Earliest images of the moon were better than people realised - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldofindie.co.uk/?p=682 <comment><USER2> I wish the article got into more of the technical details behind how this actually worked. I find it absolutely jaw-droopingly incredible that they were able to shoot gigabytes of essentially IMAX-quality negatives, develop them in flight (which requires temperatures of around 20ºC for all of the materials involved—Edit: they didn't do this because it would've been too difficult, and ended up using a mostly dry development process. See _Edit_ link), scan them(!!!), and then radio them back to the earth. I would find this amazing today, and all of this happened in the 1960s!

 _Edit_ here's a little more information: [http://www.moonviews.com/2012/06/lunar-orbiters- classified-h...](http://www.moonviews.com/2012/06/lunar-orbiters-classified- heritage.html), and the link from there to [http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/programs/docs/prog- hist-01.p...](http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/programs/docs/prog-hist-01.pdf) contains the technical details on the camera I was after. Amazing stuff.

<comment><USER3> > " _I would find this amazing today, and all of this happened in the 1960s!_ > "

If bowling alleys didn't already exist... and you pitched me the idea of fully automated systems to collect and re-rack pins and return 15-lb balls to the player after each and every throw... I would probably say that's either impossible or at least impractical at scale.

19th and 20th century engineering is amazing. Today, if I can't conceive of writing it as a mobile app than I just shrug.

<comment><USER4> > 19th and 20th century engineering is amazing. Today, if I can't conceive of > writing it as a mobile app than I just shrug.

Skills thrive only if there is an incentive, monetary or otherwise, to practice them. Otherwise they atrophy.

In my past 6 years in Silicon Valley, I worked mostly alongside PhDs in physics, math, comp sci, EE, quantum physics even. This is a metric TON of talent. Do you know what you can do with that kind of talent? You can like literally get a man to moon etc. Every one of these guys ( sadly including myself ) was working on some throwaway nonsense- ETL jobs, frontend js, distributed backend code that got rm -rfed and rewritten periodically, messaging systems replaced every year with messaging systems in latest language fad, all kinds of ultimate software crap manned by the jira monster with never ending tickets & feature requests.

So I just saved up the breadcrumbs & headed back to academia when I couldn't take it anymore. Better to work on serious stuff, even if it were ill monetized. You only have one life.

<comment><USER5> Truly, the greatest minds of our generation are hard at work coming up with new ways to trick people into clicking ads.

<comment><USER6> Or developing trading algorithms. AKA Financial Engineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _images were locked away from the public as they would have revealed the > superior technology of the USA's spy satellite cameras_

Whenever I read about 50-year-old government secrets being revealed, I wonder about all the things happening today we're not being told about -- that we'll learn about 50 years from today.

Looking at the Earthrise image, as another commenter pointed out, they didn't simply degrade the image, but they _deliberately_ added vertical lines with differing brightness and gain, so it would appear that the film scanners on the Lunar Orbiter could scan only at a very low resolution.

To use an analogy: Suppose you request a secret document from the government under the Freedom of Information Act. They decide to give it to you, but they redact 99% of the material with black markers. Oh, but they also retype the entire document, without the blacked-out portions, so you think you received the whole thing. They even add staples, 3-hole punches, coffee cup stains, and creases to the paper before photocopying it. You get 1% of material, but you are convinced that you got the complete unaltered original.

<comment><USER8> I recently visited the FBI Museum/Tour at the FBI HQ in DC. There's a section where they talk about tech the FBI had in the 80s, including a camera they used for an undercover operation where they recorded some illegal shit going on in a hotel room.

You walk into a mock hotel room and even knowing the general vicinity of where the camera should be, struggle to find it. I flat out couldn't until a friend who works at the FBI told me - it was in the period on the artists signature of a piece of artwork in the room. A literal pinhole camera recording everything in the room more than 3 decades ago with pretty great quality.

I can't even fathom the technology they have today - there's no chance that'd be on the tour.

<comment><USER9> We've gone backwards from the 60's in some areas. For example, there are no planes as good as the SR-71 any more due to their incredible costs, cheaper to use satellites over the long run.

Commitment to manned space exploration is another.

<comment><USER10> It's also pretty irrelevant today. I'm sure out messenger pigeon technology has also dropped off

<comment><USER11> Not sure what you're aiming at.

Messenger pigeons were superseded by better ways of delivering messages, covering all the use cases and then some. With SR-71 and the space program, we've lost _capabilities_ we had before. In the latter space, it's slowly getting fixed thanks to Musk & co., but we're still behind the 1970s, capability-wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The Lunar Orbiters never returned to Earth with the imagery. Instead, the > Orbiter developed the 70mm film (yes film) and then raster scanned the > negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/mm resolution) and beamed the data > back to Earth using lossless analog compression, which was yet to actually > be patented by anyone.

Absolutely incredible! The level of complexity involved involved in space flight, along with the tight tolerances, continually impresses me when I consider the relative success of these missions.

<comment><USER13> > lossless analog compression

Are there any details of this? Some of the documents imply it's simply FM modulated, no different from passing a tightly-focused B&W TV camera over the film.

<comment><USER14> > It used a method called vestigial sideband where a precise (1hz) people lot > tone was used as a means to allow the stripping away of one half the > waveform and then using that tone on the other end to reconstitute the > missing side band. It is still used in communications today.

Quoted from Dennis Wingo, co-founder of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, who has been commenting on the linked article.

<comment><USER15> "people lot tone" -> "pilot tone", I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I used to work at Ames in a facility a stone's throw from McMoon's (not singularity University hah).

Heard that the guys who worked on this stuff in there were super crochety. I went over there once to check out some old aerospace equipment they had hanging out in the back (I think it was some decrepit rocket engine), and they gave me a classic 'you kids get off my lawn speech' \- until they found out that the friend I went with had a PhD in aeronotical engineering. They lightened up after that and we had a great conversation after that. What a wacky group.

<comment><USER17> The NUMU museum in Los Gatos had an exhibit about this too

[http://www.numulosgatos.org/exhibitions-2/2016/9/23/mcmoons-...](http://www.numulosgatos.org/exhibitions-2/2016/9/23/mcmoons- how-a-band-of-scientists-saved-lunar-image-history)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wanted to look at the actual files in question, they're purported to be at [1]. However, that just displays a 'file being migrated' message[2], and according to the internet archive it's been that way since 2016[3]...were the images lost after all?

1: [https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp_gallery/](https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp_gallery/)

2: [https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp/tiff/1101_H2.tif](https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp/tiff/1101_H2.tif)

3: [https://web.archive.org/web/20161231201417/https://loirp.arc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161231201417/https://loirp.arc.nasa.gov/loirp/tiff/1101_H2.tif)

<comment><USER19> The raw recovered files seems to be available here, in any case : [https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/lo/LO_1001/DATA/](https://pds- imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/lo/LO_1001/DATA/)

<comment><USER20> Were you (or anyone) able to open any of those .img files?

<comment><USER21> They're raw greyscale pixel values. I was able to convert one with imagemagick:

convert -size 19992x16500 -depth 16 gray:FRAME_1005_H1.IMG out.png

The dimensions are specified in the .LBL files in the same directory, right at the end of the file.

<comment><USER22> Alternatively, NASA help links to IMG2PNG for windows: [http://bjj.mmedia.is/utils/img2png/](http://bjj.mmedia.is/utils/img2png/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Link to a talk about the camera.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HRF8rQD1Vw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HRF8rQD1Vw)

Short bit about the film. (cia.gov)

[https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA- RDP33-02415...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA- RDP33-02415A000500120032-7.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, these links are super useful and interesting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there any instances of people claiming the government purposely edited the original images to make them lower quality back when they were first released?

I'm curious if anyone realized the government may be hiding their true capabilities.

<comment><USER25> I'd like to know more about that too. I can imagine that since the space race and cold war was in full fledge at the time, they neither wanted to give the Russians intel on the moon, nor let them in on their camera quality.

<comment><USER26> It surprises me they could transmit an analog signal back while keeping its quality secret from the Soviets. I wonder if they did succeed at that, or just at keeping the rest of us in the dark.

<comment><USER27> It wasn't like the Soviets could just turn their TVs to the right channel. I doubt the Soviets knew what frequency they were using, and analog video is still "encoded" in the radio waves. These signals still required that specialized $300,000 equipment (which I'm sure was top secret at the time) to make sense of.

<comment><USER28> The height of the antenna would give away the frequency. But the soviets had good spy penetration into the US industrial base so it's likely they already knew anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> >>> "They set up shop in an abandoned McDonalds, offered to them as free space."

I didn't realize there were such a thing as an abandoned McDonalds.

<comment><USER30> This person documents abandoned buildings: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/25165196@N08/albums/7215769101...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/25165196@N08/albums/72157691015994841)

This blog is what it says on the tin (pizza box?): [http://usedtobeapizzahut.blogspot.com](http://usedtobeapizzahut.blogspot.com)

<comment><USER31> Related subreddit: [https://old.reddit.com/r/NotFoolingAnybody/](https://old.reddit.com/r/NotFoolingAnybody/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > After their use, the images were locked away from the public, as at the time > they would have revealed the superior technology of the USA's spy satellite > cameras, which the orbiters cameras were designed from. Instead the images > from that time were grainy and low resolution, made to be so by NASA.

Brilliant!

It states they used 70mm film which according to google is used for motion pictures, I assume a custom camera?

<comment><USER33> I'm not certain about the film used for the Lunar Orbiter probes, but the cameras that were used by the Apollo astronauts used 70mm film, rather than the 60mm 120 format that was standard for the Hasselblad cameras they used.

The size of the frame is the same, but 70mm film is wider because it has sprocket holes that 120 format film lacks.

I would imagine that for the Lunar Orbiter probes they did use a custom camera, and didn't just bolt on an off the shelf camera.

<comment><USER23> What I find amazing is a film camera in a hard vacuum. I could be wrong but two things. Designing mechanical things that work in a hard vacuum is difficult. I'm assuming bad things would happen to film in a vacuum. So assuming they were sealed under argon or nitrogen.

<comment><USER34> Nope.

<comment><USER34> "Lubricants had to be chosen with utmost care because of the risk that conventional lubricants could boil off in vacuum and condense all over the optical surfaces of the lens."

[http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/hardwares/moon/2.htm](http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/hardwares/moon/2.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reading about the equipment that they had to cobble together and keep running - reminds me that we keep losing the surplus places in the Bay Area where it would have conceivably been possible to find vintage parts.. weird stuff closed suddenly a few weeks sho, and I fear Halted is on its way out...

<comment><USER25> Those places should receive government support (as national heritage museums) or like the internet archive, big corporate sponsors (e.g. google and facebook and co can easily afford to keep those places around as a charity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great article. Digital is not always better, the technology was not there to outperform analogue tech. I even wonder if a digital camera system nowadays can outperform this 2GB images, I mean how do you transfer that amount of data at this long range without loss?! Is that even possible?

Maybe this analogue picture compression is something which is still usable and valuable in long distance space transmission?

<comment><USER37> "Lossless" analogue transmission isn't lossless. It's just less lossy than the lossy forms of analogue transmission. As a very simplified example it's really easy to modulate an analogue value in the frequency domain and maintain accuracy and dynamic range. Hence why FM stereo usually sounds pretty amazing still. It's not terribly sensitive to environmental factors. However conversely AM sounds like crap.

Now we have digital protocols which are still sent on top of analogue signals (everything is analogue down at the bottom, even your CPU). We lose a tiny bit of dynamic range through compression in some circumstances but gain error correction, speed and the ability to recover signals from below the noise floor which means less power and more distance for the same power.

So no, digital is definitely the way.

As an amateur radio operator, some of us at least tend to play with very low powers. You can have a two way conversation 3000km+ with no more more than a watt but only if you use digital modes. One reason why Morse/CW is still popular; it's a digital encoding.

<comment><USER38> To add to that, some amateur radio operators bounce their signal off the Moon. Quoting [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Ear...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication) :

> Recent advances in digital signal processing have allowed EME contacts, > admittedly with low data rate, to take place with powers in the order of 100 > Watts and a single Yagi antenna.

<comment><USER39> Thanks for sharing this, fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> So in theory if someone built a robot and spacecraft, the original 70mm negatives could be retrieved from the moon and provide even higher resolution images?

<comment><USER41> Sadly, all the Lunar Orbiter missions ended in an (intentional) impact with the moon. Seems unlikely the film would have survived.

<comment><USER42> Even if the orbiters were still orbiting, the film would have degraded due to radiation, I think.

<comment><USER43> It's really hard to orbit the moon anyway, it's not very spherical compared with the earth.

<comment><USER38> Pointers for those interested - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_\(astronomy\)#Effect_of_lunar_mascons_on_satellite_orbits) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_orbit#Lunar_frozen_orbi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_orbit#Lunar_frozen_orbits) . The "not very spherical" refers to the shape of the gravitational field, and not simply the physical shape of the Moon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> One can simply wonder how much progress is being kept secret from the world due to nationalistic bullshit. To be honest, I'd not be surprised when in 2060, someone says "we had all the stuff in the Avengers movies as actual, real technology back then".

And one can only wonder if the hundreds of billions sunk into programs like the F35 or the European A400M program haven't simply been used to fund skunk works projects instead.

</comment><comment><USER45> Description of dry developing needed!

Also that 200pixel/line scanner... Awesome. Basically a fax machine in space.

<comment><USER46> Actually 200 lines/mm - that would be about 5080 dpi, which would impressive for a modern day scanner as well.

<comment><USER47> What most people don't realise is that can make film that can record at whatever resolution we need, and we have known how to do this for over a century. It's simply a tradeoff between grain size and sensitivity. For most consumer film sensitivity is usually the more favorable trait. But for special applications we might value smaller grain size. For holographic film we can make it record better than 10000 lines/mm. This is essential because we are recording diffraction patterns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> "Earliest images of the moon _taken from space_ ", I guess?

</comment><comment><USER49> s/realized/were lead to believe/

</comment><comment><USER50> A short video from when they got the tape machines working in McMoon: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awc6dm_kvV8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awc6dm_kvV8)

There are more videos on the same YouTube channel.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is by far one of my favorite projects I've read about

</comment><comment><USER52> Interestingly enough, McMoon's has come sorta full circle. As of only a few weeks ago, it was turned into a convenience store named MoonMart.

</comment><comment><USER53> Makes me wonder how good the spy satellite pictures of the era were.

Wasn't the technology behind the Corona satellites based on this tech? I wonder if the declassified pictures they release are the lower quality versions?

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm pretty wowed by the developing as most of chemistry assumes certain earthly constraints (e.g. gravity, convection at the surface of a vessel etc).

Nice to be able to use 'earthly' in a non-mystical sense!

</comment><comment><USER55> The "NASA technician" in the second to last image appears to be airbrushing a large scale version, does anyone know if there are more pictures of this somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER56> I remember the original articles about building the team to do this recovery/restoration project. I'm so glad to see the results of their efforts!

</comment><comment><USER57> Makes you wonder what things we're capable of today that the public has no idea about...

</comment><comment><USER58> Wow. Nobody had bothered to take images of the moon until 1966? All those cameras and telescopes. You would think someone somewhere would have taken a few pictures prior to sending the rocket. Perhaps the article meant that these were the first images _from_ the moon.

By the title, I was expecting an article about the first photos _of_ the moon.

</comment><comment><USER59> > using lossless analog compression

What does this mean? Analog is inherently lossy to begin with.

<comment><USER60> I think you have got that backwards.

A digital signal is inherently lossy as it takes only finite number of values because digital is discrete (0 and 1), whereas analog is continuous and in theory it can encode an infinite number of values, subject to your codec apparatuses limits.

<comment><USER59> I was referring to the fact that an "exact value" doesn't even exist. There is noise on every analog signal. If there is no exact value then lossless becomes a meaningless term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I prefer the unrestored version of the images. They feel more real for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER62> Lookup "apollo moon takeoff" on youtube.

Watch it a couple of times, I strongly encourage this.</comment>


My weekend project that won't die: Mr. Goal - Intelligent Goal Reminders. - <AUTHOR> http://mrgoal.net/hn3

<comment><USER2> Ok, signed up. As soon as I made the account, you are trying to upsell me to buy some monthly plan. You are going for the close too early. At least let me try out the thing. Slowly slowly catchy monkey.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm confused by this. On the one hand it says:

      > We'll randomly remind by email and SMS.

Then it says:

      > These intelligent reminders come to you
      > at the right times.

And there doesn't appear to be any explnation.

<comment><USER4> The best time for a reminder is when you're least expecting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are the exact words I'm looking for. Can I use this on the front page?

<comment><USER4> Sure, go right ahead.

However, you may want to run a trademark search with the USPTO to make sure some company hasn't already trademarked it for the reminders market. Trademarks are context-specific, so if it hasn't been trademarked for this context, I would file for one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been dying (figuratively) for something to replace my folded-up piece of printer paper and sticky notes, with SMS reminders.

A couple of observations:

The use of the goal title as a top-level URI seems a bit odd (i.e. <https://mrgoal.net/goal-name/>). Obviously you can use the session info to disambiguate, but when you implement public goals, won't there be a lot of name collisions?

A little more detail on the Settings page about exactly how often "sometimes" or "often" is would be helpful, particularly for knowing how much of my weekly SMS budget will be used for each goal and in aggregate.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had the idea for this app yesterday :) Looks nicely done.

</comment><comment><USER7> Your about page needs to be more prominent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, would you have any recommendations on how?</comment></comment>


Tolkien's drawings reveal a wizard at work - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/look-closer/tolkiens-drawings-reveal-a-wizard-at-work <comment><USER2> I liked Tolkein's original book cover: it highlights the dilemma of the rings of power: all rings lead to Sauron's eye, especially the one ring: [http://i.imgur.com/hKUaH3i.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/hKUaH3i.jpg)

Kind of like using the internet: You think you can become invisible/anonymous, but you become very deeply exposed to the gaze of a remote entity.

<comment><USER3> That is a beautiful metaphor. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those, like me, who are unable to attend the exhibition, the book produced based on the exhibition is worth getting [1]

[1] [https://tolkien.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/shop/](https://tolkien.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/shop/)</comment>


A post-mortem about Whiteout Mail and its open-source future - <AUTHOR> https://tankredhase.com/2015/12/01/whiteout-post-mortem/ <comment><USER2> I took part in the Whiteout crowdfunding and I think that their client was very promising, especially as there is still no Free Software client for Android that supports PGP/MIME properly.

I also had the impression that it was just a lack of PR and good community management that is part of the reason for why Whiteout never achieved traction although it seemed technically superior compared to Lavaboom and other (at the time) more popular projects. They never seemed to have much of a presence in terms of discussions about PGP-enabled clients and could just have done more in terms of outreach. I am sad to see them go.</comment>


Gag Order on Lavabit's Levison Lifted - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/KingLadar/posts/10157136844775038 <comment><USER2> This news is definitely a win for humanity. Ladar and Edward, we need more people like you. Thank you!

For those who dont want to read blog posts on Facebook, here is a well written piece on this: [https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/24/ladar-levison-finally- conf...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/24/ladar-levison-finally-confirms- snowden-was-target-of-lavabit-investigation/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great news of the gag order being lifted, and to hear from Levison himself.

Although in regard to the post title (which has since been changed) indicating Snowden was the Lavabit investigation target, here's original discussion from March: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11308160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11308160)

</comment><comment> c-slice When the court forced him to turn over the SSL private key for lavabit's servers, Ladar submitted the private key in miniscule font on like 30 printed pages. The gov was not pleased. Mad respect for Mr. Levison. Glad to hear the gag was lifted.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a bit ironic how a news about such a topic as this is posted on facebook...

</comment><comment><USER5> Replace title with: "Gag Order on Lavabit's Levison Lifted After Three-Year Battle" perhaps?

<comment><USER6> Ok, we'll use that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No surprise here. Snowden knew he was the target as soon as Lavabit got shut down.

<comment><USER8> I think the attack vector (getting ssl/tls keys) the government was going after was a surprise. I had thought they would have requested access to the servers.

<comment><USER9> Either they had captured packets from Lavabit that they wanted to decrypt, or they wanted to be able to decrypt all traffic to/from Lavabit.

With how much traffic the NSA was collecting and archiving during that time, it is very likely that they had captured traffic that they thought might contain messages to/from Snowden.

<comment><USER10> Hopefully Lavabit was using TLS with forward secrecy making this impossible:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While it's an official confirmation it was already very clearly mentioned several months ago.

</comment><comment><USER12> already known, i believe it was leaked due to a non-redaction ( by mistake) of a released document

<comment><USER13> I concur. This is old news.

<comment><USER14> The gag order being lifted is new news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11308160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11308160)

</comment><comment><USER16> > The original case concerned law enforcement's authority to compel the > disclosure of an SSL/TLS private key, which belonged to Lavabit, and was > used to protect the communications of all 410,000 customers, when only one > of those customers was the subject of a criminal investigation.

No, not completely true. From what I recall about the case, law enforcement asked Lavabit to eavesdrop on his communications. I recall law enforcement claiming that Lavabit had done this before, previously, when asked. Lavabit balked this time for some particular reason, and ineffectively attempted to fight the request in immature ways. When asked for digital data, printed out a bunch of hex or base64 on many reams of paper. Courts frown on this kind of shenanigans. In this and other ways, Levison engaged with the court in naive, immature, and ineffectual ways, including by appearing in court without representation. By failing to make a number of arguments in his defense at trial, he was consequently unable to revisit most issues on appeal. (You usually cannot raise new issues on appeal.)

It was only after Lavabit refused to eavesdrop, after receiving a lawful order to do so, that law enforcement demanded the TLS keys in order to do it themselves. Lavabit's ineffectual handling of the issue alone was what put the privacy of the rest of their users at risk.

Lavabit was not a secure service. The site could easily eavesdrop on your communications at will and decrypt your data. The site simply made a promise not to store a key based on the user password (if I'm recalling correctly), but had the technical ability to do so upon each login. Quote from their site: "Lavabit has developed a system so secure that it prevents everyone, even us, from reading the email of the people that use it."

The site was not actually secure in the ways that it claimed, specifically the claims that it was secure against site operators reading your data, and as a consequence obviously against law enforcement. Lavabit was poorly designed and dangerously close to snake oil, and I don't think they should be hailed as having done something venerable by privacy or security advocates. They were essentially a regular webmail service with a gimmick that allowed them to claim they were doing something different, without actually doing something that provided a meaningful security guarantee. This critique by Moxie Marlinspike includes a detailed substantiation of my statements above: [https://moxie.org/blog/lavabit-critique/](https://moxie.org/blog/lavabit- critique/)

> The cryptography was nothing more than a lot of overhead and some shorthand > for a promise not to peek. Even though they advertised that they "can't" > read your email, what they meant was that they would choose not to.

(Moxie is behind Open Whisper Systems, the end-to-end encryption system that was recently integrated into WhatsApp)

There is no way for a webmail provider to ever handle your email in the clear (such as while sending or receiving it) while claiming not to be able to read it. The only way for this to be true is with end-to-end encryption with keys that reside exclusively on client machines.

DarkMail, however, which Levison started contributing to after the shutdown of Lavabit, does appear to attempt to provide true end-to-end security for email participants. [https://darkmail.info/](https://darkmail.info/)

<comment><USER17> > Appearing in court without representation

From [https://lavabit.com](https://lavabit.com) :

> It took a week for me to identify an attorney who could adequately represent > me given the complex issues involved – and we were in contact for less than > a day when agents served me with a summons ordering me to appear in a > Virginia courtroom (over 1,000 miles from home). Two days later, after > admitting their demand to my lawyer, I was served a subpoena for the > encryption keys – also marking the first time they put their demand in > writing.

With such short notice, my first attorney was unable to appear alongside me in court. Because the whole case was under seal, I couldn't admit to anyone who wasn't a lawyer that I needed help, let alone why. In the days before my appearance I would spend hours repeating the facts of the case to a dozen attorneys, as I sought someone else that was qualified to represent me. I also discovered that as a third party in a federal criminal indictment, I had no right to counsel. Thus my pleas for more time were denied. After all, only my property was in jeopardy – not my liberty. My right to a "fair hearing" was treated as a nuisance, easily trampled by a team of determined prosecutors. In the end, I was forced to choose between appearing alone, or face a bench warrant for my arrest.

<comment><USER16> A person who is running a business focused on this kind of privacy should have counsel for their company set up and ready to go. The fact that they didn't was another sign that the company was unprepared for the business that they were handling.

I'd expect someone running this sort of business to have an attorney on retainer who has advised the company of its rights and responsibilities, and who is ready to provide at least emergency counsel if not trial counsel.

<comment><USER17> I don't think Lavabit was that big of a bussiness. They had to shutdown just because of a $10,000 contempt fee.

And even if they didn't have enough foresight to have regular attorney, it seems very bullish for the government to try to overwhelm the guy with seven different court orders in about 30 days. Just because I do not have the foresight to have an attorney before something like this stars, it doesn't mean I don't have the right to run my bussiness and neither does it make any more acceptable for the government to close it down just because they didn't get their way.

<comment><USER18> You're erroneously assuming the legal system is intended to work well when you're not wealthy.

For the same reason, never piss off a retired lawyer. The amount of asymmetrical pain they can cause you is virtually unbounded.

<comment><USER19> Are you stating that that's the way it is (because I think parent knows that already) or that it's OK this way? Cause it's not.

<comment><USER20> I'll take the view that they are saying:

This is the way things are, and it's not going to change soon.

<comment><USER17> The original discussion was if the owner of Lavabit is to be blamed for being at court without representation, any it was established that he probably didn't have enough resources/foresight to keep an attorney on call (and should not be "blamed" IMO). How things are/should be is off-topic in that matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > when such opinions are concerned with such a public and controversial issue > as state surveillance

This is the first rule of state surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER22> The problem with linking to Facebook posts is that non-Facebook users are now greeted with a "sign in or sign up" pop-over that cannot be removed and obstructs the page. This is a relatively recent change. Facebook do not want to be part of the open web, so don't link to them as if they are.

<comment><USER23> This is a public wall post by the creator of Lavabit himself. Would you rather a random third party news site pick it up first before it is reposted here?

I see no problem with Facebook posts if they were created by an authoritative representative of the discussion and that was the primary point of publication (i.e. not a Facebook post pointing to their blog, in which case their blog would be a better place to link to.)

<comment><USER22> Yep and there is nothing wrong with a public wall post up until 2016 when Facebook decided to restrict read-access to those public pages by way of the annoying nag prompt. Clicking "not now" doesn't hide the nag prompt enough to call the page 'publicly accessible'. Sorry to be off-topic on this, but I feel Facebook is quite arrogant with this behavior, as their users should be in control of the public status of their posts, not Facebook.

<comment><USER24> I'm opening this in incognito mode and have no trouble reading it.

We have a different definition of publicly accessible. You can block the annoying nag prompt with your ad blocker.

I'm as upset at facebook as you are, but misleading people into not linking to an original source is a shitty thing to do.

<comment><USER25> I don't see it as shitty. It is simply not complying with the modus operandi of the owner of the original source (facebook).

I'd rather see [http://archive.is/ffjTe](http://archive.is/ffjTe) or even an image than to be reminded that facebook wants to be the gatekeeper of content.

I do block these pop ups when I can (ublock). But that means you want the average user (not using blacklists, not using whitelists, not even using adblockers) to be reminded that he should login so as not to feel like a criminal.

Oh wait. The average user has a facebook account and is always logged in.

I am not the average user, I am a specific person.

<comment><USER26> > It is simply not complying with the modus operandi of the owner of the > original source (facebook).

The authors intent is irrelevant. They are a monetized product sold to advertisers. Facebook will never act against its own interest of maximizing the size and salability of its graph network.

<comment><USER25> > Facebook will never act against its own interest of maximizing the size and > salability of its graph network.

Agreed.

What I meant to say is, if we don't like the agressive behaviour of "facebook acting in its own interest to maximize the size and salability of its graph network", we shouldn't link to facebook URLs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Copy-paste for people who do not wish to visit facebook:

Press Release Gag Order on Lavabit's Levison Lifted After Three-Year Battle For Immediate Release: June 24, 2016

Alexandria, VA--Lavabit founder Ladar Levison can finally confirm that Edward Snowden was the target of the 2013 investigation, which led to the shutdown of the Lavabit email service. The original case concerned law enforcement's authority to compel the disclosure of an SSL/TLS private key, which belonged to Lavabit, and was used to protect the communications of all 410,000 customers, when only one of those customers was the subject of a criminal investigation. After three years, and five separate attempts, the federal judge overseeing the case has granted Mr. Levison permission to speak freely about investigation. The recently delivered court decision unseals the vast majority of the court filings, and releases Mr. Levison from the gag order, which has limited his ability to discuss the proceedings until now.

Mr. Levison has consistently relied on the First Amendment in his court filings, which sought to remove the gag orders entered against him. He argued that such orders are an unconstitutional restraint against speech, and an afront to the democratic process. He plans to use his newfound freedom to discuss the case during a planned presentation on Compelled Decryption at DEF CON 24 in Las Vegas, NV.

"One of the rights guaranteed to Americans, and a cornerstone for a functional democracy, is the freedom to speak the truth," stated Mr. Levison in announcing the court decision. "The First Amendment protects opinions, including those unfavorable to government, from injunctions against speech. The gag orders in this case were a violation of that inalienable right. No American should have to live for three years, gagged, with every word carefully weighed, when such opinions are concerned with such a public and controversial issue as state surveillance. I believe the public only grants permission to be governed when it knows the means and methods its government uses to protect the body politic. While I'm pleased that I can finally speak freely about the target of the investigation, I also know the fight to protect our collective freedom is far from over. That is why I will continue to do everything within my power to protect our right to speak freely and privately.We must decide when speech is necessary. Our rights must never be subject to the whims of those officials we seek to criticize."

In order to continue the fight, Mr. Levison is forming the Lavabit Legal Defense Foundation (or "LavaLegal"), a non-profit organization founded to, among other things, protect service providers from becoming complicit in unconstitutional activities, and fight secret attempts aimed circumventing digital privacy or impinging upon the right of those involved to speak of the experience. The foundation will be funded by donations from people and organizations all over the world that want to help protect digital privacy and bolster our collective defense against government overreach. Donations can be accepted at the foundation's rally.org page or through bitcoin donations at 1Bqqy3SxZ27ZUogEeiKHYqPsmFwuRTErMu.

For more information contact Lavabit founder Ladar Levison or Lavabit's counsel, Jesse Binnall.

</comment><comment><USER28> What year is it? This was widely known a long time ago.

<comment><USER29> it's the year you should start reading the article before you comment.</comment></comment>


Fitspur: Individually you play together you have fun. Find your Activity Partner - <AUTHOR> http://www.fitspur.com/ <comment><USER2> Ahh ,,, interesting one. Needs a bit of work but does the job

</comment><comment><USER3> Sleek and modern UI. Going to give the app a spin.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a really great initiative!</comment>


MySQL at Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/11/4/facebook-at-13-million-queries-per-second-recommends-minimiz.html

<comment><USER3> I doubt this HN post could have a more boring title. The actual article is very interesting. Basically Facebook's DB developers talk about what it takes to perform 13 million queries per second, and a lot of the useful tips they've learned along the way to make scaling simpler.

There's a full video of the talk available at [http://www.livestream.com/facebookevents/video?clipId=flv_cc...](http://www.livestream.com/facebookevents/video?clipId=flv_cc08bf93-7013-41e3-81c9-bfc906ef8442)

<comment><USER4> How is the title boring? What could be more telling? Having "Facebook" in the title makes it clear we're going to be talking about astronomical amounts of data. "[insert any db] at Facebook" would be an interesting title in my opinion.

The fact that it's MySQL makes it even more interesting, given the shift of scalability interest to MongoDB, etc.

<comment><USER5> Maybe boring isn't the right word. Vague is probably better. "MySQL at Facebook" _is_ a facebook page, a launchpad user, a twitter user, a O'Reilly MySQLConf talk, etc.

<comment><USER6> not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch, but i found it a bit humorous this came out just when oracle offered a pricing plan for mysql and, especially, innoDB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "They figure out why the response time for the worst query is bad and then fix it."

This can reap huge benefits and doesn't need to be difficult. Just enable the slow query log in MySQL, use the EXPLAIN command to analyze the results, then add indexes where appropriate. I was able to fix poorly indexed tables in a vendor's application with dramatic results. In one case, a twenty-minute(!) query was reduced to less than a second.

<comment><USER8> While your premise is correct it's not always that simple. More indexes can slow down updates and inserts. A tables overall usage pattern needs to be examined before just adding more indexes. You might have fixed the 20 minute report query while slowing down some other more critical query that loaded or updated data.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is a good point and I actually noted it in my issue tracker while troubleshooting. I made sure that inserts & updates weren't negatively affected to an unacceptable degree after adding the indexes. The overall win was huge, because it eliminated wait times for a sizable staff and client base.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "It is OK if a query is slow as long as it is always slow" I find this enlightening. I think it is just one instance of difference in emphasis between Google and Facebook. Google, a technology oriented company, would minimize the average response time, while Facebook, a people oriented company would minimize the unpredictability (by minimizing the variance)

<comment><USER10> >> "It is OK if a query is slow as long as it is always slow"

I'm having trouble understanding the motivation. If a slow query is always slow, then I'm always going to be kept waiting for that page/data. It seems logical to worry about the queries that 100% of the time keeps users waiting rather than the queries that keep users waiting <100% of the time.

Does anyone care to explain why this is a good idea (for Facebook at least)?

<comment><USER11> I'm sure the rationale here is that if a given query takes 100ms, they don't focus on getting it down to 50ms even if that's several times what the average is _because they know they can_. Certainly someone should focus on making that query faster, but it's more straightforward.

The harder problem is figuring out why that 20ms query suddenly balloons to 200ms. You can say, "no big deal, it only happens 1% of the time," but if you don't know why, you could make changes to the system that cause it to happen much more frequently and eventually bring the whole system down.

Also, there's a bit of UX here. People are much more frustrated by things they don't understand and/or aren't used. There are parts of GMail that are always slow (archiving a lot of messages). I know this so I know I have to wait 5-10 seconds. What if sometimes it took 1 second and sometimes it took 20 seconds? What if it took 20 seconds 5% of the time. I'd probably always click again and think something was broken. If it's always slow, I want it to be faster, but at least I know what to expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reducing variability is one of the main goals of the classic quality engineering.

See Deming's work on statistical process control used in wartime production during WWII: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming>

I'm glad Facebook is following this old school engineering tradition

</comment><comment><USER13> The concept of variance reduction is not even new with computing - <USER2> manufacturing they have six sigma. I believe the famous GE CEO's quote was "Our Customers Feel the Variance, Not the Mean" (Google it).

This is talked about here: [http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/07/performance-o...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/06/07/performance- optimization-and-six-sigma/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I enjoyed the section on creating quality, not quantity, and its emphasis on minimizing variance. I can see how these heuristics could be applied to most startups.

The section on diagnosing should be taken with a grain of salt, though. If your company ever gets to the point where you need to monitor everything at subsecond level to catch problems or analyze and understand every layer of your stack to see how it performs, you've already won. That amount of attention to scalability means your company has a huge base of users. Not only that, it means you have the large and impressive engineering resources to devote to that problem.

That's definitely not my startup, and so the tools described, while definitely useful (and probably fun to build!), aren't anything approaching a priority for me. In the words of the stereotypical Yiddish grandmother, you should be so lucky to have those sorts of problems!

</comment><comment><USER15> It'd be interesting to know some info on the hardware back end, such as number of servers, storage system, etc. Also, how many servers does a typical query touch?

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know the througput of the largest MSSQL installation? I'm searching the web to show off a little information at work, but I can't find anything that compares.

</comment><comment><USER17> "They measure how things work in operation. They can monitor at subsecond levels so they catch problems.". Genius!

</comment><comment><USER18> Does PayPal use MySQL?

<comment><USER19> Everyone is using MySQL. But I attended a talk by one of their DBAs where he said that they large OLTP server, the one that processes the payments is Oracle. Single-instance, because Oracle RAC can't give them the low latency they needed.

They switch the the biggest machine IBM can give them every few month.

<comment><USER15> >They switch the the biggest machine IBM can give them every few month.

Yea, almost all this "web scale" scalability can achieve those numbers because they can partition, relax transactional requirements, and scale out. For system-wide true transactions, scaling up is still the only option, it seems.

Although, H-Store/VoltDB claims some impressive numbers if your OLTP app fits the requirements.

<comment><USER20> Just curious, do you have any good examples of very large scale systems that need system-wide transactions? I might miss something obvious (I'm not actually in the database area), but I couldn't come up with a good example.

<comment><USER21> It depends on your definition of 'very large scale'. Certainly any large financial/insurance company is going to be churning through great gobs of data that really does have to be universally consistent. This is basically the niche that keeps IBM's mainframe division in business.

I'd suspect that if those don't qualify as 'very large scale' to your definition (which would be entirely justifiable) that such systems don't exist because they're not currently possible. For example I don't think it's possible to implement Facebook with SERIALIZABLE no matter how much money you throw at the problem.

(I'd love to be proven wrong of course)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't understand why anyone who is in the know would sign up for this. I work at a fortune-5 corp where Oracle was once king and is being replaced with Microsoft SQL simply due to the outrageous price gouging. It's as if Oracle is trying to squeeze every last penny out of it's aging database as OSS solutions chip away at its profits. PostgreSQL is, in my opinion, poised to do this. MySQL just pales in comparison to Postgres and Oracle is kitchen sink and then some -- even at a fortune 5 we barely use all the "features" in Oracle.

I'm just astonished that a company like Oracle being around as long as they are could be so dumb. At the fortune-5, Oracle has a similar practice of gouging us on Peoplesoft licenses due to, in my opinion, lost DB sales.

Charging a customer a license by CPU core is just unethical.

It's a no wonder... Go riddance</comment>


Podcasts are back and making money - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/podcasts-are-back--and-making-money/2014/09/25/54abc628-39c9-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html

<comment><USER2> I dunno, I don't think podcasts ever left.

All the podcasts I listen to still ask for donations to help keep the lights on, it became easier now that most of them have started using patreon.com. I would much rather donate than listen to adverts because I think podcasts are kinda personal, sometime I think of it like an old friendship. It's nice hearing from the podcaster every now and then, I like to hear about their lives intertwined into their podcast, sometimes over months, but an advert just breaks the illusion. If my podcasts start getting spammed with adverts I will definitely be unsubscribing.

I think most niche podcasts are still going to struggle to make a profit from their work.

<comment><USER3> The ones I hear do 3-4 ads for 2k-5k USD each, IIUC. Marco Arment even said that Squarespace alone practically financed many podcasts for the first years of this "podcast boom".

<comment><USER2> Interesting, Joe Rogan's podcast is the only one I happen to listen to that has adverts, and they seem like they always have a Squarespace sponsorship. In this case it's 5 mins of rogan talking about his sponsors and then 3 hours of content, so the ratio of advert to interviews is still not too bad.

I also feel like Rogan won't put up with bad sponsors or vouch for dodgy products because I'm familiar with his personality and some trust has been built up over the time I spent listening to his interviews. Perhaps that's the key.

But if you happen to interrupt the podcast with some techno-music advert and have someone talk about a sponsor or some completely unrelated product, that's not cool at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me that there are a few key players really keeping podcasts afloat (Audible, Squarespace, etc.); I wonder what would happen if the industry would still look so healthy without them?

<comment><USER5> Presumably they're getting a ROI, though. They're obviously tracking the results, since the ads always tell listeners to go to a particular URL to get a discount.

If they're getting a ROI it means that this form of media is working as an advertising medium. That seems like a good judge of health to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I listen to more content in the car through podcasts than I do browsing the web while at a desk, its a passive activity that can be done while driving.

<comment><USER7> yea, I don't think I could concentrate on work while trying to listen to a podcast. I understand people putting talk radio or something similar on, for background noise, but I listen to podcasts specifically for the content, not for noise.

<comment><USER8> I listen to the One Shot! (comedy rpg) and Critical Success (improv comedy) podcasts while I program and stuff without too much trouble, while keeping up with what's going on. If I have to really stop and focus on something, I'll pause it and set my headphones down, but most of the time I can listen and work simultaneously.

<comment><USER7> I envy you your ability to do that. I can't even listen to new music, anything novel in my ears distracts me most of the time.

<comment><USER9> I typically only use white noise. My current favorite is SimplyRain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In Germany many podcasts use Flattr.com ([http://flattr.com/](http://flattr.com/)) as a form of microdonations. While this service can be used for basically anything that has a website, podcasts tend to make up a significant portion of the flattrs, it seems. Interestingly in the US sponsored podcasts seem to be dominant, while in Germany the ad-free and donation based form (or funded by public radio) is probably the majority.

Does anybody know the reason why microdonations never really gained traction in the US?

<comment><USER11> Just curious, which German podcasts do you listen to? I'm struggling to keep my German skills up, and while I have a handful of German podcasts, most of them are geared towards people _learning_ German, not people who just want to hear the language as it is spoken.

<comment><USER10> Here are some recommendations:

* "Küchenradio" one of the oldest German podcasts. The authors visit and interview people or interesting places, or just talk, mainly around Berlin. The podcast is uncut even in interview situatons. ([http://www.kuechenstud.io/kuechenradio/](http://www.kuechenstud.io/kuechenradio/))

* Basically all podcasts from Metaebene. Especially "Freakshow" (the team talks about technology and apple etc.), "CRE2 (very long (2-3h) interviews about technology, culture and society), and "Fokus Europa" (about Europe). The Author Tim Pritlove is probably Germany's most famous podcaster. ([http://metaebene.me/podcasts/](http://metaebene.me/podcasts/))

* "Sanft und Sorgfältig". The weekly radio show of comedian Jan Böhmermann and musician Olli Schulz, talking about the week and various other subjects. ([http://www.radioeins.de/archiv/podcast/zwei_alte_hasen.html](http://www.radioeins.de/archiv/podcast/zwei_alte_hasen.html))

* "Das ARD Radiofeature". In depth documentation for public radio stations about various topics. Well produced. ([http://www.ard.de/home/radio/das_ARD_radiofeature/272100/ind...](http://www.ard.de/home/radio/das_ARD_radiofeature/272100/index.html))

<comment><USER11> Freakshow ist ganz toll, aber sehr lange. Vier stunden? Yikes!

Vielen Dank!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Speaking of podcasts that make money, the Los Angeles podcast festival is this weekend[1], starting today. You can go in person or stream it live. A bunch of profitable podcasts will be there.

Keith and The Girl podcast will be there too. I work with them and they are a profitable podcasts that have a premium subscription service. You can use our discount code "KATG" to save $5 on the stream. We make a few bucks for everyone that uses the code.

[1] [http://lapodfest.com](http://lapodfest.com)

</comment><comment><USER13> I listen to This Week in Startups and Jason Calacanis always makes the ads really personal. I've gotten value from at least a couple products advertised on This Week in Startups and This Week in Venture Capital (e.g. Scott Walker, startup lawyer).

Many of the comedy podcasts I listen to aren't in love with the products like many of the tech podcast hosts, but they often deliver the ads in a funny way. I think it's very unobtrusive most of the time (and seemingly effective).

<comment><USER14> Uncle Jason's policy is essentially not to advertise products that he doesn't believe in or use himself, so I'm not surprised they have a personal touch!

IIRC there was an incident where an e-cig company was trying to sponsor TWiST, but JCal politely declined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Entrepreneur on Fire has been very vocal about their income reports. Making over 200k a month.

Its a pretty good podcast as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> Jimmy Pardo's 'Never Not Funny' has a model that works for them. They offer a free podcast through Earwolf and subscribers can pay for a second podcast and video of all podcasts. They've been with Earwolf for less than a year but they've been around and profitable for over a decade.

</comment><comment><USER17> I tried collecting all the tech podcasts I know about here: [https://podcasts.techendo.com/](https://podcasts.techendo.com/)

Does anyone have a more extensive list I can pull in, or know of any more that aren't already on the list I've built?

<comment><USER18> 4 of my favorites:

\- .Net rocks (plenty of non .net stuff)

\- Hanselminutes

\- This developer's life

\- Software Engineering radio

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems almost insulting to not mention the scores of podcasts and podcast networks that have been making money for years. This makes it sound like you can only make money if you started in Old Media and made the transition.

<comment><USER20> Leo Laporte laughs all the way to the bank.

<comment><USER21> No, he complains and plays the victim all the way to the bank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> On the matter of podcasts:

Is there any website/service a la SoundCloud that downloads/subscribes to my favourite podcasts so I can listen to them through the browser?

<comment><USER23> Pocket Casts just today started a beta version of this service [1]. The paired Android/iPhone app can sync latest episodes as well.

[1] [http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/09/26/pocket-casts-web- now...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/09/26/pocket-casts-web-now-running- exclusive-beta/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I listen to Adam Carolla every day at work, I wish I had more money or I'd support the Aceman.

</comment><comment><USER25> The whole 'relationship with the listener' thing is nonsense. I don't have relationships with the podcasts I listen to. I don't have relationships with movie actors when I watch a film either. Like come on.

I want to be informed and entertained. If I'm not, I move on to another podcast.

<comment><USER26> I guess that depends on the podcast. I feel like I have a relationship with the guys from Back to Work [1], they talk about a lot of personal stuff and I feel like I know them a little. I appreciate that a lot, it makes me trust them (and thus, I trust the products they advertise).

<comment><USER25> Using the word "relationship" is a bit manipulative IMO. If it is a relationship, it's a conditional one-sided one.

<comment><USER27> It's one of those "it's almost technically correct" things to say. It's not necessarily a lie, but it is a parasocial relationship[1] rather than a normal one

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I had a change of heart about HelloSign (YC W11) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.twincities.com/yourtechweblog/2012/09/11/i-have-had-a-change-of-heart-about-the-hellosign-service/

<comment><USER2> As someone who recently signed a document in MS Paint on a computer which I didn't have admin rights to, a cloud based service like this would be incredibly useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's hard to take this seriously. RightSignature[1] and others have been doing this since 2009 or so. I have no dog in this fight; I use HelloFax and have used RightSignature.

1\. https//rightsignature.com/

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone know when the HelloSign API is bring released?

<comment><USER5> We're rolling out beta access right now. Email joel(at)hellofax to get put on the list.</comment></comment>


Why UEFI secure boot is difficult for Linux - <AUTHOR> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/9844.html <comment><USER2> "Signing the kernel isn't enough. Signed Linux kernels must refuse to load any unsigned kernel modules. Virtualbox on Linux? Dead. Nvidia binary driver on Linux? Dead. All out of tree kernel modules? Utterly, utterly dead. Building an updated driver locally? Not going to happen. That's going to make some people fairly unhappy."

Making secure boot meaningful on Linux would be a big project - you'd also have to sign most of the stuff in userland. But if it were done, it would be done by the distro, which could easily enough sign the kernel module in its VirtualBox package and whatever else users might want to load into the kernel. Since this would presumably be optional (there would be an alternate signed bootloader that loaded an unsigned kernel for developers and power users), the GPL3 would be satisfied; and the end result is a system that's significantly harder to attack. I don't know if that's worth the effort, considering the lack of actual malware for Linux, but as long as the key is installed along with the OS, it's hardly an impossibility.

<comment><USER3> If you provide binary Virtualbox drivers, sure. I'm not aware of any distributions that do that - they provide source instead. And signing external drivers requires auditing them to make sure that there's no way they can be exploited to execute arbitrary code, because if they can then you've just signed a malware loader and Microsoft (if they're serious about secure boot being about security) blacklist your key.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that makes sense since most Linux users don't even normally have a C compiler (let alone kernel headers) installed on their systems...

<comment><USER3> Most Linux users don't normally use any out of tree drivers. <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox/Installation> indicates that Virtualbox is shipping via DKMS, which is infrastructure for automatically rebuilding the Virtualbox code every time the kernel is updated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author of this blog also gave a talk about his work implementing UEFI in linux, and the issues discussed in this post, at a conference in Australia. I strongly suggest watching this talk when the videos are released. <http://linux.conf.au/schedule/63/view_talk?day=tuesday>

</comment><comment><USER6> There's absolutely no technical reason that a signed bootloader would have to only boot signed kernels. With UEFI Secure Boot, the only signed component is the bootloader -- there's absolutely no way in which this can affect the kernel. Now, it's possible that there could be procedural mandates around this, e.g. an authority that signs your bootloader and won't do so without mandating that the kernel and all drivers be signed as well, but does this exist, or will it exist?

<comment><USER3> It'd be easy to generate a signed bootloader that runs unsigned kernels. It'd also be easy to then use that bootloader to boot malware to attack Windows. For secure boot to be in any way useful it would then be necessary to blacklist that signed bootloader. Signed kernels that load unsigned drivers have the same problem.

<comment><USER6> I'm not arguing that Secure Boot is useful or good in any way, I'm simply saying that from a technical perspective, signed bootloader does not mean signed kernel.

<comment><USER3> From a technical perspective, you're absolutely right. From a real world perspective, it requires a signed kernel and signed drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This idea of requiring everything to be signed from the bootloader up (or just the bootloader) is horrifying to me. It seems just as bad or worse than SOPA and the rest of it.

</comment><comment><USER4> > GPLv3 has various requirements for signing keys to be available. Microsoft's > new requirement that systems support the installation of user keys would let > users boot their own modified bootloaders, so that may end up being > sufficient to satisfy the license.

I don't understand. What does Microsoft have to do with GPLv3 requirements?

<comment><USER3> If it's possible for the user to use their own key then GPLv3 may permit you to ship signed code without the signing key - the user will just be able to sign modified versions themselves. Microsoft's current requirements include the ability for users to install their own keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can the BIOS be reverse-engineered to hack out the UEFI code, sort of similar to how crackers just NOP the DRM part a game? You could even return the correct response to any kernel interrogation of the BIOS to check keys.

Seems to me that solves most of the problem, even for dual-booters.</comment>


The Coder Who Encrypted Your Texts - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/moxie-marlinspike-the-coder-who-encrypted-your-texts-1436486274 <comment><USER2> I get a lot of credit for the stuff that Open Whisper Systems does, but it's not all me by a long shot. Trevor Perrin, Frederic Jacobs, Christine Corbett, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, Jake McGinty, and Rhodey Orbits are the crew that really made all this work happen.

<comment><USER3> Given that we have the man himself onboard - can I urge you to ask the WSJ to remove the comment at the start of the article about WhatsApp implementing your encryption schema? Unless I've missed something, there's absolutely no way for an end-user to determine if their messages are being encrypted (with whatsapp). Or how they're being encrypted for that matter. I feel like WhatsApp latched onto your groundwork (potentially even with good intentions) - but never actually has opened up about the implementation, opened the code to audit, or been forthright about exactly who/how many users are covered.

I fear articles like this just make the average joe think "oh, whatsapp == secure" when recent events have proven that's far, far from the truth.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/intercepted- whats...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/intercepted-whatsapp- messages-led-to-belgian-terror-arrests/)

<comment><USER4> "Absolutely no way"? I'm sorry to be impolite about it, but that's a bit of an exaggeration: one could jailbreak their phone, pull the binary into their computer, decompile it, and inspect it for implementation structures that would be coherent with how the two or three most popular encryption algorithms are commonly implemented. The expertise to be able to accomplish it doesn't come cheap, but it's certainly in the realm for anyone willing to invest the time.

If anyone out there does it, feel free to post your findings to [http://imfreedom.org/](http://imfreedom.org/).

I'd be willing to bet that WhatsApp has some competent programmers, and looks very similar to how Apple's built iMessage. I think everyone is entitled to the most security possible, but unfortunately when you're at the scale of WhatsApp, perfect security would make all that ultra-tantalizing data pretty hard to analyze. They're a business, they have a responsibility to their investors to grow the business, and data right now is a _big_ business.

<comment><USER5> So you've probably just broken the law by doing so. And you have to do this everytime the app gets updates. And you have to be sure that the encryption is actually getting used on every message. And that the key is strong and not known to Whatsapp. And also that the recipients copy of the app is behaving the same as yours. So I guess the question is, if you had something to hide would you bet your life on it?

Whereas with Textsecure. Well it just works...

<comment><USER6> >So you've probably just broken the law by doing so.

By modifying your own device? I don't think so.

<comment><USER5> Many countries have laws against reverse engineering programs. Whilst I think these laws are stupid I would prefer to just use the open source program than mess around with the closed source alternative.

<comment><USER7> According to Wikipedia[0], reverse engineering is generally legal in the US:

 _In the United States even if an artifact or process is protected by trade secrets, reverse-engineering the artifact or process is often lawful as long as it has been legitimately obtained._

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#United_States)

<comment><USER8> And that is one country out of ~200.

<comment><USER9> Yes but it has 350M people living in it, half the HN, Silicon Valley, and Moxie with his team. It's not honest to say the US is just another country among 200.

<comment><USER10> yep, in other words around 4% of the world's population live in the US and of course this pales in comparison to actually large nation states, like india or china.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Unfortunately, if Mr. Marlinspike's encryption scheme can be applied to imagery, then childporn collectors thank him too.

And there we go, highest voted comment on the article: a strawman about child pornography. Think of the keeeds

<comment><USER12> "Think of the childern" is a common refrain of the coward who values safety over freedom.

<comment><USER13> I wonder how many of the people on that think of the children side were either affected as kids, had children who had some awful experience, or are of close relation to someone who was or had kids who did. Because I could easily see something like an awful event happening to a child really warping a persons world view in a strong way.

On the other hand, I wonder how many privacy advocates have never experienced anything awful in that sense.

I'm on the privacy side myself and it's true child touchers are just hearsay for me. I know they exist, I know it happens, but it's not generally at the forefront of my mind when thinking about much of anything really. And I really wonder what I'd think if everytime I thought about policy I also had poor Timmy's story echoing away for all eternity in my head.

And then I wonder for the motivations of the people for whom child touchers are hearsay but are really opposed to privacy. Their motives must include things like drug dealers, terrorists, a belief in their own clean slate, money. It's pretty interesting to think about what goes on behind the scenes of any argument that gains popular traction.

<comment><USER14> I heard several survivors that were appalled of the "Think of the children" approach because it is too often used to push an agenda that doesn't help children at all.

For example, internet blocking of child abuse media (hot topic in Germany a couple of years ago) doesn't help children (who aren't abused 'over the internet' but in real life) because it routes resources away from public education on the matter (such as encouraging victims to speak up), social and health support (so victims that spoke up don't fall into a void) and regular police work (so that the perpetrator gets busted).

I guess child abuse on the internet is a popular topic with policy makers because "protecting children" is an easy way to score points in public and "on the internet" hides the fact that this abuse happens somewhere - and closer to any single person than they may be comfortable with. "internet" became a code word for "somewhere else".

That's a great platform to win an election.

Now, pick any company with > 10000 employees. Just by running the numbers it likely employs a child abuser. You work for such a company? It's likely that one of your coworkers, maybe even somebody you deal with every day, is a child abuser.

That's not a great platform to win an election.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've had a ton of respect for Marlinspike ever since he published sslstrip, an incredibly simple defeat of HTTPS.[1]

It's a perfect demonstration of the fundamental insecurity of the web thus far. When an insecure communication mode (HTTP) is the default and perfectly ok most of the time, the browser has no idea when you are _supposed_ to be operating on a secure channel (HTTPS) but have been tricked into downgrading by a man in the middle attack.

I can't prove it but I believe his work is a significant factor behind the shift towards deprecating HTTP in favor of HTTPS all the time. That is the only real solution.

[1] [http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/](http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/)

<comment><USER16> > the browser has no idea when you are supposed to be > operating on a secure > channel (HTTPS)

Agree about the sentiment, but there are some ways to help this. The server can for instance tell the client to always require https:

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

Doesn't help if the client hasn't yet connected to the right server at least once, though.

<comment><USER17> Also, the browser can opt into HTTPS by using a plugin such as HTTPS Everywhere.

<comment><USER18> All of these defenses post-date sslstrip/sslsniff, and if you look at mailing list conversations in the early days of HTTPS Everywhere, you can see that it was developed as a direct response to these attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Moxie and Frederic and Christine and the rest definitely deserve a lot of credit.

Half of me is really happy every time I see Signal getting more popular. The other half is more like OH GOD THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW WHAT IF I MADE AN EXPLOITABLE MISTAKE BETTER RE-READ SOME CODE.

But seriously, you should read the code. It's there, open for anyone to audit after all. Maybe start somewhere random in the guts [1][2][3] and check for things like "ereh 2# roodkcab"?

1: [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- iOS/blob/master/Sig...](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- iOS/blob/master/Signal/src/network/rtp/zrtp/ZrtpResponder.m)

2: [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- iOS/blob/master/Sig...](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- iOS/blob/master/Signal/src/crypto/EvpSymetricUtil.m)

3: [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- iOS/blob/master/Sig...](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- iOS/blob/master/Signal/src/textsecure/Util/Cryptography.m)

<comment><USER20> +[Cryptography generateRandomBytes] should possibly return NSData rather than NSMutableData.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The sailing documentary they briefly mention in the article is called Hold Fast. If there are any HN readers that are into sailing I highly recommend it.

You can watch it here: [https://vimeo.com/15351476](https://vimeo.com/15351476)

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting quotes:

> President Barack Obama called [protected-messaging apps] "a problem."

but

> Encrypted messaging was viewed [by the U.S. State Department] as a way for > dissidents to get around repressive regimes. With help from Mr. Schuler, > Radio Free Asia's Open Technology Fund, which is funded by the government > and has a relationship with the State Department, granted Mr. Marlinspike > more than $1.3 million between 2013 and 2014, according to the fund's > website.

</comment><comment><USER23> Great article, not paywalled.

Here's the thing that Moxie recognizes, that many other programs don't (in any domain):

       He says he wants to build simple, "frictionless"
       apps, adopting a Silicon Valley buzzword for
       "easy to use."

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting article and interesting guy. I like the work he and his team does on these apps. Unfortunately, they typically run on the type of endpoints that everyone from script kiddies with money to High Strength Attackers can hit. Usually alongside apps not as strong as theirs on TCB's that can at best be described as insecure foundations.

I recommend against such apps and platforms for anything other than stopping the riff raff. That's what I use them for. I pointed out the difference between secure code and secure systems in this [1] writeup. Shared much of my framework for analyzing or designing-in security in the process. The TCB of most solutions today is ridiculous: people are building on foundations of quicksand. There's only a few exceptions I've seen such as GenodeOS (architecturally) or Markus Ottela's Tinfoil Chat. Markus has been unusually alert to our concerns and updated his app appropriately even for covert, channel suppression. Quick question: which of the many crypto apps on the market can deliver a covert channel analysis to you at app and system level? Answer: few to none despite it's importance over decades with a rediscovery in past 5+ years in mainstream security.

Strong security is hard. Moxie seems awesome as a coder and good to great in both crypto and OPSEC. Thing is, his offerings break the decades old rule of having a strong TCB. Just like most of the rest. It's why they're usually bypassed or broken by strong attackers. Gotta do the whole thing with concern for each aspect of the system. TFC is a clever cheat on that even more than my MILS scheme with a KVM and a highly-assured guard. If you don't cheat around it, you better do it right or your users will suffer the consequences. Those _trying_ to contain vulnerabilities of mainstream OS's and components with any success are expending literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of labor per year. It's why I push for clean-slate, hardware and software platforms like DARPA and NSF have been funding recently (eg SAFE, CHERI processors). Alternatives using COTS tech are pretty complex and most users will probably fail to secure them to be honest.

[1] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/essay_on_fbi-...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/essay_on_fbi- ma.html#c1102869)

<comment><USER6> Anyone have a glossary?

<comment><USER24> My bad. Glad I caught it before I went to sleep. Trusted Computing Base (TCB): everything in a system that the security argument depends on. Bigger and more complex the worse. Tinfoil Chat (TFC). MILS = separation kernels, basically. A more secure form of microkernel. KVM = Keyboard-Video-Mouse switch for separate, physical devices. COTS is commercial tech and FOSS is often developed with similarly low-quality methods. Hope that helps in your translation of the comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I still can't get over Moxie wanting Google and Apple and Microsoft to be gatekeepers of what you can and can't do with your device and calling sideloading "that old broken desktop security model".

I admire your work Moxie, but sadly we stand on different sides of war on general purpose computing. I can't help but be saddened that "the other side" got someone so talented and dedicated.

<comment><USER26> I don't know about Apple or MS, but building TextSecure from source and installing it on an android phone is about as easy as you could reasonably expect it to be. It seems churlish to complain that there are also easier ways to install it.

Edit: although, of course you have to trust Github or whoever if you install from source.

<comment><USER27> They are actively opposing their apps to be published on F-Droid. Instead, they prefer on proprietary services for various (imo bad) reasons>

[https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/redphone-and- textsecure/#po...](https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/redphone-and- textsecure/#post-12296)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Didn't TextSecure stop encrypting SMS a while back? If you lose data connectivity you're sending in the clear, right?

<comment><USER5> Yes. This is really annoying it was one of the major selling points - I'd got several people to install it on this basis. They had a reason for the change but I was un-impressed

The best thing that one can say is that it is well indicated by the UI whether the message will be secure. Blue for encrypted. Green for clear. I've managed to explain this to some very tech unsavy people.

<comment><USER29> Is that a setting? I use TextSecure, and when my data cuts out, it simply fails to send the message and tells me. Every message I've ever sent (that I can quickly see) has the padlock icon next to it, which I'm assuming guarantees it was encrypted.

<comment><USER5> yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sweet article! The movie about Moxie fixing up and sailing a boat was actually was super fun to watch! I'm feeling grateful the comments section hasn't turned into a massive argument over TextSecure dropping SMS support like the whisper systems mailing list alwayssss is...

</comment><comment><USER31> Moxie gave a great high-level talk on cryptography and Open Whisper Systems at Webstock this year too, for anyone that's interested: [https://vimeo.com/124887048](https://vimeo.com/124887048)

</comment><comment><USER32> I was a great fan of TextSecure until a few days ago. I had encouraged a bunch of friends to install it. One of them couldn't get rid of a notification from TextSecure about an unread message despite there being none, and eventually they uninstalled it. Then, for the next 4 months TextSecure blackholed every message I sent this friend without warning either them or me. They never received a single message from me. After discovering that I uninstalled it.

<comment><USER2> You'll find that this is true for every messenger on Android, since there is no way to detect someone uninstalling without unregistering.

TextSecure has delivery receipts so you can see when your messages aren't being delivered, and there's a web-based unregistration flow on the Open Whisper Systems website so that users can unregister their numbers if they've uninstalled.

<comment><USER32> Thanks for the reply, Moxie. I realise I sound negative, but I do love your work. The app gave me no indication that delivery was failing. Couldn't you detect the failure when you try and forward on the message from your servers (if it is a push architecture)? Happy to give you my details if you want to look into it.

<comment> mike-cardwell It's using the Google Android push stuff, which means to deliver a message to a phone, Moxies server sends a message to Google to ask Google to push a message to the phone ASAP. So he gets no feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not that I really want to steal any of Moxie's thunder, but if you're reading this comment thread you might also be interested in SC4:

[https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4](https://github.com/Spark- Innovations/SC4)

Strong encryption that runs in a browser. Recently completed its first security audit.

<comment><USER34> I've been looking for something to replace PGP-JS for a while.

Cheers.

<comment><USER33> Any feedback you have on SC4 would be much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Kudos to moxie and team for their work and their example of positively enabling others to speak freely, for inspiring others to build better alternatives, and for being the change they wish to see in the world.

Also wanted to share one of the most provocative moxie-isms I've heard in recent years from him, in reference to WL:

"What about the truth has helped you?"

</comment><comment><USER36> So it looks like I might have understood something wrong regarding TextSecure.

Installed it, used it, uninstalled it.

Years later, a contact asks me that he "saw me in TextSecure", sent me a message.

Obviously, I didn't get that message.

Why - o why - was/is TextSecure pretending to not know about metadata when it does? Why could that happen? Moxie?

<comment><USER37> This problem is not specific to TextSecure, it also exist with iMessage and whatsapp as far as I know.

You can unregister here: [https://whispersystems.org/textsecure/unregister](https://whispersystems.org/textsecure/unregister)

<comment><USER38> > You can unregister here: > [https://whispersystems.org/textsecure/unregister](https://whispersystems.org/textsecure/unregister)

Well, _maybe_ you can. I spent several days six months ago trying to unregister, and finally just accepted the fact that TextSecure will never let me go. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Note that Open Whisper Systems is hiring: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9813309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9813309).

</comment><comment><USER40> Address book based social networks are nice to get a bit of bootstrapping, but becomes pretty bad when you want to add someone as a text secure contact, or you want to run a version without using SMS gateways. It gets pretty complicated pretty fast compared to 'what is your username'.

I hope text secure gets usernames one day that you can associate with phone numbers & emails.

The web-browser version is a good development, it shows that desktop and multi-device versions are on the way.

</comment><comment><USER41> It's awesome seeing so many privacy and secure messaging apps spring up. The tough part is getting people to use them. I've been using Wickr (I know the black box arguments, but they have a reasonable bounty in place) and it doesn't require number, contact info or addy. The phone call feature of Signal sounds interesting so I'll check it out.

</comment><comment><USER42> I tried installing TextSecure recently but it wouldn't work without the Google Play services.

I hadn't herd of their new app Signal. Has anyone tried it? I'm really interested in hearing anyone's experience using it.

BTW, I ended up installing Telegram ...and it may be mere co-incidence, but I started noticing some weird things happening that I've never seen before. I connect to the internet exclusively via tethering to my phone and while tethered I started seeing messages in Firefox from my desktop machine giving warnings that were something like "Could not establish secure connection because the server supports a higher version of TLS". My guess is that it was some sort of MITM attack... and I was possibly targeted due to the traffic to Telegram servers.

One other thing regarding Telegram: I really don't like that it reads my contact list and uploads it to their server to check if my contacts have a Telegram account. I've blocked the permission for now.

<comment><USER43> Telegram isn't secure. There's been no public audit of their "secure" code and most messages aren't even sent via the secure channel unless you expressly tell it to do so.

It has a pretty UI though, so most people seem to think it's great.

<comment><USER44> Their UI is a carbon copy of WhatsApp

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I already knew this would be an article about Moxie before clicking the link.

<comment><USER46> As TextSecure no longer secures text messages (texts) I really _wan't_ expecting it to be about Moxie and figured it was actually about the implementer of A5/1...

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Thank god this man exists.

<comment><USER48> Yes, but isn't that in an of itself somewhat depressing.

<comment><USER49> Sadly, software is complex and security is really hard (and generally a trade- off). See also djb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Where's the authentication process in TextSegure? Totally MITM'able. Not secure at all.

</comment><comment><USER51> Obama's "problem" is a "solution".

</comment><comment><USER50> There is not any evidence of encryption on WhatsApp, source code is closed so you can never be safe.

<comment><USER43> People have sniffed the wire for the WhatApp client (on Android, towards another Android) and seen that it is encrypted.

But your point stands - there's no UI to indicate if it was secure or not and the code isn't open so you can't know for sure.

<comment><USER52> I'm ignorant. How can you prove that it's encrypted in any meaningful fashion vs, say rot13?

<comment><USER53> We can disprove the existence of strong encryption with a wireshark, but cannot prove it.

Entropy of a rot13 message would be much lower than that of a properly encrypted channel. High entropy is not _proof_ of "meaningful encryption", mind you, since a compressed rot13 or plaintext message would have high entropy too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I am thinking about why encryption was only used by the military in the first place, back when the infamous Bell monopoly on phone service existed. I think cracking encryption was one of the reasons computers was created in the first place, right?

<comment><USER55> Who could listen to people's phone calls, and how many people were concerned about that happening?

<comment> vezzy-fnord Breathing in on your phone has traditionally been the FBI's dominion, in any case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This guy is not part of the solution. He is part of the problem. [https://f-droid.org/posts/security-notice- textsecure/](https://f-droid.org/posts/security-notice-textsecure/)

<comment><USER56> For those interested in the rationale: [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127#issu...](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127#issuecomment-13447074)

<comment><USER50> From [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/53](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/53)

Moxie: "I'd like to avoid distributing APKs outside of the Play Store"

Why give a single entity the power to push a malicious update anytime?

<comment><USER57> that's not how the Play store (or Android) works. Moxie signs the APK, phones will only install updates that are signed with the same certificate as the version they already have. Google cannot modify apps.

Edit: In contrast, the F-Droid builds were built and signed by F-Droid, so they could at any time include any code they wanted. Whom do you trust more, the developer or some alternate app store?

<comment><USER27> Google could also distribute a differently signed apk to selected users. And there's no way for users to check the signature of an apk (if they didn't have it installed before).

And I certainly trust an open source project much more than a US company.

<comment><USER57> But that angle of attack only works if they target you from the moment you first install the app. It would be much easier to just push a modified Google application update to your phone if that is what they wanted.

What it boils down to is that with the Play store, you can be sure that you're not getting malicious _updates_ from some intermediary, as each developer signs their own APKs, and Google doesn't have the keys. Whereas if f-droid is compromised, all applications they build are compromised. That's a much greater risk.

<comment><USER50> You can set up your own repo.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do I hate web development or do I just need a switch-up? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to decide whether I can do this forever and I need to know a couple things: whether my situation is industry-typical and if so, will I eventually get used to it. First, a little background: I've loved computers ever since I was a kid. I've always loved learning new stuff and I've made some pretty cool side projects. Somehow, I never even considered the job aspect of it until a couple years ago. I guess I was too busy enjoying it to realize it was a viable career. Anyway.
I've been working at a web agency for almost a year now, I'm in some gray area between intern and developer (in that I get paid as an intern but work on full projects without supervision like a developer), and I'm starting to learn that the challenging parts of it aren't what I thought they'd be. Having some difficult task that requires learning a new way to do things isn't a problem -- it's why I fell in love with computers in the first place. I've learned in the past few months that the hardest part is sitting for hours and grinding away at someone else's kludges of spaghetti code.
We're primarily a PHP shop, and we mostly do business websites with typical content using our proprietary CMS. That's not incredibly exciting, but it's at least not terrible. Occasionally they have an interesting requirement, API hookup, etc. Sometimes I make WP themes (for SEO purposes :() or make a Drupal module, and that's also not bad. I enjoy starting a project and building it through 'til the end. Where it gets painful is when we inherit clients that have an already existing site made by their DBA that didn't know what he was doing, or worse yet, our sales team scores a client that has an ASP site ("We're technology neutral" i.e. we'll take anything) and it gets dropped in my lap even though I don't know a damn thing about ASP and don't even have a Windows install around to work on, so I'm live-editing the site using Transmit and TextMate. Oh sure, I speak 'coder-speak' so the language doesn't matter, except that the guy that made it obviously didn't speak coder-speak and has an almost incomprehensible abomination that works, but, oh my god I don't know how and I don't want to know.
Oh, or my favorite: the guy that already spent his $500 on iLance (http://www.ilance.com/) and then realized he couldn't make it do what he wants so he hires us and we have to use iLance because he already bought it, damn it! while iLance is probably the most incompetent chunk of PHP I've ever looked at. Seriously, like "I don't know how to use arguments to make this expression, so I'll just concatenate a string of PHP code from the post variables you sent me and ram it through eval()"-bad.
tl;dr I find it miserable to work on someone else's sloppy code. It feels like I'm doing a job no more skilled than sweeping the floors at a supermarket or something. Just pounding away at a keyboard for 9 hours and then going home feeling like my brain is fried. Does it get better? Does my situation (with dramatic, frustrated emphases accounted for) seem typical, or is the place I work just particularly messy sounding? Any advice? <comment><USER2> What you're describing is in fact typical of most agencies — they're filled with young kids who become an army to grind out billable hours. I think you need to identify what you're really hating about your situation in order to figure out the correct action:

\- Is it the subject matter? Would working on a product be more fun? Would it be fun if you lost your job after a month? Would work at another agency with better clients be more fun?

\- Is it the money and/or job title? If you made more or felt less like a "code money" would you be happier? If so maybe jump to an another agency.

\- Are you really perhaps just unhappy with the people there? Or are you maybe feeling like you aren't learning anything new? That might be a good reason to jump ship.

By the way you may want to learn some patience for non-coders and the like: Learning that skill can make you management material instead of being stuck debugging.

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of people just aren't right for the agency world - I know that working on client work once in a while really grates my nerves. It's not particularly fun work but it can be challenging and you always get a fresh project to work on.

I think you're off to a good start by asking the tough questions now, just spend a little more time figuring out what you like and you don't like. Talk to your peers, talk to people in industries you're interested in, and just figure it out.

More importantly, don't rush.

</comment><comment><USER4> You've only been at it for less than a year here. Try at least a few more environments before you decide you hate the industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. I'm definitely not about to ditch development. I'm wondering my if I'm in an okay place. The other devs are cool and I like working with them in spite of how miserable the work can sometimes be.

I'm just trying to decide if I should try to work somewhere else. I definitely think I'd be happier developing a project rather than working on client sites.

<comment><USER4> By different environments, I meant other workplaces.

Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You seem stuck on the "What". I was. Try finding a reason or "Why" you do what you do. I occasionally pick up small development jobs for non profits every few weeks just so I can do something on my own terms.</comment>