School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+boingboing/iBag+(Boing+Boing) <comment><USER2> The real question is: where is the criminal investigation?

This breaks so many laws it's not funny.

And the kid originally being disciplined _at school_ for something he did _at home_.

It's the first time for a while news like this has made me feel physically sick! Lock them up :(

<comment><USER3> > And the kid originally being disciplined at school for something he did at > home.

This is pretty standard practice. Schools have all kinds of 'code of conduct' things that can get you in trouble for things that didn't happen on school grounds.

<comment><USER2> I know; but in his own home! It's psychopathic.

<comment><USER3> Oh, I agree. Just don't think this is a one-off kind of thing.

<comment><USER2> Indeed. Perhaps (hopefully) any outcome from this will spark off a review of such policies.

<comment><USER4> What scares me is the kind of review that will likely happen isn't going to be one that emphasizes the rights of schoolchildren, but that emphasizes how schools should modulate their activities to stay within the letter, if not the spirit, of the law. For anything substantial to change would require a fairly fundamental reexamination of the role of the school system in the private lives of students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was part of a program on PBS called Digital Nation. The show was very interesting, and there's a section where the school IT administrator demonstrates his ability to pull up a students laptop ... and working webcam.

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learni...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how- google-saved-a-school.html?play)

The relevant part starts at about 4:35. "They don't even realize that we are watching. I always like to mess with them and take a picture."

<comment><USER6> That's horrible!

Also: How the hell did they finance handing out Mac laptops to all their students?

<comment><USER5> Well, the video and article mentions Google and Google Docs about a dozen times...I think Google provided some or all of the financing.

From their website: <http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/09/X339/default.htm>

Showcased by Google as highly innovative school [<http://a.parsons.edu/~jenkc865/339/nyc_is339_cs.pdf>]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Found a PDF of the filing itself:

<http://craphound.com/robbins17.pdf>

It's hard for me to imagine how anyone could think this was an OK idea.

<comment><USER8> This reminds me of the strip search story from a few months ago. A young girl was searched by school officials. As it turned out, she was only carrying prescription drugs.

While the Supreme Court found that the search had been illegal (amazingly, only by an 8-1 majority) they also ruled that the officials concerned could not be held personally liable. This was because it supposedly wasn't obvious to the officials at the time whether what they were doing was illegal or improper.

Now, while I can understand that as a matter of law any court can only rule on the specific details of a particular case in context and they have to worry about a suitable burden of proof, I have to wonder how anyone could think it was OK to strip search a 13-year-old on some vague suspicion about carrying drugs.

[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/25/national/main51125...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/06/25/national/main5112597.shtml)

<comment><USER9> More disturbing about that is this: I face serious consequences for all sorts of things, many of which I don't know are illegal. Some of those things I don't know the legalities of are related to my profession. Yet, while being tried, if I put up a "I didn't know it was illegal" defense, I would be laughed at, found guilty and fined/jailed/etc. Why do the school officials get out of liability for not knowing that their actions were illegal?

<comment><USER8> IIRC, the point was that it wasn't entirely that the officials' actions _were_ illegal. There were some earlier rulings and issues of being _in loco parentis_ that clouded the issue sufficiently that the Supreme Court's hands were effectively tied. Of course, now that the Supreme Court has given an explicit ruling in this case, it would be pretty difficult for anyone to pull that defence in future.

None of this means the actions weren't grossly disproportionate, unreasonable, and abusive in the eyes of any sane, independent observer, but unfortunately that isn't what court rulings are based on.

<comment><USER9> Even worse actually. If the mandatory reporters at the school heard about this girl being strip searched by mom & dad for drugs, they would, without a second thought, report the parents to some authority. But when they do it _in loco parentis_ the same behavior is OK?

<comment><USER10> The idea is that, when the search took place, jurisprudence didn't make it clear such searches are illegal. If the legal system is not sure whether something is a crime or not, then it isn't. In theory, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be particularly sick if the legal case for this came down to deciding whether any adults had their privacy violated. In general, US courts have not been to fond of protecting the rights of children (which makes the children arrested for child porn of themselves trend still more poignant), and so I can easily see the case coming down to deciding if adults were harmed, effectively setting a precedent that it's OK to spy on kids.

<comment><USER11> you bet your ass it's ok to spy on kids; I made em, i can spy on em (sorry kiddos). the school district on the other hand, is not allowed to venture onto my lawn, much less into my house.

<comment><USER12> Why would you think you should have unlimited rights to violate their privacy? Parents already don't have an unlimited right to limit their freedom of movement (e.g. locking them up in their room indefinitly) or the right to use any kind of violence against them. (At least that's the case here in Germany, but I would guess that the US are similar.)

The rights of parents are already limited by the rights of their children, I don't see how you can then jump from "I made em" right to "i can spy on em". We also don't jump from "I made em" right to "i can beat em up" or "i can lock em up forever".

I would agree that some spying should be allowed, but not unlimited (similar to freedom of movement). Putting a camera in the bathroom would definitly not be ok. I would also argue that the rights to privacy increase with age. Secret surveillance might be ok for infants (e.g. baby monitor) but most certainly not for seventeen year old teenagers.

<comment><USER13> The underlying issue here, at least in the U.S., is that as a parent, I'm responsible for anything that happens to my children. Kid misses school, I get in trouble. Kid deals drugs, I can go to jail. Kid has a mental disorder that causes them to be violent and I let them roam free? I am responsible for the consequences. Kid keeps contraband in my car or house? I could lose my car or house to the authorities.

It's highly contextual, sure. I can't beat a kid with a stick because he eats his cereal wrong. But I am expected to restrain my children from hurting themselves, even if that means by using force. I am responsible to control what goes on in my house, even if that conflicts with the idea of increasing freedoms.

In practice, parents give way over time -- the entire idea of parenting is that the child becomes ready to be responsible for these things themselves. But there are lots of edge cases. You can't make blanket statements and have them hold up. That's one of the reasons we have a juvenile court system -- to handle the mixed rights of parents and the children they live with. In general, however, the GP is more correct than not: children do not have rights in the same way an adult does. Just like everybody else with diminished mental capacity, somebody else is responsible for taking care of them, and no matter how you do that, it's going to infringe on what they might of had if they were an adult.

<comment><USER12> Is the law that different? I know that in Germany it's quite hard to demonstrate that you have claims against the parents if their child damages something. You basically have to demonstrate that the parents really screwed up. If not, you are on your own. In Germany parents are most definitly not responsible for everything their child does.

And I never said that children have or should have the same rights as grown- ups. The law should only reflect that parents do not violate the child's rights without it being necessary and justified. And it does in Germany. I don't know about the US.

(Just one example about parent's responsibilities I remember: If, say, nine year old children damage a parking car on their way home from the playground it's imposible to make them responsible but it's also practically imposible to make their parents responsible. Going alone to and from the playground is, as long as it's not too far from home, a normal activity for nine year olds, their parents did nothing wrong.)

<comment><USER13> If you need a court system to determine whether it's necessary or justified you are doing something wrong. There is a large prejudice to leaving kids and parents to work out their own problems. Therefore in practice it's all up to parent to determine how everybody's rights are to be balanced. And that's the way it should be -- parents are supposed to be training their children to uphold their values, culture, and lifestyle. This is one of the reasons we have children. The state should only interfere if harm is coming to the child, and having your folks scan your emails or search your room is not harming you at all. (Not that I approve or disapprove of any specific practices. Like I said, it's all very subjective between the kid and parent)

<comment><USER12> As I said and repeated and really like to repeat here again: children should have limited rights and they actually do have limited rights in Germany. Spying is ok. Reading their E-Mails and going through their drawers is ok. But only up to a point. The parents just cannot limit their rights without limits.

I'm also not really sure why courts should not decide what's necessary and justified. That's all we ever did in our cases in the introductory course on public law and basic rights. (Basic rights in Germany have an influence on how courts have to decide in civil cases - just before anybody says anything about this being only the case in public law, i.e. citizen-state relationships, not citizen-citizen relationships)

<comment><USER4> I have serious concerns about any parent that decides to routinely and casually invade the privacy of their children by reading their e-mails or tracking their web browsing. Children raised in such an environment are being taught that they should not expect to have privacy and that they should will not be treated as human beings in general. That kind of casual violation is precisely what justifies infractions like those documented in the article.

<comment><USER14> I think it's actually a good idea to train them to treat the internet as a space without privacy, because it really is. Not sure if reading their emails etc is the way to go about it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This really lowers ones faith in mankind. What on earth possessed these people? There must have been at least three people with knowledge of this and probably more. _None_ of them thought it was enough of a problem to speak out against it and make a racket if necessary? I can understand one person having a crazy thought and I can imagine him convincing a second. But as soon as a third found out, the whole affair should have been seen for what it was: an invasion of privacy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Don't just sit there fuming - do something.

You can contact the school board's directors at email@example.com or call (610) 645-1800

If you believe that a criminal act may have been committed, you can contact the Montgomery County District Attorney at email@example.com or call (610) 278-3090

<comment><USER4> It seems a bit irresponsible to me to encourage people not directly involved to call the authorities over this. Surely they have been made aware, if only by the media. Often times (again, not a lawyer, so I don't know how to nail this down), charges and complaints can only be filed by those directly victimized by a crime. If people followed your suggestion, then the DA's office would soon be flooded with redundant, useless and perhaps counter- productive communications.

<comment><USER16> The DA's office provides a form on their website to report a crime - they are actively inviting people to report illegal activity. DAs only prosecute where they believe it is in the public interest to do so.

Would you call the cops if you saw a guy on the corner of your street dealing drugs? Would you do something if you heard your neighbour beating his wife? If you would, then why stay silent just because the criminals are a school board?

It is our democratic duty to speak up. It is our duty as citizens to apply pressure to those in power to do the right thing.

What do you think the Christian right would do if they got wind that a school was, for instance, permitting it's students to view pornography? They would be calling the DA, calling the school board, calling their senator in huge numbers and rightly so - that's how you achieve change in a democracy.

It's not irresponsible to do your democratic duty.

<comment><USER17> > It's not irresponsible to do your democratic duty.

It goes beyond democracy. It's about the rule of law and making sure law gets enforced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the Philadelphia Inquirer: "This is the first we have heard of this lawsuit being filed and the plaintiff's allegations," he said today. "However, we can categorically state that we are - and have always been - committed to protecting the privacy of our students."

"Our district was one of the first to provide free laptops to all of our high school students," Young said. "This initiative has been incredibly successful and well received in our school community."

"We have referred this matter to our attorneys for appropriate legal action and plan to communicate with parents and students with more information as it becomes available."

[http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20100218_Suit__Sc...](http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20100218_Suit__School- issued_laptops_used_to_spy_on_kids_on_Main_Line.html)

<comment><USER13> On one hand I really hope the original story is false/overblown, like perhaps the kid was using his webcam in a public setting online and the administrators were simply monitoring. (Which is weird, but not as weird as full-control spying)

On the other hand, if it turns out that the story _is_ overblown, I am getting really, really, really, really tired of web outlets yanking my libertarian chain. True abuse needs to be confronted. If this is baseless rumor or purposeful link-baiting, it does more to hurt privacy (by making people used to such accusations) than the administrators ever may have done.

<comment><USER19> Best case scenario for school district:

Prove via FBI or forensic information security audit team that there was no monitoring software of any kind, no remote monitoring, no logging. Prove that the assistant principal did not know what he/she was talking about when she was directly questioned by the parent.

Prove there was no conspiracy to monitor students in their bedrooms. Prove (this is hard) that the assistant principal obtained the incriminating photo by illegally searching their hard drive. Provide settlement in six figures with half of proceeds going to subsidize free laptop program for inner city Philadelphia.

Put assistant principal on leave, supply black electrical tape fee-free, remove any Remote Desktop capabilities in the OS. Hold press conference with state attorney general in two weeks to jointly demonstrate total innocence.

Worst case: TV crews camped out on Lower Merion High School campus for weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The only thing I don't believe is how a school district could afford to develop such sophisticated software.

<comment><USER21> Taxes.

<comment><USER20> Dunno where you're from, but I've never seen government-sponsored software that actually worked properly.

(I remember reading the unemployment insurance website for Illinois once... it only works in IE. Error page: <http://www.ides.state.il.us/idclaim/alert.asp> )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I knew some folks who worked at a neighboring school district and while laptops never went home with the children, Remote Desktop screen caps of the sleazy superintendent engaged in affairs with teachers and potential new hires were taken. From the stories I hear, the administration in most PA public school systems is disgustingly corrupt.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I can believe that, PA seems to have a lot of fantastically corrupt public officials. This is after all the state with the "cash for kids" scheme, where judges took bribes/extorted money from a private prison and in turn threw thousands of kids into it, plenty completely innocent (e.g. one in a case for publishing a web page that was derogatory towards a teacher). If it wasn't all involving Democrats, it would be worldwide headline news, instead the judges were allowed to plea bargain to quite modest tax evasion charges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if these laptops had a recording light by the camera like most. Wouldn't this have been an immediate tip-off to everyone? Disabling the recording light (if this happened) would have required some effort as well...

<comment><USER25> Uhh...which laptops have a recording light on them? Mine certainly does not.

<comment><USER26> All Macs that have cameras do. And it shows to the OS as a USB sensor. Obviously there must be ways to turn it on without lighting the light,

<comment><USER27> The camera LED is wired in series to the camera sensor itself. You can't power the camera without having the LED turn on.

Conversely, you can't turn on the camera LED without having the camera powered.

<comment><USER26> This is true of new MacBooks, I have been told it is not true of all models of Macs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Another problem fixed with duct tape!

<comment><USER29> There's still the microphone...

But this sort of thing makes me glad Apple at least hardwires an LED which turns on when the camera is in use on all Macs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Watch out for the telescreens, comrades!

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what offense the child committed at home that got him in trouble with the school?

<comment><USER23> Allegedly selling drugs. The "child" claims he was photographed holding "Mike and Ike candy": "Official: FBI probing Pa. school webcam spy case" (an AP story): [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/02...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/02/20/AR2010022000679.html)

<comment><USER23> The referenced article has been changed by the AP; look here for how to get the original: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139404>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sounds like someone in school administration sat in on the highschool students' reading of 1984 and picked up a few ideas.

</comment><comment><USER13> Speaking of school's control and observation of kids not on their premises, wasn't there a case a while back where a kid skipped school and later appeared on TV holding a "Bush sucks!" protest sign? My memory is fuzzy on this, but it seems like the courts upheld the right of the school to punish the kid? Anybody got a link for that case?

Extrapolating from what I don't know into things I can't even speculate on (I love the internet), what if these administrators saw the same kids engaging in obscene political action, like defiling election signs or something? Or witnessed a murder? If I remember correctly, even police who are authorized to eavesdrop are bound by all kinds of rules about what they can observe and what they're forced to take action on.

<comment><USER13> Found it -- it was the kid who displayed the sign "Bong hits for Jesus" and the school administrators were supported in suppressing free speech at a school-sponsored event. I love that kid!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick>

Also for those interested in learning more about the control schools have over free speech, here's a great PDF <http://breitlinks.com/freespeechpdf/speech.pdf>

I guess the point I was getting to was this: if a kid is at home on a school laptop, supposedly only doing schoolwork, is that a school-sponsored event? Would any activity constitute a school-sponsored event? Do school administrators have an obligation to report any crimes they may see when using this? If not, could they be considered accomplices? I would think not, but I'm not sure.

Not only is this an awful invasion of privacy, it muddles up the public sector deep in the heart of all sorts of other individual rights. So if the courts were to rule this legal (which I find highly unlikely) it would make a mess out of all sorts of other laws. In my opinion.

<comment><USER32> If a district employee came home with the student, while I was there, with my permission, and helped him or observed his work, I'd be OK with that. Again, with my permission and knowledge.

If the same employee was peeking through the window ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Technology enabled spying seems to be completely ubiquitous now. Maybe new laws can be passed, but given recent history I'm not optimistic about that. Probably the best strategy is to try to encourage more equiveillance.

As an immediate workaround if you are the parent of one of the children with these laptops:

i) Complain to the school. Make sure your complaint is formally registered (not just verbal on the phone).

ii) Install an operating system onto the laptop yourself, to ensure that there is nothing untoward installed in the background. Preferably use some linux distro, or if you are an ardent Windows fan take a backup image after a new installation which can easily be restored later to overwrite any nasties which may have been installed later.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: [http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/19/laptop.suit/index.html?h...](http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/19/laptop.suit/index.html?hpt=T2)

</comment><comment><USER34> This takes things one giant leap further, but my cousin in high school already has his personal email and home web browsing read by a team of school monitors, thanks to the provision of a laptop by his public high school.

Of course, his parents are unlikely to buy him his own laptop since he's already got one, so what does he need another one for?

<comment><USER35> What's stopping him from buying his own laptop?

<comment><USER36> Money. Students in high school may not have enough money to buy a laptop.

<comment><USER35> Go mow some lawns for a couple weeks... A few hundred dollars isn't all that hard to come by.

<comment><USER4> This is such a "let them eat cake" attitude. A few hundred dollars is a lot to come by for some people, especially at that age.

<comment><USER35> I guess that attitude comes from the fact that I've always had to buy my own cake in life. My parents provided me with food, clothing, a place to live, and other "necessities". They never bought me a laptop, a cell phone, a car, or any of the dozens of other things that teenagers seem to feel entitled to these days.

<comment><USER4> Fine, and good for you. Opportunities aren't uniform, though, and there are students who don't even have those necessities you mention, and have to work for those. I likewise was fortunate to have the opportunity to make my own money at a young age, and so I don't begrudge you that. What I take exception to is the implication that all students have such opportunities, are aware of them, and enjoy the familial stability required to exploit opportunities as they arise.

<comment><USER35> The student the OP mentioned was given a laptop by the school. I fail to see how a _second_ laptop is anything other than a luxury.

I take exception to the implication that the student's parents are stupid for not seeing the _obvious_ need for a _second_ laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> All this proves is that the several countries (USA, UK, others) have legal systems that are inconsistent, at least in the formal systems sense. Starting with "laws" as axioms, and some set of rules of deduction, you can get anywhere: Person X is a pedophile, Student Z behaves improperly on Mars, etc etc.

</comment><comment><USER38> I see a lot of child pornography arguments being made, but what if this was a work laptop that you brought home and your boss spied on you?

Would that be okay?

</comment><comment><USER39> Wait till a school administrator gets the bright idea of doing the same thing on school-issued iPhones and other mobile devices.

<comment><USER40> Schools are issuing iPhones?

<comment><USER39> Meh. Maybe I meant iPods. Too eager to get my flippant comment posted, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If this violated child pornography laws, we will get the remarkable outcome that a school system is not allowed within 2500 feet of a school. So it's not all bad!

<comment><USER42> There doesn't appear to be a claim in the complaint regarding any child pornography laws yet. But who knows--that may change if new photos turn up during discovery.

Here's some thoughts on the Fourth Amendment illegal search claim, at least:

There is this 2001 case, Kyllo v. United States, that held it illegal for the police to use a thermal scanner to detect heat lamps in a guy's house (the heat lamps being used to grow marijuana). The Supreme Court held, in an opinion by Justice Scalia:

"Where...the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant."

Seems to me this case falls pretty squarely within the Kyllo rule. Maybe webcams are in public use, but a spy program connected to a webcam and operated by someone other than the possessor of the computer would probably not be. The webcam photos were of the inside of a home, and those photos could not have otherwise been taken without going inside the home.

<comment><USER43> That's with regard to a crime, however, not a school policy.

You may very well be allowed to die your hair blue, have a "legalize weed" bumper sticker on your guitar case, or an explicit novel in your backpack off campus, but if you do any of those things on-campus you violate school rules and can be punished.

Furthermore, even things you do off-campus can violate your school's code of conduct (writing about how much your teacher sucks publicly on Facebook), and you can be punished at school.

<comment><USER44> The school, however, can not violate the law in order to learn about actions which are against the school's code of conduct.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Darts: Differentiable architecture search for convolutional, recurrent networks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/quark0/darts <comment><USER2> I'm pleasantly surprised by how well it works! No offense to Barret Zoph, Quoc Le et al but the "let's throw 10000 GPUs and TPUs at the problem" approach was frankly absurd.

And a huge +1 for the inclusion of random architectures in the results.

<comment><USER3> Why do you think that throwing compute at the problem is absurd? Arguably that's the approach that produced the resurgence of interest in CNNs.

<comment><USER4> Yes I think the whole point of Zoph and Le's research is to empirically demonstrate the desired trade off of compute cycles vs feature engineering

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool, was thinking about this subject earlier today.

Abstract:

>This paper addresses the scalability challenge of architecture search by formulating the task in a differentiable manner. Unlike conventional approaches of applying evolution or reinforcement learning over a discrete and non-differentiable search space, our method is based on the continuous relaxation of the architecture representation, allowing efficient search of the architecture using gradient descent. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, Penn Treebank and WikiText-2 show that our algorithm excels in discovering high-performance convolutional architectures for image classification and recurrent architectures for language modeling, while being orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art non-differentiable techniques.

Zoph's paper on architecture search: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578)

Concept of architecture search from ages ago: [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e2a71bf7e0ab3ba886c...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e2a71bf7e0ab3ba886cea3/t/5909113c1b631b40f8137956/1493766462349/1989+neural+networks.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not to get existential here, but the analogy to human neural networks is compelling. The algorithm efficiently redesigns itself to fit the data, just like neural synapses reconnect one another as knowledge is learned, to optimize the storage and retrieval of the information.</comment>


I passed on a 55% higher salary - <AUTHOR> https://programmerfriend.com/why-i-passed-on-a-55-higher-salary/ <comment><AUTHOR> Posting this because it bugged me a bit over the last weeks.

Is the only way to increase your salary to jump ships once per year? Also do you think it is valid to stay in a technical role?

<comment><USER2> A few things to consider here. And this is all personal opinion from someone who's been working around the tech world for ~15 years. Your mileage may vary.

1) Is monetary compensation actually the _most important_ thing to you? If the answer is yes, then optimize your career around that and always take the higher offer instead of beating yourself up over alternatives. If the answer is no, then recognize that you're going to be leaving money on the table and the balance of things that are important to you is going to outweigh money over the years.

2) I find that tech workers really often lack perspective on things like this. Talk to some friends in non-tech positions around the country and ask what they make (or go on Glassdoor and look). Chances are you make _way_ more than they do for relatively less work, but are beating yourself up for not making _even more_. It's somewhat irrational if you take a step back and think about it.

3) To answer your question directly, no, there are other options. 1) ask for more money from your current employer while respectfully providing the business case for why you deserve more money. _If they have the money to pay you_ there's a good chance they'll agree and you'll get more without having to jump ship. But recognize that many companies you might want to work for probably can't afford to pay you as much as well-funded company X trying to recruit you. Another option is to pursue additional income outside of your primary job as many people on this site do. A third option is to start your own business and take the risk of tying your compensation directly to the company's performance.

4) It's important to recognize that there is _almost always_ a trade-off between money and _doing things that are actually enjoyable_. Park rangers and zoo keepers make shit for money, but generally love what they do. Finance guys making millions of dollars a year are often completely miserable. See point #1 above.

As an anecdote, I've turned down "more money" options several times over the years and it's almost always turned out to be a good decision because the other junk that would have come with the money would have been awful. Meanwhile, several friends who hopped on the money treadmill are so hopped up on antidepressants and therapy sessions it's a wonder they're functional.

<comment><USER3> Most employers will not give much in case #3

Also on further reading the OP is from a Uni /Rnd Background which is notorious for paying people very badly and from experience when you start at a low salary its hard to get what you deserve.

<comment><USER2> I disagree on both points. It's not uncommon at all for people to negotiate 20%+ raises just by asking and making clear they are willing to leave if a significant raise isn't forthcoming (assuming, of course, that they are actually worth the raise and the company can pay it). On your second point, it's also not uncommon at all for people to very quickly raise their salary coming from a low point (just look at people who went from minimum wage to doing a code bootcamp and getting 3x what they were making previously). Tip on that - if the place you're interviewing with asks what your current salary is, tell them it's whatever your target salary is minus 5-10%. There's no downside to doing so, and no upside to telling them what you currently make.

<comment><USER3> But if they went to a tier one university after 10 years who would be ahead? unfortunately its not going on average the ones who went via the vocational route.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi impressions: the $35 Linux computer and tinker toy - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/01/raspberry-pi-impressions-the-35-linux-computer-and-tinker-toy/

<comment><USER2> I'm not particularly impressed. The Pi isn't a budget computer, it's not for watching Nyan Cat or listening to podcasts, it's a computer sandboxing tool. Yes, it has teething problems but it's been designed on a minuscule budget, had little time in the wild to actually gain any traction and most definitely has not had the time required to mature the supported software. This review is targeting all the wrong things and glossing over what the Pi is actually meant for.

As a media centre or recreational tool, it's useless, but as an educational tool it's not to be rubbished. For $35 a go, I'm willing to put up with a lack of Youtube.

<comment><USER3> I like to think of the RPi as an arduino that can run opencv. Arduinos are nice little devices for getting started in the electronics world, but when you need to do real work, it's nice that the RPi is essentially the same price.

<comment><USER2> It's a good way of putting it. Arduinos are probably more directly rewarding and usable (if you're an Engadget reporter anyway), but if I was setting up an under 16's Comp Sci class, It'd have to be the Pi, just 'cause it's more.. educational?

<comment><USER3> The GPIO pins of the RPi can act as the same digital/analog pins that your arduino has, but if you use the arduino, you're confined to using their processing language to write code.

A typical project for the arduino might be to control a few simple servo motors to drive a small vehicle. Your comp sci class can now teach in python, and have python control the GPIO pins to drive the vehicle.

I think kids would be a lot more excited to learn how to program after seeing how a small $35 device can be used to control a car remotely.

<comment><USER2> Well put. I'm no kid, and it excites me! I think it's important we don't overlook the levelling effect stuff like this has, the same way Gutenberg took books to the masses, things like this take the ability to create with technology to the masses. It's not quite the same level of revolutionary, but it's still remarkable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      because apparently it's the lack of time spent punching
      arcane commands into a terminal that has killed interest
      in computer science

Uh, actually. I think that this review is well off, and it really shows here. The command line is _simple_. Everybody I know learned to program by writing command-line programs. I mean, seriously, int main(){printf("hello world");}. That's incredible for education. Review it as a media center or a browser and you will be disappointed.

<comment><USER5> _The command line is simple._

For certain definitions of "simple" :-)

I'm one of the people who learned of a simple command line (although on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum - didn't have access to nice little unix boxes in my day).

And of course it's a fine and good way to learn how to program.

That said - I've seen a few teens take a different route. They got into MySpace. They started wanted to "tweak" things. That got them into HTML/CSS. That got them into JavaScript. That got them into coding.

Or I've seen people start with hypercard back when hypercard was the biz.

Or I've seen people start with Director (and later Flash) and move on from there.

The other thing I saw several times back in the day when I taught development to non-dev folk was that some folk were really _put off_ by the command line. I remember we had a course that I taught that was built around an GUI IDEish environment where folk were building a little SHRDLU type app. At the same time a subset of the course were on a "beginners C" course that was all command line driven. The C course was good and well taught - but some folk _hated_ it, but made superb progress on the IDEish course. It was _freaky_ to see the same people spend hours ranting about finding files and overstepping array bounds by one on one course, while successfully building basic NLP apps on another :-)

Now - I like the RasPi. It's a cute box. But I'm unconvinced that it's going to make any significant difference in the number or kind of young folk who go play with development tools. I can't really picture anybody (child or parent) purchasing one of these who wouldn't _already_ be the type to poke at a home Linux box or PC in a developerish way.

With the way that cheap PCs get recycled is the price point going to be enough? It's great for hobbyist hackers - but they were _already_ hobbyist hackers :-)

<comment><USER4> All true. I considered mentioning Excel, GUI builders, HTML, and flash (I'm too young to remember hypercard) but couldn't fit it into the post without rambling. That said, nearly everybody ends up at the command line eventually. Javascript error console, learning a second language, building a daemon or a library, what have you. Having started on GUI builders myself and stalled until I moved to the command line, I think that other paradigms are good for catching new programmers' attention, but the command line is where you really learn what's going on, and you have a slightly better time if you start out there.

      (child or parent)

The target that matters is probably the high school classroom. $35 (or $100 if you include a monitor) is small enough to be covered by a bog-standard lab fee. They can't send a desktop home with every student - too bulky, wouldn't be homogeneous, even recycles are too expensive - but you can hand them all rpis.

<comment><USER5> _The target that matters is probably the high school classroom. $35 (or $100 if you include a monitor) is small enough to be covered by a bog-standard lab fee. They can't send a desktop home with every student - too bulky, wouldn't be homogeneous, even recycles are too expensive - but you can hand them all rpis._

Hmm... I guess that makes sense. I'm probably thinking about it from the UK perspective where I don't think it'll have that same impact. At $35 per- student still seems like an awful lot of cash per-student to me if the rants teacher friends give me about getting current text books, etc. are anything to go by.

Let me put it another way. I think there are a bunch of folk who remember getting into development because of small, cheap computers with a simple command line interface. They look around today and don't see those machines, and think that adding them back will produce an influx of new developers.

But the world is different now. Back then computers were "new". Back then people were buying those boxes as "the home computer". For games and word processing and finance as well as "programming" (in 99% of cases they were never used for writing or financials - but they were _sold_ that way :-) I'm going to be surprised if the raspi has anything like the impact that the early Sinclair computers had in the UK for example.

I still hope I'll be surprised though :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The community for RPi is small mostly because it's impossible to get one. They really need to ramp up manufacturing to get the device into more hands. I ordered one 5 weeks ago from element14 but it looks like I'll still have to wait another month or two to get mine.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like how it said this

        In fact, simply launching Engadget was enough to pin the CPU and
        bring the OS to a standstill for at least a few minutes.

with no apparent irony or shame. I mean, some might take that as a sign that their website could benefit from some attention.

<comment><USER7> I thought the exact same thing. Engadget is a blog, it ought to be lightweight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For newbies, here's a guide i uploaded yesterday:

[http://moishtech.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/setup-and-run- asteri...](http://moishtech.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/setup-and-run-asterisk-and- freebpx-on.html)

<comment><USER9> I already have Asterisk/FreePBX running on my Pi and had setup an RPi Wiki page ready for some notes, but work was curtailed due to hospitalization so would you consider popping in some something, or a link, from your excellent guide. I was just working on getting DAHDI going to support conferencing and see how the board coped with that - did you get that far?

<comment><USER8> Sure no problem, not familiar with the RPi Wiki, drop me an email at tapajob at gmail dot com with the details.</comment></comment></comment>


Tearing apart printf() (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.maizure.org/projects/printf/index.html <comment><USER2> Excellent stuff. My couple of notes..

1\. printf may malloc so don't use it in an out of memory situation. Though I think this problem is vanishingly unlikely these days.

2\. printf of floats used to require linking to the math library on some platforms (-lm)

3\. I am pathetically grateful for nice diagnostics you get when you use the wrong % formatter in more recent C compilers. This used to be a _rich_ source of errors and non-portability.

<comment><USER3> Also, don't use printf in a signal handler for the same reason. Any attempt to malloc or free within a signal handler context runs the risk of a deadlock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The registers rdi, rsi and rdx are acknowledged in the article but they don't appear in the disassembly:

      000000000040f9c0 <__libc_write>:
        40f9c0:  83 3d c5 bb 2a 00 00   cmpl   $0x0,0x2abbc5(%rip)  # 6bb58c <__libc_multiple_threads>
        40f9c7:  75 14                  jne    40f9dd <__write_nocancel+0x14>

      000000000040f9c9 <__write_nocancel>:
        40f9c9: b8 01 00 00 00        mov    $0x1,%eax
        40f9ce: 0f 05                 syscall

This is because they are set when the write function is called. The System V AMD64 ABI specifies that rdi, rsi and rdx are used for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd arguments of a function, perfectly matching the Linux system call ABI. The 5th and 6th also match: r8 and r9, respectively. However, the 4th argument doesn't match: system calls use r10 while System V uses rcx. I wish I knew why.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that disassembly a replacement of the call to printf with a call to the write system call? Most compilers have the printf family as builtins to allow removing them from the code entirely: [https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Other- Builtins.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Other-Builtins.html)

<comment><USER6> Compilers will rarely inline all of printf in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish there was a book length guide with this kind of tutorial style writing but haven't found much. Everything I've found on Linux is more like a reference resource

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a good overview of how it all works. On some systems like AmigaOS, there is no libc at all, for example standard input / output is handled by the dos.library in ROM. compiler-specific implementation is delivered as libc.a, which means that only static linking with libc is possible. UNIX® software cannot be compiled at all without modification and without having the 3rd party ixemul.library downloaded from "AmiNet" and installed in the LIBS: assign (which usually resolves to SYS:LIBS, which in turn usually resolves to either DF0:LIBS or DH0:LIBS).

</comment><comment><USER9> "Linux/GNU" is a new one. Not sure if it's a typo or a troll, but if the latter, it's a pretty decent troll if such a thing exists? If it's a typo, geez dude. You're going to give RMS an aneurysm.

<comment><USER10> > You're going to give RMS an aneurysm.

He has much more serious problems nowadays...

<comment><USER11> Surely he has Emacs configured to rewrite all references to the one true name.

<comment><USER12> VIM?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As far as the formatting part is concerned, if you just want to look at an implementation, FreeBSD's is extremely nice and readable:

[https://github.com/lattera/freebsd/blob/master/lib/libc/stdi...](https://github.com/lattera/freebsd/blob/master/lib/libc/stdio/vfprintf.c)

For FRRouting, we decided we want to use Linux kernel style extensions (like "%pI4"), so to get this in a portable way we imported FreeBSD's printf into our code. Since printf() isn't exactly "hot" code getting changed a lot, we considered the maintenance / duplication cost acceptable.

You can see the result here:

[https://github.com/FRRouting/frr/tree/master/lib/printf](https://github.com/FRRouting/frr/tree/master/lib/printf)

[http://docs.frrouting.org/projects/dev- guide/en/latest/loggi...](http://docs.frrouting.org/projects/dev- guide/en/latest/logging.html)

stdio support is completely gone in our copy, WCHAR_SUPPORT is disabled at compile time, locale support is stubbed out/hardcoded to C locale. None of these matter to us. As a result, we can use this printf even in the SEGV handler. (That's only a bonus though, the main reason was extensibility on the format specifiers.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17114919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17114919)</comment>


Rewriting Functions with Fold and Reduce - <AUTHOR> https://maex.me/2019/04/rewriting-functions-with-fold-and-reduce/ <comment><AUTHOR> There was an issue with the content in the article, I've just fixed it.</comment>


On "The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice" - <AUTHOR> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-enduring-grace-of-the-trivial-on-the-battle-between-the-frogs-and-the-mice/ <comment><USER2> Thank you. Enjoyed immensely</comment>


Jekyll on iOS: When Benign Apps Become Evil (while passing App Store review) - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity13/jekyll-ios-when-benign-apps-become-evil

<comment><AUTHOR> Synopsis: _" A novel attack method that ... allows attackers to reliably hide malicious behavior that would otherwise get their app rejected by the Apple review process... make the apps remotely exploitable and subsequently introduce malicious control flows by rearranging signed code."_

Direct to PDF: [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity13/sec13-paper_wang_2.pdf)

I thought the idea of using dynamic analysis to find and exploit private APIs without referencing them in ways app review could find, was inspired.</comment>


Show HN: Multi-user web bash terminal built in Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pocha/terminal-codelearn

<comment><USER2> _Note : security etc has not been taken care._

<comment><USER3> There's a non-techincal problem of making sure that no one does something stupid

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually no. Its purely technical. Here are the steps :-

1\. Limit user privileges <http://linux.die.net/man/5/limits.conf>

2\. Create a jailed environment & copy limited binaries in the environment for him to execute <http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/>

It is pretty big a technical problem. Most of the server selling guys anyway do the above things. They miss the web based shell though.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: What's the Y Combinator review and decision process like? - <AUTHOR>

I was curious to know more about how the YCombinator partners review all the applications they receive? Does every partner read every application? Do you review them together or separately? What kind of discussions do you have about each application? Do you talk more about the people or the idea? How is consensus reached to decide to fund a company or not? etc. <comment><USER2> No. Separately. None except about the borderline cases. Mostly the people, but about the idea if it's either very bad or very good. We know one another so well that most of the time we just have to look at one another; if there's debate it's about whether the founders seem relentlessly resourceful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since all partners don't read all the apps, about how many applications does each partner read and each application gets read by how many partners on average?

Two more questions that are unrelated by don't merit their own thread:

There's a focus now on the maker of MinoMonsters because he's the youngest entrepreneur you've funded. Who's the oldest entrepreneur you guys have funded?

Have you ever funded entrepreneurs that are related? (e.g. parent/child, siblings, etc.)

<comment><USER2> The numbers vary depending on people's circumstances. I think last time I read about 800. We all read all the top ones.

I'm not sure who's the oldest. There have been a few in their 40s, but I don't remember their exact ages. I know we've funded people with kids older than the youngest people we've funded.

We've funded brothers, cousins, and married couples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's a good place for you to find answers: <http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

You can also find information here: <http://ycuniverse.com/>

<comment><USER4> And also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2310110></comment></comment>


The Indictment of Julian Assange Is a Threat to Journalism - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-indictment-of-julian-assange-is-a-threat-to-journalism <comment><USER2> Is it legal for a journalist to assist another person in invading someone's home, for the purpose of obtaining information that could be published?

It is not. It's very illegal, for good reason.

It's also illegal to do the same thing with a computer system.

People need to start thinking about information systems as property, in the same way that your house is your property, and your car is your property. In this case, the information system is government property, which for some reason many people believe gives us special license to take whatever we want from it. But the same principle applies to the property of private individuals, including you.

So do you really want to live in a world where the governing maxim is that information wants to be free, and that justifies any and all means of getting to it, including breaking into secure information systems?

That sword cuts both ways.

<comment><USER3> What specific "principle" are you referring to where you conflate private property with public property? That they are both just types of "property" and therefore the invasion of either is an identical ethical misdemeanour? This seems a rather crummy "principle" to me. There is a world of difference between the two types of property, and it's fundamental to the very definition of a nation - especially the US. Government property is publicly/collectively owned by the citizens of the nation, while private property, while coming with certain collectively agreed responsibilities (tax, licenses, codes etc), is controlled entirely privately by individuals. Invasion of private property as you say is unambiguously morally wrong, but I don't think the same can be said about collectively owned public property. I'm not saying everyone should have a "license" to ransack public property, but if there is an invasion then the morality of the act has to be gauged on case by case basis - if the public property of a non-corrupt state is breached for private gain then of course that's wrong. But what if property of an evil/corrupt regime is breached for the public good - surely the same can't said?

<comment><USER2> Just the principle that the laws that dictate what is and isn't government property and who is and isn't entitled to access it are decided by legislators that were chosen by the people of the United States in an election, and not by Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or any other single individual

<comment><USER3> If taken at face value (i.e. putting aside other theories) Assange, Manning, WikiLeaks et al aren't attempting to decide or write new laws, but rather commit acts in the public good, as they see it. Such acts are capable of transcending mere legality - by that I don't mean that they shouldn't be punished based on the laws of the political moment, rather the state's response to such acts may lay bare either the intrinsic good or evil of the state, as judged by the citizenry of the time. In this way a nation's course can be adjusted, and legislators with different values may come to power. I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Because invasion of public property is currently illegal, it should ethically never be attempted, even when one may feel there is an overwhelming case to, let's say, air dirty laundry in the public interest?

<comment><USER4> I have my own (unpopular) opinions on Manning, though while a clear Patriot in my mind (acting in the interests of the greater good), they did indeed commit a crime, and that the sheer volume of the leak from Manning was capricious, harmful, and beyond what was needed to serve the greater good - do I think 30 years in jail was a reasonable response? Frankly, no - but I think they needed at least a slap on the wrist or worst case 2-5 years - I think justice (the interested in the greater good) was served by pardoning Manning.

In short, sometimes you need to act in the spirit of, rather than the letter of the law to act in the interest of the greater good - but if you overreach, expect the long arm of the law to catch you and punish you for that overreach.

<comment><USER5> Her sentence was commuted she was not pardoned, which is an important distinction.

But still, yes I broadly agree with your position.

Civil disobedience comes with consequence and that consequence shows the states true colors IMO.

<comment><USER4> I'd argue that some consequence was _reasonable_ in this case, as she went far beyond what was needed to achieve clarity for the greater good.

<comment><USER5> Yep. Agreed.

Egged on by Assange as well it seems.

Even when she said that's all I have she was encouraged to go digging for more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's important to look at the actual indictment [1] rather than all the commentary about it, because everyone involved seems to have an axe to grind thanks to Assange's colorful character.

The indictment charges Assange with conspiring with Manning to unlawfully gain new access to a protected government computer system. Specifically:

* Assange gave Manning a CD to boot from on the target computer, containing tools to copy the protected password data.

* Assange received a copy of the password hashes from Manning, and attempted to crack them.

Regardless of what reasons the Obama administration had to proceed or not proceed with the indictment at the time (which we are not privy to), these are very clearly defined criminal offenses in the USA, with much precedent behind them. Had Assange not provided the hacking tools, and had he not attempted to crack the passwords, this indictment would never have happened.

Press freedom and protecting your sources is not the issue here; it's about conspiring to hack a government computer.

[1] [https://www.lawfareblog.com/document-julian-assange- indictme...](https://www.lawfareblog.com/document-julian-assange-indictment)

<comment><USER7> _> Had Assange not provided the hacking tools, and had he not attempted to crack the passwords, this indictment would never have happened._

He has not been under trial yet, so how do you know with such certainty he actually did that?

 _> Press freedom and protecting your sources is not the issue here;_

A lot of very prominent people who deal with politics, activism and journalism disagree with this assessment. On top of that list would be: Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and Noam Chomsky. Their reasoning seems pretty solid. And unlike some media people, they didn't suddenly flip-flop in their positions on such issues.

<comment><USER8> Allegedly then. It doesn't change the nature of the charges.

And who cares what prominent people think ? They aren't the ones who will be judging whether Assange committed a crime or not. Lots of prominent people have defended guilty people before.

<comment><USER7> _> And who cares what prominent people think?_

Well, I happen to value Glenn Greenwald's analysis of the impact this prosecution will have on journalism a tad more than unsubstantiated comments from random people on Hacker News.

<comment> village-idiot I for one will wait for a trial rather than speculating on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So it appears that the author of this piece and the authors of the nearly identical Intercept piece [0] are skeptical of the "conspiracy to hack" charges brought against Assange. From what I understand, the action conspired towards was gaining access to an account on a government network that neither Assange nor Manning had access to ordinarily, with the goal of better covering Mannong's tracks (the other account had just as much file access rights as Manning).

I understand the claim that this was an effort by Assange to protect his information source, but should it really not be considered Bad to login to someone else's account on a government network and spoof your actions with their name attached? Is it so unreasonable to believe that that's somehow too far?

[0] [https://theintercept.com/2019/04/11/the-u-s-governments- indi...](https://theintercept.com/2019/04/11/the-u-s-governments-indictment- of-julian-assange-poses-grave-threats-to-press-freedoms/)

</comment><comment><USER10> No journalist would help their sources hack their employer for more documents. Journalists can take documents their source already has; but helping their source illegally access more documents is against the law.

Imagine if these were physical documents in a safe. A journalist helping the source crack that safe would be very illegal.

<comment><USER9> I thought Manning already had access to the documents in question. The goal of getting into another account was to cover their tracks, not to gain unauthorized access.

<comment><USER10> Breaking into another account is unauthorized access. Doesn't matter if that account had more, the same, or even less access than Manning's account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Assange is in my opinion a slimeball, and not a neutral player, but I don't think he committed a crime - at least not anymore than Daniel Ellsberg did when they published the Pentagon Papers, or for that matter Bob Woodward did when publishing the Watergate Leaks from the FBI - but, like I said, not a Neutral Player - he has his own agenda, which while from time to time may align with the interests of the greater good, is neither benign or uniformly positive. I dont consider the charges against Assange to be any more of a risk to journalism than the charges leveled against Ellsberg in the wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers - and will likely not survive a trial. The assertion that he helped Manning beyond acting as a publisher/dissemination method is absurd and more or less baseless.

<comment><USER11> There is an important difference between Assange and Ellsberg so your comparison of the two isn't a good one:

Assange did not steal and leak the materials, he was the outside party publishing them.

On the other hand Ellsberg _was_ the person working for the government who copied and leaked all the materials _and knew_ he might face charges for that reason.

In this comparison Manning would be compared to Ellsberg. And Assange would be the reporter at The NY Times or WaPo (I'm brain farting here) who published them.

<comment><USER12> He wasn't just publishing them. He is accused of trying to crack the NTLM hash of a DoD admin login.

[https://www.lawfareblog.com/document-julian-assange- indictme...](https://www.lawfareblog.com/document-julian-assange-indictment)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have to say, this makes me sad. I visit HN daily, mostly look at the headlines and rarely engage in the discussion, but seeing what are supposed to be smart, thinking people commenting in here just saddens me. Same goes for the other 1k+ comments on the previous thread.

It seems you people think it's ok to have someone end up like this guy for helping a source get us information we all benefited from. You can say trying to protect this source's identity is conspiracy to commit computer hacking, but your head needs to be buried very deep into the sand to pretend this is anything but the excuse used to get him.

The actual crime here is holding governments accountable. Trying, at least.

I understand most of you didn't love him for exposing problems inside a political party otherwise set to win the election. I really do. I understand he didn't do much to be loved by the public. I understand 10 years of propaganda could make most people change their mind about a saint. But here, too?

I listened to his most recent interview today and I really enjoyed his views. I half expect people to point out this is Russian state media, and yes, the reds are out to get you but can listen to it in the background, that way the watermark can't bother you.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J98ed6oML2A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J98ed6oML2A)

I lost one fifth of my karma yesterday defending the guy, let's see if this comment goes the same way.

Edit: funny enough my comment went to -3 in no time before slowing crawling its way back to +1. Almost like if... Nah.

<comment><USER11> I agree with your sentiment of disappointment in the general response on HN to this. And I also have the same disappointment in the general media's response. I thought Tulsi Gabbard's defense of Assange to Tapper on CNN was spot on, and can't believe it's up to a few politicians to defend journalism _on a news network_ instead of the news network itself.

The previous Obama administration went very hard against whistle blowers, but even they ultimately decided that prosecuting Assange for this would be a step too far.

What's happening seems to be people don't like him for various reasons (fair enough), are blind to the larger issues and chilling effects caused by this prosecution, and so with motivated reasoning decide this is not about politics and is about hacking, he's a bad hacker who tried to crack a Government password, and they're just standing up for some principal of not trying to hack Govt passwords or some such.

<comment><USER14> Would you mind telling me the gist of his comment? Was there a good reason for flagging it?

I could have sworn that you used to be able to still read [flagged] comments here. When did that change, or am I misremembering?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone have the specifics of what was the _exact_ nature of Julian Assange's help in cracking the password? Specifically,

1\. Did Assange send Manning the name of utility that would crack the password?

Or

2\. Did Assange send Manning a link to the utility in order to download it?

Or

3\. Did Assange send Manning a page of Google search results, and/or a Wikipedia page, a technical article or blog post with the computer science fundamentals behind password-cracking?

Or

4\. Did Assange send Manning a technical article or blog post with step by step instructions to crack the password?

Or

5\. Did Assange crack the password himself?

I apologize if this information has been released somewhere and I haven't seen it. In addition, apologize if the questions that I asked sound painfully fundamental or demeaning towards Assange or Manning.

What I am trying to get at is how easy it seems to get in trouble with the law in this case. Suppose someone comes up to me and says they want to know how to hotwire a car (or whatever the term is) in order to steal it, I happen to blurt out that this someone can "just Google that", and then this person goes out and does just that without me being totally sure about their intent to do so. Am I now an accomplice to the crime?

<comment><USER16> Here's the chat excerpt:

[https://twitter.com/kpoulsen/status/1116341065416462336](https://twitter.com/kpoulsen/status/1116341065416462336)

<comment><USER15> Thanks a lot 'r721 ! That's even more worrying where there might be mismatch between the recorded intent and the actual intent.

<comment><USER16> This subthread is quite interesting, apparently "In a conspiracy charge, the outcome doesn't need to be achieved, only there was a "meeting of minds" and steps taken to achieve that end goal":

[https://twitter.com/MalwareJake/status/1116417498168156166](https://twitter.com/MalwareJake/status/1116417498168156166)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IANAL but he's awaiting trial for hacking, not being a journalist. Whether or not the charges are true will be one for the courts to figure out.

<comment><USER18> The article goes to great length to show that the supposed crimes (except for the one password, maybe) are things that journalists do. It's even more shady because his co-conspirator, and the one who was charged with and convicted of the crimes that are unambiguously illegal, has been pardoned.

edit: I don't really care about the difference between pardon an commuted sentence because they both are a get out of jail free card.

<comment><USER10> >except for the one password

If he did attempt to break the password hash, he conspired to hack military systems. I don't see why someone who attempted to break a password hash for access to classified documents shouldn't be prosecuted, journalist or not.

<comment><USER19> Don't mil guys have DoD cards or some such? Why would hacking a password help anything? You still need to have a card for you account, no?

<comment><USER20> At least back then SIPRNet had a password login for normal users. I've been out for nearly a decade, so I don't know if the situation has changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps I'm cynical, but the outrage from the media over the arrest of Assange smacks of duplicity for me. After all, it was Asaange who helped leak documents which then the media could write about. He was almost doing their job for them. Distant echoes of when Gizmodo found an iPhone 4, and some tech journalist ( Who would have loved the scoop) scolded them.

<comment><USER22> I don't understand where the duplicity would be in that. "The media" (your term) used documents from Wikileaks in their reporting and now are outraged about the arrest of Assange? There is nothing incongruent about that.

Did I misunderstand you?

<comment><USER23> Some in the press are alleging he's an "activist", not a real journalist[1], which seems self serving.

The reason, they hope to "define" what s true journalist is, so that they can remain gatekeepers of who journalists are and what is news. Baffling.

[1][https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/opinions/julian-assange- activ...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/opinions/julian-assange-activist-not- journalist-ghitis/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Assange offered to try to crack a computer password for Manning

>"Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log onto the computers using a username that did not belong to her," the indictment says. "Such a measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of disclosures of classified information."

It's up for a trial to determine how much / if any of that happened, but if it did it seems well outside the boundaries of what a journalist should do.

I don't expect a journalist to be assisting someone in accessing information illegally. If the journalist is just given it fine they should be protected, but this seems a good step beyond that.

The article talks about how it would have helped protect that source but it's clear it also would have provided more information / assisted in that process.

Let alone a concern I would have if I were a journalist (I'm not) that providing my source with some cover of another real world person could seriously harm that other person.

</comment><comment><USER25> Reporting on leaked documents is one thing. Helping your source crack passwords on government computers is another.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I guess it's a little bad to help crack a password but it also doesn't seem like a huge deal. Part of the stuff that Assange leaked included footage of American helicopters murdering people - which seems like a much bigger deal. If I crack your password and read your email and discover you're a serial killer, then yes, I've done wrong and should be punished for the minor crime I've committed, but you should be punished for the serial killing too.

In my view Assange should be sentenced to a hundred hours of community service immediately after the people responsible for planning and executing the vastly more consequential crimes Assange revealed are sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.

<comment><USER27> It doesn't feel like a crime serious enough for extradition to me.

He is guilty of skipping bail, which is a serious crime. It's possible that there's merit for what Sweden wanted to extradite him for, and the courts should look at the merits of extraditing him to Sweden

<comment><USER25> Sweden has dropped those charges though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yeah, the Assange case is going to tie everyone up in knots, because he's practically the definition of 'complicated'.

Everyone's going to take a different side, based on:

\- He helped make available information genuinely in the public interest about US technically-not-quite war crimes.

\- He's alleged to have committed sex crimes in Sweden

\- He arguably delivered the presidency to Trump

Edit: it's kind of an ethical version of rock-paper-scissors - no matter what position you take, Assange himself has provided a reason not to take that position.

</comment><comment><USER29> What if Rachel Maddow had a source inside the IRS who's trying to get at a folder that has trump tax returns and other financial details but doesn't have access. Source says they can deliver everything if Maddow can get some passwords on a thumb drive cracked. Maddow says she can't but to keep trying.

</comment><comment><USER30> > The Indictment of Julian Assange Is a Threat to Journalism

The Indictment of Julian Assange Is a Threat to Russian Agents.

FTFY. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19635988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19635988)

</comment><comment><USER31> So. Mind you I haven't really followed what Assange did or didn't do. But it seems like a lot of people are angry at him because they think he is responsible for having Trump becoming president. Before that, the same people seemed pretty supportive of him.

<comment><USER12> I mean it came out that he/wikileaks were communicating and coordinating with the Trump campaign and Assange requested that Trump ask the Aus govt to appoint him as Aussie ambassador to the US as payment for helping him win.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the- sec...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret- correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738/)

So many that supported him earlier don't support him anymore because he was delaying and timing leaks and selectively leaking things to help get Trump elected. I personally felt he lost the moral high ground after that.

<comment><USER32> The charges in question are still regarding those earlier leaks, though. One can reasonably argue whether they were morally right or not, or even that it's too complicated to simplify like that - but it has to be argued in that original context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems everything I want to say here is likely to end up as [flagged].

If only I wanted to cast vague and unsubstantiated aspersions; then I'd be fine.

</comment><comment><USER33> The material support claim is he helped direct how to hack passwords, but I've only seen claims of that, and the Obama administration didnt think it was true at the time.

But now, that claim is back and the same week Ecuador receives 4.2 billion... Great Timing.</comment>