9th circuit upholds denial of preliminary injunction against dish's hopper - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/victory-fair-use-and-consumer-choice-ninth-circuit-rejects-networks-appeal-fox-v

<comment><AUTHOR> To be clear, the EFF story doesn't mention this, but what was appealed was _only_ the denial of a preliminary injunction against Dish. (We'll see if they change the title, I changed it from the page title to remove the editorialization by EFF that lost some of the real meaning)

While the decision is quite good, it used a different standard of review than will be used if this case goes to trial and is then appealed again by Fox.

So, it's not the end by a longshot, but, is very good so far.</comment>


How do smaller groccery shops catalogue all their items. I need to access it - <AUTHOR> Hey, How do smaller groccery shops catalog all their items and how would I go about accessing it. <comment><USER2> Call a few of the stores, and ask the managers.

</comment><comment><USER3> The UPC database is public.</comment>


Cable TV's Password-Sharing Crackdown Is Coming - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-20/cable-tv-s-password-sharing-crackdown-is-coming <comment><USER2> The Netflix policy here is a good compromise: limit the number of concurrent streams for each account and then turn a blind eye to password sharing. That way sharing passwords is allowed in practice, but also has a clear consequence - you may be blocked from playback if too many of your family members (or friends) are watching simultaneously.

Implmenting stream limits is tricky, as there are edge cases that are hard to get right. However, common DRM services like Widevine and Playready have adopted the extensions necessary to implement stream limits, so there are already "of-the-shelf" solutions.

In short, this is a non-issue with available technical solutions.

Full disclosure: I'm an engineer at Netflix who works on cable set-top boxes.

<comment><USER3> So I tried out a service called "Playstation Vue" a while back, and I'm very inclined to believe that "stream limits are tricky"

There were dozens of times in the 2 months that I had the service that I was unable to stream, because I had hit a "concurrent streams" limit.

Switching between devices, having my browser auto-login (which would take up a "slot"), And the fun bug they had for a while where if I started a stream on my phone, then "cast" it to a chromecast, it would count as 2 streams, and due to a limitation where playstations were given their own dedicated "slots" meant that 2 people couldn't watch on a chromecast at any given time even though I should have had 5 simultaneous streams allowed.

I ended up canceling the service because of it, and I appreciate the limits that Netflix has much more.

<comment><USER4> The better solution would be to always start the new stream, but disrupt the oldest one.

<comment><USER5> ...and a counter for how many times a new stream started so that you can send warnings to an account for bad behavior?

...and then the customer complaining that their poorly-behaving device keeps getting interrupted?

Disrupt the oldest one, sure, but make sure to have some sort of clear indication of what happened and why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One way to solve this is to look to Spotify. They changed their restriction: only playing music out of one device; into a feature: you can now control your music from any device. In addition to this, they used things like playlists, the discover weekly recommendations and other strategies in order to make it annoying to share an account. WHILE also having the barrier to getting your own account to the point where the annoyances (listening to ads, or paying $7.99 a month) are still better than pirating (possibility of low quality, no seeders, sketchy websites).

Of course this isn't to say this is how cable companies should exactly go about solving their problem, but by cracking down on their PAYING subscribers, they will drive more people NOT less to either pirate, or share passwords.

<comment><USER7> Spotify's way of handling is completely terrible and i am very tempted to cancel. I have a bunch of Echo's around my house and the Spotify family plan which i share with my wife . My wife can't play music on our the Amazon Echo if i am using Spotify elsewhere on my phone, or laptop because of the one account one stream rule Spotify implements..

You can't create fake accounts for your Echo's, they actually make an effort to verify you actually exist with some identity database. All to prevent a legitimate customer from being able to use their service.

<comment><USER8> Have you even tried searching your problem..?

[https://www.spotify.com/us/family/](https://www.spotify.com/us/family/)

[https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Family-Premium- mul...](https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Family-Premium-multiple- devices-playing-own-music-simultaneously/td-p/1349248)

<comment><USER9> My Sonos is logged into Spotify with my own creds. So if I'm driving around using Spotify and my wife fires up the Sonos with my creds saved to it, it stops playing in my car.

She's got her own account on our family plan, but she's not going to change the username/password to hers every time she uses the Sonos (and me do the reverse).

I suppose I could generate a "dummy" family member account used just for the Sonos, but then it wouldn't have my playlists....

<comment><USER10> I'm fairly certain that Sonos allows multiple streaming accounts for each provider. I currently have three Apple Music accounts registered on my Sonos, and have had multiple Spotify accounts registered in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "The CEO has said that one unidentified channel owner had 30,000 > simultaneous streams from a single account."

This is more about bad implementation (and possibly design) than anything else, then. ALL of the other online services I've worked on have had a reasonable and enforced policy here. It's not that hard to do (there are harder corner cases if you _do_ allow customers to do things like family sharing, but it's still not rocket surgery).

</comment><comment><USER12> No problem. I want to stream the Olympic Channel, and I even pay $100 for a cable subscription that includes it.

Oh, I can't stream it though. Uverse only lets me stream from 3 of the NBC Sports channels, and not that one. Guess I am going to just cancel the cable I pay for and use someone else's Comcast login instead.

I don't mind paying for streaming service, and when HBO cracked down I bought a subscription that night. But some services you can't even pay for if Comcast doesn't run cable to your house.

<comment><USER3> I don't like pirating content. I feel it's akin to stealing even though nothing physical is "stolen". (not trying to impose this on anyone else, this is just a personal belief of mine)

However there is one exception, and it's when a company will not allow me to purchase a tv show or movie.

All too many times I've watched seasons 1-4 of a show on something like Netflix, only to find that the most recent 4 episodes of season 6 are on a cable "on demand" service, and season 5 is only available as a DVD box set purchase, with the first half of season 6 literally 100% unavailable anywhere.

I want to pay for their product, they have the product, in most cases they created the product! But they aren't selling it because of reasons that I honestly don't care about any more. I will happily steal that content without remorse.

<comment><USER13> The BBC is an excellent example of doing it wrong, and giving me the choice between nothing, and piracy.

<comment><USER14> Have you looked at [https://acorn.tv/](https://acorn.tv/)

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I agree that's one of the best ways to access that content, but they can do so much better!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can only see a crackdown on this as resulting in inconvenience for paying customers. There are so many options for piracy that people will probably find another way to watch streams almost immediately.

I suspect that if you invited friends to sit on your couch and watch a broadcast with you, the content companies would claim that as piracy too, since your friends are not necessarily paying subscribers.

<comment><USER16> Right, in most cases, esp with live sports, these things are already restreamed. In some cases, I have paid for the official streaming service and used the pirated one because it was more performant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > About one-third of internet users stream cable TV without paying for it by > using credentials of someone they don't live with

There is no way this is true. Not saying that it isn't a problem, but statements like the above are approaching the same level of BS as when the ad industry says most people would prefer to trade their privacy for the privilege of being manipulated by targeted ads.

<comment><USER9> Maybe "one third of internet users WHO stream cable TV do so without paying for it" ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > But the prevalence of password sharing suggests many of those customers > [...] are watching popular shows [...] for free, robbing pay-TV providers > and programmers of [...] advertising dollars.

Can someone help me understand how it is robbing them of advertising dollars? I understand it's robbing them of fees (though I don't like the double-dip model and especially loathe the concept of retransmission fees). But I don't understand how more "free" eyeballs are costing advertising dollars. In fact, I would think more eyeballs would be an advertiser's goal.

<comment><USER19> They probably get advertising dollars per subscriber. The people stealing passwords arent counted as subscribers so they dont get revenue for those.

<comment><USER18> Ah, so they are being "robbed of advertising dollars" because they assume that password stealers would otherwise be legitimate subscribers? Ha. In the meantime, a non-subscriber viewing something isn't technically taking anyone's money and this type of weasel-wording keeps public opinion against them.

Also, they would be wise to get advertising dollars per viewer as TV streams are often legally multiplexed in a household. This had traditionally been the case in the pre-digital world w/ Nielsen ratings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This could work, but only if they treat the people affected as customers and potential customers rather than as criminals.

\- make it easy for the legitimate customers to actually watch their streams. Instead of "too many streams in use", try "click on this link in your email to start watching"

\- make it easy for free-loaders to watch. Instead of "too many streams", say "click here for an instant 3 month free trial!"

Or something like that. You have people who want to watch your stuff. That's a very valuable lead, don't throw it away by offending them.

<comment><USER21> >> click on this link in your email to start watching

How would that work with my Roku?

<comment><USER22> use the smartphone in your pocket to click the link?

<comment><USER21> So I now need two devices to watch something on my TV? I would need to wait for said email to show up to click the link? What if my email server is down, no TV?

What if I use an email address I share with my friends and family which defeats the purpose?

<comment><USER23> If you don't have a readily available email address for things like password resets and two step verification, can you please tell us how you managed to travel back in time to 1998?

<comment><USER21> I do have such a thing, don't be willfully obtuse. Those that you mention are for things that require security for me and my stuff, not to watch TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pointless. If you crack down on this successfully, people will just find another way. If they don't find another way, they'll move to different content. Too little too late. We're way past game over.

</comment><comment><USER25> Password sharing is a symptom of cable companies inability (or indifference) to innovate on either content or price. They are driving millions of people a year away from their services and the idea that cracking down on password sharing will bring people back to them is quite silly.

Speaking anecdotally, I cut the cord years ago and do have some shared password access that I use, but purely "because it's there". I got along fine without it and will continue to do so if this crackdown gets me.

<comment><USER26> I think you're confused about the role of the cable companies in all this.

The cable companies are just the pipe. Cable company margins on video are low. Content providers control the content production and price.

Unless you're suggesting the solution to the problem is more vertical integration (a la Comcast NBCUniversal)?

<comment><USER21> From the article:

"The chief executive officer of Charter Communications Inc., which sells cable TV under the Spectrum name, is leading an industrywide effort to crack down on password sharing."

Seems to me the cable companies are heavily involved. Which makes sense because they would like to sell the cable TV access just as much as the Internet access. If customers only need streaming and no cable TV then I would imagine they would stand to lose quite a bit of revenue.

<comment><USER26> I was responding to this bit:

>Password sharing is a symptom of cable companies inability (or indifference) to innovate on either content or price

Because video is barely profitable and HSD is very profitable, cable companies definitely do not like to sell TV as much as they like to sell HSD. Cord cutting is not as big a deal for the cable companies' profitability as most people think. If anything, the bandwidth required for streaming (now in HD but soon in 4k and then in VR) is so high DSL becomes less viable as a competitor and cable companies can raise prices for HSD even faster.

<comment><USER25> by "content" I was mostly referring to how that content is packaged and delivered. Cable customers are paying huge premiums for channels they don't want but have no other choice.

<comment><USER26> That is by the design of the content providers

<comment><USER27> This is mostly correct.

For cable/satellite/OTT, most of the _package_ (Viacom, Time Warner, NBCUniversal, etc) content providers bundle content and get a large lump sum up-front per annum from each distributor. However, premium a la carte content providers (HBO, Showtime, etc) receive a small lump sum plus a a bulk of the per subscription fee.

For Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime - content is bundled and paid for up-front per annum on a multi-year contract. For example, Paramount/MGM/Lionsgate/EPIX distributed solely through Netflix thru 2014 and then switched sole distribution to Amazon Prime.

Hollywood traditionally likes cash up front because production and marketing costs are "bursty" rather than evenly distributed. And this is because the success to failure rate (risk) of entertainment products is too abysmal to easily obtain reasonable financing rates from lenders or reasonable terms from investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >The more the practice is viewed with a shrug, the more it creates a dynamic where people believe it's acceptable. And it's not.

This kind of diktat is actually pretty comical. Social consensus is pretty clear on how little people care about this, but for cable companies isn't not only a profit impact but a deep moral wrong. Might they not have more success by understanding exactly this disconnect in mentalities over streaming services, rather than trying to pump petulant propaganda?

<comment><USER29> > Might they not have more success by understanding exactly this disconnect in > mentalities over streaming services

There's no disconnect, because they don't actually believe this. It's just the line they're using, and the line that their lobbyists and lawyers will use. Until there's a robust technical solution (maybe facial registration?), they need to try social and legal ways to maintain and boost their margins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The screams of a slowly dying business model. This is what I expect them to be very effective at shutting down sharing streams, and then getting a small boost of new subscribers, followed by an increase in the rate at which subscribership goes down. And as the revenue falls, and contracts expire, more and more companies will skip the 'middle man' of the cable provider and offer their stuff on aggregating services like Apple TV, Roku, or Amazon Video.

<comment><USER31> Most of the money you pay into your cable company goes to the broadcasters and not the cable company. Thats why cable companies have so many strange fee's. Thats about the only way they can make profits. -Not saying its right, or that I support their model. Nor do I agree with how much profits they are garnering off people with no choice in most places.

<comment><USER32> Actually, if you dig into the documents, you'll discover that cable companies make thin margins on their television/content broadcasting, but they make _orders of magnitude_ worth of margins on providing broadband internet service. I pay Spectrum about $90/month for something which costs them literally just over a single dollar/month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If they cut the shit and stop splicing the same 3-4 minute ad cut into their on-demand streams every five minutes, maybe we can talk. Especially if they cut the ad providers that go ass-over-bean-box on 50% of their loads, forcing you to reload the stream, and rewatch the same show about eight times to get to the end, because they have disabled fast-forwarding and seeking.

</comment><comment><USER34> I am going to cancel my cable if I have to reenter my password more often. It's already a huge pain in the ass.

</comment><comment><USER35> > About one-third of internet users stream cable TV without paying for it by > using credentials of someone they don't live with, according to Parks > Associates.

I call bullsh*t.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is absurd: I pay for two simultaneous streams on Netflix and thats what they give me. What businesses is it of theirs who is watching them? My car has two seats: it's none of the manufacturer's business who sits in which seat.

We shouldn't let these self-righteous selfish neanderthals try to justify their egregious rent-seeking.

</comment><comment><USER37> I watch any live sporting event I fancy, for free.

Once you know where to look, the cost is about a minute of your time to pick which particular feed, among many, to watch.

Do you want the home-team's broadcaster, the visiting team broadcaster, and do you want that in another language, maybe? It's à-la-carte.

A cable company password is never involved.

In the future, the old-fashioned companies we know today who don't "get" it will not exist. This Bloomberg article illustrates why, albeit indirectly.

<comment><USER38> Usually when people use the term "get it" on this topic, they're referring to a better business model that sustainably supports all the participants in the marketplace. You don't seem to be using the term that way. Rather, you seem to describing ordinary theft.

What exactly is there to "get" from your comment? That you're gleefully infringing copyright? If so, yes, we already know you exist. You're not adding anything to this conversation.

(By the way, this comment also applies to ad blockers in web browsers. If you don't like ads, that doesn't mean you still get to view the content without ads, any more than you still get to attend a concert whose ticket prices are too high for you.)

<comment><USER15> Actually, I think to your point about blocking ads, if your server sends me data I am entitled to render it any way I choose, omitting any element I am not interested in (ads, etc). Similar to how it is not infringing copyright to leave the room or not look at the screen during a commercial break on broadcast television.

If you don't want ad blockers to view a site then find a technical means to prevent it. You are not going to convince me that I have a moral obligation to consume psychologically manipulative content that is unrelated to what I am seeking to view.

<comment><USER38> Don't be surprised when that happens. Entire websites sent as a single PNG, or Widevine increasingly determining how/whether you view content. It didn't have to be this way.

You can frame this as civil disobedience against duress, or attack a strawman of morality (which I never brought up). It's not that complicated or subjective. It's a business transaction. I'm saying if you don't like the store, don't patronize it. You're saying that if you don't like the store's prices or how they do business, then you get to take the goods without paying.

<comment><USER39> > Entire websites sent as a single PNG,

Interesting. Are there any sites that you know which do this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Pretty dumb, like most "anti-piracy" time wasting. They should start releasing video DRM-free, if they want to do anything positive about it.

</comment><comment><USER41> Expected, after the VPN crackdown.</comment>


A Year in the Life of a Software Consultant - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_A-arPsOTAimQg8x2eChtOOBC26wwSGWV4vmL3m_jt0 <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I posted the article since I've found few examples of techies detailing their work life (e.g [1]). Interested to know how others work.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-does-a-typical-day-of-a-quant- tra...](https://www.quora.com/What-does-a-typical-day-of-a-quant-trader-look- like)</comment>


MacBook Pro 2018 performance can be improved by limiting power consumption - <AUTHOR> https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-2018-Much-more-performance-with-a-few-clicks.317552.0.html <comment><USER2> Apple will address this in software I think

<comment><USER2> [https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/07/apple-releases- software-f...](https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/07/apple-releases-software-fix- for-macbook-pro-slowdown/)</comment></comment>


Brazil arrests Facebook executive in row over police access to data - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/brazil-arrests-facebook-executive-row-over-police-data-155215319.html <comment><USER2> Just to clarify stupid arguments. The federal police was asking information like ip address from organised crime pages, they use Facebook as other social network pages(In this case actually we are talking about Whatsapp). Don't have ANYTHING TO DO WITH SPY CITIZENS. Like PCC([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primeiro_Comando_da_Capital](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primeiro_Comando_da_Capital)) has an official facebook page. There is many people in Brazil who stole cellphones, kill people and post on Facebook(Yeh, I know is ridiculous dumb, but people does). Definitely the IP address will help the cops. Please stop to talk about stupid spy conspiracy without understand the "why". They arrested Facebook's VP because they don't know what to do anymore, because Facebook always deny the justice requests. Oh, if you think that they are protecting your data, you are just dumb as a stone, they are just protecting them self.

(Sorry for my poor english, it isn't my first or second language.)

<comment><USER3> Try and struggle through this please

[http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome- privacy.html](http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html)

Or read the google-translated version into Portuguese

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=pt&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=pt&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fmartinfowler.com%2Farticles%2Fbothersome- privacy.html&edit-text=)

It explains very well why this is no trivial issue to Americans nor to tech people.

Also, your drugs should be legalized or decriminalized, anyway. It would put all the bad guys out of business and bring the entire drug market back within regulation. Portugal did it and it's considered a success, why can't Brazil?

<comment><USER4> That article includes a link to an official Portuguese translation, which is still available at

[http://lixo.org/blog/2013/08/05/privacidade-protege- pessoas-...](http://lixo.org/blog/2013/08/05/privacidade-protege-pessoas- incomodas)

<comment><USER3> ah. oops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brazil also arrested Google Brazil CEO/Country Manager a few years ago.

[http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/26/tech/brazil- google/](http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/26/tech/brazil-google/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Judges in Brazil certainly have a way with foreign companies & countries. For example with immigration issues (fingerprinting[1], random deportations) they will go tit for tat.

[1] [http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/12/30/brazil.usa.immi...](http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/12/30/brazil.usa.immigration.reut/)

<comment><USER7> Simple reciprocity.

<comment><USER8> All governments should extend the courtesy that US extends to their citizens to Americans entering their country. Perhaps that will encourage Americans to encourage their government to treat non-Americans better.

<comment><USER9> So... You're suggesting Americans have some kind of power over the American government or something?

<comment><USER8> Well it is suppose to be a representative democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Put simply, they are in contempt of the court disregarding the subpoena. This, under Brazilian law, warrants the arrest.

They could fight the subpoena but decided to do nothing, so, I kinda agree with the court on this one.

<comment><USER11> It's not that simple: it seems that the issue isn't that WhatsApp/Facebook have wilfully disregarded the subpoena, but rather that Brazil isn't happy with their assertions that the information requested doesn't exist. WhatsApp has previously stated publicly that they don't retain any messages once they're delivered; if this is true, it's not strictly that they aren't willing to comply (though this may also be true), it's that they _can 't_ comply.

<comment><USER10> I agree, and if they CAN'T comply, they should address it on the court, not on a public statement that has no valid legal value.

That's what it comes to. The court requested three times, increasing the fines each of the tries and it was received with [legal] silence from Facebook. That's why they went ahead and issued the arrest warrant.

<comment><USER12> The odd thing is, there are so many ways you can avoid an arrest legally in Brazil as long you have the legal resources. They could have thrown a _liminar_ (injunction?) to avoid handing the data or, as a last resort, an _habeas corpus_ to avoid the arrest.

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

Our ex-president Lula has just avoided questioning/testifying on a corruption case. He's suspected of having gotten an apartment from construction companies as a bribe. It was on someone else's name, so he doesn't pay taxes on it etc (also illegal apart from the bribe). This is much more serious than this Facebook case, and there's so much evidence now that it would be a slam dunk case in any decent country. And Lula got out of it legally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Brazil is a sovereign country and they are free to define their legal system any way they want. Facebook needs to comply with Brazilian law, not the other way around.

If you do something illegal you should expect punishment from the law sooner or later.

<comment><USER14> I'm not saying Facebook is right, but following the law isn't necessarily the right thing to do, neither need one always expect punishment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Greenwald at The Intercept writes a lot about American spying and overreach in data access. I'll be interested to see what he writes about Brazil's activities such as this.

<comment><USER16> Probably about as much as you see from him on the subject of Russia and China. The Intercept is about as unbiased as Fox News - lots of criticism directed towards the US and its allies, silence on every other country.

<comment><USER17> Lets be fair here:

1: Greenwald is an American so the actions of the US government are relevant to him and his readers.

2: Greenwald is a lawyer, trained in US law, therefore the actions of the US Government vis-a-vis US Law is a suitable topic for him to cover.

3\. China and Russia have been oppressing their people and their peoples rights for a long time. Neither have a constitution that is supposed to enshrine the rights of the citizens. SO there isnt much of a story there i.e. russians have no constitutional right to privacy, when that privacy is invaded by the state because the state has enacted laws that allow it to do that, there is no story. Plus even if there were there are probably russina lawyers and journal;ists who would be more knowledgeable on the subject and could bring it to the awareness of their russian readers. I doubt many russian media watchers read a lot of greenwald.

4\. The US sells itself as the land of the free, so their hypocrisy makes the story worthwhile/interesting. China and Russia have never really hidden the fact that they will spy on anyone and everyone that they can. US says "we are your friends" and then spies on everyone regardless of their status as friend or foe.

But you know handy to throw in a straw man argument to try and deflect attention away from the US government and make the journalist the bad guy in this situation.

<comment><USER18> > China and Russia have been oppressing their people and their peoples rights > for a long time. Neither have a constitution that is supposed to enshrine > the rights of the citizens. SO there isnt much of a story there

Counterpoint: If something goes without saying for long enough, people stop knowing it, because they _never hear it._

The "drunk looking for his keys under the streetlamp" model of news reporting is indefensible. Let it go long enough and you end up with a large population of belligerently uninformed people, like we have now, who think the United States is the most violent, oppressive, and brutal government in the world, and that Americans have no human rights. This has real world consequences of an increase in relative political power and legitimacy for genuinely oppressive states.

<comment><USER17> Im not saying that it's right but it is not Greenwald's fault that this is happening an blaming him for it is essentially trying to discredit what he has brought to light because of what he has not covered. If that isnt a trick straight out of the CIA/NSA handbook then I dont know what is.

<comment><USER15> Identifying bias or double standards is journalism 101. Spies do that too given they have to collect information too. Yet, wondering about a guy who ran off with the Snowden leaks on his own for selfish gain... even to Schneier's surprise... isnt CIA/NSA propaganda. It's a legitimate concern about his motives and/or moral high ground he tries to leverage in debates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What if FB fired the VP? Pay him a nice severance, pay his legal fees but cut him off from being able to comply with the court order.

At that point the authorities are left holding the bag.

<comment><USER20> Then they go to the next guy in line.

<comment><USER21> Wonder if they would hire someone already in prison, purely to be a placeholder...? :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Brazil may be shooting themselves in the foot -- they're trying to create an innovation industry around Sao Paulo and these things will just create a chilling effect that chases a huge bunch of industries out of the country.

</comment><comment> ng-user God I'm happy Yahoo is dying, that was disgusting to read.

<comment><USER23> Um, "Don't shoot the messenger"???

<comment> ng-user Guess I didn't make it obvious enough, their website is what I found disgusting.</comment></comment></comment>


Why files need to die - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/why-files-need-to-die.html

<comment><USER2> > As we go about our daily lives, we don't open up a file for each of our > friends or create folders full of detailed records about our shopping trips.

We don't? I look up my friends in a contact book on my iPhone - each friend's entry is a conceptual "file" in a "contact book" folder.

I keep my shopping receipts - files - in a folder - a drawer in the kitchen. (Okay, I don't, but hypothetically I could.)

If we're talking about documents meant to be shared, that's fair - a simple flat file may not be enough to store everything you want to know about it, you'd want something more akin to a versioning system, or a wiki.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr: because files are an "old" concept.

Hmm. The QWERTY issue is completely incidental and a total red-herring. And just because something is old doesn't mean it should or needs to be replaced.

Needless to say, no alternative is suggested.

At the end of the day, no matter how we think of or use "packages" of data, they are just that - coherent bits which make up a meaningful whole: whether that's an image, 140 characters of text, a pdf document or whatever. I'm struggling to see how the concept of a "file" can be super-ceded.

</comment><comment><USER4> A file is a file whether you call it data glob, group of bits, or Beelzebubba.</comment>


Black market Blackphones get sent a kill message that bricks them - happy-go-lucky https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/silent-circle-bricks-grey-market-blackphones-with-os-update/ <comment><AUTHOR> Slightly off topic but related to the product: how can a device using Android be considered safe and trustworthy privacy wise? The maker can surely choose FOSS only Android and encrypt communications, but the moment they add a binary only device driver it can do whatever it wants since it runs with kernel privileges (ie, sniff virtual keyboard, listen to conversations, access messages, contacts, photos, documents etc). If I'm not mistaken (please correct me in case I am) there's still no phone out there with open device drivers, which IMO translates into giving only a false sense of security to the user. Moreover, if I buy a security oriented device and it has a remote kill switch, I would expect at least to be the one and only entity in control of it.

<comment><USER2> Having a FOSS phone would only be considered trustworthy if it had been reviewed by an entity you trust. I'm not aware of any mainstream OS that has been fully reviewed for security, so realistically the concept of a "trustworthy" device in that sense doesn't exist.

Even if such an audit was done perfectly (a very serious and difficult undertaking), it would be a point in time assessment, so would become less relevant as new code was committed.

Basically you have to trust some group of people to run a modern computing device/environment, it's just a question of who and how much...

<comment><USER3> Proprietary software starts off with a high level of trust - trusting just one company. But it can never progress past this.

The advantage of FOSS is that the set of who can audit the code is _open_. It starts small, but grows with popularity and remains _agile_ \- eg doesn't necessitate transitively trusting whatever nation-states a single company is vulnerable to.

<comment><USER4> "Proprietary software starts off with a high level of trust - trusting just one company. But it can never progress past this."

The first systems that were trustworthy were done by proprietary companies with independent evaluation of the product, signatures on source/binaries, and/or optional generation from source on-site. This became standard practice in security- and safety-critical development. You can scale it to as many people available for review often under NDA for the source itself but not signatures or binaries.

<comment><USER3> Sure the company can improve their process, but you're trusting the company to do that and do it properly - a user's relationship is still effectively rooted with one company. It's generous to call this "high", but forgive me for trying to make the point palatable to people who believe an autocratic company makes for something trustable.

A company can do things that are similar to Free software (eg allow customers to build from source), but in the context of modern discussion I'd say that's just taking on aspects of Free software.

<comment><USER4> Im responding to this claim:

"Proprietary software starts off with a high level of trust - trusting just one company. But it can never progress past this."

It's totally false. The evaluation side has been done more times than I can count. It doesn't even have to start with a single source. Many products started as a collaboration of multiple organizations checking each others work that share the result. Another model is CompSci inventing something with details open at the start, patented, and then turned into closed source product. Finally, there's Shared Source models where you can have, fix, or extend the source so long as you're paying. Burroughs B5000 (1961), first system resilient to 0-days, was distributed in source form to customers.

You were oversimplifying proprietary systems then attacking that simplification.

<comment><USER3> I appreciate your historic perspectives, but it feels like we're merely quibbling over terms/framework on this one. I don't think _I 'm_ oversimplifying, more like it's current mass-oriented software that essentially falls into two basic camps, Free and proprietary, with various small tweaks to each model. For example, something like a mass-NDA for every user is going to fail for consumer-oriented software, whereas a company contracting a discrete number of external auditing decomposes into trust through branding.

I'd _love_ to find a commercial model that could work for consumer-oriented Free software [0], and I think it could sound quite similar to something you describe. It's just that those type of multi-party collaborations have been pulled into the attractor of free-as-in-beer, at least as far as the code itself is concerned.

[0] I say Free instead of Open, because I can envision software lacking just FSF freedoms 1b and 3 could get stuck in a bad state as well. Like say everyone knows there is a bug and how to fix it, but is legally prevented from doing so.

<comment><USER4> "but it feels like we're merely quibbling over terms/framework on this one. I don't think I'm oversimplifying"

You were. You made a blanket statement about the whole, proprietary model. In recent comments, you've changed your statement to talk about how the model is applied in the general case. As in, popular implementations vs all implementations. I'll reply to the new comment anyway.

"For example, something like a mass-NDA for every user is going to fail for consumer-oriented software, whereas a company contracting a discrete number of external auditing decomposes into trust through branding."

That's basically what happened. It could go further where lots of users get the NDA with cross-checks but not mass on high-volume scale. It helps if the software is designed in such a way where it can be shown it doesn't manipulate the system. I once proposed memory safety, safe API use, and sandboxing as a start on that. Automated tools could assess those. One could go further with information-flow labels tracking confidentiality or integrity enforced by compiler, runtime, or hardware. A few CompSci projects do it but not mainstream.

"I'd love to find a commercial model that could work for consumer-oriented Free software"

They pay for it. Then they get it. The source is in a FTP server or something somewhere. Things like branding, enterprise features, and tie-ins keep them buying from original supplier. Been done in a few ways although always a risk of clones.

"[0] I say Free instead of Open, because I can envision software lacking just FSF freedoms 1b and 3 could get stuck in a bad state as well. Like say everyone knows there is a bug and how to fix it, but is legally prevented from doing s"

Dual-licensed (proprietary + GPL) covers this. A few, quick proposals follow on non-free trying to approximate free. One could do a shared-source license that allows bug fixes. One could allow redistribution of software to other _paying customers_. One could cap what's to be paid or for how long before what's purchased becomes perpetual. One can make it go FOSS if it's EOL'd or gets under certain amount of developer time/contributions (tricky measure). Recent proposal was time limit on how long a version or individual product would be paid with it going FOSS after that time limit.

So, quite a few options here. One thing that's important to remember is that FOSS will always have a disadvantage over benign, paid model. The disadvantage is you can contractually ensure those being paid are doing support, bug-fixes, enhancements, pen testing, etc. They can also cover the pro's to do it right. They have lawyer money for patent trolling that will come their way. Combined with shared source like above, they might also get most or all benefits of FOSS with benefits of paid. It's why I'm highly interested to see companies experiment with hybrid models. A few have showed up here but nowhere near enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So does this achieve anything other than fuck the people over who (probably unknowingly) wound up buying such a Blackphone? I can just imagine waking up, looking at my phone which has been working perfectly well up until that point, and being told it now has been bricked for some licensing issue.

This seems really scummy and would drive me away from their products forever.

<comment><USER6> > I can just imagine waking up, looking at my phone which has been working > perfectly well up until that point, and being told it now has been bricked > for some licensing issue.

If I were to buy a Blackphone, I would do it because I wanted security, and because I trusted the manufacturer to provide it. The problem with security is that just because my phone appears to be "working perfectly" doesn't mean that somebody isn't eavesdropping on everything I say.

A counterfeit Blackphone, in other words, is completely defective and untrustworthy, no matter how well it appears to work, because my trust in the manufacturer is broken.

<comment><USER7> But how does that lead to the logic of turning the hardware into a piece of trash, instead of just informing the user?

<comment><USER8> If you don't turn the counterfeit phones into trash, there is no incentive for people to buy the real thing. This hurts the sales of Blackphones and the revenues and profits of the company which invested cash into developing the product - and harming their ability to provide security for genuine customers.

<comment><USER7> So, protect the profit first, protect the customers second?

I don't exactly see how it bumps up the profit though. You have a bunch of obviously interested customers, who want your product, and then the company has come out with "Actually, we expect you to buy the phone twice, because of a mistake that may or may not of been your fault"

<comment><USER9> The customers didn't buy a first blackphone, they bought something vaguely similar, but counterfeit. They literally bought a backdoor.

Remember the hassle WhatsApp got for failing open?

The Blackphone+SilentOS is an actual crypto device for people who believe they need crypto. It needs to fail closed. This may cost some people $100, but save their lives.

This also gives the customers the ability to sue the sellers, or at least push for refunds via the sales platforms.

<comment><USER7> WhatsApp got that hassle because it failed open and didn't clearly inform the user that it was doing so.

If the user is informed they have a non genuine device that is not safe or secure (e.g. like Windows' nag notification), then they can't expect it to work like a secure device, but more like an ordinary phone.

Then both normal consumers (who will continue to use the phone since they didn't really care too much in the first place about safety) and security conscious consumers (who will re-buy asap) would be more inclined to use the same brand in the future

<comment><USER9> I can't imagine that anyone worldwide was going to buy their first and only smartphone, but decided to spend more to get a special high-security black phone, and is then without a phone because of this. And even if they were, I'd rate the safety of even one user who'd accidentally click through the warnings and make a call that should have been secure but wasn't, as paramount.

If my smoke/heat/etc detector starts to fails I don't want it silently dropping back to a smoke-only detector. I want it to start beeping loudly and refuse to stop.

> If the user is informed they have a non genuine device that is not safe or > secure

Having to flash a new OS onto it is an appropriately sized clickthrough for a warning of that magnitude. Like being woken in the night to change a smoke- detector battery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These don't sound like counterfeits. This sounds like Blackphone doesn't have control of its supply chain.

Oh well, more reason to never consider purchase of one of their devices. Shame because they actually are doing some decent software development.

<comment><USER11> It sounds like they have a problem with ghost shifts.

The factory they contracted to assemble their phones is running extra shifts off the books and selling the extra phones for extra cash on the side. This happens all the time in China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I stopped buying high-priced electronics on eBay or through Amazon resellers. Number of counterfeit products is staggering and superficial quality is high (exterior is usually close to perfect)

<comment><USER13> seems like this is a perfect case to use ebays/paypal's refund policy that (apparently) always favors the buyer. The policy that people were using to steal from sellers by pocketing the product and mailing back junk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How can someone trust a "real" Blackphone if they source production out to a factory that they have no control over?

<comment><USER15> Do all sellers of security devices manufacture them in house? Now that you mentioned this it really does sound like a serious problem for providing any kind of guarantee..

<comment><USER16> Most of them do, yes. IronKey and Yubico both actually extensively document their manufacturing process, which is in-house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm honestly surprised that enough people buy Silent Circle phones that these countermeasures would be worth it to anyone.

<comment><USER18> Especially with their public claims of openness/open source vs. actual steps taken to provide source: [https://www.quora.com/Will-Silent-Circle-silence- critics-who...](https://www.quora.com/Will-Silent-Circle-silence-critics-who- demand-they-uphold-their-promise-to-release-their-source-code-If-not-can-they- be-trusted).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The implication in the story is that the contract manufacturer made extras and sold them on the black market. How common is that?

Does anybody know who made the phones?

<comment><USER20> It is a common strategy of manufacturers in China. You, as the designer, get ripped of by the very people that you pay to produce your product. The quality can match the original because they use the same factory, same tools, same processes that are used to produce the original product. The manufacturers simply work another shift, e.g. night shift, or do a few more runs. In some cases, manufacturers clone the whole factory that is used to produce the original product so they can increase output of counterfeit goods.

<comment><USER21> This is why devices like game consoles and at least a few models of cell phones have a "geneology" database maintained by the official manufacturer, with originating key material in the hardware, and additional activating key material provided to the device at certain well-controlled manufacturing stations. You simply can't make a working device without going through that process.

[Just bricking Blackphones is a terrible move; letting the users know their phones were counterfeit and leaving them on would have been a far better move, IMHO]

<comment><USER19> So if this is a known problem with known solutions, then the fact that Blackphone didn't do any of this makes them look like amateurs. Maybe one shouldn't rely on them for security...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If this is not their phone, made by them, how can they brick them? How is that legal?

<comment><USER23> It is legal because they don't license their software with a license ensuring freedoms of the user. The user is not free to use their software.

That's the point of the GPL. If the users took care of only buying products including only GPL'ed software, then they would have the freedoms: 1- to use the software, 2- to copy it for their friends, 3- to get the source to audit it and modify it (so they would be free to remove any backdoor that wouldn't exist in the first place for this very reason), 4- to compile the source to binaries and use them to replace the provided binaries (so their may increase their level of trust of the software they run on their hardware).

Do not buy products that come with freedom-restricted software!

<comment><USER24> After all that the GPL still doesn't help these users unless they are _also_ able to spin up and maintain the various servers & services the software also relies on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So there is this company that markets an "enhanced privacy" device and the marketing material shows a home screen with Chrome, Play Store and Google App.

Thank you for the laughs!

<comment><USER26> plus they can remotely disable your device without your approval, very safe...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> These phones are on sale for less than 100 euros, a very good price given the hardware specs.

The genuine phones sell for 662€ with a one-year subscription.

</comment><comment><USER26> TLDR privacy oriented phone can be disabled remotely by someone else than you or in other words how to ruin your reputation in 5 minutes

</comment><comment><USER28> Someone will make a patch for this, just wait.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can't IMEI also be cloned though?

<comment><USER30> In England tampering with IMEI is _serious business_ , and carries a potential 6 month prison sentence.

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/31/section/1](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/31/section/1)

I'm a bit surprised that isn't the case in the US.

<comment><USER31> Good grace, this is an overreaching bill.

This also affects Bluetooth and WiFi MAC addresses, even of laptop computers (!), if going by the letter of the law. Trivially changed by userspace tools, and IIRC Apple randomizes the MAC addresses to prevent people tracking other people's devices.

Edit: It gets even worse, in theory anyone distributing software capable of changing MACs or writing tutorials on how to do this commits an offence. Just look at [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/31/section/2](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/31/section/2), it's madness.

<comment><USER30> It's poorly drafted, but it's only ever used for people who change IMEI. I think it's only used if they change the IMEI on stolen phones. But yes, it's yet another bad English law passed as a kneejerk response to something or other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> ebay isn't a black market...

</comment><comment><USER33> Seems a bit funny, that a device that is meant for privacy allows remote control by its masters.

<comment><USER34> What are they meant to do?

They build a secure phone. It gets ripped off by the manufacturer and resold by anonymous eBay people who can install whatever backdoors on the phone. Then the people using them are being snooped on - exactly what they don't want in the first place.

Bricking the phones is the right thing to do.

<comment><USER3> They're supposed to _not have this capability_ , if they actually built a secure phone!

<comment><USER35> What, the capability to install updates? So you'd be fine with a secure phone that the vendor could never update?

<comment><USER3> The vendor shouldn't be able to push an update, no. And to the extent that this update was pulled by users without a diff/sanity check/etc, then that constitutes a de facto _push_. In any case, any update should be completely revertible (which doesn't prevent against data leaks from hostile code, but does prevent against denial of service).

This type of _attack_ is just a _test case_ that any truly secure device has to defend against. I'm not advocating a specific mechanism of avoiding this behavior, because there's obviously work to be done here to come up with a better mechanism than "every user audits every line of source before installing". It's just that this design work _has to be done_ \- "security" based on trusting a company is easy, and doesn't differ appreciably from what say Apple already provides.

<comment><USER36> Your demand is impossible. Any software update mechanism relies upon trusting the software vendor.^ The only thing you can ever hope for is that the update mechanism is capable of trusting that the update has not been tampered with in transit.

^ with the debatable exception of software distributed in source code form in a language you're able to audit and compile yourself, though you'd still be vulnerable to cleverly concealed exploits

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> BlackPhone is scam and snake-oil. Cloud "privacy" with remote control. Need privacy? Use burners.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's fair to call Blackphone "Scam and snake-oil" just because it uses cloud features and has remote control.

What's fair to say is that you're implicitly trusting Silent Circle to be both competent and benign. But then running pretty much any modern computing device requires you to trust various groups of people in that regard, so this isn't that different really.

<comment><USER38> Trusting third parties is, in general, not a great approach to privacy.

<comment><USER36> Trust is the only way security works in practice. Have you personally audited all the software and silicon in your secure device?

<comment><USER38> That's an entirely different type of trust than trusting someone who says "I swear that I won't look at your data".

<comment><USER36> It's a bit easier for a cloud provider to look at your data surreptitiously, but you apply that very same "I swear that I won't look at your data" trust upon every software and hardware vendor from your USB keyboard to your internet router.

<comment><USER38> While that is a good point, it's easier to break open your keyboard and ensure it's not emitting RF than it is to audit a site that may be under an entirely different state.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: No Coin – A browser extension to block coin miners - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/keraf/NoCoin <comment><USER2> Today I read that The Pirate Bay tested this new form of monetization (running a miner in you browser). I thought that might solve website monetization finally. We still have to figure out stuff like battery draining on mobile but it is the first step and I can buy some Monero which is well suited for JS/CPU mining (or in other words, it doesn't have a huge upside when mined on GPUs).

And what do I see here? That before it even started people are fighting it.

Found this solution better than ads and infinetely loading ad-tech JS files.

<comment><USER3> I'd rather pay with my wallet than with my battery. And I'll pay only what _I_ buy. Lock me out if I don't pay, or tell me to GTFO, and I'm totally fine with it, but you can't pick my hypotethical-pocket because I opened up your page. This is like charging window-shoppers.

And like a sibling comment says, if this catches on, most web sites will do both, i.e. ads + client-side mining.

One nice day publishing industry will no longer be an industry but a group of non-profits, which won't have to sell stuff, and publish way more objective and high-quality stuff.

edit: grammar

<comment><USER4> I'd argue that ads already pick your pocket just for window shopping the page.

There's no such thing as Adblock for video streams on Twitch anymore; the ads are burned into the stream, so you can't block them. (Hopefully YouTube won't switch to the same tech.)

Is that picking your pocket just for watching a video steam? If not, why is a video steam materially different from consuming a website?

<comment><USER3> Ad money comes from a third party, not me. Whereas with this coinhive thing, I'm paying with my computational power and my battery (which is the most important thing here). Traditional internet ads increase resource consumption too, which is part of why we block them. Ads that are part of a video are different, you can skip them, and they cant breach your privacy (I dont know what Twitch are doing, though).

<comment><USER4> (You can't skip them, sadly. The video won't buffer until the ad has fully buffered, which happens in real time.)

<comment><USER5> Baked in v.s. player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Title could be improved - this is for Google Chrome only. Anyone using an ad blocker can simply add...

      https://coin-hive.com/lib/coinhive.min.js

...to their custom block-list instead, no need for an extension.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not exactly Google Chrome only, you can run it in any Chromium based browser such as Opera, Yandex, Vivaldi, etc... And I do also have plans to port the extension to FireFox (I haven't read their docs yet but I guess it shouldn't be too hard).

Regarding the custom list for an adblocker, as said in other comments, the idea was to keep it separate from adblocking. Coin mining in the browser is a different issue. Where ads are tracking you and visually interfering with your browsing experience, coin mining, if abused, is eating your computer ressources resulting in slow downs (from high CPU usage) and excessive power consumption. You might be OK with that and not with ads, or vice versa. Or you might just want to keep ads blocked entirely and just enable the coin mining script for a minute to pass a Captcha. That's why I believe having a separate extension is useful.

<comment><USER7> Here's the addon with the same code on firefox: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no- coin/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-coin/)

Can you please share your email to make you the owner of it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For context: The Pirate Bay is now launching a javascript-based Monero miner in all visitors' browsers to mine coins for them in the background (possibly as an alternative to ads).

<comment><USER9> As long as there is disclosure of it and the mining is relatively efficient, that is a very interesting business model. The site collects revenue relative to the amount of time users spend on the site and not the number of page/ad views. It is also a pretty seamless way to integrate micropayments from users into a site. Handing over a credit card number or similar is a big barrier to overcome while this requires no setup for the user. As a user I might prefer this to ads in certain circumstances.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > and the mining is relatively efficient

That's a huge "if"; it's my understanding that most cryptocurrencies are currently only efficient with ASICs.

<comment><USER9> Efficiency doesn't mean profitable. Traditional miners require profitability while this system would only require some unknown level of efficiency. The equipment costs is basically negligible because you are using idle capacity of existing hardware. The marginal revenue also doesn't need to beat electricity costs because the people paying the electricity are not the ones who are receiving the revenue. For example if every $1 of electricity generated $0.90 of revenue, that would be equivalent to the site paying a 10% fee on the micropayments they receive. That would likely be perfectly acceptable to both sides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this an extension and not a filter list for existing adblockers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because it is different than ads. On a site, you might want to leave ads blocked for privacy reasons but just enable the miner to pass the coin-hive Captcha for example.

<comment><USER11> In uBlock you can just click the big off button and then click it on again. I see that No Coin has a 'disable for 1 minute' button, which is slightly different, but probably not worth a separate extension for most people.

[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/How-to-whitelist-a- we...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/How-to-whitelist-a-web-site)

<comment><USER12> OTOH I'm ok with ads, but not ok with miners. So wouldn't make sense have an ad blocker that doesn't block ads.

People seems allergic to browser extensions this days. I also get the "why is this an extension and not a filter?" on a non ad-related extension.

<comment><USER13> Things is, all the funcionality to block certain content has already been created and tested (at length) in uBlock Origin.

Using a different addon for exactly the same purpose but for different content is the worst kind of separation of concerns.

<comment><USER12> Browser APIs to block content are fairly simple. There's no reason to use a huge piece of software if you just want to block some urls.

Ad blockers have their own issues, including trust about maintainers intentions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wait, people are actually doing this? Using client-side resources not to deliver content or applications to clients, or even to visibly deliver things like advertisements, but to divert user CPU cycles for their own purposes?

I want to know more about this. Are they seeking any kind of consent from the users, or even disclosing it to the users? If not, I have serious doubts about the legality of this behavior.

<comment><USER15> The Pirate Bay just tested that yesterday, apparently. They bundled a Monero javascript miner with some of their pages. The funny thing is that while the legality of that is questionable enough for the more reputable websites not to go down that road, TPB is already shady enough to pull it off - and their users don't really have anyone to complain to.

It's worth noting that this isn't exactly a new idea - some MIT students had a project a couple of years ago that was basically that, except they tried to turn it into a startup. The viability of it was questionable back then as well.

<comment><USER16> I'm intrigued. Do you know what the startup was called?

<comment><USER17> Not OP, but this is probably it:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For those wondering how it works, it seems to be a blacklist. Here's the crux of it:

        chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener(details => {
            // ...

            // Is domain white listed
            if (isDomainWhitelisted(domains[details.tabId])) {
                return { cancel: false };
            }
            return { cancel: true };
        }, { urls: blacklistedUrls }, ['blocking']);

It's kind of sad how much boilerplate is required to write a simple extension. I wonder if there's a framework for saving labor while building cross- compatible browser extensions. Then again, maybe the world doesn't need yet another JavaScript framework.

<comment><USER19> That's what was attempted with Greasemonkey and Tampermonkey, wasn't it? Userscripts and so on.

<comment><USER18> I loved using those tools, but I think many browser extensions today are more involved than small shim scripts. A lot of them have CRUD operations, data editing interfaces, css/image assets, etc. I was thinking about something a bit more composed like create-react-app.

<comment><USER20> I wrote a grease monkey script that allowed you to annotate a website and save the notes permanently to local storage. It had all of the above features. The only real limitation is the sandboxing.

<comment><USER21> Do you have a link to the script? Sounds like something I'd use.

<comment><USER20> I don't think I have a copy since userscripts died, but on cursory inspection this Reddit script looks like it does similar things - [http://userscripts- mirror.org/scripts/review/170091](http://userscripts- mirror.org/scripts/review/170091)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Use of excessive resources should be a privileged action, isn't something like coinhive a malicious vector?

<comment><USER23> No more than the existing trend of 'web app' entirely Javascript rendered websites. My solution to both is very simple: I run JS only from white-listed domains. Sure this breaks many sites but, well, fuck those sites.

<comment><USER24> Someone mentioned a CoinHive Captcha. This is usually when my NoScript approach breaks. There would be no way around enabling the captcha script, therefore enabling the miner. Normally I then... fuck those sites, but what if that's reaaaally becoming a thing and say StackOverflow does it? You would need some way of adjusting allocated browser resources real fast and precise. Only way I can think of right now...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's funny because just yesterday I was at a hackathon and made AddCoinPlus [1], a browser extension that uses a very tiny bit of your CPU to mine for non-profits of your choice. People really loved it because it is your choice to do so or not, it's not a website making your CPU work for their own profit.

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

</comment><comment><USER26> Leaving the problem with battery life behind for a moment, this really has the makings of a perfect solution to the monetization problem imo. It's decentralized, democratic, etc.

Also when taking the problem with battery life into consideration, if the website notifies you that it does this you're free to find another website.

</comment><comment><USER27> _The extension is simply blocking a list of blacklisted domains in blacklist.txt._

Some way to detect that a non-visible page or service worker is using excessive CPU time or GPU assets would be useful.

How long until porn sites start doing mining in the background?

<comment><USER28> >How long until porn sites start doing mining in the background?

How long have porn sites _being_ doing mining in the background ?

Remember that porn sites are always the front line of innovation on the web, some are probably already doing it

<comment><USER29> > Remember that porn sites are always the front line of innovation on the web

Often stated, rarely with any actual support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Issue at uBlock's GitHub – "[Request for block] Crypto Miners": [https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/690](https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/690)

</comment><comment><USER19> Asking people to mine for you on your website is just like asking customers to wash the dishes at your restaurant. Even if you have a ton of them it is still annoying and doesn't pay.

</comment><comment><USER31> Trading content for processing power seems like a logical and satisfactory solution to an age-old problem- people wanting free stuff, businesses wanting to stay in business. I think it's a beautiful example of new economic models enabled by tech. Are people's main concerns battery life/power usage?

<comment><USER32> My concern is that I can't leave a tab open long-term without risking a performance hit. Of course that's also true now (with ads or heavy JS), but those generally aren't deliberately trying to induce high(er) CPU loads.

<comment><USER31> It makes sense. Maybe a cryptocurrency could be used to symbolize that transaction, and limit the amount of allowed processing power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I really like the idea of a proof-of-work captcha, but can it work? The hash requirement needs to be low enough for mobile devices, but scraping and automation are usually done on powerful servers. Is there an equilibrium where it's comfortable for end users, but a real deterrent for servers?

<comment><USER34> No there isn't, that's why it won't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Imo: instead of a separate extention this should be a maintained blacklist for ad blockers.

<comment><AUTHOR> From another comment: "The idea was to keep it separate from adblocking. Coin mining in the browser is a different issue. Where ads are tracking you and visually interfering with your browsing experience, coin mining, if abused, is eating your computer ressources resulting in slow downs (from high CPU usage) and excessive power consumption. You might be OK with that and not with ads, or vice versa. Or you might just want to keep ads blocked entirely and just enable the coin mining script for a minute to pass a Captcha. That's why I believe having a separate extension is useful."

<comment><USER35> I understand, but still I don't want to maintain a thousand separate tools that basically do the same thing: block websites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Current generation browsers are blocking [bad] adverts and plugins. How long before we see hard CPU time limits on scripts? I can't imagine it's hard to implement but what a waste of developer time.

This is why we can't have nice things.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is there a way to exploit the miner scripts? I mean in a way: Never trust the client? If the proof is calculated on the client, how does the server confirm that the proof is correct?

<comment><USER38> Generally, checking the solution is trivial. Hashing billions of hashings to find what you want is want takes resources.

<comment><USER37> So when I intercept the script and send a bad proof back, it would not do any harm? So no [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/) for the bad miners? I guess, we need browser extensions that just send the correct proof to my own wallet then?

<comment><USER38> The bad proof can be trivially checked and discarded.

If you want the results of the mining it makes more sense to run yourself with a native miner than run on the browser.

This coinhive thing only makes sense [to run on a browser] because they're exploiting the resources (hardware and electricity) from the visitors.

<comment><USER39> It is true for checking final solution, but what in case of partial results? I am not sure about monero but with BTC I could claim I checked range assigned to me and found no solutions. I guess mining pools have solved it in some way.

edit: I see that Coinhive pays only for solved hashes, so there is no way to "harm" them, and for website owner it makes no difference if hashes are not computed at all or invalid results are submitted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Can anyone explain to me like I'm a five year old why would anyone need to block coin miners on their browser and why they would be mining there in the first place?

<comment><USER41> Mining consumes power. If you're on a mobile device, that power is limited and will result in you having a flat battery sooner than you otherwise would.

They are used because the coins that are mined can be sold and the money used to pay for hosting and food.

<comment><USER42> I do Eli 5s every day:

Mining makes the battery die quicker.

They are mining to make money so they can buy food.

A silly man pays the bad man money for the tiny baby numbers they find in your phone when they mine it.

You can still watch Frozen. The battery isn't dead yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The only reason i don't like browser based mining for websites is due to it all being contingent on volume of visitors and not the actual content of the site.

</comment><comment><USER44> Tried the Chrome extension, but it just toggles between "Enable No Coin" and "Unpause No Coin." I didn't disable it, but I have to enable it? Repeatedly? And I didn't pause it, so why would I be unpausing it? Where do I look if I merely want to find out whether it is currently 1) enabled and/or 2) paused? And how do I toggle either or both of those? Does it need to be this complicated?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a bug that is happening when the background script doesn't run. It only happened to me in an outdated version of Opera. Updating my browser fixed it.

It is a very early version of the extension, improvements are on their way.

<comment><USER44> I've got the browser sandboxed... and adblocked... and ScriptSafe'd and sometimes HTML5-blocked... so maybe that has something to do with it too! Will test it again with all that stuff turned off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How long until a major consumer site like Facebook or Twitter starts mining on users' timelines? How much could they generate?

</comment><comment><USER46> Worth noting that I found jsFiddle running coinscript this morning

</comment><comment><USER47> Though I'm opposed to the idea of web sites leeching mining time from me, honestly it would probably use less CPU than so many websites that deluge me with video ads…

<comment><USER48> Maybe, but I already block those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This would make a lot more sense as a blocklist for ublock than as its own extension. Actually I wouldn't be that surprised to learn it's already blocked.

</comment><comment><USER50> It would be nice if there was some way to integrate charging status into this. I would be fine donating a few seconds of CPU/GPU time for an ad-free experience, but I would only want to do it if whatever device I was on was running off of wall power and not it's battery.

</comment><comment><USER51> This made me think: I wonder if there are WebAssembly based miners?

<comment><USER52> Coin Hive already uses WebAssembly: [https://coin-hive.com/#hash- rate](https://coin-hive.com/#hash-rate) (3rd paragraph under 'My Hash Rate Seems Low').

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> And thus the arms race begins.

</comment><comment><USER54> The only reason anyone would do this is if you actually wanted to take down torrent sites.</comment>


14 Megapixel, Six Monitor Ubuntu Karmic Setup  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jasonmorton.com/?p=24 <comment><USER2> In 2001, I bought my first LCD, a 19" Princeton Graphics monitor for $1200. In 2004, I bought two Dell 19" for $600 each to replace the original LCD. In 2007, three Dell 19" LCDs for $400 each to replace the two Dells. Now, I can buy six 23" LCDs for approx. $200 each for a total cost of about $1200. It's funny how the number of monitors continues to increase while the total nominal investment remains constant.

I had been talking on and on for years about getting a 6-LCD setup and I'd even predetermined what I'd do with each LCD in a 3x2 layout (top1: IM/Chat, 2: Graphics Editor, 3: Putty/Shell, bottom 4: FTP/Explorer, 5: Text Editor, 6: Browsers). My techie friends laughed at me but at a resolution of about 2048x1152/LCD, I would have ample resolution for just about everything and I wouldn't have to alt-tab at all. My productivity in web-dev would absolutely sky-rocket. And since could rig my own stand instead of buying a $600 one, I could get my dream-setup for about $1500. I had built my workstation in 2007 to easily handle 6 DVI ports when the time was right. Now all I needed was an excuse to splurge.

Last month, two of my Dell 19" died, leaving me with just one monitor. My wife joked that I needed new monitors because she didn't wanna be married to some one-LCD guy. She practically kicked me out of bed and told me to find my 6-LCD X-Mas gift. I spent three hours surfing Newegg, Dell Outlet etc. and finally found my dream setup. Right before I clicked 'Place Order' I yelled out "Honey if I click this button, I'm never leaving my computer room." I don't think she heard me but I clearly did and for some weird reason I didn't like it. I cleared my cart and started looking for a laptop instead.

I've always been anti-laptops because come on, how can you even compare a 3 or 6-LCD setup to a laptop with a tiny screen, tiny keyboard, and crappy batteries. However, something went off in my head at that point and I realized I didn't want my perfect 6-LCD setup even though it was right there in front of me. I have wanted 6-LCDs every single day for the past decade - ever since I started making web-apps. But it was when I yelled that I don't want to leave my room that I realized that I actually do want to leave my room. Now I take my laptop with me everywhere I go and program whenever/wherever I want to. It's a very big change for me and my productivity has definitely taken a hit. However, my desire to code has risen and that is important. Who cares if I'm capable of being highly productive if I don't feel like it most of the time? I guess the take-home lesson here is that it is not the specs but the environment and experience the setup fosters. I still might buy my 6-LCDs someday, if I ever have a crazy do-or-die startup idea, but for now, I'm just happier with a laptop.

<comment><USER3> > (top1: IM/Chat, 2: Graphics Editor, 3: Putty/Shell, bottom 4: FTP/Explorer, > 5: Text Editor, 6: Browsers).

The mental cost of task switching probably takes a larger toll than Alt-Tab- ing.

> She practically kicked me out of bed and told me to find my 6-LCD X-Mas > gift.

;-) Probably because you kept whinning and talking about it and she got tired of it.

> I've always been anti-laptops because come on, how can you even compare a 3 > or 6-LCD setup to a laptop with a tiny screen, tiny keyboard, and crappy > batteries.

I am also in general anti-laptops but for a different reason -- keyboards. As long as I can fit 2 80 column code windows in my emacs I can work fine, but not if the keyboard is crappy. That is why I spent a little extra and got a thinkpad -- it has one of the best keyboards and an integrated trackpoint (nipple) mouse. Between that and using emacs I don't have to lift my hands from the keyboard at all.

<comment><USER4> I worked for a few months using only a Toshiba Portege 3440 (or something). 12" screen with 1920x1200 rez. Had the trackpoint. Sweet machine, great for travel.

Now I still use a laptop as my main machine (Dell D830), but I've got some extra monitors (and other hardware as well). They're handy for glance-over peripheral stuff, but I work best with things right in front of me (mostly vim, bash, and a Web browser).

This topic got me wondering if alt-tabbing for window-switching, or ctrl- Fn'ing to a different desktop, was all that much of a distraction, or a worse interrupting, than moving my head and adjusting my focus. I just don't see it. Switching apps or desktops via the keyboard is no more of a "context switch" than moving my head and attention to a different device. Maybe even less so. Finger memory FTW.

Mostly I think I just adapt to what I have when I have it. Additional screen space, while nice, doesn't mean _that_ much of a productivity gain.

What makes the biggest difference to productivity is how distracted/distractable I am. With no room for IM or IRC and such, they simply get turned off or moved to a desktop out of view. With the extra screen, I'm tempted to keep them running off to the side.

It seems a lot like closet space. They more you have, the more stuff you find to put in it. You acclimate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For a much easier on the neck and cheaper solution:

One 26" screen in the middle, two 24" screens rotated 90 degrees left and right of it. Raise the middle screen so the top aligns with the other two and push the other two down as far as they will go.

edit: one of the nicest benefits of this setup that I have found to date is to have a full-height email client on one side (right for me) and a full height browser on the left screen. It especially pays off when searching for stuff, no more scrolling, all the results on one page are visible at once.

<comment><USER6> In that case (rotating the screens) don't get a Twisted Nematic display. I have the Samsung 2443SW, which, like the Samsung panels in the link, has a TN display, and it is simply not usable rotated 90 degrees. The color and brightness gradient from top to bottom is bearable in panoramic mode, since both your eyes see the same color on each horizontal line. Rotated 90 degrees it's simply awful, because each eyes sees a different color/brightness, and the angle between top and bottom of the screen is so much larger.

<comment><USER5> Yes, that's very true. I wonder why they even sell those with a rotation capable stand, it makes no sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally I don't think it's right for a man to have more screens connected to his computer than he has blades on his disposable razor...

<comment><USER8> Well the mainstream blades are catching up very quickly...

Also, some men use a double-edged blade or a cut-throat (very rare), which means dual monitor setups already break your rule.

<comment><USER9> The singularity is near: [http://codeforfood.org/2006/03/19/the-razor-blade- singularit...](http://codeforfood.org/2006/03/19/the-razor-blade-singularity/)

<comment><USER8> For some reason, the word "ouch" came to mind :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> With so many screens I would think it might be interesting to consider removing the bevels on the edges. The big black bar effect looks bad IMHO.

I have no idea if this is possible to remove while leaving the VESA mount on the back, or even if the entire monitor would fall apart.

Great, now I'm going to spend the day taking apart an old monitor.

<comment><USER11> Do a blog post about this. I think it's a question everyone has had at some point. How much of the bezel is really neccessary? Can it be removed DIY?

<comment><USER12> Just get your buzz saw and slice em off. I'm sure it'll work fine, how sure I wouldn't want to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We had a 15 screen setup for a while <http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardcunningham/859013515/> tried to run it from 32bit machine, but with 8 graphics chips (on 4 cards) it only left 700MB or so of addressable memory, so it crawled. In the end we ran it on a cluster.

<comment><USER5> On a university budget things get a little easier :)

Very nice setup, I've done something similar with xdmx long ago, but with only 5 screens, the 5th screen, a mac is not visible in this picture:

[http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.ht...](http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/projects/screen/dscf1072.jpg.html)

But I found that the 'wraparound' screen requires way too much movement, so that's why I've been trying to find ways to reduce the horizontal component.

For desktop work I think the 1+2 solution I described elsewhere in this thread is next to optimal.

This one is nice too:

<http://www.jmu.edu/hyper/visualization/hardware.html>

And I've seen another one but I can't seem to locate the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd much rather have two decent panels than those six cheap TNs. Especially considering the poor viewing angles you'd end up with that setup. The colour degradation is going to be absolutely awful.

<comment><USER15> It depends on the work you're doing. If he's not an artist, he almost certainly doesn't care.

<comment><USER16> Have you ever tried to write code on a TN panel? I ordered a Dell 22" UltraSharp with a TN, and sent it back the next day for the 24" that has the VA panel (and is 2.5x the price).

<comment><USER14> Same, had my 24" TN for 2 days before returning it for a HP IPS panel for 2.5x the price — so glad I did. Even at the optimal viewing angle, colours were fundamentally lighter at the bottom (and darker at the top), making text in the bottom 1/3rd straining on the eyes. Never again, given a budget, I'd much rather to compromise on the computer hardware than the monitor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a 30 inch at home, it is awesome, I like to use it in addition to my laptop screen. I run firefox on the laptop screen emacs on the big screen. When you move to a large screen, window management become even more problematic. Fitt's law falls apart at 2560x1600.

I recently moved to stumpwm, and I have been having a blast. Stumpwm is a tiling window manager written in Common Lisp. I tried xmonad and awesome, but stumpwm just made more sense to me. I think that all of the tiling window managers are a bit clunky now, but they have a lot of potential.

The next time I see 30 inch screens for less than $900 on outlet.dell.com I plan to buy 2 and mount them in portrait mode.

<comment><USER18> > Fitt's law falls apart at 2560x1600.

Indeed. I'm running 1920x1200 on a 24". I would really like a simple tool on WinXP so that I could "midimize" a window: drag a title bar to the corner of the desktop area (minus the task bar) and have the window snap to 1/4 of the desktop, or drag to an edge and snap to 1/2 the available space. I do something use the "Tile Vertically" and "Tile Horizontally" commands to get a neat layout, but it's too awkward to do it all the time.

<comment><USER19> So install one:

<http://www.winsplit-revolution.com/>

<http://jgpaiva.dcmembers.com/gridmove.html>

As described with screenshots/animation here: <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000928.html>

<comment><USER18> Many thanks, that's exactly what I wanted. I searched for tools like that a while ago and never found anything that did it at the time, so it's nice to see someone meeting the need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have been coding on a tiny netbook (with emacs in full screen mode) for the past few months and I LOVE it.

I now think that needing more than a 9" monitor is a code smell.

<comment><USER21> About two years ago, I was in a programming class with a friend who regularly uses a netbook. Whenever I tried to help him track down a bug or modify a piece of code, I always complain about the puny keyboard. For some reason, I always inadvertently punch the wrong key, or punch many keys at once, or otherwise do something stupid. It was a nightmare to use, and I was either forced to do one-finger typing (and even that screwed up) or dictate the code for _him_ to type.

So, my question is: _How_ do you program on a tiny netbook _for months_ on _emacs_ with such a small keyboard?

Moreover, the text size on his computer was comparably tiny. For me, a netbook screen cannot comfortably accommodate two heads, while preserving a decent amount of code on the screen. My head usually obscures the entire screen and he'll have to remind me not to look so closely.

My second question is: How do you deal with text size without sacrificing the amount of code on the screen?

<comment><USER20> They keyboard is 95% of full size. I think people get psyched out by small keyboards but that after a few hours on it your hands naturally adjust (perhaps practice going between keyboards helps)...

I don't use a particularly small font. I find that emacs works great -- switching between buffers, toggling between marks, bookmarks, etc., is extremely easy, and some chords are easier to type b/c of the keyboard design.

I have the font size set to 10pt which seems to be about the right size. I would probably use that size even on a larger monitor. Subpixel rendering and the LED backlight on this netbook (plus a nice emacs color theme) makes the text read very easily.

For documentation, I just open it in a web browser and switch with alt-tab or ctrl-tab (within the browser).

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the reply!

I guess I was a bit one-sided on my keyboard judgment. However, could you elaborate on your emacs chording remark? How exactly is it easier? (I'm not an emacs user)

This may be a bit off-topic, but I've heard stories about people suffering from eye strain due to bright LED lights and/or smaller font sizes. Have you ever suffered from eye strain due to extended use? How does coding on a netbook feel if you use it for an extended period?

Lastly, I'm concerned about performance issues. I've heard that netbooks are notoriously slow, which implies slowing down the coding process? Is that true for you? Does it allow for virtual desktops and is it fast (enough)?

<comment><USER20> Emacs is designed to be used 100% by keyboard... one way it has evolved is to support chords (holding down multiple keys then pressing another)... This keyboard is flat and the keys do not have big "trenches" between them, which makes it easy to hold down (for example) shift and ctrl at once.

I have not experienced eye strain from the display brightness, though a few times I have temporarily made the font larger (I find that sometimes I just feel like using a 12pt font to write code)...

The netbook is somewhat slow (about 70% the speed of my regular laptop for things like running a test suite, etc. I have actually enjoyed this and taken the extra time to take a few deep breaths and practice mindfulness :) I know it sounds weird but it's easy to get caught up in the rush to write more code -- to the point where even a very fast laptop will feel mind-numbingly slow at times... I know this one is a bit slower, and by accepting that and enjoying the occasional moment of patient waiting I have come to enjoy some of those previously annoying slowdowns...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is what I use: [http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3370/3638277193_27cc47d9b8.jp...](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3370/3638277193_27cc47d9b8.jpg?v=0). The only extra hardware I need to run a 30 and a 24 off of my Macbook is a USB->DVI adapter... less than a hundred bucks.

His set up is pretty nice, though I don't think I could use all of those screens.

Some of the prices he throws out in his article are also kind of whack. I don't know of any Macbooks that cost $3600.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm always curious why people think having multiple displays is so super awesome.

1) It ruins your neck. The ergo people at Yahoo really dislike giving people dual monitors let alone 6.

2) You can only look at so many of these screens at once, probably too at the distance he is sitting. Why not just use virtual desktops at that point because it doesn't cause neck trauma.

<comment><USER24> the only application I can see is wall street traders, even they don't need more then 2-4.

<comment><USER25> you're clearly not a trader. give a trader a screen and they'll fill it.

<comment><USER24> No, I am not, but I know a few. Depends on the markets you trade and the analysis you do though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty impressive since it's already hard to have dual screens working well on Ubuntu. Nice job!

<comment><USER5> Why is that hard?

I have something quite close to that here and was actually surprised how easy it was to get it running, including CUDA support and 3D acceleration.

<comment><USER27> I have as basic a setup as a dual monitor can be. A laptop connected to a second display, <http://uswaretech.com/dump/screenshots/screenshot_018.png>

With this Ubuntu will,

1\. Get the initial display order wrong 50% of the time, (The monitor which was on the left will be on right on next startup.) 2\. Wont get the the larger monitor to display in its full area, if I plug the second monitor and enable it to already running laptop, some part of display area will be blank.

Admittedly, both of these are possibly fixable via modifying xorg.conf, but if I boot to windows, it gets it right, every time, without any modifications. :(

<comment><USER28> The reason you are having problems is that the first monitor is selected by the bios at boot time. If there is no monitor attached, it has to make the 'first' monitor the one on the laptop. If the laptop lid is closed, it may pick the external as the first monitor.

Generally the easiest way to get this done is to have nvidia graphics and use nvidia-settings. If you have some less well supported graphics setup, welcome to the world of linux!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Personally, i'm waiting for:

[http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/08/samsung-and-ati-team- on-s...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/08/samsung-and-ati-team-on- syncmaster-md230-mega-displays-for-wide/2)

6 x 30" (2560x1600) for $3,100 seems like an amazing bargain.

<comment><USER30> I was at CES this year and those monitors were amazing. We asked when they were going to be released the Samsung guy said later this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In a multiple monitor discussion, it's never inappropriate to link to Stefan Didak's home office: <http://www.stefandidak.com/office/>

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow! That's six whole displays I can't do anything useful on!</comment>