<comment><USER20> > Why not penalize by percentage?

The ACCC usually does do it this way.

Some recent examples: [https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/air-nz- penalised-15-mi...](https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/air-nz- penalised-15-million-for-price-fixing) \- Air NZ penalised $15m [https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/iphone-and-ipad- misrep...](https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/iphone-and-ipad- misrepresentations-cost-apple-inc-9-million-in-penalties) \- Apple fined $9m [https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/domain-name-corp- and-d...](https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/domain-name-corp-and-domain- name-agency-to-pay-195-million-in-penalties) \- Domain Name Corp/Agency fined $1.95m

You'll see that most of these amounts are pretty close to the amount the companies made from the activities and scale with the size of their operations</comment></comment></comment>