Simultaneous AP and Client Mode Wi-Fi on Raspberry Pi Zero W - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lukicdarkoo/rpi-wifi <comment><USER2> I've been using a similar solution, but I had quite some problems using AP and client mode at the same time. The WiFi chip inside the RPi Zero W (BCM43430) only supports AP and client mode on the same channel. If you setup an AP first, then connect to a client network, hostapd will update the channel of the AP, but clients will notice a disconnect. There are also issues with the firmware blob (see [https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1403](https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/1403)) in AP mode that haven't been solved yet.

<comment><USER3> What I did on a similar project using a different board was scan all the APs in the area first, get the band of the AP with the strongest signal, then bring up the device AP using that band. I figured the AP with the strongest signal is the closest AP and the one you most likely want to connect to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The pithier article (linked to from the above) is at

[https://blog.thewalr.us/2017/09/26/raspberry-pi-zero-w- simul...](https://blog.thewalr.us/2017/09/26/raspberry-pi-zero-w-simultaneous- ap-and-managed-mode-wifi/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The script is heavily based on the article. Full credit to the article!

For everybody interested in details, the article gives useful insights on configuration automated by the script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for this.

I had built [similar repository]([https://github.com/computationalprivacy/unveil-pi-data- colle...](https://github.com/computationalprivacy/unveil-pi-data-collector)) as a part of wifi data capture and visualisation experiment ([Project UNVEIL]([https://github.com/computationalprivacy/unveil- deployment)](https://github.com/computationalprivacy/unveil-deployment\))) but it used external antenna.

Any links on how does underlying hardware work to enable simultaneous connections?

<comment><USER6> Here's the article which the posted GitHub project is based on.

[https://blog.thewalr.us/2017/09/26/raspberry-pi-zero-w- simul...](https://blog.thewalr.us/2017/09/26/raspberry-pi-zero-w-simultaneous- ap-and-managed-mode-wifi/)

> At this point, we should be able to connect a device to our Raspberry Pi > Zero W's AP SSID, while we also have our RPi connect to another access point > for internet access, and we should be able to access the internet from that > device through our RPi.

The "simultaneous" aspect seems to be achieved by having two devices: wlan0 and ap0, the latter created by udev.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is perfect for hotels whose TV sucks and their wifi has those captive portals so you can't use a Chromecast, Firestick, or Roku.

It just needs a captive portal of its own when the client side is disconnected.

<comment><USER8> I travel with a little $12 wireless access point for this purpose. Which is actually cheaper than you can get a pi zero w setup with PSU anyway.

<comment><USER9> Can you explain more?

<comment><USER8> You can search for "travel router". These things are built exactly for this. [https://www.amazon.com/s?k=travel+router](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=travel+router)

They usually have an interface so that when you get to a hotel, you can either plug them into the hardline or they will let you connect and then select the hotel's wifi and enter the password.

The great thing is that all your devices will already have your travel router wifi info saved. So when I go to a hotel and fire it up and connect, all our phones, ipads, Roku, even an Amazon echo we sometimes take will will all connect right up.

Sometimes I even luck out and the lan cable going into the TV will be unmetered. One hotel I was getting 100mbps up/down all week for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've looked at the links posted here and the repo but I fail to find what is the use case for this?

<comment><USER11> Ever stay at a hotel that charges for wifi access on a per device basis?

<comment><USER12> No, but it's not uncommon to find hotel internet that has a fairly low device count limit. The place I use WiFi repeaters is on airplanes, to avoid the hassle of re-authenticating every time I switch between phone and tablet and laptop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would this be good for something like connecting the Pi to a VPN for say Canada, then broadcasting an SSID for it.

Then connecting a Fire TV Stick or Chromecast to this AP, and tricking it into letting you stream Canadian Netflix or DAZN etc.

<comment><USER14> Maybe it was just an arbitrary example, but really, there's no reason to want Canadian Netflix. We only get about half the stuff the US does.

Also, we have the same "content can't be offered here by Netflix because the local IP license has been bought out by a different owner" problem that the US and many other places does; but in Canada's case, most of those local IP owners are conservative dinosaur media companies, who either haven't managed, or haven't bothered, to set up their own alternative streaming services yet. They just... hold the licenses, doing nothing with them. Hoarding them, like a dragon. So there are many shows you just can't stream in Canada at all, no matter who you're willing to pay.

<comment><USER15> During the pandemic I can blaze through new additions to the Netflix US catalog with speed, then its time to go find something new to watch for the next few weeks. All of the regional Netflix get movies and shows that the US does not - I was able to watch Star Trek Discovery in its entirety on Netflix Germany for example. Netflix Hong Kong has an amazing catalogue but I could not get that one to work with my VPN. Netflix UK is the most disappointing because it is more or less devoid of UK movies and shows aside from Monty Python and Peppa Pig (both already available in the US anyway).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any idea why systemd was not able to be reliably used, and had to use cron?

Is there a 'fix' for that ?

edit: This was not meant to be offensive. I was simply hoping somebody could offer how it could be used with systemd and remove the reliance on cron.

<comment><USER17> I think it's just a shortcut because of lack of experience with systemd (this is not intended to be offensive btw - if cron is already installed and you save time by just using what you know, why not?). I would be very surprised if cron could do something that can't be done with systemd timers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suspected that the network wasn't ready, so I configured the service start after network without much luck. I didn't go further than that.

<comment><USER17> Systemd can be very powerful and you can even depend on individual devices being added/removed. I'm pretty sure you can even replace the udev rules with a systemd equivalent if you tried hard enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone noticed a shortage of Pi Zeros recently? It seems everywhere has run out of stock.

<comment><USER19> More time to tinker at home? Over the course of a couple weeks, I purchased four a two months back. A project I worked on inspired at least another person in my office to buy one.

<comment><USER20> My local microcenter has been jammed packed since the pandemic started. I also purchased 2 a few months back and a bunch of accessories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can this be used as a range extender if you use the same SSID and password for the access point as the net you're connecting to? Would other clients silently roam between the two (or more) networks using the same name and password?

<comment><USER22> I think it would need to spoof the same MAC as the original AP too.

<comment><USER23> No, the identification method of an extended service set is the SSID, aka the network name. Just set up the same SSID and password on both APs, and put them onto the same ip layer network. Your device will roam the networks automatically. Each AP should get its own MAC otherwise they will think packets sent to the other AP was meant for them. WiFi is robust enough to deal with noise like e.g. bluetooth, so it might survive it, but I doubt it'd support two STAs with the same BSSID communicating with each other.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_set_(802.11_network)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_set_\(802.11_network\))

<comment><USER24> How do you do this with most consumer devices? The only AP I've seen do it successfully is the AsusWRT series - Media Extender mode seems to be transparent. If I try it with anything else I'll end up with two seperate networks, e.g. 192.168.8.0/24 connected to 10.1.1.0/24 (I actually have a GL.inet AR750S in this configuration right now)

<comment><USER25> If you can wire the 2 AP via a LAN, then this is how I've used cheap consumer wifi APs which are usually combo AP+router devices:

The first AP is connecting to internet gateway through its WAN port. This AP does the networking stuff like DHCP, NAT, etc.

The other wifi APs are configured to be AP-only, i.e. disable DHCP. Use same wifi SSID and auth settings as the first AP. Then connect the APs using their LAN ports.

Client devices should now connect to the AP with the best signal.

But if the client is already connected to an AP and a better-signal AP is available, many clients won't automatically connect to the better AP. This is because the client don't know that the other AP is the same network. So if you move around you may need to trigger the client to disconnect and reconnect.

This can be solved with APs that have a "mesh" feature which can instruct connected clients to reconnect to a better AP in the same network using [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11k-2008](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11k-2008) but AFAIK mesh systems from different manufacturers aren't interoperable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what's the use case other than a poor wifi extender, or niche cases of sharing one connection between multiple devices where you pay per connection.

Though I do wonder whether you can add a proper wifi antenna and make the RPI an 'ok' wifi extender. That might be a viable option, provided the performance is ok.

<comment><USER27> Initial configuration/management for the device in question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why is that not easy and widely used as nearly all devices we used like camera (dslr to car camera) and remote controller all resolved to stop WiFi and switch to another mode etc to connect.

<comment><USER29> Partially because of chip capabilities, and partially because understanding networking is hard.

I don't think most chips can do this fwiw, but it's definitely cheap enough now that cameras and IoT devices will probably start doing it everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Whatever happened to ad-hoc mode?

<comment><USER31> Not sure exactly what you're referring to, did the author explain in the past they rather want ad-hoc network setup or something?

Otherwise, ad-hoc is different from AP+Client, as ad-hoc is only between two devices (at least from what I gather) while AP+Client would allow a distributed network where clients are interconnected.

<comment><USER22> I thought ad-hoc is N devices, optionally decentralized. This could emulate that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So in short a poor range extender or a way to do MitM.

<comment><USER33> The Offline Wikipedia/Stackexchange project (Kiwix) has similar devices for kids classrooms/libraries in rural areas with no internet - [https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/kiwix- hotspot/](https://www.kiwix.org/en/downloads/kiwix-hotspot/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> A bit off topic:

I'm looking for a project that starts with an AP. Once someone connected to it; it opens a web page to configure the client (choose which WIFI from a list, and type the password).

It connects to the chosen WIFI and shuts down the AP.

Anyone here did something similar to that?

<comment><USER35> Starting point: [https://github.com/balena-io/wifi- connect](https://github.com/balena-io/wifi-connect)

<comment><USER36> I've seen Raspberry Pi images from Ubiquity Robotics(not Ubiquiti Networks) having similar daemon called "pifi" for command line operation, but this one looks nicer

</comment></comment></comment><comment> non-entity Just curious, but I was trying to help someone with a Raspberry Pi Zero W wifi issue the other day and had trouble finding sny info about the wireless chipset used. I couldn't find it listen anywhere on the site, or several tech review sites, only extremely useless information on the 802.11 versions support. If it recall correctly, it didn't even show up in the schematica. Luckily wikipedia had the name of the chipset used, but I don't get it. Why does their official documentation seem to be so secretive?

<comment><USER37> It's not secretive, it's just that most people are not very interested in the exact type of Wi-Fi chipset used.

You can see the chipset name (BCM43430) on dmesg:

      $ dmesg | grep brcmfmac
      [   26.488164] brcmfmac: F1 signature read @0x18000000=0x1541a9a6
      [   26.512759] brcmfmac: brcmf_fw_alloc_request: using brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio for chip BCM43430/1
      [   26.513315] usbcore: registered new interface driver brcmfmac
      [   26.539406] brcmfmac mmc1:0001:1: Direct firmware load for brcm/brcmfmac43430-sdio.raspberrypi,model-zero-w.txt

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> How to get faster internet at a hotel: Have 4-5 of these connected and talking with the hotels WiFi, and one who share Internet with you. All the traffic goes to a server you have at home that "join+proxy" the traffic. Based on the idea that every user have a limited bandwidth, combining multiple will give you higher speed.

<comment><USER39> You can also plug multiple wifi dongles into a usb 3.0 hub and use magic to load balance traffic across all the interfaces connected to different wifi internet APs.</comment></comment>


The RubyMotion Way - <AUTHOR> http://clayallsopp.com/posts/the-ruby-motion-way/

<comment><USER2> > _Rubyists get a lot of flak for the kind of DSLs and black magic > method_missing tricks the above libraries use; but you know what, maybe that > attitude is just what Objective-C has been missing._

I politely disagree. Objective-C hasn't been missing risky and error-prone approaches that merely attempt to save a few characters at the cost of correctness. Extensions like 'when' are vague, and could just as easily be co- opted for KVO as they could for UIControl event handling.

Also, the example is not accurate. In Objective-C, you'd control-drag from the button to your action method, using Interface Builder.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the value add of a `when` style isn't saving keystrokes but improving readability. What happens when the event fires is right there in-line with the button, not somewhere else on the page. Yeah there are editor tricks to command+click to it and such, but that's still some overhead.

TBH I think it really is a matter of preference at this point. There could be a killer, must-use RubyMotion framework in the future, but for now I simply feel more productive and flexible in Ruby.

In fact, the most impactful change of RubyMotion (and I somehow neglected this when I wrote it) is testing. It ships with a really powerful port of Bacon which is lightyears better than UIAutomation, KIF, and every other iOS testing framework I've tried. `rake spec` is a seamless, regular part of my workflow in a way that Xcode failed to achieve.

<comment><USER2> > _I think the value add of a `when` style isn't saving keystrokes but > improving readability. What happens when the event fires is right there in- > line with the button, not somewhere else on the page. Yeah there are editor > tricks to command+click to it and such, but that's still some overhead._

With Interface Builder, there is no "right there in-line with the button", because the button (and the entire remainder of the layout) is instantiated and fully laid out in a nice WYSIWYG editor.

That said, as the you noted, you _can_ do this in Objective-C. However, due to the propensity for conflicts, it's bad form to insert un-prefixed category methods into system classes.

This is an appeal to emotion, but I must be honest: I'm concerned about the day that I'm asked to take over maintenance of a Ruby Motion project, especially if it's likely to diverge significantly and arbitrarily from our community's existing best practices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> " If you've tried projects in Ruby and just didn't like it, RubyMotion probably won't change your mind. But if you've ever wanted to make iOS or Mac apps but didn't want to get over the hump that is Objective-C, maybe this will get you going."

Can RubyMotion itself be used to create Mac apps in addition to iOS apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, should have specified! As jballanc said, I was referring to MacRuby (<http://macruby.org/>). I'll add a link there for clarification.

RM and MR are both by Laurent Sansonetti, and the experience developing for them is identical. The Ruby code is just as portable as Objective-C between iOS and OS X. I'm working on something right now which uses both technologies and it's been a great experience.

<comment><USER4> There is, of course, one important different between MacRuby and Ruby Motion: the former is GPL compliant, and the latter is commercially licensed.

I think this is a shame, because I suspect lots of people would quite like to contribute back to the project, and that's currently not an option.

<comment><USER5> Of course it's a shame that Laurent needs to eat and of course this has everything to do about RM being able to build for Mac or not. Knowing him, I know he would prefer RM to be open source but it would be much harder for him to monetize his efforts.

I'm perfectly ok with paying a fee to get RM but I know that wouldn't pay for support (especially if the community handles it which is already the case).

Corporate sponsorship doesn't always works and often lacks security and stability for both the developer and the project as they are at the mercy of one entity.

<comment><USER6> He would make more money charging for support or for the tail end (e.g. codesigning).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I sometimes wish rubymotion and macruby had named parameter with default value, something like

def functions(with, this: syntax="default value") end

but over all, I think rubmyotion rocks and I hope and brings some great Objective-c/Cocoa world into ruby-world and vice-versa.

<comment><USER8> You can setup your method to accept a hash, and then do something like this...

syntax = options[:syntax] || "default value"

...in the method body. Still, it would be nice to have it built in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you want a deeper dive into RubyMotion, the creator was just on The Changelog podcast - [http://thechangelog.com/post/25928209107/episode-0-8-2-ruby-...](http://thechangelog.com/post/25928209107/episode-0-8-2-ruby- motion-macruby-and-more-with-laurent)

He actually left Apple to launch RubyMotion -- a commercial product, by the way -- after creating MacRuby and developing/maintaining it for several years.

</comment><comment><USER10> iOS development is not only objective-c and Cocoa Touch. XCode, interface builder, instruments are also big helpers and sometimes there can be memory problems that you can only trace with instrument.

<comment><USER11> That's if you like using interface builder. I personally dislike it and prefer to lay things out programmatically, but this probably has to do with the fact that I came to iOS development from the web development world.

<comment><USER10> I also try to not use IB most of the time, but especially if you are building not so custom designs, IB really increase the productivity and keep the code clean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why the tricky horizontal scrolling on this page? (In Chrome and Firefox, at least. Oddly, Safari presents it as a regular vertical page..)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's because of a media query that responds to wider window sizes, strange that it didn't register in all your browsers (it does on my Safari when I fullscreen)

It's supposed to help readability while maximizing screen use in those cases (instead of either stretching out paragraphs to two lines or centering the body as to take up only a small percentage of the window). I'll change it to trigger on a wider dimension, sorry!

<comment><USER12> Aha, that would explain it. I almost never use Safari so its natural size is likely somewhat thinner than my day to day browser :-) I was _just_ over your ~1300ish pixel width.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are there examples of products that were developed with RubyMotion?

<comment><USER14> This is a pretty mindblowing app example which is on it's way to the app store: <http://clip.ignition.hk/>

Lots of low-level stuff there, which is very very impressive.

<comment><USER15> That is a very cool app. Thanks for sharing the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > (after the code preview) Pretty nice right?

Yes, very nice. And also very annoying.

Using these little shortcuts everywhere is confusing. There is no order in things.

ObjC is beautiful. There are classes, instances, methods, blocks. And everything has its place.

This is a mess, Rails is a mess, most of Ruby code is a mess.

Proceed with the downvotes.

<comment><USER17> Proceed with the semicolons.</comment></comment>


The State of United States' Incubators - <AUTHOR> http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/2009/07/fostering-local-economic-development-the-state-of-united-states-incubators/

<comment><USER2> It would be nice if somebody did this for the whole capital sphere, including follow on investment and the rest of the world.

To have all that information in one place would make it one hell of a resource.</comment>


Attention Is All You Need - <AUTHOR> https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7181-attention-is-all-you-need <comment><USER2> This paper has a lot of prerequisites to understand. A good paper to read is precursor to this paper released a year ago: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01933](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01933)

</comment><comment><USER3> I expect we'll be seeing many shakeups on what has (perhaps prematurely) become the established norms for NN architectures (CNN and RNN) throughout the next few years.

Its a great time to be alive!

</comment><comment><USER4> See the Google blog post from last summer, [https://research.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel- ne...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/08/transformer-novel-neural- network.html) A novel simplified architecture for sequences and translation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can somebody assist in breaking this down?

<comment><USER6> I'm seconding this. I could not find a good resource to understand what "attention" actually _is_.

(The next step for me would be to follow the citation trail to the original paper, but that might not be the best place to come to an understanding of the thing.)

<comment><USER7> Attention is just a weighted sum over a set of vectors, where the weights sum to one. Attention weights are usually created by neural nets. The word "attention" might seem more grandiose than what it actually does.

<comment><USER8> That may be true on a mathematical level, but that's also the answer to just about any neural net question... it's all just a a weighted sum. My understanding of "attention" on a higher level is the ability to concentrate more neurons on "important" areas of an image than less important ones.

An imperfect analogy is how the human visual system has better resolution at your eye-line's center than at it's edges. In this analogy, your brain should not waste effort processing image details in your peripheral vision.

<comment><USER7> The key element is that we use neural nets to compute the attention weights, so attention itself is learnable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reading the headline I thought the article would be about mindfulness, which would have been nice. Reading the article I was pleasantly surprised to find a different subject that I also enjoy. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Would this have implications for using ANNs on recursive structures (trees and graphs)? Their "position encoding" seems a little contrived, but may be amenable to a more complex positioning scheme (e.g. paths from a root node).

Whilst there are "standard" approaches in computer vision ("CNNs applied to <foo>") and sequence processing ("LSTM RNNs applied to <foo>"), there doesn't seem to be any "standard" for variable-size, recursively-structured data. Sure there's recursive ANNs, backpropagation-through-structure, etc. but they all seem like one-off inventions, rather than accepted problem-solving tools.

<comment><USER11> Seq2Seq is kind of a standard, but also strikes me as pretty hacky. The network has an encoder and a decoder mode, reads until it finds an end of input signal, then switches to decode mode. This is how absolutely nothing works in nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this really significant? I'm not an NN kind of guy but I find it an interesting thing to follow from a distance. From the abstract, this sounds like an important paper. Is it?

</comment><comment><USER13> This paper was uploaded to arxiv 6 months ago (June). With the fast pace in translation in the last years it might be outdated already

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder how Capsule nets can evolve using Attention model like this

<comment><USER15> Capsules basically do a kind of self-attention. But there the parent features compete for a coupling, not the child features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I suggest changing the link from the .pdf to the web page: [https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7181-attention-is-all-you- need](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7181-attention-is-all-you-need)

It's one click to get the pdf from there. But you also get a plain webpage with abstract, citation details, and so on, which you can't get back to from the PDF.

In general it's good to knock the ".pdf" off the end of all papers.nips.cc links. Similarly turn /pdf/ links on arXiv into /abs/ links, and replace "pdf?" in openreview.net links with "forum?".

<comment><USER17> Agreed. Plus, its really annoying to open it on mobile and my phone starts downloading the pdf file immediately, which I don't want to have to manually delete in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Abstract:

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks that include an encoder and a decoder. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English- to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles, by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.0 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature.</comment>


Go pacakge for ideal tty prompt - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tcnksm/go-input <comment><USER2> "pacakge" => "package" "tty" => "TTY" Also, use title case.</comment>


ReconstructMe - Intuitive Real-time 3D reconstruction system - <AUTHOR> http://reconstructme.net/ ReconstructMe is an easy to use real-time 3D reconstruction system. With ReconstructMe you simply grab your Microsoft Kinect and move around freely. While you move, the system continuously updates and refines your model.<p>ReconstructMe is currently looking for a limited number of keen BETA testers. In case you are interested, sign up! <comment><USER2> Hey Christoph,

Your beta looks great, when my life calms down a bit I'm really looking forward to playing with it.

But.. there's another story I want you to tell. I re-posted your beta announcement onto the google groups hosted mailing list for my tiny hackerspace half a world away from you and within 12 hours you were personally interacting with us on the capabilities of your system.

Wow! What are you doing to be able to track discussions on reconstructme so well? That's a pretty impressive level of customer engagement...

<comment><AUTHOR> derekja,

thanks for your feedback. Basically, we are getting alarms whenever ReconstructMe pops up (Google Alarms). That way, we found out about your discussion group and we love to communicate and give support.

Best, Christoph</comment></comment>


Does this sentence seem friendly? Maybe not now - <AUTHOR> http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2015/1209/Does-this-sentence-seem-friendly-Maybe-not-now <comment><USER2> You forgot the period in the title. ;-)</comment>


Is your website blocked by the Great Firewall of China? - <AUTHOR> http://www.blockedinchina.net/?b

<comment><USER2> Having lived in China for the last 1.5 years, I find that the more annoying thing is not when sites get blocked in China. Rather, it's when sites get slowed down due to packet shaping, or something else, just because the site is foreign, has been marked as not nice, or something else. That is REALLY annoying. So of course as soon as I turn on my VPN, there's no problem at all accessing those sites.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, very true. Have a look here, the GFW adds at least 200ms to simple ping: <http://just-ping.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My website is working: <http://readbo.com> and its a social news reader, that means you can read twitter and facebook through it :) might be useful for China</comment>


German judges explain their decision that ad-blocking software is legal - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/german-judges-explain-why-adblock-plus-is-legal/ <comment><USER3> Since this submission relates to blocking ads and trackers, I think it's worth bringing up that uBlock Origin [0] is better than Adblock Plus in (all?) ways (see the README for more details). I migrated to it a few years ago and overall I've been very happy with the outcome.

I'm opposed to all tracking that isn't opt-in by default. I haven't thought about the topic at great lengths, so there may be cases which I'm failing to consider, but I've generally found "opt-out by default" to be highly hostile to users. e.g. In the US you're only allowed to digitally opt-out of credit card prescreening [1] for five years unless you're willing to mail something out. This considerably raises the burden on the user, even though I'd conjecture most people are not interested in receiving this kind of mail, and they'd largely consider it spam. I make a point of blacklisting any service that mails me spam, and I encourage others to do the same.

Additionally, I'm also opposed to ads because I've found they're generally against the user's best interests. Humans are more important than companies.

[0] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)

[1] [https://www.optoutprescreen.com/](https://www.optoutprescreen.com/)

<comment><USER4> > is better than Adblock Plus in (all?) ways (see the README for more details)

That's only if people agree with your ideology. Instead of making blanket statements which are inherently subjective, just explain why you prefer Adblock Plus.

Personally, I vastly prefer Adblock Plus. I have no ideological objection to advertising or tracking in general, I just don't want intrusive ads. ABP does an excellent job of filtering out intrusive ads while still allowing me to support the sites I like where advertising is minimal.

I love the ad-supported web and strongly disagree with the notion that it's against users' interests. Getting free content and services in a competitive marketplace without switching costs is invaluable.

<comment><USER5> Read the README. ABP sold out a while back and now shows ads on certain websites who pay money to ABP. uBlock Origin doesn't show ads on any website unless you specifically allow it.

<comment><USER6> This was also mentioned in the article. ABP still allows you to block those whitelisted ads.

<comment><USER7> Why use an extension that white lists ads by default when there's an open source alternative that you have full control over?

<comment><USER8> Because, as mentioned higher up, you might actually want to support ad-based sites. This is an easy way to do it with no effort.

I use uBlock. But I approve of the existence and success of ABP and similar.

People differ.

<comment><USER9> You can support ad-based sites with either tool by whitelisting a site.

uBlock requires you to do this explicitly for each site you want to support through ad revenue. I suspect most novice users will never do this.

ABP is now using their user base as leverage to extract payment from some sites to show ads by default. I don't think that is a good idea at first blush, but there may be arguments for the practice I haven't considered.

<comment><USER4> A lot of quality content I find is on niche blogs where I might only read an article or two. These blogs are often advertising supported.

I'd much rather outsource the work of whitelisting to ABP than having to do an individual consideration on every single site I visit.

There's also the fact that I _never_ want to see malicious/intrusive advertising. If I maintain my own whitelists, I have to experiment site by site. If I use ABP, they do that experimentation and enforcement for me.

The thing that totally frustrates me is how many people in this thread seem to be totally incapable of grasping that ABP in fact offers _exactly_ what I want: someone blocking intrusive advertising, but not all advertising, with me having to do zero work. As a bonus, there's even a business model attached (so they're less likely to randomly sell out their install base to a malware provider).

<comment><USER10> This argument makes no sense at all, a niche blog generates very little traffic which means it has very little advertising revenue, and this revenue goes to the hosting company which offers hosting for free in exchange of putting _theirs_ ads on _your_ blog.

Those niche blogs could choose to pay for their hosting and it costs less than 10$ a month ($5.99 or $8.25 at wordpress.com[1])

If the advertising based business model failed overnight, I highly doubt finding 75 to 100$ a year to stay online would be out of reach.

You do know that about 10% of the advertisers get in the whitelist by paying instead of conforming to the acceptable ads program ? You probably know that the acceptable ads is very limited in scope and most non intrusive ads never get whitelisted but surely you know that adblock plus has now evolved into an ad selling platform.

It seems to me that adblock plus does not fit your stated ideological stance as well as Brave[3] does. You should consider ditching ABP and using Brave instead which blocks tracking and replaces all ads by other non-intrusive ads and also offers and option to pay websites directly so you could contribute to the hosting fee of those niche blogs.

[1]: [https://wordpress.com/pricing/](https://wordpress.com/pricing/) [2]: [http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/13/12890050/adblock-plus- now-...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/13/12890050/adblock-plus-now-sells- ads) [3]: [https://www.brave.com/](https://www.brave.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IMHO, by choosing to provide their content as an HTML data stream via HTTP to the user, "Der SPIEGEL" implicitly allows to consume this content in whichever way the user sees fit, as HTML is simply a markup language that can be interpreted in various ways, and could even be read in a text editor.

By trying to force the user to consume this data through a specific channel (e.g. through a standard-compliant browser with no ad-blocking abilities), they implicitly try to deny him/her the right to use the content in accordance with the HTTP specification.

Per se there's nothing wrong with forcing people to consume information/media through a specific technological channel (some people might disagree here of course), and companies like Netflix and Amazon have been doing this for many years already.

The difference here is that "Der SPIEGEL" explicitly chose to use an open medium, the world-wide-web, and an open protocol (HTTP) to disseminate their content, probably with the intent to reach as many people as possible. Unfortunately (for them), both of these technologies are built on the premise that the information can be consumed in whichever way the user sees fit, using his/her own software of choice, be that a desktop browser like Chrome, a terminal browser like Lynx, or even just a text editor.

If they really want to force people to consume their content in a specific way, they should simply ask users to enter an agreement with them, which could state that the user needs to consume the content in its entirety (advertisements included). That they don't do this is probably due to the fear of losing market share, as probably many users would not be willing to enter into such an agreement.

<comment><USER12> A logical step if a news outlet wants to show news+ads is to just offer their paper as PDF on the site. No click bait headlines, no Facebook trackers - <USER2> a newspaper, with ads.

The catch? The ads in the PDF are images without scripts and tracking.

Good.

Does the income from such ads not generate enough income?

Then GET OFF THE INTERNET or just close down the newspaper and take a long holiday. But don't tell me how to consume a http response please.

<comment><USER13> > The catch? The ads in the PDF are images without scripts and tracking.

PDFs support scripting. Wouldn't that suffice?

<comment><USER14> But you can use a PDF reader that does not support (and thus ignores) scripts. [1] Of course, the publisher could build the script such that it displays the article text only after the ad has been displayed, and we get the next arms race of adblockers and adblocker-blockers.

[1] Fun fact: Okular has an "Honor DRM restrictions" checkbox in its settings dialog that you can actually uncheck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any other verdict would be a potential legal risk to Google and everyone else in the ad business for the following reason: if Google can force its users to see ads, this basically means that they are not providing a free service any more, but that Google and the user engage in an exchange: Google provides the search service, and the user agrees to look at a few ads in return. Legally speaking, this could be seen as barter trade and result in two taxable events: Google selling the search service to the user, and the user selling some of his attention to Google. The consequence of this interpretation would be that Google would have to pay VAT on ad revenue in the country where the ad was seen. Also, receiving these "not-free-any-more" services could be classified as income for the user. This sounds absurd at first sight, but you should not underestimate the creativity of desperate tax authorities.

<comment><USER16> > This sounds absurd at first sight

Yes, companies paying their fair share of taxes is absurd.

<comment><USER17> Please define "fair share." That is such a loaded term because it implies that the only benefit of a company to people is in the tax revenue it provides a government.

We could reframe that argument to say that Google should provide a fair share of jobs to the unemployed. Billions of revenue but far fewer employees than some companies half the size. Clearly Google isn't hiring a 'fair share' of workers right?

We can ride this all the way into absurdity. We shouldn't be judging companies by opinion-based metrics like "fair share" but instead on their net economic contribution to the economy -- not their contribution to a government.

If Google paid zero tax, the economy is far better off with them than without them; look at the jobs it provides (and the economic activity those generate,) look at the return on investment to shareholders (which helps those shareholders earn money they can invest in other ventures.)

It isn't all about taxes. Google spends money far more effectively than government. Google should pay taxes at an amount commensurate with the public goods they consume -- not a cent more. Remember, taxes aren't ever paid by companies -- they are paid by individuals. You raise taxes on Google, you raise taxes on every person with any sort of relationship with Google.

<comment><USER14> > We could reframe that argument to say that Google should provide a fair > share of jobs to the unemployed. Billions of revenue but far fewer employees > than some companies half the size. Clearly Google isn't hiring a 'fair > share' of workers right?

Actually, you can take this argument to the end and arrive at the UBI model advocated by German economist Jörg Gastmann. His model has a sales tax (and no other taxes) that starts out absurdly high (e.g. at 200%), but well-paid employees are tax-deductible, to the point where you don't pay hardly any taxes at all if you employ about 7 employees per million € in revenue. Companies that don't need that much employees can instead pay a basic income to someone in order for them to count as employee. (There are some more rules, e.g. every person can only count as tax-deductible employee for one company, and a tax-deductible employee may not work more than 40 hours a week, but that's the basic gist.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some interesting facts from the article

> As of August 2015, Adblock Plus was installed on approximately 9.55 million > browsers with German IP addresses. That's about five percent of the > computers in Germany used to access the Internet.

> About 3,500 websites are on the Adblock Plus "whitelisting" program that > allows for "acceptable ads" to be viewed by default. About 90 percent of > those sites don't pay, but the largest 10 percent make payments to Adblock > Plus for the white-listing.

> While Adblock Plus users can easily turn off even those "acceptable ads," > about 75 percent accept the default settings and allow the ads. Eyeo > determines what is an "acceptable ad." It bars all moving images and many > types of still images, allowing mostly for just static text ads.

I prefer something like ublock that doesn't ask money to let ads through. I'm puzzled by the morality of that.

<comment><USER19> I prefer something like ublock as well, but I wouldn't call what AB+ is doing a morally ambiguous question. I think this is actually pretty straight forward all around. I can install or uninstall software on my computer. Websites can serve ads. Websites can block me from viewing their site if I have an ad blocker installed. AB+ can whitelist sites. A website can or can not pay AB+ to be whitelisted.

<comment><USER20> What you described isn't complex logic, it makes sense, but that's not where the moral ambiguity enters. Abp is basically a cop that allows some criminals to slip through as long as they pay on the side... that's the moral issue.

Granting access for paying members simply means ABP has become a gatekeeper with its own power and it is now offering access at a price, unethically

<comment><USER21> > Abp is basically a cop that allows some criminals to slip through as long as > they pay on the side... that's the moral issue.

Only if ABP states that they block ALL ads, full stop. But their website doesn't say that, it says "Surf the web without annoying ads!" which wouldn't exclude non-annoying ads.

Maybe that's not how the extension/service was initially introduced but at this point they're not lying to new users. The website even explicitly calls out that they do let some non-intrusive ads through. [https://adblockplus.org/](https://adblockplus.org/)

If they didn't have the qualification language front and center on their site but rather had a bunch of asterisks to tiny, tiny footnotes hidden on a different page I might lean more towards agreeing with your assertion. But this information isn't hidden, it's readily available.

<comment><USER22> I'd like to comment on the non-annoying part.

I use uBlock (and previously, ADP) because of the fact that parts of the Internet will give you ADHD, no matter if you started with it or not.

Parts of the Internet are quite literally unusable without ad blocks. This should be a much larger discussion than it is, given how shitty sites don't get lots of views, ergo, who's actually viewing the ads to begin with?

<comment><USER23> Ads apparently work. Either by impression (you notice the ad, and the brand gains a tiny bit of reputation in your unconscious mind) or by directly engaging you ("40% off on 'item'! That's actually a pretty good deal!").

Large corporations wouldn't advertise online if they didn't have metrics that back up that claim. If advertising online in November meant a significant rise in sales, then apparently buying the ads worked. People are viewing them.

This doesn't mean that ads work equally well with every viewer, and it certainly does not imply that ads are beneficial to the viewer, but it does mean that ads do generate income.

I agree that ads can be part of a problem for a lot of folk, and I recommend anyone I see browsing without an ad-blocker to install one of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Me and my business partner did get hit by Springer in Germany due to an iOS content blocker. We lost the part that relates to damages and won the one that touches copyright.

Springer bases its claims on two principles:

1) Ad blockers are damaging their business money-wise.

2) An article and an Ad are an indivisible entity. And from a copyright perspective, removing the Ad means violating the copyright of the article.

We lost 1 and won 2. Now we are on the second round. In Hamburg too, which relieves me. Hamburg is tough. If Eyeo won there we have a good chance to win as well. And now Eyeo decided to support us. Things are getting a bit better for our case.

Because of that I am truly grateful to them. If it was not from Eyeo Ad blockers would be now banned from Germany.

Our case was the typical one that I thought only happens in the movies: Big company crushes small company (and crushed us indeed they did) to build a case against a bigger company than us.

From what is worth I am very happy that Eyeo won the case. If they win they will have a legal precedent. And they will go for against all the others.

And what about our ad blocker? We had to take it out from the App Store.

I wrote an article a few months ago regarding this case would somebody be interested.

[https://medium.com/@iPhonsoGmbH/](https://medium.com/@iPhonsoGmbH/)

<comment><USER11> Honestly, win this, then sue them back. This behavior should not be tolerated. The whole ad blocking wars are even more bizarre than the "Leistungsschutzrecht", where publishers tried to force search engines (mostly Google) to pay for the fact that they show content from their websites (and as a result drive traffic to them!), which sounded very similar: Instead of simply telling Google not to index their openly available content (e.g. through robots.txt), they explicitly allowed it, but then tried to dictate how exactly Google should use it in order to maximize their profits.

Seriously, if you don't want your content to be freely downloaded, viewed and processed, simply hide it behind a paywall or invent your own proprietary format, and leave the open Internet alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > "The Claimant [Spiegel] argues that the Defendant's [Eyeo's] business model > endangers the Claimant's existence," reads the judgment, which isn't final > because it can be appealed by Spiegel. Because users aren't willing to pay > for editorial content on the Web, "it is not economically viable for the > Claimant to switch to this business model."

In what situation _is_ endangering someone's business model grounds for their illegality?

Also, I don't get why larger content owners don't self publish ads. It should be possible to have an appliance running on your own infrastructure or cloud, that gets proxyed requests from your own domain. That way the content it indistinguishable from the ads (or at least heavily merged). If you randomize the placement of ads / content images and both come from opaque URLs (ex: [http://media.example.com/:some-uuid](http://media.example.com/:some-uuid)) it wouldn't be apparent which should be filtered.

Biggest issue I can see if that ad buyers would have to either trust the publisher or control the appliance. I suppose the latter is possible as if the request is proxyed you can align the counts of "Requests I've sent you" with "Requests you've received" to reconcile if there's cheating / lying happening.

This may be too complicated for a smallish site, but well within the technical capabilities of Der Spiegel, NY Times, etc.

<comment><USER26> Because it's not just about showing an ad to the user, it's about knowing which user to show that ad. The ad networks track you across the web, and in the process learn a great deal about your demographics and interests. This alows businesses to target you specifically.

Spiegel can only track you across their own site which might not tell them much about you, making the ad space less valuable.

<comment><USER25> > Because it's not just about showing an ad to the user, it's about knowing > which user to show that ad. The ad networks track you across the web, and in > the process learn a great deal about your demographics and interests. This > alows businesses to target you specifically.

Sure if you're not clearing your cookies, obfuscating your User-Agent, and rotating your IP address regularly. All that aside, the real baseline of comparison isn't a targeted ad, it's no ad at all. It doesn't matter how great third party ad networks are at tracking users, if their third partyness is what makes them so easy to block then they're going to go the way of the dodo.

> Spiegel can only track you across their own site which might not tell them > much about you, making the ad space less valuable.

I wonder if that even matters. They already know what article I'm reading and possibly what other articles I've read (again assuming logged in / tracking cookies / etc). Should be more than enough. I really think a steady income stream of un-blockable but not quite as effective ads will win out over blockable but hyper targeted ones.

<comment><USER27> > _I wonder if that even matters. They already know what article I 'm reading > and possibly what other articles I've read (again assuming logged in / > tracking cookies / etc). Should be more than enough._

I agree. I mean, I would react _much_ better to ads relevant to what I'm actually reading just now than to random crap based on stuff pulled out of some tracking database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The judges took note of the fact that Spiegel could have done something > about ad-blockers. For instance, it could have shut ad-blocking users out > from the Web content, _linked advertising directly to the website 's HTML_

I don't think that's a good idea. Doing exactly that would mean: the ad auction has to be closed and content injected server-side into the HTML page before sending the first byte to clients. And even if you're just inserting a JS snippet at the bottom of your body, it also means that you're giving the advertiser control over your entire page/website and of the clients' browser. Given the cluster of shitty and deceptive content pipelined by ad networks, no wonder they're not going to do that.

<comment><USER29> >the ad auction has to be closed

Absolutely not. It would take some more time for your ad campaign fine tuning to apply, and to count clicks, that's all. Ad networks would install their boxes in datacenters and hosting providers' networks. Ads would cost a little more.

>content injected server-side into the HTML page before sending the first byte to clients

Injected, yes, but why before sending the first byte?

>it also means that you're giving the advertiser control over your entire page/website and of the clients' browser

I'm sure WhatWG will quickly find a technical solution to this problem too. Say, a special HTML tag attribute that tells the browser "treat content inside as third-party", which eventually will be exposed to ad blockers.

Spiegel is right, "it would not be a long-term solution"

<comment><USER30> "Ad networks would install their boxes in datacenters and hosting providers' networks. Ads would cost a little more."

You're vastly over-simplifying the technological problems involved with site- serving ads. The bids don't come from "ad networks" \- I also assume you mean ad exchanges not ad networks? - they come from a federated collections of bidders (generally called DSPs or other custom bidders, which there are hundreds or thousands of). They also rely on extensive client-side cookie matching in order to determine who the user is and how valuable they are. Not only that, but then the ad itself lives on a different server from the one doing the bidding, and is often generated dynamically based on that specific user as well.

You can't just dump these either; real-time bids from many sources, user-based advertising, and dynamic advertising, are some of the key contributors to the continuously increasing value of remnant ad placements over the last 5-10 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think it would be pretty hard to argue that you serve a "unified offer" (at the moment at least). The user requests the content without any promise of downloading and rendering all of the content linked, and the server happily serves the content. The fact that almost all web browsers by default (rather naively) obeys every instruction from the web server doesn't imply that the user actually agrees to render (and get tracked by) everything linked.

</comment><comment><USER32> Google has chosen a wise stance on adblock: "they are not a threat, so we don't bother" (while it is, and they spare no effort to get precise stats in how much ads is blocked and where.)

This alone was shutting down the conversation that adblock is threatening the market for long 10 years since industry people and sharehokders started raising the red flag.

Now, when everybody downstrean, including publishers, realised just how much money they loose to blocking and started talking openly about it, the genie is out of the bottle

<comment><USER33> That's not Google's actual stance. I went to a Digital News session held by the company last year wherein they had a "ad blocker" session - they basically said they're "just watching and waiting" for now but have "ideas" for fixing it in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It seems to me that Spiegel looks at it from a ridiculous premise, that Internet somehow should provide a working business model for them. I just can't imagine how something like ABP could be illegal... I made a http request to get a public resources, and it is up to me how I will display it, I can filter everything but a text, or if I want I can render the page so only ads will be displayed. :-) I have no obligation to render the page a certain way.

Now with ABP taking money to pass certain ads, that something different, I myself don't feel it is ethical, so I uninstalled the software.

<comment><USER35> It would be pretty sad if the web really can't provide a working business model for quality news.

I prefer ads rather than high-cost paywalls, and then ideally a "use as-free" option for a small sum (think android apps). I want to read diverse sources and can't cough up €50-160 for 10-20 different sites that i use more or less frequently. I'd pay €5-10 for each good site that i use frequently to see it ad free and am happy to accept unobtrusive and non-malicious ads on all other sites.

We can't act as if everything must be free and painless - then we'll end up with a truly broken internet. The ad pendulum swung far too much to one extreme with horrendous intrusive and malicious ads across the web, but if we let it swing too far the other way we'll end up with a truly dead web where only exploitative (virus-spewing, manipulative (eg paid/planted "news" and propaganda a la RT & Xinhua) and commercial sites continue to exist.

My impression is that if i want the internet to remain valuable i will have to accept 'good' ads or start coughing up funds myself.

<comment><USER36> But paywalls _are_ a working business model. Your dislike of them is understandable, but if that's what it takes, then that's what it takes.

As for reading diverse sources - well, how many people subscribed to 10+ newspapers at once, in the heyday of paper? And why should it be any different in the age of the Internet, if the amount of human labor required to make one newspaper (or equivalent) remains the same?

That said, I do think that the current subscription models are also broken (which is also why they're unpopular). What we really need is a seamless micro-transaction protocol, so that I could pay, say, 5c to view one article that I'm interested in. And the browser should provide a consistent UX for the website to request payment, and for me to approve it or not; and also to clearly distinguish links to paywalled resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Even a broken clock is right twice a day. This court is a broken clock when it comes to Internet-related rulings. Recently they found a website owner guilty because a single link on his website lead to a third-party website that used a CC picture without proper attribution.

</comment><comment><USER38> Am I missing something? If Der Spiegal doesn't want people to view their content while using an ad-blocker can't they detect and block those users (assuming those users also allow JS)?

<comment><USER39> Sure, they can detect ad blockers and present a nag screen. The ad blocker can respond by defeating their detection feature. For example, it can delete the detection function before it even executes. They could circumvent that; ad blockers could nullify their fix; they could fix it again... This could go on forever.

In my experience as an user, no website has ever beaten an ad blocker. It's like trying to secure a computer against an adversary with full physical access. The content has left the server and is on the user's machine. Nothing can stop a sufficiently determined user from consuming it, with or without ads.

I answered a question on User Experience.SE about this:

[http://ux.stackexchange.com/a/96907/3437](http://ux.stackexchange.com/a/96907/3437)

I tried to express just how big the power disparity between the developer and the user is. Looking back now, I think I came off as too extreme.

I think the other answers are excellent; they address the UX aspects in a way I wasn't able to. Definitely learned from them.

<comment><USER40> If a site declares that you should not access it without disabling your adblocker, and they go as far as to explicitly try to prevent your access with direct messaging (interstitials, pop-up/light boxes, etc.), yet the user then works around those protections and accesses it - wouldn't that qualify as illegal access in some form?

<comment><USER41> How so?

A user requests a data stream, and receives it. That the user chooses not to execute or render a part of that stream is up to them - the data has already been delivered.

Interstitials, pop-ups and the like are simply contained within the stream, and aren't even guaranteed to run inside the browser. If the data connection is incomplete, modern browsers often discard data that is incomplete. Is that also illegal access?

The data stream is in the user's hands - and it is delivered _before_ any Terms and Conditions are given.

It's similar to someone giving you a burger, saying it's free, waiting till you take the first bite, and then demanding that you eat the rest whilst they photograph you, and then use said photos to pay for making the burgers.

You could just walk away with your free burger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm interested in eventual Google's reaction to ad-blocking software. Will they try to weld ads to web technologies or they'll accept the current situation?

<comment><USER43> I guess they'll just raise inconvenience to block the ads higher and higher, just like they did on Android phones, where Chrome did not have any extensions and apps serve ads that cannot be blocked without you getting root access to your phone (which is another inconvenience) and editing your hosts file or something like that.

<comment><USER44> Blocking ads is the only reason that makes me depend on root. I built a script[1] that generates flashable zip and from time to time I update it on my phone.

[1] [https://github.com/zant95/hBlock](https://github.com/zant95/hBlock)

<comment><USER45> If you weren't aware, if you have root there's AdAway:

[https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=adaway&fdid=...](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=adaway&fdid=org.adaway)

<comment><USER44> I know that app, but I have enjoyed creating my own project and currently I use it not only on my phone, but also on my laptop and router (with Tomato firmware ad blocker).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Has Der Spiegel ever distributed malware via ads? I can't find anything solid, I can find a few scattered reports of such ...

* [https://plus.google.com/100667046318444095686/posts/brFPEa1j...](https://plus.google.com/100667046318444095686/posts/brFPEa1jeSq)

* [https://plus.google.com/+SaschaEm/posts/K9Uvc6KCHKx](https://plus.google.com/+SaschaEm/posts/K9Uvc6KCHKx)

(TIL: Germans swear by saying "Fuck!!" in English)

<comment><USER12> What is malicious? I consider any ad that has any kind of tracking to be malicous. I think they did that.

<comment><USER46> Well yes, but I mean specifically malware infections delivered by ad JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > Because users aren't willing to pay for editorial content on the Web, "it is > not economically viable for the Claimant to switch to this business model."

Speaks mountains of how conscious the newspapers are that they're producing stuff nobody wants to pay for. Perhaps they should put a bit more effort into producing things their audience values to read, and a lot less effort tracking users and fighting ad blockers.

</comment><comment><USER48> Why do they not buy the ads and serve them from their servers in a difficult- to-guess way? Like a mid-sentence jpg or whatever?

<comment><USER49> To serve the ads under the 1st party domain - without ending up in a situation where the entity reporting the number of ad impressions and the entity receiving money based on that number of ad impressions are the same - is often significant effort.

<comment><USER12> Spiegel can just say "we can show your banner on the top of every page for a week for X euros". We have approximately N page views per week and historically we see that Y% click the banner.

Either someone buys it or they don't - at some price point someone _will_ buy this (Hell I'd personally buy it at some price).

This is what online advertising should be. No impression charging, no targeting, no tracking (and of course no automated fraud prevention)

Today, when tracking and targeting is possible, obviously dumb online ads are hard to sell. Why would I pay $10k to show my shoe banner to everyone if I can pay $0.01 per impression to 20-30 year old shoe geeks only?

If only dumb ads are possible (as in print media) then they _will_ be possible to sell again. Perhaps not for the smallest 95% of web sites, but perhaps for Der Spiegel.

<comment><USER49> I agree. These problems only exist for pay-per-impression and targeted ad models, and the return of dumb ads is a solution to this. I should have made that clearer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> In what Bizarro world could Adblock be illegal?

<comment><USER13> Is it at all similar to how satellite TV used to be decrypted by lots of people with bootleg cards?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I quite like AdBlock Plus.

I've been using it for a long while and I appreciate the Acceptable Ads program, nothing is free and I wish to support websites if I can. It's either that or a paywall.

I also use uMatrix, which I recommend to run in conjunction with adblock, it allows for a very finegrained permission control, much more finegrained than uBlock.

<comment> irq-1 > I appreciate the Acceptable Ads program, nothing is free and I wish to > support websites if I can. It's either that or a paywall.

You can't negotiate with advertisers -- you can't make a bargain between ads or paywalls. Advertisers want it all.

Only technical restrictions will stop them. Even then they'll try to use lawsuits, government agencies, moral shaming and worse.

<comment><USER51> >You can't negotiate with advertisers

Well, seing how websites actually sign up for this and I've personally found it very pleasant, you can negotiate with some advertisers.

Just not the cancerous ones that would shove more malicious malware down your throat than not-malware.google.not-malware.ru using internet explorer 6 on an unpatched Windows XP without Service Pack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Well, is closing my eyes legal?

</comment><comment><USER53> i use uBlock AND ABP and Adblock for youtube. still some things bypass them sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER54> Adblocking has indirectly created many of these fake news sites we see today and will only create a more cluttered and product-filled user experience.

Most news sites rely only on advertising for income. Real reporting and investigation costs money. Since their main money source is now drying up, news is starting to become hearsay, rumors, and things you see on Twitter (anything you can find from the comfort of an office chair). This quickly leads to a race to the most clicks, which may or may not be factual.

We also are now starting to see blogs and many other news sites switch from advertisements on the side or top (which can be blocked) to entirely sponsored articles written around a product or service. We've always had sponsored articles, but not as prevalent as it is now.

Real journalism costs money. When you remove the only way to fund it, we end up with what we have now: fake news passing as real journalism and fake articles which are actually advertisements.

<comment><USER55> Quite the opposite. Ads led to all these fake news sites. Ads disable the concept of people paying for something they consider valuable. Instead all you need to make profit is to get people to look in your direction long enough to show them something they might actually consider spending money on. You don't need facts and journalism for that. You only need facts and journalism to build trust with your customers so they might consider paying you directly.

<comment><USER54> "Ads disable the concept of people paying for something they consider valuable"

Nobody pays for news anymore, so sites are forced to get money through ads. The concept that everything needs to be free has also led to the abundance of advertisements.

"You only need facts and journalism to build trust with your customers so they might consider paying you directly."

In the past 5 years, many local, paid, newspapers have gone out of business. It nearly destroyed the entire industry. People don't pay for news anymore because of the Internet. It had the same shakeup the music industry had a decade ago.

I seriously doubt you would be happy paying a fee for every website you visit. This is what would need to happen if we get rid of advertising completely.

I feel like many people want it both ways: a quality product for $0 dollars and no advertisements of any kind. It's just not realistic.

<comment><USER55> News had the same shake-up the musicindustry had and now people are paying for music again. If news are valuable to people you will get them to pay for quality. It's not my fault they can't figure out a working business model that doesn't involve selling the trust they built with their readers and viewers to corporations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> System is funded by X.

One day, some smart people fed up of paying X invent a way of evading. «It's not fair to pay X!» they say. Most people follow them, why wouldn't they?

Next day, same smart people: «Humm, how about people paying X/? to us instead of paying X to the system? Let's make a compelling argument explaining the fairness of it as some people feel that evading is somehow immoral. They will bite.»

\-- Devil's advocate

<comment><USER36> The reason why people feel that it's not fair to pay X, is because they don't perceive the value of what they're getting to be worth that. And the reason for that is that there are many other places they could go to, to get a similar thing (as far as value perception goes).

In other words, it is an oversupply issue.

If ad blockers do indeed make this business model unprofitable, the size of the market will shrink rapidly, and at some point supply will become lower than demand. And at that point, the remaining content suppliers will be able to charge X, and people will pay it, because they won't have anywhere else to get their fix from.

So this all is one case of the market working things out on its own. There's no reason to interfere here - it'll find a balance eventually. The only reason to complain is if you dislike what that balance will look like (e.g. if you'd prefer more sources of content than the market can actually bear). But the only way to maintain a different balance is by subsidies, direct or indirect. If ad blockers are banned, for example, that is, in effect, a government subsidy to the content creators.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Bootstrapped and profitable - what would you like to know? - <AUTHOR>

I am writing an article about our experience bootstrapping an online community from 0 to our first million users - and profitability.
What aspects of bootstrapping an online business should I focus on?
Which questions would you like me to answer? <comment><USER3> What part of the business did you know without a doubt that you could do, and which part did you know without a doubt that you couldn't do (but you did it anyway)?

Is the original business idea living in the current site, or did you significantly pivot? How did you recognize when and in what direction to pivot?

How did you all and the business stay alive before profitability? Jobs? Credit cards? Sold your antiques?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't question myself very often, I don't see myself as super smart or super competent but I believe that you can do anything you want as long as you are willing to pay the "price". Sometimes a project may demand from you more than you are willing to give, but rarely a project will demand the impossible. So I guess I never questioned if there was anything I couldn't do, but I was very aware there are certain things I wouldn't be willing to do (black-hat SEO for example).

We have pivoted at least twice but we did so by small steps, we never sat down and decided on a brand new direction. Instead we analyzed the data and changed the incentives in place to guide the community to one direction or another.

Regarding keeping the business alive, we didn't quit our day jobs right away and for the first couple of years we treated more like as a hobby. Then eventually we started supplementing our income with it, etc, you get the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This may be obvious but what you did to get to those million users and if you have any regrets or what you would do differently. Sounds like an interesting article, can't wait to read it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, I am going to try to detail the process of securing our first million users with as much detail as I can :)

My biggest regret is that many things we did back them were motivated by the kind of "get rich quick" mentality that now I know does more harm than good.

I wish we had focused more energy on serving our users well instead of focusing so much on trying to rank well on Google.

However, the interesting question is: if we had focused less on SEO and more on the product as I wish we had, would we be having this conversation? (meaning, would we have survived?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How many users did it take you to reach profitability? What was the product or service fee and was it all paid or you made money via advertising? Basically what was the monetization strategy and how did you make it work?

Congratulations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)

We were profitable almost right away as long as we were not working on it full time. It wasn't until we were generating 20-30 million impressions monthly that we were able to quit our day jobs.

The service is free and monetized through AdSense - although we have just introduced a virtual currency as an experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Online community" can mean many things. What sort of business do you do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our product is based around multi-user chat rooms and instant messaging with social networking features on the side. People basically join our service to make new friends instead of connecting with their real world friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking forward to the article! Some questions I would ask:

How about how you formed your founding team? How long it took you to release the product? Did you seek out advisors?

<comment><AUTHOR> It started with just me for the first 3 months, and then a friend joined me. Took me about a month to build the very first version and well, it was awful! (but at least it was live)

We didn't seek out any advisors and we still don't have any. Maybe this is something we should be considering?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Link to the eventual article or its location? 75% of us will probably miss the HN post as it floats down the new stream.

<comment><AUTHOR> On it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How did you get from 0 to 10k users? What approaches did you try that worked/didn't work?

<comment><AUTHOR> The first 10k users were hard to get and we had to do a little bit of out-of- pocket PPC advertising to seed the community, after that we focused on building links, SERP and building a product people liked. It was a long road and between 0 and our first million users and we almost gave up many times. At some point we even had the site up for sale on eBay - I am so glad we didn't find a buyer :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do you moderate/manage the community? How do you handle abuse and conflicts?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a tough one, probably deserves an article by itself!

We have a team of volunteer moderators that I find incredibly valuable. These are users that love our product so much that they are willing to spend a lot of their time helping us without any sort of compensation - and I cannot thank them enough for that.

Other than moderation, we also have to deal with all sorts of spammers and scamers. We were so naive at first, we built a system expecting everybody to be honest and good - well, that turned out to be a mistake.

Fast forward a few years and now we have generated enough IP on automated countermeasures against spam/scams and automated moderation that we could probably spin off a business to monetize that.

Anonymity definitely brings out the worst of some people, it is rather shocking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What kind of monthly revenue are you guys doing now?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't feel comfortable disclosing figures but to give you an idea, we have a nice office, we own all our hardware, have just hired our first non-founding member and we eat steak quite often.

<comment><USER10> Ah, sorry - I misread this as an anonymous thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the background on yourself and partners?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two of us and we are both technical (and we have just hired our first non-founding team member, also a developer). My partner is a rare hybrid of brilliant developer and competent designer, something I am very grateful for.

Both of us have a background in high-performance computing and that has helped keep hardware costs down to a minimum - we served up to 2.7 million users from one single server and it wasn't until we switched to MongoDB that we had to buy more servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Marketing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some PPC, a lot of link building. Our strategy was to rank well on Google and rely on organic traffic to grow. I am not sure if that was a good strategy to start with but it has paid off handsomely (although it took a while...). Having free visitors delivered to us everyday by the search engines is quite an asset to have.

<comment><USER13> How did you do your link building and what did your ppc ads look like?

<comment><AUTHOR> We were complete amateurs back then, we literally emailed hundreds of sites asking for links. That didn't work so well but it was enough to secure some organic traffic. We tried doing a few press releases and in retrospect, the content of those releases was rather embarrassing - but hey we were learning by doing right?

The PR generated quite a few back links but it is hard to assess how effective it was. We also tried to buy links and that didn't work out at all (too expensive).

I will check our AdWords account to see if I can retrieve our PPCs ads text.

<comment><USER13> thanks - what was the link building strategy you ended up focusing on and why?

look forward to seeing the ad texts. thx for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How you monetized it. At what point did it become profitable? What do you think the draw was for membership?

<comment><AUTHOR> We monetize it mostly with AdSense, we tried other ad networks but nothing quite compares. Adsense combines near infinite inventory with the highest RPMs I have seem anywhere.

We were "profitable" right away because our costs were so low and because we designed the site to run in auto-pilot, requiring very little maintenance. Even so, it took 2-3 of years before we were generating enough revenue to consider quitting our day jobs.

<comment> rush-tea so it takes 2-3 years from idea to launch to profitable? my question if that's not correct is how long does it take you to go from idea to today? at what point of the timeline when it becomes profitable?

thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it is a matter of how you define profitable. We were profitable right away but our profits were insignificant. I would say the "big moment" for a bootstrapped business is the day you quit your job and go full time.

Every business is also different but if you could charge your customers at least 2x more that it would cost you to acquire a customer through PPC - <USER2> could scale quite aggressively to "quit-your-job" kind of profit in a short period of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not to detract from rfurlan's thread, but is there really a lot of interest in the stories of bootstrapped and profitable companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question, I guess I simply assumed there would be an audience for it because people always ask me a lot of questions about it in events, etc. I thought it would be nice to have an article to refer them too instead of telling the same stories over and over.

So, is there interest? :)

<comment><USER15> What kind of events? I'm curious about this question because as a cofounder of a bootstrapped business myself, nobody seems to care too much about what we do or how we do it. It's a world apart from the experience of funded companies, who get enormous amounts of press, attention, and interest( from other entrepreneurs, anyway - we have no problem getting the interest of our customers ).

If you get a lot of questions, I may be completely wrong about my perspective, here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Standard fare SV events, pitch competitions, cocktail parties etc. People in the hardcore entrepreneur circles don't care much about bootstrapping at all - it is almost as they see it as a sub-optimal way of starting a business. Well, it is probably sub-optimal so I can't really blame them, can I?

<comment><USER15> This may be a geographically unique phenomenon to the SV area. Then again, I don't really go to pitch competitions or cocktail parties. We'll just continue quietly building our business :) Thanks for your input.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is probably an optimal strategy ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visual Studio 2015 Extensions You Might Find Useful - <AUTHOR> http://www.hamidmosalla.com/2016/09/12-Visual-Studio-2015-Extensions-You-Might-Find-Useful.html <comment><USER3> Here are a few more that I use:

EditorConfig - Reads your .editorconfig files and applies their settings.

Markdown Editor - Edit Markdown with live preview.

Smooth Scrolling - Use smooth scrolling instead of jumpy scrolling, nice for two-finger touchpad scrolling. There are also two different extensions named "Smooth Scroll" (no "ing") that do similar things. I've had one or another of these work better depending on the machine.

Strip'em - Force consistent newlines when files are saved. (Note this is not in the extension gallery, you have to get it from the developer's site.)

TabSanity - For projects that insist on spaces for indentation, makes the left and right arrow keys jump a full indent level instead of one space.

Text Macros for Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015 - Adds some of the keyboard macro support that went AWOL some years ago.

And of course things like ReSharper or Visual Assist, plus language specific extensions like HLSL Tools, PowerShell Tools, Python Tools, etc.

<comment><USER4> >TabSanity - For projects that insist on spaces for indentation, makes the left and right arrow keys jump a full indent level instead of one space.

Hold your control key down while hitting right/left arrow. This will jump to the beginning or end of the next word (effectively skipping the tab/spaces).

Now you can remove an extension! :) 

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I do use ctrl+left/right all the time, along with their friends ctrl+shift+left/right. The Home key is also handy since it toggles between the beginning of the line and the first non-whitespace character on the line.

I still like TabSanity, though. Perhaps it's because I use tabs in all my own projects and I like the way the left-right keys move one indent at a time. So having those keys work the same way with space indentation has a certain comfort to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great list! We've also been blogging about extensions to give folks visibility into new ones to explore, here is one example:

New and Noteworthy Extensions for Visual Studio – April 2016: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/02/new...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/05/02/new- noteworthy-visual-studio-extensions-april-2016/)

You can find the other posts and related ones using this tag filter on our official Visual Studio team blog: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/tag/extensions...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/tag/extensions/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Since we're sharing, here are some good addons that I like:

\- [https://github.com/tom-seddon/VSScripts](https://github.com/tom- seddon/VSScripts) (disclaimer: written by me - however I didn't write it because I think it's useless!) - insert text by printing from command line tools, and alter text by piping selection through a command line tool

\- [http://www.usysware.com/dpack/](http://www.usysware.com/dpack/) \- addons that improve the code browsing experience a bit (I particularly like the methods and file browsers)

\- [https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1290e058-33da...](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1290e058-33da-485f-9b75-1891abc947b3) \- word-wraps comments for you. An absolute godsend if you want to write meaningful comments without going nuts

\- [https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1141bff-463f...](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1141bff-463f-465f-9b6d-d29b7b503d7a) \- makes the debugger auto-attach to child processes when launched by your main process. Highly recommended if you work with multi-process stuff - <USER2> out-of-the-box UX for debugging that sort of thing isn't great, but in my view this pretty much fixes it

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a ton of extensions for VS 2015. I'm getting worried though that they all are collectively bogging down Visual Studio. Is there a way to profile what is causing freezes in VS?

</comment><comment><USER8> As someone who uses visual studio at work everyday I often find it incredibly slow and thats even without any extensions. I am curious if you use VS do you use it on windows severs or are you running windows 10? Also as far as the slowness often how large are you projects? Do you run your TFS work space local or server?

<comment><AUTHOR> The only thing that it really chokes and dies on is if I try to open a mix of C#, SQL, JS and HTML files at the same time. I'm not totally sure what it is doing or analyzing, but the memory usage jumps up to somewhere north of 2GB with a lot of disk thrashing, when I might have 200 kb of text files open. JavaScript intellisense seems to be the most likely culprit, to the point that I have gotten in the habit of doing all front-end editing work in WebStorm, and reserving VS for the backend code, which is a much happier experience.

This is on Windows 10, with a solution of about 15-25 projects. At one point it was close to 100K LOC, but that was before we went in with fire and sword to remove some terrible, terrible amounts of redundancy, so it's considerably less now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Visual Assist was helpful for Unreal Engine 4 programming as the default VS code completion was insanely slow

<comment><USER10> May have to try Visual Assist again since ReSharper moved to this awful licensing model and is getting increasingly slower with every release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This might b a good place to ask - is there a way to browse c# source code by traversing dependency graph instead of a list of files?

I feel that there has to be...

<comment><USER12> Perhaps Code Map is what you are looking for? [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/jj739835.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/jj739835.aspx)

(Requires Enterprise to create and make edits, Professional can open and make minimal edits)

(actually this is the better link for mapping dependencies: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dd409453.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dd409453.aspx))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anybody knows similar extensions/plugins like Viasfora for IntellijIDEA?

I'd love to have some scope highlighter when inside a nested if-else.(Java)

</comment><comment><USER14> As an Emacs user, I'm looking to see anything I'd find useful here... nope. The few useful ones have Emacs equivalents, and most of them wouldn't even qualify as extesions: they're just snippets I'd drop in my .emacs file.

<comment><USER15> Well. Emacs is trying to be everything and is extremely powerful. VS on the other hand is better in its own domain than Emacs.

<comment><USER14> But what IS the VS domain? Is it just plain text editing? Because Emacs can smash it at that. Is is programming? Because Emacs beats it in the general case at that, too. Is it programming in a very specific language? This is where it starts to win out, but I don't want to switch editors every time I switch languages, and Emacs does all of that Good Enough. It even has semantic autocomplete in some languages at this point. The only thing it's missing is refactoring tools, which aren't as important when you're not writing Java.

<comment><USER16> Debugging. VS has a pretty amazing debugging experience.

<comment><USER14> Does it beat the Emacs debugging experience? We've got some pretty sweet debugging integration.

<comment><USER17> MSVS has "edit & continue" for C# code. It also has backwards step debugging with Intellitrace.

<comment><USER14> Jeez. That's actually quite impressive! I mean, well done.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


When Did Life on Earth Begin? - <AUTHOR> http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/76/when-did-life-on-earth-begin <comment><USER2> " Even modest temperature increases of a few hundred kelvins can cause argon to diffuse..."

 _Modest_? Even a "mere" 300 degrees Kelvin is a _540 degree_ change on the Fahrenheit scale.

Also, in the photo caption: "The red peaks in this rock from Greenland, which dates to 3.7 billion years ago, may be fossil stromatolites—layered structures created by the earliest microbes." To me, those look _nothing_ like known stromatolites, which form more or less as cylinders as the microbe layers stack up.</comment>


Techstars: One month left - <AUTHOR> https://www.postmaster.io/blog/67002/techstars-one-month-left

<comment><USER2> Did anybody else have the thought that Techstars might be closing shop by the title?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, didn't even think of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Accurate description of the experience!

I would say that learning to manage the mentor meetings helps you get way more out of it. If you don't do it well, you dwell on the same points every meeting without moving on to new stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the question I have been asking myself, and I couldn't find anyone writing anything about it. When you shouldn't apply for TechStars?

</comment><comment><USER5> What is werewolf the card game? I did a quick google search and nothing really came up.

<comment><USER6> It's not really a card game but uses cards to assign roles. You might know it by another name, like Mafia or Assassin.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If anybody has any specific questions about Techstars, I'm happy to answer.

<comment><USER7> Do teams really meet with 3-5 mentors a day ? That seems way beyond the point of being useful. When do you have time to build anything or talk to users ?

<comment><USER6> It feels overwhelming at times, but it is very useful. It's at the heart of what makes TechStars an accelerator. You get instant feedback on your ideas from great mentors.

You're right that it's hard to build much during the first month. But when the first month is over, you feel very confident about what you need to do. That makes the next month and beyond incredibly productive on product and customer development.</comment></comment></comment>


Yosemite bolt replacement and Death Block removal (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.planetmountain.com/en/news/climbing/yosemite-bolt-replacement-and-death-block-removal.html <comment> vhost- Having removed a couple death blocks myself from climbing routes while doing maintenance, I can tell you how scary these things are. They are very heavy, but someone using it as a hand hold can dislodge it very easily.

One block I rapped in on to remove was only being held in place by a stone about half the size of my hand. All I did was push that stone away and then lightly pull with a pry-bar and the entire block plummeted and destroyed the trail I had just performed maintenance on 2 months prior. Better the trail than a belayer or hiker. The block had chalk all over it, so people used it as part of the route. It had to go immediately.

If you are a climber and climb outside often, I highly encourage you to donate some money to the ASCA because they send people who do maintenance new bolts and equipment to make sure routes are safely climbable.

<comment><USER2> I don't do much climbing anymore, but I figured it'd be nice to send them a few bucks. So, that's done.

If anyone else wants to help keep people safe while they climb, even if you're not a climber, here is the donation link:

[http://www.safeclimbing.org/help.htm](http://www.safeclimbing.org/help.htm)

They even give you stuff, if you donate more than $25. Somehow, donations sometimes 'feel' more meaningful when you know you're not really going to benefit from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "The problem with society is, everyone wants to build things, but no one wants to do maintenance." \- Kurt Vonnegut

I remember when Chris McNamara founded the American Safe Climbing Association to fund bolt replacements. It was such an obvious idea in retrospect-- something the American Alpine Club should have thought of years before. I think they're affiliated now somehow. But it seems almost certain that they have saved the lives of some climbers by doing maintenance.

<comment><USER4> > "The problem with society is, everyone wants to build things, but no one > wants to do maintenance."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526878)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Roger Brown is a solid human. Replacing old fixed gear is mostly a thankless task, but Roger just keeps fixing things.

[https://web.stanford.edu/~clint/rep/08614.htm](https://web.stanford.edu/~clint/rep/08614.htm)

<comment><USER6> Meh Photobucket.

<comment><USER7> Such a shame.

Why wouldn't he have hosted the pictures on stanford's server alongside the HTML? They should have the resources to host a few JPEGs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Curious question: Why are electric drills not allowed but manual drills are ?

<comment><USER9> The idea is that the sound of an impact drill adds to the noise pollution of a supposedly "natural" area, and that they're "too easy" so they result in a proliferation of bolts in the rock. There's a lot of argument back and forth on the subject in places like Yosemite, where it sees so much traffic that it could hardly be called natural anymore. Personally, I'd rather hear 12 seconds of a Li-ion rotohammer than 30 minutes of some dude whacking a hand drill with a hammer, and since they make better holes, a rotohammer drills more symmetrical holes and is going to let the bolt seat better and it won't result in a proliferation of cratered out rock where old bolts pull out and have to be replaced by drilling new holes next to it. It's a touchy subject for a lot of folks. Some don't like "permanent" protection at all, but in places they don't allow bolts you end up with "temporary permanent" nylon slings tied around rocks all over the place. Doesn't really seem better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Needs (2012) in the title.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! missed that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Was going to say that this was a joke about MacOS bugs, but then I opened the article. :P

<comment><USER13> I'm relieved to see I am not the only one!</comment></comment>