How the Voyager space probe's golden record was made - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/voyager-golden-record-40th-anniversary-timothy-ferris <comment><USER2> I looked at the contents of the Voyager Golden Record a while ago (at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_Voyager_Golden...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_Voyager_Golden_Record)). Frankly, it's underwhelming. There's lots of arbitrary sentimental data that will make very little sense to another civilization, no matter how smart they are. It appears that it's more of a message to ourselves, demonstrating our cultural diversity.

The first few images stored on the disk are interesting. They establish our location in the Milky Way as well as our math and physics.

<comment><USER3> I've really enjoyed reading about the disk, and feel that they executed well on the concept - especially given the limitations of the media. It may have struck a good balance between what would be too simple technologically and not communicate much, and something which would be too complex technologically, and could be difficult to decode. The contents show a variety of what Earth looks like and sounds like, and some of our most basic concepts with regards to math and physics. Communicating more complex concepts within math or physics could be severely constrained by having to introduce the required notation in an intuitive way.

What better could we have chosen to communicate, given the same limitations of format?

<comment><USER4> By biggest objection (assuming that the disk is actually intended for aliens, which I do not think it actually was) is the the technology to encode the data, but what content we chose for the limited space.

For instance, consider the "color" images we included. In reality, each color image is actually just 3 black and white images taken with slightly difference response curves. Granted, the solar spectrum image should give them enough information to determine these curves; but, unless they have an identical visual system to us, they would still not be able to reconstruct what they would see as a true color image. If we really wanted them to see in color, we could have chosen more appropriate response curves to take our images from. Regardless, the space would have been better spent including more images. However, from a PR standpoint, including color images was likely a very good move.

Simmilarly, I do not any justification for including spoken greetings. Assuming the correctly decode them as sounds (which I think is reasonable), and understand them to be a language (less reasonable) I don't see how they could decipherer anything meaningful from them (except, perhaps, the phonetic inventory of human languages). Similarly, I would expect aliens to do little more than scratch their heads at the inclusion of 90 minutes of music.

<comment><USER3> The point about color images is interesting. Although they might not be able to deduce the exact wavelengths in which the image is encoded, they would very likely be able to understand that the colored image layers are connected, as the layers correlate highly in their spatial structure. In the same manner that we use artificial coloring to better understand astronomical images, the color information on the disk provides more information when viewing the images, which could make the images more interesting for their study.

For the spoken language, there is likely not enough information to decode its meaning. But its inclusion together with images of us might lead them to understand how we communicate by voice. The sounds of animals and humans may be similar to other lifeforms discovered. Music as well may be something which is common to many forms of intelligent life. It would probably not be possible to understand much of the contents, but observers might be able to relate to the emotions in the music (even though they may not map directly to ours). In any case, with art much of the value lies in the interpretation. As long as content is presented which they would care to judge as art, they may see value in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a bit of a voyeuristic fascination with the relationships and personal drama of the people behind these types of famous and consequential efforts.

In the article Tim Ferris mentions that Ann Druyan was his fiancee at the time. I suppose it's common knowledge that she was also Carl Sagan's third (and final) wife.

NASA's Voyager, the Love Story [1] reveals that their affair grew out of and became an integral part of the project:

 _Just how do you stumble upon a woman in love and record her brain waves for an interstellar message? It helps when the young woman is herself a member of the recording team: Ann Druyan.

On June 1, 1977, Carl and I shared a wonderfully important phone call," she recalls. Without the aid of a date or even a romantic moment alone, the two had fallen in love during the mad rush to complete the Golden Record. "We decided to get married. It was a Eureka! moment for both of us—the idea that we could find the perfect match. It was a discovery that has been reaffirmed in countless ways since."

"My feelings as a 27 year old woman, madly fallen in love, they're on that record," says Druyan. "It's forever. It'll be true 100 million years from now. For me Voyager is a kind of joy so powerful, it robs you of your fear of death."_

According to her recent interview with LA Times they were a bit more circumspect about their Eureka moment than the NASA article would suggest:

 _During this period, she and Sagan, who was then married to his second wife, also realized they were "madly in love." Reluctant to jeopardize the mission, the pair waited until Voyager 1 had successfully launched before breaking the news to their significant others._

I feel this adds an extra dimension to this matter-of-fact statement from Ferris's article:

 _We disbanded soon after I delivered the metal master to Los Angeles, making ours a proud example of a federal project that evaporated once its mission was accomplished._

[1] [https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/2011/2...](https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at- nasa/2011/28apr_voyager2)

[2] [http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-ann- druyan-...](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-ann-druyan- cosmos-20140607-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> By focusing on audio recordings and putting those on a mechanical medium, did Carl Sagan intend to address it to primitive civilizations lacking the means to read digital media? In that case, the platter would have to come down into an atmosphere, greatly diminishing its chance ever to be enjoyed, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER7> Consider the time this thing was produced in - digital media didn't effectively exist.

<comment><USER8> also it's gold so it might live longer no ?

<comment><USER7> Quite arguably a mechanically reproduced record is better than digital.

<comment><USER9> If your argument is along the lines of what I think it is, then this is a fallacy. See "Sampling fallacies and misconceptions" in [https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil- young.html](https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

"All signals with content entirely below the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) are captured perfectly and completely by sampling; an infinite sampling rate is not required. Sampling doesn't affect frequency response or phase. The analog signal can be reconstructed losslessly, smoothly, and with the exact timing of the original analog signal."

<comment><USER7> No, thats not it at all.

Analog reproduction is far less complex and easier to explain in pictures to an unknown entity that might find it. Figure that they'll need to build what effectively amounts to a record player to play the thing back. In addition there was no digital technology of the time with a large enough capacity to store what we sent, or that was durable enough to deal with an unknown time in space.

Quality of the reproduction is not a consideration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's also a form for crowdsourcing a new Golden Record for 2017: [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-would-you- explain...](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-would-you-explain- humanity-today-to-aliens)

<comment><USER11> I wonder if potential aliens be like 'oh great, valuable metals - let's go and scrape that planet.'

<comment><USER12> Given that the metals in question are common in basically every planetary system... no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is likely to become the ultimate "time capsule," for a human to recover in the not-too-distant future, when a few light-weeks of travel is commonplace.

</comment><comment><USER14> Do later missions like 'New Horizon' contain a similar message? I wonder if nowadays there is a 'greeting card' committee NASA that decides such things.

<comment><USER14> Here they are - creating a message to be uploaded to the computer [https://www.newhorizonsmessage.com/](https://www.newhorizonsmessage.com/)

Now I wonder how long it will take until the memory of the computer is destroyed by cosmic radiation. I guess the old method of a gold plated record would be more durable.</comment></comment>


Why Parallel Programming Is So Hard - <AUTHOR> http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-parallel-programming-is-so-hard.html

<comment><USER2> Take this with a grain of salt; if you read a few more articles it's pretty apparent that the guy is a crank.

There's some hilarious stuff there, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crank or not, his stuff on parallel programming makes sense.

<comment><USER3> It could really use some examples of what the hell he's talking about.

Wide ranging examples, too. I'm sure he could come up with one or two, but can he come up with a whole bunch, which span a reasonably wide swath of algorithm space?

Show me how to, say, invert a matrix, which is a possible-yet-annoyingly-hard problem to parallelize ordinarily, and I'll take it seriously.

<comment><USER4> He has a parallel quicksort example on his "relevant links" section. He seems to be saying that software should work pretty much like hardware.

<http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/quicksort.htm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IMHO, this guy is 6 different kinds of crazy. Parallelism is of course more efficient. Parallel algorithms are about determining which steps in an algorithm can be executed independently of one another to take full advantage of multiple CPUs. Some algorithms can be decomposed this way, some can't. As we hit the upper limit of single processing we have to scale out into multiple cores to get more speed. My impression was this guy never really understood how parallel algorithms work, so he decided to hate them.

<comment><USER4> I don't think you really read the article since the author never said that parallelism is inefficient. He's saying, among other things, that decomposition (which you seem to favor) is not the right way to design parallel programs. In other words, if sequential objects are used to create sequential programs, it follows that parallel objects should be used to compose parallel programs. Sequential order thus becomes a consequence of signaling, i.e., communication between parallel objects.

<comment><USER6> The problem is coming up with these "parallel objects" through anything other than decomposition. For example, in the quick sort demo you linked to, his first step is to decompose quick sort into 5 sections which can run in parallel. But then in this article, he claims that decomposition is somehow "fake".

Message passing is a great idea, check out Erlang if you want more. Reading this guy's articles, it seems like he is half way towards something interesting, but has blown it all out of proportion. He's at war with his daemons, he even lists some of them on his "Enemies" page.

<comment><USER5> Took me a 2nd read to get the daemons joke...

Very well put, I get the same impression about decomposition. The bottom line is each CPU core can execute some sequence of instructions. If there's more than one core, there can be more than one sequence. Threads are the best current abstraction for that, and this guy goes off on how threads are evil and all this. At the heart of it, there are no objects just data flowing from disk to ram to registers, calculations being performed in the core and data flowing back.

There are always monads in Haskell for really putting concurrency into the forefront...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I understand correctly, the way to build a parallel system is to have everything concurrent by default and then specify the specific parts that are sequential. Just like to build a secure system, you have to disallow everything by default and then specify the specific operations that are allowed.

Makes sense!

<comment><USER8> Sorta. I'd have preferred to see an example or two.

The problem is that "sequential" vs. "concurrent" isn't solely an implementaion choice. It's a property of the _problem_. Some problems are inherently sequential, and can't be meaningfully scaled to an arbitrary number of cores. So color me skeptical, basically. Concurrency is hard because it _is_ hard. While there may be a paradigm out there that makes it less so, I'm going to need to see it in operation before I make any judgements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The reason why parallel programming is hard is, like John Hennessy said:

"Many of the early ideas were motivated by observations of what was easy to implement in the hardware rather than what was easy to use" (see [http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=show...](http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=445&page=5))

i.e parallel programming was always an afterthought. To architects, building a parallel system was viewed primarily as a hardware hurdle to overcome.

</comment><comment><USER6> > In a truly parallel system, all events are synchronized to a global clock

Ants work together to form an efficient parallel system, where is their global clock?

<comment><USER4> It's inherent in the speed of light in their local environment. Physics 101.

<comment><USER6> Pardon? It's exactly the opposite, if the speed of light is constant, there can be no global clock.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity>

<comment><USER4> In the frame of reference of the ants, all clocks agree with one another. This means that timing is global within their FOR. There is no problem in determining simultaneity because there is only one FOR in question. And even in multiple FORs, their relative speed would have to approach that of light for any ant to notice a difference between local times. Deny at your own detriment.

<comment><USER6> Frankly, I think you've brought up the speed of light as a distraction.

More interesting than whether they are moving at the same speed, is whether they are thinking at the same speed, particularly, whether they think with a common tick. Since time appears for the most part to be continuous, that's not going to get you a tick, nothing for the ants to synchronise their clocks to.

If being in the same frame of reference was enough, then you could just put two computers in the same room and call it a synchronised system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Huffington Post's Clever Traffic-Generation Machine Works - <AUTHOR> http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/08/2334216/how-huffington-posts-clever-traffic-generation-machine-works?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=facebook

<comment><USER2> I'm amused to see slashdot doing with mondaynote.com's article exactly the same trick mondaynote.com is pointing out that huffpo is doing to wsj… Seems they couldn't find a more seo-linkbaity headline though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Main discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4217722>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!</comment></comment>


Show HN: I hate tracking time on projects so I automated it - <AUTHOR> https://moonlighter.io/ <comment><USER2> It looks promising, but it still requires a lot of manual data sorting, isn't it? Could you automate it further, as in output "you have worked 5 hours on project X and 19 hours on project Y this week" ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah multi-project views are planned for the next release I'll do. Part of the issue at this point is finding what the "minimum" threshold is to avoid the noise/extra logged time.

At the moment, there's more manual steps than I'd like, but it's still a lot less painful than I was doing when I had to start/stop the timers manually when working before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would be nice if I could enter my hourly rate and have it show me both hours and revenue for a particular project.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea - It would be fairly easy to add to the main settings, but then allowing per-project rates would require a few more UI updates. Happy to add better support for this type of usage!

I generally don't bill hourly, so I'm more concerned with the hours spent on various projects/components. And especially how they relate to future project estimates.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm solo on this so I'd love to know what I can do to improve it and/or what people think about it in general. Please ask me anything!</comment>


Report on the Bezos Phone Hack [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6668313/FTI-Report-into-Jeff-Bezos-Phone-Hack.pdf <comment><USER3> There is pretty much no actual evidence here and at least a few indications that they are not iOS forensics experts. Bezos did not choose the right company to handle this work.

Some of their assumptions are really stretching, especially the bit about the picture of the woman looking vaguely like his girlfriend, as if that's an indicator that they know about her. They seem to be working backwards from their conclusion and trying to stretch the evidence to the explain what they want to be true.

I actually was more convinced that MBS was involved _before_ reading the report. Now seeing this, plus the story that AMI paid her brother 200k for leaked texts that WSJ saw and verified, really has me doubting.

<comment><USER4> The report claimed they couldn't decrypt the whatsapp video, so Dino A. Dai Zovi (head of security for CashApp) published code [1] to do it.

The report also concludes that they need to jailbreak the phone to do more analysis, but hadn't yet for undisclosed reasons. Bezos was using an iPhone X, which is trivial to jailbreak with checkra1n [2].

So yeah, FTI didn't know what they were doing.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/1221324029841244161](https://twitter.com/dinodaizovi/status/1221324029841244161)

[2]: [https://checkra.in/](https://checkra.in/)

<comment><USER5> > _so Dino A. Dai Zovi (head of security for CashApp) published code to do > it._

Great! May be useful to decrypt also the whatsapp videos, mentioned in _Lev Parnas_ ' excerpts.

FTR, Just found that there are many other tools available for decrypt whatsapp in last two years.[0]

[0] [https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=whatsapp+decrypt&s=update...](https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=whatsapp+decrypt&s=updated&type=Repositories)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Due to end-to-end encryption employed by WhatsApp, it is virtually > impossible to decrypt the contents of the downloader to determine if it > contained any malicious code in addition to the delivered video.

I can't make any sense of that. The phone is the end in "end-to-end". It contains the decryption keys. Why would "the downloader" be any different to decrypt than the video? Also they show a screenshot of the video being sent through WhatsApp... but they're saying that the video was downloaded via some malicious executable? I would have thought the video would _contain_ the malicious code. That makes no sense.

> Advanced weapons grade mobile malware typically installs itself to the root > filesystem of a device to maintain persistence and avoid detection.

This report sounds like bullshit. It sounds like they looked at the cellular data use, noticed an increase after this whatsapp message was sent, and did a bunch of random stuff they barely understood to fill out the report. Their list of "forensic tools" or whatever includes like... grep. And virutalbox. They also _didn 't_ jailbreak the phone and look at the filesystem, so I'm not sure what they even looked at besides just sniffing the wifi traffic.

EDIT: I reread the report. Jeff Bezos' phone was not hacked. They are claiming that a video attachment in whatsapp contained a malicious executable that gained full filesystem access to his iPhone based on absolutely nothing other than the fact that his cellular data upload increased. Most of that increase happened _almost a year later_. The guy just started using iCloud photo backups or sent someone videos via imessage or something. There are _way_ simpler explanations for why the media got his text messages. Like, you know, the person he sent them to showed somebody.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's a really long document to say that they weren't able to find much of anything. They think his bandwidth usage went up for a long time after he got a WhatsApp message from MbS' number and couldn't actually analyze any malware. I have to wonder why they'd hack him with a video flying their own flag.

The thing about the women looking similar is really reaching and doesn't make any sense. We already have other reports that Bezos' GF showed texts to her brother who sold them from other reports.

Finally, what's with really rich people sending their electronics to 3rd party security firms and not letting the Feds analyze anything directly? You'd think that if this was really some matter of national security or whatever, you'd want an investigation by people with subpoena power. But I guess that doesn't matter for some reason?

<comment><USER3> Private companies keep it closely guarded and destroy any copies of it after the job is done. You can be reasonably confident that it won't leave the analysis laptops.

If you give it to the FBI, you have no guarantees. It's property of the government and is archived and stored indefinitely as evidence. The FBI do not do private investigative services for important rich people, they investigate crimes.

<comment><USER8> Given the motivations of a private company or the FBI, who would you really choose? I'd go private with anything sensitive, they can't arrest me and they have a profit motive in protecting my data.

<comment><USER7> It would be odd for them to arrest Bezos for having his own phone hacked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Two questions (which aren't really explained in this report):

1\. Did he have to actually play the video, or was simply receiving the message enough to compromise his phone?

2\. It says after his phone was compromised, a large amount of data was extracted from his phone. Was this only WhatsApp specific data (cached pics and videos from messages sent within the app) or did the malware actually have full access to all of the files on his phone?

Because of iOS's sandboxing and permission system I would not have expected that a vulnerability in WhatsApp itself would be able to grant access to the entire phone. That seems like it would be much bigger news if it were the case.

<comment><USER10> They don't know. They weren't able to actually find the exploit code, so they don't know how it worked or what level of access it achieved. Or whether there even was an exploit at all.

That said, if there was an exploit, I'd be surprised if it _didn 't_ escape the iOS sandbox. As an exploit category, iOS sandbox escapes are medium difficulty. Not as easy as WebKit exploits, or privilege escalation on some other operating systems (...such as macOS), but still plentiful. Or from a buyer's perspective, more expensive, but readily available. MBS doesn't exactly have issues with expense.

By the way, image/video parsing vulnerabilities are somewhat rare themselves, at least in stacks that only handle a small number of formats (not something like ffmpeg or VLC with a bazillion file format parsers that nobody's looked at in decades).

<comment><USER9> > As an exploit category, iOS sandbox escapes are medium difficulty.

Are there any published explanations of exploits that achieve this? Just curious what it would look like.

<comment><USER10> Project Zero has some excellent writeups.

Here is one from last year where the author exploited a kernel vulnerability that's directly accessible from within the sandbox:

"voucher_swap: Exploiting MIG reference counting in iOS 12"

[https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/01/voucherswap-e...](https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/01/voucherswap- exploiting-mig-reference.html)

And here is a massive writeup, also from last year, analyzing the privilege escalation parts of no fewer than five different exploit chains, which were found bundled together in a real attack, each targeting a different range of iOS versions. Not five exploits, five _chains_. It's a great read:

"A very deep dive into iOS Exploit chains found in the wild"

[https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very- deep-d...](https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive- into-ios-exploit.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This story has frustrated me from the very first Bezos blog post [1] as a fairly obvious counterintelligence operation.

Now a year later the story has resurfaced and it's all the same conspiracy theories based on nothing.

This report demonstrates as clearly as you could hope that there was no real analysis and no real evidence of any of the absolutely extraordinary claims made by Besos and de Becker. [2]

From what I can tell, the only reasonable conclusion is that this whole thing was a retaliatory attack on MBS and on AMI. Yet a year later, the news headlines are all parroting that the report proves MBS _personally_ orchestrated this exploit.

We are now at the point of _theater of the absurd_. This story has been a smoldering load of garbage from the very beginning. [3] I can't believe it keeps coming around.

The closest I can find to an honest accounting is this WSJ op-ed [4], which many here won't like because it ties the totally flawed reporting on this story back to similar flaws in the Russiagate reporting. That is, a story the media wants to be true just a bit too badly.

[1] - [https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr- pecker-146...](https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr- pecker-146e3922310f)

[2] - [https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeff-bezos-investigation- finds...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeff-bezos-investigation-finds-the- saudis-obtained-his-private-information)

[3] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19535965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19535965)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19539943)

[4] - [https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-tries-to-wag-the- dog...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezos-tries-to-wag-the- dog-11579909357)

<comment><USER7> The media doesn't shy even from starting wars over this stuff (the gas attacks that weren't in Syria, WMD in Iraq, etc.). Expect them to make many layers of conclusions like this to support some goal in, I dunno, replacing MbS with someone they like better after a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Probably "technical" should be removed from the title.

<comment><USER13> Ok, removed. It doesn't seem to be how the article refers to itself, though I can't be sure because the thing is unsearchable.

<comment><USER14> I think the parent was being sarcastic, referring to the really poor quality of the report.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They lost me at "encrypted downloader". The WhatsApp video attachment format allows for...a downloader? I strongly doubt that.

Perhaps what they should have written is that they cannot decrypt the video and thus check for an exploit within it (it's commonly called payload, because it doesn't have to be a downloader...).

I see from other comments here that I am not the only one doubting the report wording at the very least.

<comment><USER16> Probably an exploit.

<comment><USER17> Nope, they seem to mean the encrypted file format used by WhatsApp to transmit and store attachments, which a competent forensics outfit should be able to decrypt: [https://medium.com/@billmarczak/bezos-hack-mbs-mohammed- bin-...](https://medium.com/@billmarczak/bezos-hack-mbs-mohammed-bin-salman- whatsapp-218e1b4e1242)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> an-allen This report is a pure, unadulterated, dumpster fire. No one is explaining how a video file is a trojan vector. Also this report has way too much background of the "Hacking Team" that really sounds suspect from me. I just feel if you are trying to establish that this vector was the source of a trojan - <USER2> actually prove that instead of giving a page or two of conjecture on where this code that you haven't shown is malware - came from.

Also, obligatory, correlation does not imply causation. This report hinges on the argument that "video received from MBS and shortly thereafter the total data egress increased". Okay what data was egressed? Where was it egressed to? Just basic things are missing from this report that are relevant.

Absolute garbage.

<comment><USER18> > Also this report has way too much background of the "Hacking Team" that > really sounds suspect from me.

Consultants write like high school students with a ten page research paper requirement. If you don't have real content pad it with extra background, bulleted lists and superfluous tables.

The final product needs to be long enough so people think real work was done but boring enough that they don't actually read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What does it mean that the malicious video was delivered via "an encrypted downloader hosted on WhatsApp's media server"?

<comment><USER10> It means that they don't know what they're talking about.

A "downloader" refers to part of an exploit payload (or other malware) that downloads additional code. But an attacker can only use a downloader _after_ triggering an exploit and getting code execution. If they're right about there being an exploit related to the video, it would presumably be in the video file itself; otherwise there would be no need to send an irrelevant video. But in that case, the exploit couldn't have been used to download the video in the first place. And why would you need to use some special code to download a video attachment, when that's presumably part of WhatsApp's builtin functionality? Also, even if there was a downloader involved, it would be, as the name suggests, the thing that does the downloading – not the thing that was downloaded.

Whether or not there was an exploit, it seems almost certain that WhatsApp automatically downloaded the video like any other attachment, and the encryption was WhatsApp's own end-to-end encryption. Indeed, the report itself cites WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption in point 22, so it seems like they should be aware of that. Maybe they just don't know what "downloader" means, or maybe their ignorance is deeper; I can't really tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So the billionaires of this world, Bezos and MBS, exchange memes with photos of pretty girls. And Bezos reads The Daily Mail. Just like the rest of us, except having way more $$$.

<comment><USER21> The daily mail was loaded in the forensic test, likely as an ad in some other page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Former Chief of Staff of FBI's Cyber Division" => Outlook Calendar Expert

</comment><comment><USER23> Does this refer to the GIF-parsing double-free remote whatsapp exploit discussed in detail on HN some months ago?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21135424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21135424)

</comment><comment><USER24> His internal team could have done better.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is interesting, privacy and security work both ways. Protecting us and our data and enabling malicious actors. I have turned off Auto Downloads on Whatsapp.

<comment><USER26> I never understood why that feature is not disabled by default. I am so tired of this madness for frictionless UX everywhere. Just because someone has to have everything readily available without having to click.

Where is the UX when someone sends stupid dumb pictures constantly in groups you belong to? And those get downloaded automatically. Or where is the UX when someone hacks your phone thanks to this "feature" enabled?

Even IE disabled this feature!

<comment><USER27> I'm still grateful that this feature is still available behind a toggle and not whatsapp using its smarts to decide what should be downloaded or not. But I can understand the desire for frictionless user experience because for vast majority of the population this is not an issue. If you hold something of significance it is upto you to practise and execute sensible security measures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't understand why they refer to the list of 192 URLs that all turned out to be legitimate as "IOCs"

Why would a device reaching out to bing/wikipedia/medium be considered an indicator of compromise, or even a suspected IOC?

</comment><comment><USER29> Well, no direct evidence, just co-timed egress data spikes, which no one noticed for 9 months. If there was a hack, it was a pretty successful one.

</comment><comment><USER30> tl; dr: nothing is proven yet in either direction. The report acknowledges "ongoing work" is needed to root the phone.

Maybe they should have waited to publish until they did that.

</comment><comment><USER31> Don't read. Read comments and save your time.

</comment><comment><USER32> by downloading the pdf, will my iphone get infected? :)

</comment><comment><USER33> if this is true and MBS wants to silence Jeff Bezos just because his owned paper attacks him, mind you this paper just like every other major western paper attacks him day and night since the murder of the Saudi "journalist" so silencing one paper won't make any difference anyway. Why would he send this infected video which is probably linked to a backdoor only a very few have knowledge about, from his own Whatsapp account not from some associate or a friend of Bezos who is in his contacts? This whole story doesn't seem logical to me.

</comment><comment><USER34> This was really boring from a security or forensics perspective. Nothing really substantial in there. But fortunately there are other angles to view this document from: if this is authentic, it says that the richest man on the entire planet...

...uses a two year old phone. I mean, I like my iPhone X too, but hey, if I had like north of 100 billion dollars, I would certainly spend about 1500 of those dollars for the newest iPhone generation every year (especially if my older generation has an unfixable bootloader bug compromising its entire security architecture).

...exchanges silly meme pictures with ostensibly funny texts with his billionaire friends.

<comment><USER35> May be he did not find any good reason to upgrade? Sometimes its just not worth the time rather than the money part. I'm sure a lot of people here feel the same even though they have the means to buy one every year.</comment></comment>


Banks begin moving some operations out of Britain - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a3a92744-3a52-11e6-9a05-82a9b15a8ee7.html#axzz4CdZ1abFJ <comment><USER2> Paywalled..?

<comment><USER3> Click the "web" link above, then click the first google result

<comment><USER4> I think this might be a more accurate process:

1\. Copy the web link above. Stick it into Google

2\. select the dropdown next to 'www.ft.com › Companies › Financials › Banks' which for me brings up a 'cached' link.

3\. Click on the 'Cached' link and you should see the article

<comment><USER4> Or just try this link: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bWfIIh-...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bWfIIh- CoZoJ:www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a3a92744-3a52-11e6-9a05-82a9b15a8ee7.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone elaborate what passporting means in this case? I don't think that was explained in that article. I'm assuming that it has something to do with transferring funds from one country to another?

<comment><USER6> In that context it means when a bank is regulated in one of the countries in the single market (UK in EU), it can operate without regulatory concern in all the countries there. It is understandable that certain operations will inevitably be moved to a city in the heart of EU instead of staying in London.</comment></comment>


Generating Test Data For Your Application - <AUTHOR> http://www.devcurry.com/2009/12/generating-test-data-for-your.html

<comment><USER2> The feature of being able to describe test data sets, and then generate what really comes down to SQL is really neat. And it looks like they offer SQL exporting.

However, if you are generating test data for an application you've created - this really only comes in hand if you are lazy. I only say that because to really harness the (limited) power, it requires a "donation" of $20. Not that supporting the cause is bad or any of that jazz - I get it. But if I'm giving someone 20 dollars for it, it better be more than stub data, and don't limit me to 5000 records at a time either.

I'm not trivializing this tool - but for something that could be hacked in IRB in 10 minutes there has to be a more compelling reason to do it this way.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention there are already some good libraries in popular languages that are capable of doing most of the hard work:

Perl - Data::Faker - [http://search.cpan.org/~jasonk/Data- Faker-0.07/lib/Data/Fake...](http://search.cpan.org/~jasonk/Data- Faker-0.07/lib/Data/Faker.pm)

Ruby Gem - Faker - <http://faker.rubyforge.org/>

Bonus round!

Ruby Gem - Populator - <http://github.com/ryanb/populator>

Faker generates "fake" values, while Populator provides some nice constructs for using collections/ranges of data for your fields.

<comment><USER4> I wrote something like this for myself a while back, then stuck it up on GitHub. Its written in Java and generates all sorts of "user" related data. Addresses, emails, etc. Can also generate social-graph connections between the generated users.

DummyDataGenerator: <http://github.com/mindcrime/dummydatagenerator>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since my app is meta-data driven, it was easier for me to implement an "Add _Record_ with random values" for my testing. Exposed it for public users and I have see it being used a lot.

In action (animated gif, 186 KB) : [http://crm.ifreetools.com/static/images/blog/generating- rand...](http://crm.ifreetools.com/static/images/blog/generating-random- values-animate.gif)</comment>


Fata Morgana in the Juan de Fuca Strait - <AUTHOR> http://epod.usra.edu/blog/2018/09/fata-morgana-in-the-juan-de-fuca-strait.html <comment><USER2> Used to work in Alaska on boats and saw this many nights coming into Seward harbor. It made the entire town (all small buildings) look like mid sized sky scrapers of the same height, even across the horizon, and then it would fade away.

<comment><USER3> Sounds a bit like a scene from the Hitchhiker's Guide: [https://www.shmoop.com/hitchhikers-guide-to-the- galaxy/chapt...](https://www.shmoop.com/hitchhikers-guide-to-the- galaxy/chapter-9-summary.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice that he could get a picture of it. I saw something similar (vertical stretching) as a child, the family car was driving along a fjord when I noticed a boat with two giant men standing in it. Then as we drove further the image shifted and there was a tiny rowing boat out on the water, with two men sitting.

My great-grandfather once saw a semi-mythical island settlement on the horizon in the area where he used to fish (he was a fisherman). There are many stories about that place. My great-grandfather understood what he saw though -- it was a mirage of a real settlement, on an island much farther out. Too far out to see normally, but conditions can sometimes show a mirage of it. And that's where the mythical place and the stories came from.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some people have postulated Fata Morgana might have led to the sinking of the Titanic.[1] Obviously speculative, but apparently weather conditions, again, it's speculated, at the time could have been favorable for such atmospheric phenomenon.

[1][https://turcanin.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/fata-morgana- the-m...](https://turcanin.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/fata-morgana-the-mirage- that-sunk-the-titanic/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I had to follow a bunch of the links before I understood what this was. Very interesting stuff!

This link was the most helpful: [https://www.atoptics.co.uk/fz139.htm](https://www.atoptics.co.uk/fz139.htm)

</comment><comment><USER7> See also,

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

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

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

</comment><comment><USER8> Fascinating. Love the reference to Morgana from Arthurian legend.</comment>


To help replace the CAC card, Pentagon enlists AI startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.fedscoop.com/cac-card-twosenseai-startup-dod-contract/ <comment><USER2> > The contract, an other transaction agreement (OTA) awarded through DOD's > Rapid Innovation Fund, will focus on next-generation identity verification > by authenticating users "by their behavior, such as how they walk, type, > carry their device, or interact with the screen," TWOSENSE.AI said in a > release.

It sounds like a bad idea. I'm reminded that for many, many years; the "locks" on the US's nuclear weapons had the combination set to all zeros, because the Pentagon was worried the complexity of using an actual combination would mean they'd be rendered useless in wartime [1]. It seems like the height of foolishness to tie military effectiveness to a finicky and unreliable "AI/ML" solution. Soldiers will probably behave differently in wartime, and I can large numbers getting locked out of their devices as a result, at least initially.

[1] Since any war they'd be used in would probably last less than an hour.

<comment><USER3> The moment it requests the user to authenticate by taking a minute or so to display their behaviors because of a false negative, it'll probably be canned

<comment><USER4> ...unless it's been widely rolled out already. They just need to make sure that it doesn't fuck up during initial testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Behavior-based authentication is invisible to the user, therefore it can be used continuously without creating any extra work_

Yeah...right. As if vanilla CAC authentication isn't already littered with UX warts.

Also, clickbait article title:

 _Well, from my [DoD CIO Dana Deasy] standpoint, the CAC will remain the department's principle authenticator for the foreseeable future._

<comment><USER6> > _the CAC will remain the department's principle authenticator_

At least in principal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wait, in the story's top photo they covered up the person's human-readable information but left the barcode exposed?

<comment><USER8> At least they stopped putting social security numbers in the barcode a few years ago

<comment><USER7> That's good, at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This talks about continuous authentication, which isn't about accessing a system, but rather flagging unusual behavior for followup inspection.

<comment><USER10> There's nothing new about this, except for attaching "AI" to it. There's something to be said for the value in detecting drive-by or opportunistic attacks, or cleaning up after the fact. Though it was a thinly veiled advertisement for his company, Counterpane, Bruce Schneier made the case for this approach in a 2001 paper: [https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper- msm.pdf](https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-msm.pdf)

But these pattern detection systems are fundamentally incapable of preventing targeted attacks. For a targeted attack any pattern recognizer (heuristic, bayesian, neural net, army of elite white hats, w'ever) simply provides a blueprint for reliably subverting the system. They could never replace a hard, cryptographically strong authentication factor providing _distinct_ , _provable_ security characteristics; certainly not in environments like DoD facilities which require such strong authentication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given how long it took to deploy CAC and iron out the major issues I'm not holding my breath on this.

</comment><comment><USER12> CAC Card... Common Access Card Card.

Sorry DoD Acronyms never stopped getting on my nerves even 5 years later.

We had a game to find how many acronyms we could find with the same word multiple times.

<comment><USER13> I was once part of a 2-vendor software demo/showdown with a DoD client. Both vendors (us and them) each had two hours to present our solution and why it would be a better fit for the DoD base to adopt. It was a totally routine enterprise software demo.

But during the day's introductory remarks, it became clear that the DoD had invented a new acronym for the meeting. I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was something silly along the lines of S.P.E.A.R. - <Some Topic> Project Education And Review.

It was when I witnessed the US military invent a brand new acronym to represent one specific routine meeting I had with them that fully internalized just how out of control acronyms were in the US military.

<comment><USER14> The aviation community is also quite acronym-ful. I wonder if it's because of military influence, or the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a terrible idea. Machine learning solutions are fuzzy and inexact (which is why they are great at some problems). Using a ensemble of nonstandard biometrics to identify a person is going to lead to a whole lot of problems:

1) "by the way they walk, interact with their phone, commute to work, and how and where they spend their time."

Ive known many many Marines during my service... We were always injured, sprained wrists and ankles, broken fingers, torn muscles. That's normal for a fighting force that does continuous training. Our weight was changing constantly, as well as our locations, sleep cycles, and habits. The listed biometrics would be curfuzzled by this lifestyle.

2) "therefore it can be used continuously without creating any extra work" said Dawud Gordon

Imagine the amount of work needed to debug a system like this when it doesn't believe the identity of an intelligence officer trying to get to his workstation in a top secret environment. Would he be detained at the guard post until they fix it (standard SOP if he tries to enter the building without a CAC card and TS ID).

While thing seems ludicrous to me.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thank goodness it's the DOD, because it will take 10 years to get this approved, but sadly they'll approve technology that is 6 years old.

<comment><USER15> After spending roughly 10 billion dollars on it (here's to you, F35 Junk Strike Fighter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think there needs to be a specification and a framework for ID cards and how they get used with all the best practices dealt with, so that people don't have to roll their own and make mistakes in the process or overpay. These things might already exist.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if they know that the current AI tech always has a non-zero error rate and as a rule it's not very robust to the data distributions it hasn't seen, which can be something as mundane as e.g. a different brand of the sensor or different compression settings.

</comment><comment><USER19> When I worked for DISA I had a manager who loathed when anyone would repeat the last letter in an acronym. Hearing things like CAC card, ATM machine, PIN number all really got him going and we heard CAC card a lot.

</comment><comment><USER20> How does the 'this authenticated person seems to be nearby or holding me' signal get from the device into the security domain on a continuous basis?

</comment><comment><USER10> The DoD might also be interested in a bridge in Brooklyn that's currently up for sale. It's a real steal, and could be used to replace all their other bridges, too. In fact, it'll revolutionize bridging.

<comment><USER15> My God, they'll never need another bridge!!! Is it powered by the "AI"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > CAC card

> CAC card

> CAC cards

This is so annoying. It's like saying ATM machine, or PIN number.

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

<comment><USER21> I think in many contexts there's a case to be made for the redundancy. For instance, at a checkout counter where a customer or cashier may have a pen in hand, may be wearing one or more pins, and is subsequently prompted for a PIN - saying "PIN number" immediately resolves any possible ambiguity. "ATM machine" similarly disambiguates the machine from the abbreviation for "at the moment". "CAC" is an acronym with many meanings and is sufficiently uncommon for laypersons that replacing parts of speech with it is bound to cause confusion. I am tempted generally to consider the unqualified use of acronyms as jargon which I prefer to avoid using whenever reasonably possible.

<comment><USER7> I respectfully disagree. "Enter your PIN" can't refer to their ballpoint or to the little flag on their lapel. If I'm getting cash from the ATM, I can't mean the Asynchronous Transfer Mode router. "Present your CAC at the door" would only have one meaning in any setting where you'd be expected to show your CAC.

<comment><USER22> But neither of those contexts are an article on the internet or casual conversation, which could very well be about ballpoint pens, little flags, or anything else.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


264 SPAM hosts on Google's own CIDR range - <AUTHOR> http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/188.8.131.52-184.108.40.206

<comment><AUTHOR> It's bad when a major ISP like Time Warner has spammy servers and my email server has to reject email from even my own family members. It's really bad when email from professionals using their Gmail address gets rejected by my server because Google's own servers are spamming as listed by SORBS.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your morning routine? - <AUTHOR> What does your morning look like from the time you wake up to the time you get to work?<p>How do you transition your mental mode from personal/family obligations to work? What do you do in the first 30 minutes of getting to work? <comment><USER4> Alarm goes off at 6. I hit snooze 12 times until it's about 7. I half doze, half ruminate on why I can't just get out of bed at 6. The hour I steal from myself gives me immeasurable pleasure. Around 7 I make it down into the bathroom, where I check political news for about a half hour. I ruminate on how unhealthy my eating habits are. I take a shower, and get out of the house by 8. On the ride in, I try to use positive thinking to set the tone for the day, but I generally fail and focus on negative thoughts. I obsess about whether living and working on the Internet have caused a reverse personal renaissance. Often I grab a high carb, high fat bagel and cream cheese, and large coffee.

Once I'm in, I log onto here for a half hour, check reddit, and try to force myself to "feel motivated". I hop onto Lync, and the underlings tell me about drama from their mid 20s lives. I get jealous of them and all the experiences they could be having, but they're locked up in the same corporation I am. We do fake smiles and get lots of coffee. I do agile meetings and track my own progress in a little web app. Once per week, a chart is mailed based off metrics I self assigned, to my manager and the director.

By 11am I start to decide if I am going to write any code for that day. If I haven't started, I get overwhelmed. Lately I have panic attacks, but I have a new doctor who tells me to stop eating carbs and drinking coffee. I lie to her and tell her I am, and then get those items on the way back from the appointment as a reward.

Tell me I'm not as alone as that felt

<comment><USER5> Fwiw coffee makes an enormous difference for me anxiety wise.

The initial boost in energy and mild euphoria is not worth an evening full of anxiety and irritability for me personally.

Yes, that's my experience in the evening even if I have coffee at 8am.

Anyway just sharing in case anyone is struggling and looking for something to tweak.

<comment><USER6> Take theanine with your coffee. A ratio of 2:1 theanine to caffeine does wonders.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it and give it a shot.

That said, it's nice not relying on coffee everyday for a boost, though there are at least a couple days a week where I could really use it, esp after a night of unpleasant sleep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 06:00 - woke up

06:05 - got out of bed

06:10 - dragged a comb across my head

06:15 - Found my way downstairs

06:20 - drank a cup

06:30 - looking up, I noticed I was late

06:32 - found my coat, and grabbed my hat

06:33 - made the bus in seconds flat

...

16:30 - Found my way upstairs and had a smoke

16:50 - Somebody spoke and I went into a dream

<comment><USER8> Have to catch an early train Got to be to work by nine And if I had an air-o- plane I still couldn't make it on time

'Cause it takes me sho long Just to figure out what I'm gonna wear Blame it on the train But the boss is already there

<comment><USER7> A lot of people don't realize who wrote that song; the original album credit said just "Christopher".

<comment><USER8> Wow Prince yet again

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 06:00 - Alarm (wife is up at 5:40)

06:05 - Coffee. Check email/slack/rollbar/etc for anything urgent.

06:15 - Local news for weather/traffic, HN and national/world news check.

06:30 - Shave, shower

06:55 - Eat breakfast with my wife.

07:10 - We leave for work and I drop my wife off at her office.

I listen to my daily podcasts in the car. My drive to the local office is 15 minutes so on those days I finish my podcasts at my desk. The head office is 1 hour away, so I can finish them all on the drive.

I try to finish all communication tasks and all error/task/planning triage at the start of the day. The rest of the day is for coding and whatever meetings I have to attend. I try to break my coding into 1-1.5 hour chunks so that meetings don't hurt my flow as much. My calendar is pretty free since we are a small team and try to respect each other's time.

Lunch time (other than time spent eating) is spent either in meetings or in meditation/on a walk.

Back home at 5:30 after picking my wife up and we fix and eat dinner together. We'll both do some work in the evenings if we need to, but not every night. Usually just enough to finish off what was in progress at the end of the day.

We are in bed by 9:00, reading until lights out at 10.

For me the set schedule helps me transition my mental mode between work and family times. And since we usually commute together, my wife and I are on the same schedule. It helps keep us from being in 2 different modes at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER10> \- Wake up at 430-5 (Used to use an alarm, now it is a natural thing. I am also asleep by 930pm and usually catch a couple of naps over the weekend).

\- Take my dog out, hit the restroom, have breakfast

\- Train on my bike for 1-1.5 hours

\- Try real hard to catch my bus at 735. I usually miss nowadays, So I hitch a ride with my wife at 845 to the bus stop.

\- reach by 915 or so. Coffee and coding. I try to get some coding done in one block in the morning and one more in evening.

\- lunch at 1130 - HN at this time, and when am waiting for meetings etc.

\- ride back home by 630 or so. I reach by 730 or so.

\- couple of hours with the fam

RE transition: I have tried many 'methods' and clocks etc. but nothing beats intrinsic motivation: I try to work towards that. (Having goals that matter, finding real work that I love etc). I ride and train hard on my bike because I want to. I work because I want to. There are days / weeks when I get into a slump when there is lower productivity, but C'est la vie. Trying hard to be productive is usually a drain / anxiety inducing thing for me anyway - so I have just come to accept the cycles in my life :)

<comment><USER11> Do you find going to bed at 930pm hurts your social life?

That is by far the largest thing keeping me from the "early to bed, early to rise" lifestyle. I like going out with people, or generally engaging with others at night.

<comment><USER12> I'm going to pick that the answer is no, as having kids and sorting them out has the effect (on me and others I know) of hindering night time socialising and at the same time stopping you from wanting to go out at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 07:00 - Philips Hue lights slowly turn on until bright at 07:10

07:10 - iPhone alarm goes off

07:12 - Bedside alarm goes off to make sure I actually got up

07:14 - Shave, long, hot shower

07:40 - Leave for work (either walk to the train station or drive), eat a Banana on the way

08:15 - Arrive at work, make a coffee and fill water bottle

08:20 - Team lead of a small ops / systems engineers, some management style work, lots of puppet coding, keeping an eye on monitoring and tickets, assist my team and developers with any peer review / issues / discussions

10:00 - Sometimes get a morning snack / coffee

12:00 - Lunch, avoid carbs and try to stick to high protein, low sugar foods when possible.

12:15 - Back to work any time between 12:15 and 13:00

Any time between 15:00 and 18:00 - leave work

Any time between 17:00 and 20:30 - Order dinner from UberEats, maybe have a wine or two

Most evenings - Catch up on comedy shows, read books

Some evenings - Perform out of hours scheduled work or finish things I was on a roll with remotely from home, go to gigs, catch up with friends over dinner etc...

</comment><comment><USER14> I like to have a cup of coffee and watch some TV comedy when I get up. It never hurts to start your day off (or end it) in a light-hearted mood. I especially try to pick work- or office-related humor. For a while I was watching The Office, and now I'm onto The IT Crowd.

</comment><comment><USER15> It took me time and reflections for building a decent morning routine, I think the best way was to realize what tended to ruin my day just after waking up: checking social media, checking emails, browsing the internet ...

In other words, filling my head with too much different data and information. That was exhausting me and 99% of the time, it was not worth it.

I believe it is important for me to start the day by _focusing on one thing_ , whatever it is, whether it's a project, a dream or learning new things. Usually, I take advantage of this time to read great books to reflect upon.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm a remote worker (developer) with what is probably a terrible morning routine, but I'll mention it here for balance.

I wake up roughly 10 minutes before start-time at work. I roll out of bed, put on some clothes, and use the bathroom before I stagger out to the living room.

Out there I pour myself a drink and typically move my laptop to my recliner instead of my desk. I find it warmer and far more comfortable in the mornings.

My first 30 minutes at work varies based on things like whether or not anyone has requested something from me (we work from a few time zones), how defined my current task is, and what state I left things in the night before. I usually start in on a development task within a few minutes.

</comment><comment><USER17> For me the morning route give me the power and focus for all the day, so it's very important.

I wake up at 5:30 and I meditate for 5-10 minutes. After that I eat, I check the Slack to see if I have any important request from the team during the day (we are in three different timezones, Spain, Japan, SF). I prioritize and add to the calendar my day tasks (if I have to do a task, it means that is important and it has to be schedule in a proper time to put focus on it).

After that I do sport from 7 to 8. Sometimes I go to the gym for some cardio exercise and another times just for a 30-45min run.

I arrive to the office at 08:15.

</comment><comment><USER18> Eh, most responses are idealistic here. I am not sure how many are speaking truth.

I work for one of the FANG. Workload is 60 hrs per week.

8:30 am- get up and get ready

9-30 am- start for office

10 am- in office

12-15 pm- lunch. No eating at desk

1-15 pm- tea

5-30 pm - leave office

6- 7-30 pm- go to a coffee shop and see any girl is worth talking.lol. I am single.

8 pm - <USER2>

9-30 - <USER3>

9-30 pm to 11 pm - again work

11 pm - midnight - reddit/hn

Midnight - 2 am - Can't sleep.

Looks like I am forever single and no women likes me.

That's life.

<comment><USER19> Sad way to look at things. Have you ever had luck with women? Are you in shape? I'm guessing you might be because you go to the gym. If not, work on packing on some muscle.

Then, focus on having fun, interesting hobbies and going out and meeting people. Build an interesting life first and it will be easier to find someone to share it with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My best days have me getting out of bed in the wee hours for a brisk ride or run. A close second is knowing that I've penciled in some exercise time later in the day.

Once I've showered, I usually get the kids to school then either head back to the home office or head to work.

My morning is infested with quick email/slack replies to urgent issues on my iPhone to answer questions, coordinate and get meetings setup for when my day actually starts.

I block out my calendar from 7-8AM and only accept the most urgent calls/meetings begrudgingly.

I can often join a meeting in co-pilot mode (someone else is driving and just needs my inputs) while on my commute.

All of this is powered by wrapup activity the night before (30m @ 9 or 10PM) so I've set expectations for the next day - if that doesn't happen, I'm a bit more stressed in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER21> Context: 27 y/o, fiance, no dependants

4:45 - alarm goes off, start getting ready

5:05 - go down to garage and prep bike

5:10 - meet those that I am riding with

5:15 to 7.15 - Ride and then coffee(s)

7:30 get home and shower and take already prepared bag

8:00 take train to work

===

On the days where I do not ride it is essentially the same but replaced with gym.

Cycling changed my life; would not be the person I am today without it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wake up at five something, take a piss, shower and dress yourself.

No time for breakfast, throw intra and post-workout shakes into the bag and head to the gym with SO.

After training, we may sit down to eat something in a bakery depending on the time.

Go to work. Upon arriving fetch some decaff and prepare that stupid daily meeting. Middle manager crack.

Lunch break. Walk in the park for one hour while drinking a litre of milk, phoning relatives and listening to podcasts.

I get paid for browsing HN.

After work it's all me and SO time. We love cooking elaborated dinners and gossiping about our colleagues.

Videogames and technical books are the only computer related things I still do. I despise them so much I had to buy a PlayStation for gaming as touching a keyboard makes me anxious.

GitHub is your resume now.

</comment><comment><USER22> Alarm at 6:30 snooze couple times, stare at the ceiling and having a 3 minutes existential crisis, drink water (amazing for waking up your brain and body) shower, dress leave for coffee . Take the bus to college while reading news and HN.. Day starts

</comment><comment><USER23> \- When I first open my eyes on the morning I usually get most of my intellectual work done from my bed. I call it half sleepy / half awake. This is when my brain is at %200. Sometimes I resolve yesterday's issues or get new ideas. It's amazing how fast and clear my brain is, right when I wake up. It only lasts for 5 minutes unfortunately. I try to take notes because everything disappears pretty quickly.

\- Then I pull out my phone and check out my emails + news. It's usually 7am so the west coast is still sleeping.

\- Then the food routine kicks off. Shower, breakfast, water, coffee then more water.

\- Check out my emails again, it's about 8:30am. Now the day really starts.

</comment><comment><USER24> -Alarm goes off at 5:30. Hit snooze once.

-Alarm goes off at 5:35. Depending on how sleepy I am I may lay in bed for 1-10 minutes, usually petting the cat.

-Put on clothes in dark.

-Get out of bed, fill up a large jar of water and sit in living room. One pillow behind back, one pillow on lap, laptop on lap pillow.

-Put computer on airplane mode, open word doc of current novel manuscript.

-Write at least 500 words in manuscript (generally finish by 6:15).

-Get back in bed until partner's alarm goes off at 6:35.

-Get up, put on hot water. Eat cereal and read Harper's.

-Off to work at 7am.

-Spend first 30-45 minutes at work reading HN, ArsTechnica.

<comment><USER25> What do you do with the large jar of water?

<comment><USER26> Obviously drink it. It's one of the best health advice to drink a couple glasses of water when you wake up.

<comment><USER25> I agree it's a good idea to drink water in the morning, it just seemed funny that filling it was mentioned and then nothing more.

I guess I expected it to show up in the final step, like Chekhov's Gun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I currently live with a really good friend of mine who is studying, therefore I prefer to do personal things in the morning. It's not only because of him, but I find myself much more productive in the morning as well.

06:30-06:45 - Alarm goes off + max 1 snooze. After that I prepare a cup of tea and sometimes a breakfast

06:45-07:45 - I look into my personal projects and todo list, try to sort out as much stuff as possible.

06:45-08:00 - Prepare for work and take a shower

08:00-08:15 - Leave home

</comment><comment><USER28> Alarm 7:15. Snooze. Snooze. Snooze. Snooze. Make espresso, add some milk, drink in bed while reading Facebook. Resolve to quit Facebook and contact friends directly instead. Shower. Pack rucksack, get dressed. Cycle to work, between 15 and 45 minutes depending on location. Check emails and flag those I should action that day. Change out of cycling clothes. Do something productive, then duck out for coffee and buttered toast at 10:30am.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wake up naturally, no alarm clock. 7ish in winter, 6ish in summer.

Shower and think about the work days problems.

Drive to work, picking breakfast up on way. In the summer, I bike to work a few days a week.

Work on mentally challenging stuff and try to ignore email until lunch.

Eat lunch in my office (takeout) or go out to lunch with a friend.

After lunch, read email, write clients back, sometimes take a nap.

Then work until dinner time and go home.

(I'm a software developer, consultant/contractor.)

</comment><comment><USER30> I wake up around 5am, have a cup of English breakfast, and read the news or whatever code I'm interested in at the moment. From 7am - 8am I work out, then head into work all happy and full of endorphins, prepare second cup of tea, and write a list of three specific micro-tasks I want to accomplish that day.

I usually fizzle out by 3pm, so I like to tackle my most complex tasks before then!

</comment><comment><USER31> I typically don't need an alarm and wake up anywhere from 6:30 AM - 7:30 AM without a problem.

Sometimes I'm impatiently waiting for the sun to rise so I can get up.

Been doing a quick 5 minute meditation, then go to brush my teeth. If I'm lazy, I might browse online on my smartphone.

Eat breakfast at 8, send my daughter to nursery if needed, and then head to work by 9 AM.

</comment><comment><USER32> When I was working I would be up at 3:40am head to the gym, workout for an hour, home by 5:10am shower, make breakfast for the husband and myself. Eat, read and journal then out the door to head to the office. Work until 5:00pm. Home by 6:30pm cook, read and write in bed not later then 9:30pm.

Now up at 5:30am gym, home, job search, read and write.

</comment><comment><USER33> \- Alarm 6am

\- Grab my bag (prepared the night before) and cycle to the gym for 630

\- Gym 630 -> 730

\- Cycle to work for 815

\- Drink loads of water and eat breakfast

\- Shower and get to my desk for 9

\- Work, read, and tick off things on my todo list until my colleagues arrive (anytime until 10am)

I find if I skip the gym I can be in a terrible mood. Seems like I don't even consider riding my bike exercise anymore, just transport!

Always in bed by 10-11pm.

EDIT: Formatting.

</comment><comment><USER8> Woke up, fell out of bed.

Dragged a comb across my head.

Found my way downstairs and drank a cup.

And looking up I noticed I was late.

Found my coat and grabbed my hat.

Made the bus in seconds flat.

Found my way upstairs and had a smoke.

Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wake up, go downstairs, make coffee and toasts, play with my son for 20-30 minutes, shower, clothes, work.

That usually happens between 9am and 10.30am.

Lunch at 11.30am :-)

</comment><comment><USER35> usually wake around 8:00. breakfast in bed with partner. shower, stagger in to office. Take morning ritalin. check morning cartoons (xkcd smbc, frazz), read HN (18 minutes noprocrast). Check sites for jobs (_still_ no Python contracts. It's been nearly a year). Start work on whatever little job there is, or on my never ending side project. snack more than I should. Eat a couple of apples. Wish there were some interesting paid work in the offing, or even some interesting lighting work (the live music scene here is almost as dead as the Python contract market). Try to understand the next new bit of technology for the side project: currently how to write a mobile app and how to structure code for embedded ARM devices and port code from AVR to that.</comment>


Teletext Bad Apple - <AUTHOR> https://bitshifters.github.io/posts/prods/bs-badapple.html <comment><USER2> Very cool! I spent a lot of my youth navigating Teletext. Also lots of people doesn't seem to realize that Teletext is still alive and updated daily in some European countries like Spain.

<comment><USER3> It's still hugely popular in the Netherlands, but somewhat ironically mostly viewed through the web or apps. I wrote a simple command line reader scraping the web version: [https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt](https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt)

<comment><USER4> Hang on, I'm Dutch, I know it still exists, but how you'd say, is it still "hugely popular"?

<comment><USER3> Personal observation, but also the app is #12 for news on the App Store and NOS themselves stated in 2017 that the service is popular:

[https://www.spreekbuis.nl/npo-en-nos-over-de-toekomst-van- te...](https://www.spreekbuis.nl/npo-en-nos-over-de-toekomst-van-teletekst/)

(I'm not going to argue about where to drawn the line between 'hugely' or merely popular etc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related: [https://www.azabani.com/2020/06/29/bad-apple-for- taskmgr.htm...](https://www.azabani.com/2020/06/29/bad-apple-for-taskmgr.html)

<comment><USER6> Related: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-ckCeE_HUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-ckCeE_HUs) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAxWIAjz6S4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAxWIAjz6S4)

(ESP32 + Ikea FREKVENS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For reference on what teletext is: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext)

<comment><USER8> I wonder how this could pass anyone who's now older than 10 years by. Are there countries that just never had (widespread adoption of) teletext?

Most people probably haven't used or seen teletext in years, but I'd expect people to know what it is anyways because there's cultural references aplenty.

<comment><USER9> Two things:

1\. AFAIK NTSC doesn't support it, so North America never had it. There were equivalent standards but not one universal one to unify around.

2\. Are there that many cultural references? I'm struggling to think of many that I saw growing up and I'm in my thirties. It existed (and I used it a lot!) but it wasn't exactly part of the cultural zeitgeist. The internet had already taken over.

<comment><USER10> I think the only cultural references I see are football-result nostalgia. Quite a few do still crop up though (and even more so, almost every day I get an ad for a Ceefax inspired mug with my team's results on it).

<comment><USER11> I too have fond memories of using Ceefax for my football news pre-internet - the ones I remember were I think "302" for general football homepage or "310" for Scottish football scores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> mikefax

</comment><comment><USER13> Kind of off topic: Judging by the title it's another one of these write-ups on how AAPL is the worst anti-competititve monopoly that is using its position to do bad things. Thankfully it's something completely unrelated.

<comment><USER14> Unless you're familiar with Bad Apple, that is. Sort of a meme, not exactly sure why, I guess the visuals, as far as the song goes I think it's one of the lesser Touhou tracks.

<comment><USER6> At some point the video became the standard thing to show on weird displays. We mostly have Marcan to thank for that [1], I think.

Kind of like porting Doom to prove that you have code execution on something that you never were meant to have code execution in the first place, but instead to prove you can display full motion video on something that was never meant to display full motion video.

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSL0FDcsVJE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSL0FDcsVJE)

<comment><USER15> I remember seeing OpenLase after I developed a bunch of laser projector games [1] [2]. I wish I had known about it back then. Python was a huge bottleneck, and I had to come up with workarounds for the GIL and other problems.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs&t=15s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x034jVB1avs&t=15s)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf- ans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-jf-ans)

<comment><USER16> That's very cool and inspirational! I've been wanting to do laser projection too. Was your laser projector home built or bought online? If home built, do you have some links describing how to do it? If bought online, do you have a link to where you ordered it from?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>