Bitcoin isn't decentralized - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@homakov/stop-calling-bitcoin-decentralized-cb703d69dc27 <comment><USER2> Stop. Equating. Hashrate. With. Network. Control. Hashrate barely matters. The influence these Chinese miners have is next to nil. Them having hashrate doens't mean they get to decide on anything meaningful, it just means they get to reap the economics benefits of transaction minting.

If they tried to exploit their 'power' in any way, people would just fork the chain and move on. They have no ability to actually take advantage of their position in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER3> > just fork the chain and move on

It's not quite _that_ simple - the chain will need to be forked with a protocol whose algorithm doesn't allow these miners to continue to dominate. And achieving consensus on that in the heat of the moment will be non-trivial.

Any fork that continues to use SHA-256 will be a trivial target for attack by these miners; they won't blindly continue to mine the "defunct" chain.

<comment><USER2> Ya, it'd cause some short term disruption, to be sure. But it's not an existential threat. And it certainly doesn't make Bitcoin 'centralized'.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are more than 1 variable in the outcome. And from what I see it is very existential. Just not used yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Huh, was expecting the article to be about different meanings of centralization and how Bitcoin doesn't meet all of them -- to use Vitalik Buterin's terminology[1], it's not logically decentralized (being ultimately based around a single consensus ledger). Instead it's claiming that Bitcoin isn't politically decentralized like it claims to be.

[1] [https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of- decentrali...](https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of- decentralization-a0c92b76a274)

<comment><USER5> Yeah bitcoin is distributed, it functions as if it has a ~10m global semaphore. The actual details are much more complicated, but with the current design you are not getting around that, current efforts are to build systems that only settle to the chain when trust is broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is so silly. How can it get front page on HN?

The important point that he's missing is that, even though the pools are centralized, the individual miners are not! And this is really the main difference.

As ASIC chips get faster and faster we'll reach a physical point that it won't be beneficial to keep large rigs running in a central location - because of the economy of energy distribution.

I'd love it if there was a greener solution for decentralization than energy, but there isn't, otherwise we'd be using it! It's as simple as that.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is the logical implementation of the game-theory model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article seems to focus on China's share of the miners, so I'll address that: I'm not that concerned about the Chinese miners. If they wanted to disrupt the network they have had plenty of chances to.

The author assumes that all Chinese miners are controlled by the same entity. Which, while I do believe that the Chinese govt. can shutdown any miner they want to, I don't believe that 100% of the miners are operated by the Chinese govt. If you break down the pie chart into the different Chinese entities that actually operate the miners it begins to look more decentralized.

After reading the paper that was posted here the other week about forking the network using BGP to effectively create two sepereate Internets, I think that if a country did go rouge, we could all just set our firewalls to drop all connections from Chinese nodes and that would be that.

Let them run their own chain where they can manipulate their coins price like the do the yuan.

<comment><USER9> > we could all just set our firewalls to drop all connections from Chinese > nodes and that would be that

That's not how it works. All it takes is a _single_ connection bridging the partition for a chain with more work to replace your chain. That connection could be through a VPN, Tor, a satellite ([https://blockstream.com/satellite/](https://blockstream.com/satellite/)), or someone physically carrying a USB drive containing a better chain across the border and starting up a node.

Honeybadger chain don't give a shit.

<comment><USER8> VPN and Tor are still vulnerable to something like this: [https://btc- hijack.ethz.ch/](https://btc-hijack.ethz.ch/), but satellite, that's pretty cool!

I guess if a country wanted to they could jam satellite communications, close their borders and cut all major fiber lines, but that still wouldn't stop the ham radio folks from running pirate stations broadcasting blockchain updates lol.

Thanks for the correction!

<comment><USER9> That paper actually specifically mentions VPNs as a countermeasure to BGP attacks:

 _Increase the diversity of node connections._

 _The more connected an AS is, the harder it is to attack it. We therefore encourage Bitcoin node owners to ensure they are multi-homed. Observe that even single-homed Bitcoin nodes could benefit from extra connectivity by using one or more VPN services through encrypted tunnels so that Bitcoin traffic to and from the node go through multiple and distinct ASes. Attackers that wish to deny connectivity through the tunnel would need to either know both associated IP addresses or, alternatively, disrupt all encrypted traffic to and from nodes— making the attack highly noticeable._

Ham radio is another great idea. It's a bit of a gray area, at last in the US where commercial use and encryption (but not digital signatures) is prohibited. Transmitting block headers may not strictly be against the letter of the law. The transactions themselves though probably would be.

I've been meaning to set up a service listening on APRS-IS ([http://www.aprs- is.net/](http://www.aprs-is.net/)) that rebroadcasts transactions _to_ the Bitcoin network. I don't think such a service would violate the regulations, but users who wish to use it would be responsible for ensuring their transactions did not (if that's even possible)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is such a tired argument. It says more about the author than it does about Bitcoin. The point isn't to have perfect decentralization. The point is to have good enough decentralization that the system works. In the case of Bitcoin "good enough to work" means at least three separate entities mining with none having greater than 50% share.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thisisfine.jpg is usual in Bitcoin problems

p2p cash! => ok, store of value

decentralized => ok, let's just hope China will be good to us

I hold quite a few BTC, but I prefer to remain realist.

<comment><USER7> nodes define decentralization in bitcoin, not miners, because it is nodes that define and police consensus in bitcoin, not miners.

<comment><USER10> In the white paper it was intended that all nodes were also miners. Non-mining nodes don't really contribute much to the network.

<comment><USER7> Mining was never even mentioned in the white paper because it is immaterial to consensus. As has just been demonstrated. Again.

And that argument is getting tired. You need to update your script.

<comment><USER10> The paper doesn't use the word 'mining' it says the following under section 5 Network step 3...

"Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block."

Quite clear that nodes look for the proof-of-work solution (aka: mining).

You can also see there is a whole section in the paper, section 8, that talks about verifying payments w/o running a node.

[http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/](http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/)

<comment><USER7> Henceforth be thy lesson :

So let's talk about nodes and consensus as defined in the whitepaper and implemented in nodes.

Let's start with the bitcoin white paper ([https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)) :

> Satoshi from the Bitcoin white-paper chapter 12 'Conclusion' : The network > is robust in its unstructured simplicity. __Nodes __work all at once with > little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are > not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best > effort basis. __Nodes __can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting > the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They > vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by > working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work > on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this > __consensus mechanism __.

First, you have to understand what 'consensus' actually means :

> > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_%28computer_science%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_%28computer_science%29)

> A fundamental problem in distributed computing and multi-agent systems is to > achieve overall system reliability in the presence of a number of faulty > processes. This often requires processes to agree on some data value that is > needed during computation. Examples of applications of consensus include > whether to commit a transaction to a database _(or, for example, committing > blocks to a blockchain)_ , agreeing on the identity of a leader, state > machine replication, and atomic broadcasts. The real world applications > include clock synchronization, PageRank, opinion formation, smart power > grids, state estimation, control of UAVs, load balancing and others.

What does this mean if you are but an intrepid traveler amongst the erstwhile numpty-folk?

Nodes are agents in a multi-agent system with an agreed set of consensus rules ([https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/how-does-a- bitcoi...](https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/how-does-a-bitcoin-node- verify-a-transaction/)), which they and they alone enforce, that ensure that the system functions. Transactions are propagated through the multi-agent network based upon the agreed consensus rules by nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. Miners retrieve valid transactions from any of these nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. They then order the transactions, and perform a hashing function on them until the hashing function returns a value that is suitable to the nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. They then pass the new block that they've created to the nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. The nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system, then validate the block to ensure that each of the transactions within the block agree with the consensus rules. Then the node, which is an agent in a multi-agent system, extends the block-chain by attaching the new block to it. They then pass the new block, if it is valid, to other nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system. Then each of these other nodes, which are agents in a multi-agent system, each do the same validation on every block.

Nodes accept incoming transactions and validate them. Miners don't. Nodes replicate transactions to other nodes. Miners don't. Miners take transactions from nodes, and order them in a block, and perform a hashing function on them (the only thing they do). Miners pass the new block to the node. The node validates the transactions in the block. Miners don't. The node validates the block. Miners don't. The node extends the blockchain. Miners don't. The node replicates the block to other nodes. Miners don't. It is the validation of the nodes, and their CPU's, that define and police consensus in bitcoin.

There is only one function that miners do. They take transactions, put them in a block, and hash them. As soon as a miner produces a block that nodes don't want, it is rejected. Miners work. Nodes validate. So nodes are the proof in proof-of-work.

Nodes accept the transactions, validate the transactions (using their CPU), replicate the transactions, maintain the mempools, validate the blocks (using their CPU), extend the blockchain (using their CPU), replicate the blocks, serve the blockchain, and store the blockchain. Nodes even define the PoW algorithm that miners have to employ. If you can't convince these node owners that are using their node on a day-to-day basis, to uninstall their node software and install your new node client, especially when that node client decreases their node security and decreases the network security, any change you have is going to go exactly nowhere.

So nodes maintain the protocol, not miners. It is thus. It has always been thus. If you can't convince all of those node owners running their node clients to uninstall one client and re-install another, any change you have to consensus is DOA.

See for yourself. Download it. ([https://bitcoin.org/en/download](https://bitcoin.org/en/download)) It's currently at 0.15.1

[https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node](https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node)

> A full node is a program that fully validates transactions and blocks. > Almost all full nodes also help the network by accepting transactions and > blocks from other full nodes, validating those transactions and blocks, and > then relaying them to further full nodes.

Ya need to turn off that rbtc tap. It makes ya stoopid.

Thus endeth thy lesson.

<comment><USER10> You are confusing what the Bitcoin Core software currently does with the original intention set out in the white paper.

<comment><USER7> And you have just had how bitcoin works explained to you, and yet you choose to remain ignorant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You need to see this discussions

"Decentralized credit rating on the Blockchain" [https://us.teamblind.com/article/decentralized-credit- rating...](https://us.teamblind.com/article/decentralized-credit-rating-on- the-blockchain-bNuPyCXs)

</comment><comment><USER12> I disagree with the premise of this article. Just because miners are based in China is not proof of collusion. I agree there is some fishy stuff going on with Bitmain and Antpool and others, but isn't it in their best interest not to break faith?

Wouldn't exchanges (who are holding all the money and are not (explicitly NOT) based in China still have the cash to fund withdrawals? Wouldn't the rest of the world STILL be free to fork the chain to a good faith ecosystem? Isn't Bitcoin Core largely made up of non-Chinese?

</comment><comment><USER13> Any article that refers to mining pools as "miners" is missing the picture and misleading. First get the naming right, then we can talk.

</comment><comment><USER14> > no hard-fork to different PoW alg can save you from that, because you will > start with a much weaker hashrate

Security derives not from hashrate but from energy consumption. E.g. Ethereum has a many orders of magnitude lower hashrate but its energy consumption is a significant fraction of bitcoin's.

</comment><comment><USER15> If the Chinese act bad and there is a fork, even if the Chinese fork has more hash power doesn't mean the market will favor their coin, out contrary, no one will trust their chain, since they acted malicious, who will buy their coins.. it will also be an opportunity for new miners.

</comment><comment><USER16> So the main point of the article is that China controls > 50% of the mining pool. Is there any reason what-so-ever that multiple companies would ever want to collude and fork it, and thus crashing the value to 0?

<comment><USER17> Not as long as they own a lot of the coin itself, no. If any of these miners sells their stake, freak out immediately since their next step would be to short bitcoin through some means before causing a value crash. And you've also got to consider market reactions; if any of the miners sells a decent amount of their stake, freak out immediately- because they're liable to sell more soon, causing everyone to freak out and crashing the market. And so on. This doesn't sound stable- perhaps the whole thing could be taken down by a miner deciding he needs a bit of cash to buy a house.

<comment><USER18> Your conception of the amount of money involved here is off by several orders of magnitude

<comment><USER17> Clarify? I can't say the market capitalization of Bitcoin off the top of my head, but neither can I tell whether you think I'm making it out to be higher or lower than it is.

<comment><USER18> Much, much lower. Buying a house vs 120B+ market cap.

<comment><USER17> And a bank run can't occur in a 120B market? Or commodities worth 120B can't be shorted? What?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's still decentralized by design, though, even if not practically.

</comment><comment><USER20> Stop. Writing. Like. This. Please.

<comment><USER21> I have to wonder if comments like these might be better directed at the article on medium rather than hackernews, just in case the author isn't the poster.

<comment><USER20> Probably true, but not everyone has a Medium account or would like to make one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sigh...I disagree. ~17M Bitcoins. ~17M BCH coins. How many splits coming up soon from the BTC chain? 10k Nodes. Multi-million dollars invested into 'mining'. 0.0001 is at parity/value with the USD Dollar. How many people trade these cryptocurrency tokens? How many program and develop to aid the security and value of the entire crypto network? How many businesses/services opt to accepting these tokens instead of fiat? I don't think people realize the gravity of what has happened in plain sight.

There is no single one point of failure. None. Why? because this isn't about 'one ring to rule them all' nor 'one token to use'. Look at this entire ecosystem of crytpocurrencies, as a whole.

Sure the code has had some issues but...those were ironed out many years ago. Even if multiple people own 1M tokens...guess what? It's distributed....many....many more times than our current oligarchy system from central banking and fiat currency. Where the USA prints money and accounts to no one but themselves.

Anyone could look up how systems create points of failure. The crypto network, as a whole, has more computational power than numerous supercomputers. They aren't just 'solving puzzles', as Bitcoin 101 people are saying. These are built on-chain and off. Online and off. This thing, should be seen as a biological wonder. This is like a virus, trying to consume us all. I strongly doubt our, current and imperfect, society can stop this new paradigm shift. We are entering a phase of our history that will change how we value and interact with one another.

It's here, it's incentives are ingenious. No war, bombs nor law can stop it. It is has no weakpoints. Those weakpoints that exist, are mitigated by other areas of the network being able to offload that risk.

Or after skimming this guys article. It DOES _NOT_ MATTER that 3-4 companies try to game the 'mining hashpower'. Why? because ~17M tokens already exist. Many of those earlier adopter CAN and DO shift the entire market, as they should. This isn't about 'hashpower'. This isn't about thinking about Bitcoin in a very traditional sense. Think of every aspect as a weakpoint and stakeholder. With all aspects being attributed a value. Sure, an exploit can be found, but over time, those exploits decrease exponentially because more brain, computational, and social dynamics have been 'attacking' the system. This system grows and evolves and it's adaptable based on the behavior of humanity. People choose the value and the system adjusts.

P.S. I know I sound weird and maybe esoteric but...I've been watching this space almost since the beginning. I wish I entered sooner but I just didn't believe anyone would ever adopt it. The early days of bitcoin, these tokens were given away, proud and free. Now, 50 of them (one early block) could pay for most, if not all, 1st world college tuition. Or a home. The cost? Being socially crazy and weird. Well...things are a bit different now. Why? What is the math about? What are the social dynamics about? Why are 'splits' so contentious? What are those social dynamics about? There is SO much going on here that 90% of people don't know, let alone don't get. 20 years from now, we'll wonder why we/humanity didn't think of this sooner.

P.P.S. I'm not resting on my own opinion but instead have been challenging my own throughout this 'bitcoin experiment' and I am open to changing my mind but...the math is decent, the software is decent...I look forward to when someone can articulate 'major' flaws that can 0 day the system. Or even 30 day the system. It's too ironclad but feel free to 'enlighten me'.

</comment><comment><USER21> Distributed?

</comment><comment><USER23> From what I understand, the attacks miners can perform can be easily detected by the actually decentralised full nodes. Once detected, these miners can be removed. So yeah, this part of bitcoin still requires some human politics, but it is fairly minimal.

People are trying to figure out how to make mining less centralised. None of these growing pains are some kind of fundamental flaw that cannot be overcome.

<comment><USER24> It's more complex than that. There needs also to be a consensus to remove a block of the chain.

Without consensus, the best-case scenario would be that it results in a fork.

<comment><USER7> > It's more complex than that.

No it isn't actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> They should show a piechart of the genders of the people running the miners.

It will show likely 99% male.

<comment><USER26> End the blockchain patriarchy! We need more pink hashes.

Red hashes no! Pink hashes yes!</comment></comment>


Google loses data as lightning strikes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33989384 <comment><USER2> Relevant amusing bit from the Amazon FAQ: "S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years."

I think my favorite part of that is "on average", as if you will be making repeated ten-million-year trials of this effectively brand new technology.

The point is that once you get into several nines of reliability, really rare events that are impossible to model start to dominate your risk budget.

<comment><USER3> At this point, correlation matters. In the unlikely event that I lose at least 1 object, what is the conditional probability of losing another?

(Forgetting about correlation was a big part of the MBS and LTCM financial failures)

<comment><USER4> And Fukushima.

Assumptions that variables are independent are often very mistaken.

<comment><USER5> Or the bigger problem: assuming your future reliability looks just like your past. For example, say they have a problem with year 2038. Everything works great until everything doesn't work at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like this wasn't caused by power surges reaching the equipment but rather an effect of repeated power loss to drive arrays not fully designed to handle it. The article is pretty unclear. Still sounds like an infrastructure problem though.

<comment><USER7> The incident report ismavis posted below (and linked in the article) has far more information: [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056#57195...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056#5719570367119360)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google's actual statement with RCA: [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056#57195...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056#5719570367119360)

</comment><comment><USER9> I work on cell sites, grounding system design and repair is a primary design element, even then, the presumption in the industry is that if a site takes a direct hit - or for that matter a nearby strike - the equipment is a total loss.

The surge suppression gear we put in (lead ins at power feeds, RF feed, etc) is mostly to prevent a fire and to ensure the extra energy goes largely to ground.. but it won't prevent dead gear.

<comment><USER10> Are you saying essentially that "There is no such thing as a surge protector, they don't physically exist. Only surge reducers exist." Because that's what it sounds like to me.

EDIT:

All right, I'll rephrase. According to Google's infobox from nat'l geographic, lightning generates up to 1 billion volts.

-> Are surge protectors at even the highest-end data centers simply not rated to a billion volts of surge protection?

<comment><USER11> There's a "protector", but the protection isn't guaranteed to be 100% effective.

That's an OK use of the language in this context and has many parallels in other fields. E.g. using a condom as protection against pregnancy and disease. Many people have learned the hard way that it's not 100%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This raises a relevant concern that's been on my mind: what's the best way to back up cloud services? Given that services like S3 and Google Drive have many more nines of durability than any local storage system I could devise, are backups even worth the trouble?

There are a lot of cloud-to-cloud backup services out there, but to me that seems like the blind leading the blind, especially with regards to malicious data destruction. For instance, I've recently been experimenting with Cloudally to automatically back up Google Drive, which seems like a good solution at first- until you think about the fact that Cloudally uses Google accounts for authentication (and doesn't use 2FA for native authentication). In other words, an attacker with access to my primary data (Google Drive) would also have access to my backups. Worse than that, Cloudally actually increases the attack surface, since its lack of 2FA presumably makes it easier to crack than my Google account.

Similarly, I'm guessing a lot of cloud backup services share data centers with the services they are backing up.

<comment><USER13> If you really care about durability, your best best is erasure-coding + a wide geographic distribution of shards. For example, you could encode 1 TB of data into four shards, each shard containing 500 GB. You distribute these to servers in SF, NYC, Berlin, and Sydney. The key here is that you only need two shards to recover your 1 TB of data, and they can be _any_ two shards. So if lightning strikes Berlin, and the Big One hits SF, your data is still safe. And thanks to erasure-coding, you can achieve this with only 2x redundancy (instead of 4x).

<comment><USER14> It's been a while since I followed this. I see over 100 Reed-Solomon erasure- coding projects on GitHub. Which would you recommend?

<comment><USER13> Well, I have to shamelessly plug my startup, www.siacoin.com, which implements the scheme I described above using a peer-to-peer network, with payments made on a blockchain. We are using Klaus Post's excellent pure-Go implementation ([https://github.com/klauspost/reedsolomon](https://github.com/klauspost/reedsolomon)) which exceeds 1GB/s throughput.

<comment><USER14> Thank you. It's very cool. But can Sia work with hosts that are reachable only as Tor hidden services?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Curious - how do they know lightning hit four times? Was someone outside counting?

<comment><USER16> Yes, lots of folks are counting.

[http://www.blitzortung.org/](http://www.blitzortung.org/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks very much for posting this link. Could be really handy for physics teaching next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The real clouds are getting angry at companies misappropriating their name

<comment><USER19> In other news, real clouds file lawsuit against cloud providers for trademark and copyright infringement. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The cloud strikes back.

</comment><comment><USER21> > Google said that just 0.000001% of disk space was permanently affected.

Assuming 1 petabyte of total storage at the datacenter, that equates to about 100mb. I wonder how much storage they have there.

<comment><USER22> I think your estimate is too low by 1000x. 1PB is 500 2T drives. There's no way Google would run a data center with only 25-250 hosts.

<comment><USER23> [https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/)

XKCD guessed 15EB in 2013

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Lightning crashes, an old server dies...."

<comment><USER25> Oh, I see you're Selling the Drama ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So Google said: "...although... the storage systems are designed with battery backup, some recently written data was located on storage systems which were more susceptible to power failure from extended or repeated battery drain. In almost all cases the data was successfully committed to stable storage, although manual intervention was required in order to restore the systems to their normal serving state. However, in a very few cases, recent writes were unrecoverable, leading to permanent data loss on the Persistent Disk."

I thought battery is supposed to cover writing the entire write buffer cache to disk in case of power loss. Sounds like they had some badly designed gear which did no account for partial battery charge which should downsize the cache to battery's capacity.

</comment><comment><USER27> Glad to be part of the 0.000001%. We had a tough night because of this outage :(

</comment><comment><USER28> At Amazon, when resolving an issue in our internal ticketing system I recall there being "Act of God" as a reason code. Seems applicable here.

<comment><USER29> I think this is a technical term in the insurance world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It sounds like they mostly lost recently created/stored data that hadn't yet been fully replicated to the required degree of redundancy.

</comment><comment><USER31> Key point from Google's status incident page that clarifies some of the partially-incorrect statements in the press and comments about this:

"In a very small fraction of cases (less than 0.000001% of PD space in europe- west1-b), there was permanent data loss."

[https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056#57195...](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/15056#5719570367119360)

<comment><USER32> Quoting the data lost as a percentage of disk space is both accurate and misleading. It makes the impact sound tiny because only recent writes were affected. Obviously writes that were in flight at the time of the incident are going to be a tiny percentage of overall storage. What they don't tell us is what percentage of persistent disks which were in use at the time were affected. That percentage is likely far higher. If only 0.000001% of volumes in use were affected it would never have made the news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "The Google Computer Engine (GCE) service allows..."

Did anyone else cringe?

</comment><comment><USER34> Do they know what customers were affected?

I use google drive a lot, I don't track what's in my drive, should I be worried?

<comment><USER35> I think it only impacted people who were using Compute Engine and storing data on a hard drive instead of using Cloud Storage. I suspect that Drive data has redundant copies stored in multiple data centers in addition to frequent backups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Zeus killing some porn

</comment><comment><USER37> So Google has no redundancy at datacenter level?

<comment><USER38> Not for block storage (aka persistent disks): "we would like to take this opportunity to highlight an important reminder for our customers: GCE instances and Persistent Disks within a zone exist in a single Google datacenter and are therefore unavoidably vulnerable to datacenter-scale disasters. Customers who need maximum availability should be prepared to switch their operations to another GCE zone. For maximum durability we recommend GCE snapshots and Google Cloud Storage as resilient, geographically replicated repositories for your data."

Achieving RPO=0 generally requires synchronous replication to a different datacenter which adds significant latency.

<comment><USER39> Amazon builds datacenter redundancy in the same geographic locale. You can then setup synchronous replication between datacenters without atrocious latency, as all the disks are fairly close by, albeit powered [in an emergency] by independent generators.

OTOH, Google does datacenter redundancy across different locales, which make synchronous replication perform much worse, like you noted.

<comment><USER38> GCE appears to have a similar region/zone structure as Amazon, but neither provider replicates block storage across zones.

<comment><USER39> I stand corrected. Looking at [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/zones?hl=en](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/zones?hl=en), it seems that GCE has multiple zones in the same locale (region). I might have confused with Google's internal setup, which during my tenure there, was heavy on using replication across locales, up to systems like Megastore and the 200ms synchronously replicated commit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Thats why you should always write it down folks...

</comment><comment><USER41> Wouldn't successive lightning strikes be _more_ likely due to ionisation of the air?

<comment><USER42> Well, there's the opposite argument:

"Wouldn't successive lightning strikes be _less_ likely due to reduced local electric potential?"

It's not readily apparent to me which of the effects will be larger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I sense a future Mr. Robot plot idea.

<comment><USER44> And magnets! Everyone loves magnets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The wrath of the Gods.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wow. NSA attacks are really leveling up.

</comment><comment><USER47> This could potentially explain a lingering error on my Google Drive. Might there be movement within Google to contact the owners of data that was lost?

<comment><USER48> The article mentions Compute Engine, which is an external offering that isn't really used internally. It's hard to say what else might have been affected, if anything, but going by the article this shouldn't be causing your problem.

<comment><USER47> Fair enough. One can hope.

<comment><USER49> File syncing is a hard problem..

<comment><USER29> Only because we make it hard.

<comment><USER50> If you've got a way to make it easy, we'd like to hear it.

<comment><USER51> Similar to git, but if you have multiple branches of the same file, display them visually and allow the user to merge just that file?

<comment><USER52> If people have to do anything it's not good enough.

<comment><USER51> That is then mathematically impossible.

What if I edit the same pixel, in the same image, in the same nanosecond on two different devices, and then sync?

There are situations where conflicts are necessary. The focus should be on making conflict resolution easily accessible, not on trying to be smart and overriding files at random

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've lost attachments to old gmail messages before, I never thought it was impossible or unlikely for Google to lose data.

I'm sure the data wasn't truly lost. If I'd called them up and they'd made it their priority to find my old files, they could have done so, having so many redundant backups. But of course no one at Google is taking calls like that or acting on individual requests. The data was effectively lost, not technically lost. But I'm sure it's uncommon.

</comment><comment><USER54> Beyond security, this highlights one of the main issues with the cloud. Was there no backup?

Of course once you get beyond the headline, I think most people are much worse with protecting themselves from rare outages than Google.

<comment><USER55> As mentioned in the article, it only affected recently written data of 'Google Compute Engine' services. GCE allows user to launch VMs and generate arbitrary data on the server.

Normally, Google redundantly distributes out data to at least 3 different geographically distinct locations. Check out the 'BigTable' white paper [0] for more info.

For 99% of cases (and pretty well all user cases), this would not cause data lose. The key here is that the data was generated on the servers and did not have a chance to duplicate before the event.

[0] [http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable- osdi06.pdf](http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf)

<comment><USER56> Nowadays they use Reed–Solomon coding to effectively distribute their data without copying it to 3 places.

<comment><USER57> Do you have a source for that? Why would they start using it now?

<comment><USER58> Disclaimer: googler, but not working on storage.

link here: [http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...](http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.reverse- proxy.org/en/us/university/relations/facultysummit2010/storage_architecture_and_challenges.pdf)

actually in colossus one can tune RS coding parameters per file, to get a tradeoff between performance/durablity.

RS coding uses less copies, but same level of safety (tradeoff is the recovery computation time.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bill Gates switches to Android phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41399823 <comment><USER2> The total failure of Windows Phone to gain acceptance in the market is a huge pity. I have a Lumina 950 as a secondary device (for loading with a local SIM while abroad) and it's a solid performer with a polished OS, refreshingly 'different' UI, and excellent basics (build quality, call quality, and battery life). The basic, core apps I 'need' in this role are available (WhatsApp, Facebook/Messenger, Twitter, _& cetera_) and it hotspots very dependably towards my myriad Apple devices (iPhone7+, iPadPro10.5, 11" MacBook). It even has some very fascinating features not seen elsewhere (I have a dedicated dock for using certain apps with an external screen, keyboard and mouse, whose name escapes me at the moment).

I really wished they had managed to gain a foothold, because as a platform it really lacks nothing (excepting an app developer base, and actual producers of handsets).

<comment><USER3> Every major version was a new os. Their phone strategy was terrible and lacked commitment. It didn't help that it was started by one CEO and abandoned midway through by the next CEO.

<comment><USER4> It failed repeatedly under one CEO, until the next CEO put it out of its misery.

Ironically, by the time it was terminated it had developed into a very valid product indeed. Shame - Apple and Android definitely need more competition from someone with actual resources (sorry to the Sailfish, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone, etc etc).

<comment><USER5> > _It failed repeatedly under one CEO, until the next CEO put it out of its > misery._

The person who was the head of the Windows Phone group while it failed repeatedly under the first CEO was promoted and put in charge of the entire Windows division by the next CEO.

Something to contemplate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Before I joined Apple I was at Microsoft and I did use a Windows Phone. It was a Lumia 1520.

And honestly the OS was rock solid and worked great (unlike my experience with the Lenovo Windows work laptop I was given which would keep blue-screening after going into hibernate for more than 5 minutes. I ended up switching to a SurfaceBook once that was available and it worked perfectly. Amazing laptop. Like a MacBook Pro. Except without Bash which sucked so you had to learn PowerShell to script things (well until recently now I think there's Bash on Windows using some kind of emulation trick I guess))

Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of a pity it didn't take off.

But because the app ecoosysem was so poor after about 6 months I switched to a Samsung Android phone (there was no Google Pixel at the time), which had worse battery life but it performed fine.

I use an iPhone now and the biggest thing I miss is the lack of certain categories of apps that I could find on Android or Windows that I couldn't find in the iOS App Store.

And the feature set of iOS usually lags behind Android but after using it for over a year now it's really not that bad and I really like the cross-OS integration features with macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

Universal copy paste is a killer feature imo.

To be honest I'm happy with both Android and iOS. They both have the same set of popular third party US apps in their App Stores.

<comment><USER7> > _Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of > a pity it didn't take off._

Agreed. We developed a couple apps way back in Windows Phone 7, and the UI was slick and stylish. The developer tools were fantastic - very fast and easy to create decent apps. Unfortunately we didn't see much ROI for those apps, and then Microsoft decided everyone needed to redo their apps for Windows Phone 8. It was an easy choice to drop support for those apps and stop all development for Windows Phone at that point. The biggest problem people had with Windows Phone was the lack of apps, and it seemed like MS caused that problem themselves.

<comment><USER8> Yup!

But they do this with version 6.5 then "rewrote apps" for 7, and then "rewrite apps" for 8 and now for 10.

It's easy to understand why devs are pissed-off from that decisions.

PS: I forgot fiasco with 7.5 and upgrade to 7.9 and 8.0

<comment><USER9> 8 -> 8.1 was also a similar transition.

There was a period where targeting the 8.0 APIs meant you had access to one set of features and targeting the 8.1 set of APIs meant you were missing certain features but gaining others. The constant rewrites was a nightmare from the developer perspective and prevented any traction being gained.

The story of Windows Phone is full of similar bone-headed decisions in which Microsoft continuously pisses off people trying to love it.

It's been a while but here are a few things that stand out to me as being particurarly bad:

Many Windows Phone users came from Zune, so they were super into music. The Windows Phone 7 -> 8 transition made the music app into a horrifically bad experience missing so many features it was laughably bad compared to other platforms.

The flagship for a period of time was the Lumia 1020. Nokia wrote all sorts of interesting applications for it that were later unsupported or removed when Microsoft acquired Nokia.

Microsoft shipped no flagship for a really long period of time (other than the flop of the Lumia Icon available only on Verizon) and so the "super fans" had the choice of sticking with their Lumia 1020 or 'upgrading' to a cheaper build quality and worse camera Windows Phone that had better specs. Eventually when Windows 10 for phone rolled around they promised 1020 users that Windows 10 would support their phones, but eventually they gave in and announced they couldn't make it work. At that point there wasn't a fantastic successor to the 1020 from the camera perspective, so many users just left.

For a period of time the Lumia 520 was the best low cost ($50 - $100!) smartphone on the market. People actually really liked it, but once again it was unsupported when it came time to upgrade to Windows 10. This meant that a large portion of the Windows Phone install base was fragmented. Microsoft decided they didn't want to win the low-end, they wanted to win the high end (high m argin!) so they stopped making cheap phones like the 520.

I think Microsoft's problem is they continuously changed strategies all the time when they weren't seeing returns. They wanted Windows Phone to be "Microsoft scale" instantly. It seems they felt that as one of the world's largest software companies they should be instantly successful and if they were not then it was better to refocus their efforts elsewhere they could make more money. When they didn't see instant sucesss with Windows Phone there would be a leadership and strategy change resulting in whip-lash for users and developers.

I really think they had to take the under dog approach and make a few users love them, then a few more, then a few more. At the time there would have been a class of users for whom the benefits of the platform would outweigh getting the trendiest apps. Microsoft had enormous opportunity: Android phones were unusably poor on low end phones, iPhones were really expensive and more restrictive. The "app gap" to me really seemed like putting the cart before the horse. Even a company as large as Microsoft can't brute force a grass roots sort of thing like an app development community. The "app gap" is used by many to excuse Microsoft's failure to not develop a competitive platform. From my perspective Microsoft's desire to have instant success, to make a device for everyone, meant they made a platform that ultimately failed.

The crazy thing is they still haven't pronounced it dead yet. Perhaps they have a final hail mary device they're going to try, or perhaps some lingering arrogance means Microsoft would rather leave Windows Phone on life support then declare it dead.

<comment><USER10> Fully agree with your point of view.

For a while WP devices actually had more market share than iPhone on some European countries, because they were the only affordable alternative to Android.

With all these missteps they managed to drive both the consumers that enjoyed WP, and Windows developers that had fun coding apps for it.

I have this gut feeling that since Windows 10 tablets and hybrids are actually more successful than Android based ones, they would like to try a "mini- tablet" that can make phone calls.

But they burned us so many times, that most likely it will be UWP apps that happen to run on such "mini-tablet" by accident, than being made explicitly for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Windows Phone 8 was probably one of the best OS's Microsoft ever did. It was fast on cheap hardware and the UI actually had just one idea instead of several layers of cruft of generations of unfinished new ideas. It was more open than iOS where it counted and more closed than Android where it mattered.

So naturally it failed.

<comment><USER12> Windows 10 Mobile is better. Developers can use the same XAML + C# toolchain for universal apps, but easily deploy to desktops as well. The Edge browser is much better. It is fast, and shares the same kernel as regular Windows, as well as Xbox.

The upcoming mobile version will have something called CShell which means that the interface will be shared among desktop and mobile, meaning that there will be no differences aside from x86 support.

<comment><USER13> Are we supposed to buy legacy/obscure devices to get it though? They lied about upgrading my 920 very blatantly.

<comment><USER14> If you are talking about Windows 10 mobile on lumia 920 you can upgrade it by installing their app called Upgrade Advisor[0] in windows store.

[0] [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/13778](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13778)

<comment><USER13> It doesn't work. Why would you waste my time like that? Have you tried it like I just did? Have you seen the comments there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At one point, Microsoft was reported to be earning somewhere in the neighborhood of $2B per year in revenues from IP licensing agreements with Android ODMs. I think that's largely fallen away now, but it's not as if Microsoft didn't get a pound of flesh from this platform, commercially.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion- per...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion-per-year- from-android-patent-royalties-2013-11)

</comment><comment><USER16> I recently switched back to Windows Phone after several years on Android and I'm liking it a lot so far. I switched from a Samsung Galaxy S6 to an HP Elite x3. The app ecosystem is lacking but I have the apps I really need (Slack for work, WhatsApp and Telegram for messaging, LastPass) plus several nice to have apps. I find I don't want a lot of apps any more and would rather use the browser or cut them out completely.

</comment><comment><USER17> Long story short: Developers, developers, developers, developers. The same reason why people won't switch from Windows to Linux is why people won't switch from Android to Windows Phone.

<comment><USER18> It's not only developers (although that was a HUGE Robles and also one of the big two problems with WebOS).

Every time they made a huge change in the OS (for the better) basically none of the existing phones go it. So every time they updated they were basically throwing away the previous platform. If apps weren't compatible (I don't know) they may have been resetting that as well.

Combined with how late they were to the party that was just a death sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, I guess 10 years ago - if I said Mr Gates would be walking around with a Linux device as his most often used 'computer' \- no one would have believed me.

What next ?

<comment><USER20> Its not like he had much choice. Adopting Apple, his historic competitor, would have been too much of an ego bruising for him. Linux is more neutral to MS anyway. MS never had a lock on the server market that linux is successful in. The home computer front has always been under attack by Apple with varying results. Especially today where owning an Apple computer isn't just for 'designers.' Pretty much every college student has one.

<comment><USER10> > MS never had a lock on the server market that linux is successful in.

Only because Linux happened, businesses were happily moving from proprietary UNIXes into Windows NT and 2000.

<comment><USER20> Linux ate proprietary Unix, not Windows. Windows "servers" domination as listed by garner and others were tiny office NT4 domains back then, not internet facing websites and such. The web never really got dominated by MS and Unix and Linux always strangled MS in the cradle. Even stats by netcraft are misleading. Sure you'll see a lot of small business IIS crap and Exchange OWA, but that's no the web in general. The web has always been dominated by linux/Unix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This story was originally reported the same day Apple announced that it would no longer use Bing.[1]. Gates' sudden affection for Android feels like a transparent way to snub Apple in retaliation and nothing more.

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16361628/apple-siri- bing-...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16361628/apple-siri-bing-google- search-results-spotlight-mac)

<comment><USER22> Apple started using Google, so Bill Gates got back at them by also using Google?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I always liked Windows Phone. It was a truly unique and refreshing alternative to iOS, not the carbon copy that Android is.

</comment><comment><USER24> Windows Phone was the best thing since webOS. The developer experience was (and still is) a lot better than for iOS or Android. I'm sure it will eventually come back.

<comment><USER18> I don't know how it could. It doesn't matter how nice it is the app ecosystem is too important and they'd be light years behind.

If they emulated Android (like Blackberry)... why not just buy an android phone?

<comment><USER25> The fact that Microsoft is pushing Universal apps so hard, and if you're making a universal app for desktops, it's trivially easy to allow it to also work on Mobile. A not-insignificant number of times I've installed an app on my desktop and then realized I can use it on my phone, or installed a phone app, and realized it's great on my desktop too.

If UWP takes off, their mobile app support will follow. New Windows 10 S devices only running UWP apps will encourage this progress a lot.

<comment><USER26> > New Windows 10 S devices only running UWP apps will encourage this progress > a lot.

If anybody will actually buy them.

<comment><USER27> There's a setting now to set Windows 10 Home and Pro to only allow Store apps as well. How soon until that tempts more of us that do unpaid tech support in our free time for family and friends to just turn that setting on for them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's a mild delight in noting that Microsoft failed to break into _someone else 's_ platform stranglehold. Personally I wasn't sad to see it fail to obtain a place in the market.

Disclaimer -- I've never used a Microsoft phone. Indeed, I only know one person that had one - and even then it was an employer decision. Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows computer, or that it integrated better with their existing Microsoft systems. People who want to 'think different' could have embraced Maemo, BB, Sailfish, Firefox, or various other niche platforms. And then observed the same problem -- lack of people developing applications for them.

<comment><USER29> > Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like > their Microsoft Windows computer

The one place I want microsoft to succeed is smartphones. Android spies on basically everything you do. Both android and iOS are vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before. Compared to the current smartphone OS offerings, Windows was (and is) an incredibly open platform.

<comment><USER30> Android itself does not "[spy] on basically everything you do", that role is given to the Google-specific services and applications you can - but do not have to - run on the thing. Neither is Android "vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before", the source to the basic OS is available after all. The exception to this is formed by the device drivers which generally come in the form of "blobs" which are tailored to a specific build of the OS. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to make use of source builds, a situation which might be rectified by "project Treble" [1] but the jury is still out on this.

With the source to Android available and decoupled from the device-specific code it should be easier to create alternative Android distributions. This should also make it possible to upgrade Android on devices which have been abandoned by the vendor and those which never got any updates to begin with.

This is not just theory by the way, I'm using a number of Google-free Android devices myself. They run just fine without those Google bits, they don't spy more than any other device. This does not mean it does not spy at all but that problem is present in all mobile devices from all manufacturers and under all operating systems: the radio interface layer is a black box closed source blob in all commercially available devices that I've come across.

[1] [https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here- comes...](https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes-treble- modular-base-for.html)

<comment><USER31> The Android that competes with the iPhone and Windows Phone devices in the market at large is the Android that either has Google Play Services, or occasionally has a much worse (privacy-wise) Chinese alternative suite.

The Android you get without Google Play Services are more like Firefox OS, or Ubuntu Phone, or chrooting into Debian and calling that your "OS", interesting things for developers, but not really what the average end user would consider a serious phone option that's even on their radar.

<comment><USER30> Those who are interested in the nitty-gritty of keeping a semblance of privacy generally will not baulk at taking some hurdles to get there, nor do they expect their devices to work exactly like those within the walled gardens.

Now if there where a way to combine these two worlds - that of the 'it just works but it knows more about me than I do myself' and the 'it does exactly what I tell it do do, no more and no less' \- it would be feasible to offer such a device to a larger section of the general public.

A stripped-down Android distribution - sans Google-specific bits, with some replacements where needed - which does over the air updates just like devices on the other side of the wall would be a good start.

<comment><USER31> iOS lets you keep a semblance of privacy without hurdles. The walled garden even contributes to it's security.

I think more people who have a passing interest in privacy would rather take a walled garden on some of the best hardware out there with a rather enjoyable, if not powerful, OS.

<comment><USER30> iOS only allows this if you consider your data to be private as long as it doesn't leave Apple (i.e. the garden). This does not mean your data can not be used for profiling purposes, it just means the profiling would be done wholly within the confines of Apple, Inc. If you trust Apple to not use this data for anything but your personal good you can feel safe and secure. If on the other hand you consider Apple to be an (extreme) example of a profit-driven company you'd do well to reconsider whether you want your personal data within their reach.

While it is hard - and getting harder - to evade profiling it is still preferable to minimise the amount of personally identifiable data collected by commercial or governmental organisations. Using an Android device without Google-specific code can help here.

<comment><USER31> For the majority of users I'd recommend trusting Apple. If you're in a class of user where Apple can't be trusted I don't recommend a smartphone. They can earn profit by being the privacy oriented alternative to Google's OS.

I think the conversation has shifted from my main point. When the average user hears "Android" or says it, it's "Android + GPS". The GP said Android but seeing as the most common Android devices competing with the other two OSes they mentioned come with GPS I find it disingenuous to try and imply that it's not "Android proper" if it has GPS. If anything Android _without_ GPS isn't "Android proper" in this context because of the amount of functionality it provides that people include when they compare those OSes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I really liked my Windows Phone and wish they were still being made. The OS was stable and fast, and you could resize the squares to make them easier to hit with your thumb. Battery life was good. I think if they'd gone with premium hardware they'd make sales to people who appreciate a good looking phone and one that didn't make them wait for pointless animations to finish.

Now that Microsoft has talented hardware people working on really nice products like Surface, they could probably do an in-house design on a new phone. Borrow a page from Motorola/Google's Moto X Pure Edition and put a wooden back on it - it's grippier than plastic or glass, and looks classier too.

<comment><USER33> Acer, HP, and Alcatel still make them. Microsoft doesn't make any and Windows Phone 8 is dead, I think.

<comment><USER25> In fact, it sounds like a Verizon model of the HP Elite x3 is launch-imminent. I'm hearing mid-October.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, I may end up switching to Verizon, though I'm not sure how happy they will be. US Cellular owns the towers near me and Verizon has an agreement to share towers with them. However, Verizon recently cut about 12,500 people off because they were using non-Verizon towers too often. (This made some news sites and the municipalities are less than impressed.)

US Cellular doesn't like to activate non-branded phones, though I guess they have started doing some. They share the same tech so I don't know of any technical limitations that would prevent it.

I will need to replace mine. It is running 8 (.1 maybe?) and I guess it can be upgraded but I'd rather not risk it and it is getting long in the tooth.

I should add that I'm in an unusual position where I don't even carry my cell phone very often. I often even forget to bring it with me. I don't depend on it, am not chained to it, and it frequently goes without attention for days or weeks at a time. I don't actually install anything on it. The stock apps do everything I want to do, and more. Right now, I think it's in the cab of the tractor, though it might be in the car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The lack of a Youtube App from Google killed the Windows Phone.

[https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/2013/08/15/the- limits-of-googles-openness/)

<comment><USER35> It's insane to me that there haven't been any anti-trust lawsuits against Google for this kind of crap they pull.

More examples:

* Deceptive ads all over the web telling people to switch to Chrome

* You can't use any other search engine but Google from Chrome on Android

* The insane amount of Google integration on stock Android

Google has almost total control over a typical internet user's experience

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I miss my Lumia 920 with Windows phone 8.1. I feel bad for MS (Nokia mostly) when I see Apple/Google announcing a feature that has been on WP8.1 for years (Google lens, tap to awake, ambient/always on display, offline maps/navigation, wireless charging etc.).

</comment><comment><USER37> In 2010 I nearly joined a company which was building their business on deploying and managing Windows Mobile devices to enterprises. Glad I didn't do that!

</comment><comment><USER38> He also "played around with Firefox a bit" sometime around 2005 (2004?). I'll take his word for it that he really thought IE6 was still better by then ;)

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4508897.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4508897.stm)

</comment><comment><USER39> I think Microsoft hasn't given up on smartphones yet. They will give it another try next year with Surface Phone. Can't just leave such huge market to Apple and Google. It's worth it for them to keep trying to compete. Maybe they'll get it right next time.

</comment><comment><USER40> He used it secretly before, but didn't tell anybody about it... :-)

</comment><comment><USER41> Wonder what model he's actually using. Pixel most likely?

</comment><comment><USER42> It's possible it's a Microsoft Android phone.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why is this on HN? Articles like these should be on TMZ or some other non- relevant websites.

</comment><comment><USER44> Does it also mean, Gates is no more concerned about Privacy or Google targeting him with ads?

<comment><USER45> You'd think a rich guy would have to be very concerned with privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I accidentally rode an elevator mr gates was in. Just me, him and an EA from exec area

He was carrying a laptop. No case.

It was well before cell phone ubiquity and way before smartphones.

I thought "wow, the richest man carries an unprotected laptop, no briefcase, his hair even uncombed (probably because he just came from heliport)"

I felt "LC" because i cared about a celebrity (and even noted my diary).

Later, the parking guard said it was to be a low key meeting. We all speculated and believe it had to do with using unused bandwith?during overnight hours...

I still feel LC because i read the article...

<comment><USER47> I can't work out which one of these you're referring to: [http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/LC](http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/LC)

<comment><USER48> Lara Croft? Liver Cirrhosis? Leaky Cauldron??</comment></comment></comment>


How climate change is affecting your health - <AUTHOR> http://features.lshtm.ac.uk/project/climate-change-affecting-health <comment><USER2> Probably mentally with all the bullshit flying around</comment>


What happens when you put stupid people in charge of stuff. - <AUTHOR> http://www.dems.gov/index.asp?Type=B_PR&SEC={D68CD0B2-1442-4804-9F6B-AF67DE7FF585}&DE={FDD09C4F-E958-4E13-A92B-179C2FAC6FEA}&Design=PrintView#_edn1

<comment><USER2> Least friendly URL ever.

<comment><USER3> Looks like any Amazon URL to me.</comment></comment>


Aliens could end global warming or kill us  - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/Aliens-could-end-global-warming-or-kill-us/articleshow/9674440.cms

<comment><USER2> This is a terrible headline and terrible summary of an interesting paper (here: <http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1104/1104.4462.pdf>) linked in a YC discussion that died out with 4 points and no comment (here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2905161>) yesterday.</comment>


$20 Android PC on Kickstarter – Remix Mini - <AUTHOR> http://www.jide.com/en

<comment><USER2> Isn't this just a mini ChromeOS computer, not "Android + Windows" like they allude to?

<comment><AUTHOR> it runs Android. but it is an android that customized for mouse and keyboard experience.</comment></comment>


Viruses That Leave Victims Red in the Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/technology/internet/14virus.html

<comment><USER2> _Often the victims lose control of their accounts after clicking on a link "sent" by a friend. In other cases, the bad guys apparently scan for accounts with easily guessable passwords. (Mr. Marquess gamely concedes that his password at the time was "abc123.")_

Hard to feel sympathy for the guy at that line</comment>


Why San Francisco Gets So Foggy in the Summer - <AUTHOR> http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2015/06/08/making-sense-of-san-franciscos-bone-chilling-summertime-fog/ <comment><USER2> The politico-enviros used to call their scary scenarios "global warming" but who can argue with "climate change"? Weren't we all going to freeze to death based on their weather reports from the '70's?

<comment><USER3> > The politico-enviros used to call their scary scenarios "global warming" but > who can argue with "climate change"?

Global warming is the source of climate change, climate change involves local changes which are not always warming.

> Weren't we all going to freeze to death based on their weather reports from > the '70's?

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: [http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/the-1970s-ice-a...](http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/the-1970s-ice- age-myth-and-time-magazine-covers-by-david-kirtley/)

<comment><USER2> Battle of the URLs; [http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global- co...](http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling- alarmism.html)

I lived through the last round of this scare-mongering and remember it first hand.

<comment><USER3> > Battle of the URLs; > [http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global- > co...](http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-co..).

Actually clicking through the links on that page, I find that, where there are full text articles linked, they are sensationalist headlines backed by stories that entirely reflect that global cooling was not generally portrayed, even in the body of those popular media articles, as a likely outcome or scientific consensus, but as one _potential_ outcome of pollution induced climate change. In fact, several of them expressly identify that even then there was a scientific consensus on CO2-driven warming being a current trend, but noting that then-less-understood effects of other pollution forms _might_ , at high enough levels, reverse that and result in radical cooling, even to the extreme of a new ice age.

> I lived through the last round of this scare-mongering and remember it first > hand.

I lived through the time period when the potential of global cooling was being discussed, too, and remember it first-hand. And I remember, despite being rather young, being _quite_ aware that it was a fringe theory, not the scientific consensus, to present it as anything more than one of many possibilities emerging from a then-murky variety of climate evidence pointing in different directions (with warming being the current -- then as now -- secular trend, but some new and not yet well understood factors having been identified that could, in some models, lead to a radical reversal.)

<comment><USER2> Thank you for your reply.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dive into Deep Learning: Berkeley Course - left-left http://d2l.ai/chapter_introduction/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> This course appears to be above average in terms of terminology and and code quality for a free online course. (although the DL part focuses on MXNet, which is not as ubiquitous as TensorFlow/PyTorch)

<comment><USER2> Spelling not so much.

<comment><USER3> Feel free to fix any typos you find via pull request! [https://github.com/d2l-ai/d2l-en](https://github.com/d2l-ai/d2l-en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks.

1\. We have just translated contents from the Chinese book [https://github.com/d2l-ai/d2l-zh](https://github.com/d2l-ai/d2l-zh). However, the translation quality is not good enough; thus, we are still editing. As @EForEndeavour put, you are more than welcome to become a contributor of the book if you spot any issue: [https://github.com/d2l-ai/d2l-en](https://github.com/d2l-ai/d2l-en) Your help is valuable for making the book better for everyone.

2\. Indeed, recently we were also asked by a few instructors why we use MXNet in 'Dive into Deep Learning' (D2L). Here is what we think:

a) Traditional deep learning (DL) textbooks often illustrate algorithms without implementations.

b) In view of this, D2L features both algorithms and implementations for DL. Doing so does not require exclusive features of any deep learning framework.

c) Thus, even when re-implementing the algorithms in the book with other DL frameworks, the code descriptions won't be too different. We use MXNet because we are familiar with it. No matter which DL framework one uses, it should be easy to switch to another one.

As a concrete example, in the case of applying RNN to language models, the implementation includes data preprocessing, model construction, and training loops. D2L will guide you through how to transform text data to allow efficient mini-batch iteration, how to implement RNN (with or without using RNN api), and how to efficiently and effectively train a language model. On one hand, even if a DL novice can memorize the algorithms in a traditional textbook, it is still hard to apply it into a real project without knowing implementation details. On the other hand, such implementations are general: the code will be similar even when being re-implemented with another framework.

3\. We thank institutions for adopting or recommending D2L in their courses, such as UCLA CS 269 Foundations of Deep Learning, University of Science and Technology of China Deep Learning, UIUC CS 498 Introduction to Deep Learning, and UW CSE 599W Systems for ML. When we wrote the book in Chinese, the book benefited from a lot of feedbacks at [https://discuss.gluon.ai/latest?order=views](https://discuss.gluon.ai/latest?order=views) and pull requests from 120+ contributors. It would be very helpful if we could get feedbacks and help from more readers when we are editing.

Happy weekends!

</comment><comment><USER5> Could we get a good course on something _other than_ machine learning / ML? Maybe hardware?

<comment><USER6> Even something niche. I want a great course in computability theory. HN is almost 100% ML these days, as if ML is the only exciting thing happening in CS world. Very disappointing.

<comment><USER7> Not computability exactly, but Ryan O'Donnell from CMU has put up videos of his undergraduate and graduate complexity courses. Might be of interest. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWnu2XymDtORV-- qG2uG5eQ/pla...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWnu2XymDtORV-- qG2uG5eQ/playlists)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks pretty great, except for the fact that it would require you to learn MXNet, which hardly anybody uses. Paid for by Amazon I guess?

<comment><USER9> The instructors include core contributors to MXNet. I don't imagine one would expect, say, François Chollet to do a course on Pytorch :)

<comment><USER8> Keras is quite popular as well. My point is, these courses have the cognitive load that's quite high even without having to deal with an unfamiliar framework.

Don't get me wrong, it seems like a great course and anyone interested in the field will certainly get a lot of mileage out of it. But by choosing a rather obscure framework it kind of shoots itself in the foot compared to e.g. Fast.ai course, which is jam packed with practical advice and uses PyTorch. Like it or not, there are two dominant frameworks right now: TF and PyTorch, the latter is my personal favorite by far. A more practical (and fairly low- effort) approach, therefore, would be to duplicate code samples in PyTorch.

That said, Fast.ai shoots itself in the foot a little too, by requiring Python 3.6 and up, which a lot of people don't have out of the box. I understand why they do it (type annotations), but still. They also hide PyTorch behind a rather large ball of Python with cognitive loads of its own.

<comment><USER9> Your point is understood, and reiterated in other posts here. I just wanted to add context to the course as being presented by an author of MXNet, who is free to present it in his own framework.

Anyway, there's no dearth of courses in the popular frameworks already, it doesn't really help enrich the community if all educational resources only taught the current "market winner", we might otherwise be missing other opportunities or ways of thinking. Imagine if all schools only taught Javascript or Java!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HP TouchPad reduced to $99 in Canada - <AUTHOR> http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/product/hewlett-packard-hp-16gb-touchpad-with-wi-fi-16gb-wifi/10173116.aspx?path=01191e3f32fb2966d8a052fd3272bd05en02 Futureshop and BestBuy have them for $99. I am not sure if they are both sold out but I couldn't find a way to buy online. <comment><USER2> Already being discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2905627>

FYI, it's sold out at most locations.</comment>


A no-fly zone to protect Linux from patent trolls - <AUTHOR> http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/ <comment><USER2> Just for future reference the actual address is [http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/12/08/a-no-fly- zo...](http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/12/08/a-no-fly-zone-to- protect-linux-from-patent-trolls/)

</comment><comment><USER3> But software patents are so vague. You'd have to submit every line of code in Linux for this to work, right?

Didn't someone patent storing a wishlist in a database? So wouldn't this need to list storing X in a Y for all X and Y?</comment>


A list of all "Gift HN" posts. Would be nice to see this grow - <AUTHOR> https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22gift%20hn%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story <comment><USER2> The last Gift HN was 5 years ago. Nowadays, with current marketing strategies, Gift HNs are guaranteed to be abused if endorsed.</comment>


NTSB cites drivers in fatal Tesla crash, and photos tell the harrowing story - <AUTHOR> https://www.autoblog.com/2020/03/19/ntsb-investigation-tesla-autopilot-florida-fatal-crash/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't load / redirects the entire page to an ad network(???)

Alternate article with some pictures: [https://electrek.co/2020/03/20/tesla- criticism-deaths-autopi...](https://electrek.co/2020/03/20/tesla-criticism- deaths-autopilot-crashes-ntsb/)

<comment><USER3> interesting difference in headlines.

TFA: "drivers at fault"

electrek: "telsa partially at fault"

of special note because, since electrek sounds like an pro-industry site, they have twisted the report headline to be as anti-tesla as they can.

both articles themselves are pretty weak, but the electrek one is at least the better of the two.

<comment><USER4> electrek is about as pro-tesla as it gets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The semi was probably doing 800# gorilla driving: the Tesla may have had right of way, but semis are sometimes going to do things that force people to stop for them.</comment>


The Most Detailed Map of Auto Emissions in America - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/10/climate/driving-emissions-map.html <comment><USER2> Seattle's emissions per person are _up_?! C'mon, Seattle. I'm just guessing, but maybe all the bike nuts that are going to ride to work already moved here, and the n00bs drive. Or here's a better one: outrageous house prices mean people are moving further out and driving more, let alone being close enough to bike/walk to work.

I'm only surprised because, personally, we had a less-than-average footprint to begin with, and have been whittling at it since. I only drove the electric car this morning because at 32F/0C I don't want to dump a single track vehicle (bicycle/electric scooter/motorcycle) on black ice like I did last year. We're replacing the 30 year old furnace with a heat pump next week (most efficient I could buy). We insulated the attic this summer. We rarely fly anymore. Don't tell me personal emissions are up, we're running out of ideas. :-)</comment>


Facebook is in the privacy spotlight but should Google be next - <AUTHOR> http://www.afr.com/technology/social-media/google/facebook-is-in-the-privacy-spotlight-but-should-google-be-next-20180412-h0ynog <comment><USER2> Google is on the list, but I'm going to break away from the flock and say they shouldn't be _next_. Credit agencies and data brokers, who facilitate the worst kinds of third-party privacy violation and about whom most people know very little, should go next. Then the government itself. _Then_ Google, and then Amazon.

BTW, if you want to have some fun, just try to imagine that the the government's interest in Facebook's data practices is not so much to regulate it as to _copy_ it - either for the government itself or for election campaigns. IMO that makes a lot of their otherwise nonsensical or inconsistent behavior much more understandable. Creepy. They totally want to know more about us than Facebook and Google put together; they just don't know how.

<comment><USER3> "...Google is on the list, but I'm going to break away from the flock and say they shouldn't be next. Credit agencies and data brokers ... should go next...

Why can't it be both?

Serious question.

<comment><USER4> "Why can't it be both?"

In fairness to the OP, the notion of someone being next is coming from the headline, not the comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google is more dangerous than Facebook. In the later you usually have a persona you pretend to be. But Google knows you better than yourself. You can't lie to Google. Is your teenage daughter pregnant? Do you have a disease that is socially rejected? Do you want to have an abortion? Are those pimples in your groin an STD? Are you secretly looking for another job? Google probably knows that before you do. And their business plan is making money out of that information.

And let's never forget Eric Schmidt:

[http://precursorblog.com/?q=content/googles-top-ten-anti- pri...](http://precursorblog.com/?q=content/googles-top-ten-anti-privacy- quotes-part-3-googles-own-words-series)

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place;"

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told CNBC's Maria Bartiromo 12-7-09.

The "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it;"

Said Google Chairman Eric Schmidt 10-1-10 per the Atlantic.

"Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are;"

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told the 2010 Techonomy conference.

"We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about;"

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt 10-1-10 per the Atlantic.

"It's a future where you don't forget anything…"In this new future you're never lost...We will know your position down to the foot and down to the inch over time;"

Explained Google Chairman Eric Schmidt at TechCrunch, 9-28-10.

"No harm, no foul;" Concerning Google's unauthorized collection of WiFi signals from tens of millions of homes in 33 countries over three years, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told the Times of London in May 2010.

<comment><USER6> If we really want to deal with Google's enormous power, we'll need to tackle the issue at both ends: political and technical. As for politics, it doesn't look like Google is going to be attacked the way it happened to FB - the CA affair was almost an accident. And Google knows better and will do everything to avoid accidents.

The second issue is technological. The competing search engines are not there yet, although they're continuously improving. Google got where they are not only by text search, but also extending the search categories horizontally. The competing search engine would need some smart minds to come up with something extra, something genuinely useful that would make people flock there.

Then there are all other parts of Google ecosystem that people depend on: Gmail, Adwords, Adsense, GA. And millions of Android devices. How to eradicate all that from our lives? It will take decades to complete - if we started now, that is.

<comment><USER7> Using other search engines goes a long way to get them there - the more they are used the more advertising dollars they get (and the less google gets), which leads to dollars to invest.

I find that duckduckgo is good enough for everything these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fun fact: Google collects much more data from Android devices than from iOS devices. This might be unsurprising, and even obvious, but I was surprised how precise and intrusive that data is.

The whole time I was using an Android phone with my google account logged in on the device, google recorded and retained basically everything. My location, without even me using the maps app. My old contacts which I deleted from my contacts lists were still in the records. Any IPv4 or IPv6 address my phone was assigned to. This was even more creepy than facebook's data trove. I deleted my data on facebook as far as I could and also the account (not just deactivated) and I deleted most of the data google had on me. The problem is that I only can _assume_ that all the data is now gone, but how can I be sure?

Google might constantly assure that they handle everything with care, but the extent of their intrusion into my private life is really scary.

<comment><USER9> It also annoys the hell out of me how often companies get away with something if they just say "Whoops, it was a mistake/bug."

Google was recently found to track Android users' location even when they didn't have their GPS on. And they said it was a "bug". Like I'm just going to believe that from a company whose main objective is to track as much about us as possible.

But my point is the FTC should have slapped them with a major (at least tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, depending how long they've been doing it and to how many people) even if this _was_ a bug.

If you tracked or collected data without users' consent, you get fined - bigly. No ifs or buts about it. Enough with the BS excuses and apology tours while they pocket billions from the "error" or "mistake."

<comment><USER10> As long as money and politics are strongly intertwined it is unlikely this will happen within the country of origin of the company. Lobbyists are just too powerful.

And that's before we get into the kind of tricks and entity like Google or Facebook could pull if they decided to become an active participant rather than just a channel for advertising. If that hasn't already happened.

<comment><USER8> Money and politics is basically the way people run things, as sad as it sounds. You can substitute money with something different, it doesn't matter as people need some system of exchange. Money seems effective and easy enough.

So, it's not the money that is the problem. It might have something to do with people, but I haven't figured it out yet.

<comment><USER10> In most countries companies directly paying politicians is seen as corruption.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately politicians can be lobbied/bribed in many subtler ways. A corporation can invest in city infrastructure, donate medical equipment, libraries, etc. then invite their friendly politician for a public speech to the inauguration so that the public associates something good (that didn't cost taxpayers a single dime) to his face. That politician gets a lot more votes and the corporation gets a foot in the government door: a win-win scenario for both and completely legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not saying Google is a saint, but it's orders of magnitude better at privacy than Facebook:

\- Malicious actors can't access most Google data has on you. Especially not by releasing psychological quiz app.

\- Google is not tracking logged out users. New id is assigned to logged out users only for very short periods of time.

\- Mostly compliant with GDPR for years prior to the regulation being released. The same can't be said for Facebook.

\- Search results are much harder to manipulate by malicious actors than Facebook news feed ranking - based on the history of such manipulations.

\- I don't work on either right now, but at the time I did Google had way much better internal access controls for employees.

Amassing personal data can be considered unethical on some levels, but amassing personal data can't be equated with being bad at privacy. Among "personal data hoarders" Google is by far the most coginzant about keeping that data private.

<comment><USER13> > \- Malicious actors can't access most Google data has on you. Especially not > by releasing psychological quiz app.

If I remember well, Google was part of PRISM. And it did give data to a malicious state actors. Plus it has analytics, which you can pay to have data on people (although no personal, but personal data from facebook is aggregated and used the same way in the end). Also google let you literally google people to find any data that other service would leak.

It's not as bad, yes. But it's still a lot.

> Google is not tracking logged out users. New id is assigned to logged out > users only for very short periods of time.

I'm not an insider, but I would imagine that with android, gmail, chrome, various search tools and google Web APIs (fonts, graphs, analytics...), Google tracks you everywhere, whether you are logged in or not. It doesn't even need a cookie with all the behavioral data it has to fingerprint you.

And it's so big I doubt that any employee inside knows how everything works and everything that is done.

> Search results are much harder to manipulate by malicious actors than > Facebook news feed ranking - based on the history of such manipulations.

Now. But they've been at it for more time. I remember the early days of Google, and it was black SEO everywhere. It became only hard to game the system recently. Even when StackOverflow came out, we had so much spammy clones, and it's not that old.

It also came out at the cost of less relevant results: now I can always find instantly what I know I want, but rarely discover something I'm happy I found about that is related to my current search. The bubble is very strong.

<comment><USER14> > I'm not an insider, but I would imagine that with android, gmail, chrome, > various search tools and google Web APIs (fonts, graphs, analytics...), > Google tracks you everywhere, whether you are logged in or not. It doesn't > even need a cookie with all the behavioral data it has to fingerprint you.

Why would they take all that risk when they allow you to opt-out of targetted advertising?

<comment><USER13> Which risk. No actor has any way to verify that. It's incredibly complicated software, lost in the forest of their billions lines of code and thousand of servers.

Even if any actor had the will, the mean and the skills to check it out, and I doubt we had even two of that, the task is immense and the ability to hide high.

Add on top of that the power of a company that has the budget of a small country...

There is no important risk.

Now even if there were like 0.00001% of chance they get caught. So what ? What are the consequences ?

Bad PR ? Who cares, customers will forget in 3 months.

A fine ? Who cares, they can buy pay 10 times that before diner.

Prison ? Scape goats and lawyer will make sure it's not a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux Google tracks online behaviour on an industrial scale. It's baffling how little scrutiny the company faces, least of all from the tech community who often rush to it's defence. (Does a multi-billion dollar company need your defence?)

When you create a Google account, you're asked to provide your name, your gender, your date of birth, your location and your mobile phone number. Some of your most personal and private details, all of which will now be tied to your online behaviour.

That ceaseless data capture starts right from school, where millions of students use a cloud-based OS called ChromeOS that records everything they do. It's quite horrible that this is happening - the kids don't even get a say, it's the adults who've decided this.

It doesn't matter if that information is only collated in aggregated form and detached from user accounts, we don't know how that information could be mined or analysed either now or in the future. (In fact, I suspect that even Google hasn't figure all the possible uses of the ginormous quantity of user behaviour it has captured and continues to capture).

And we've seen from Spotify and Netflix how even aggregated data can reveal very private and personal user behaviour.

Google and many of it's supporters conflate security with privacy. Just because Google hasn't ever suffered a breach of user data, people say that Google can be trusted. You can't have privacy without security, but security by itself does not equal privacy. You're still being tracked relentlessly by Google no matter how securely it's storing your online behaviour.

<comment><USER15> G Suite for Education very clearly doesn't track students using it.

[https://edu.google.com/k-12-solutions/privacy- security/](https://edu.google.com/k-12-solutions/privacy-security/)

<comment> open-source-ux Where does it say that it doesn't track students on that page?

The G Suite for Education Privacy Notice [1] clearly states that Google collects device information, unique device identifiers, mobile network information (including phone number of the user). Also logged are IP addresses, location information, and app usage using unique application numbers.

Even if this information is detached from individual accounts and aggregated, it equals a phenomenal amount of data captured by Google on millions of students in the US.

[1] [https://gsuite.google.com/terms/education_privacy.html](https://gsuite.google.com/terms/education_privacy.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The difference is that Google doesn't share that information with other firms. Having centralized information for a user is important to many (you can always spread it across multiple emails and accounts) but I think violation of privacy is the main reason Facebook is under investigation not centralization of data.

<comment><USER2> > The difference is that Google doesn't share that information with other > firms.

Are you absolutely sure about that? Are you absolutely sure it will remain that way tomorrow, or next month?

<comment><USER10> He may be sure but he's wrong either way. The Google real-time bidding spec outlines pretty clearly what data Google will share with third parties.

<comment><USER16> > The Google real-time bidding spec outlines pretty clearly what data Google > will share with third parties

This is exactly my point is it is clear you are consenting and have control and can opt out here: [https://adssettings.google.com/](https://adssettings.google.com/). I am very aware of real-time bidding for ads works.

Also you shouldn't assume gender.

<comment><USER10> Anonymous profiles can be addressed using either gender until otherwise specified, besides that HN is so skewed towards males that it is a safe assumption.

If you want to distract from the discussion at hand by making it about gender then that's on you.

As for 'consenting' and 'opting out' that's not how it should work, you don't 'consent' to being tracked by Google because you didn't opt out, that's Google assuming your consent (which, to tie it in with the previous bit is a lot more serious than assuming someone's gender).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My personal gut feel is that in the fairly long history (for a tech co), we've seen surprisingly little malicious use of data come from google. In a company of their size I'd expect a lot more screw ups and scandles, so perhaps they deserve a little more trust?

At the same time, they're at the size and momentum that they should always be under scrutiny even if the answer keeps coming back "yeah they seem to be acting responsibly". We don't want to have an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

</comment><comment><USER18> Reprising my comment from a few weeks ago:

Facebook never gave me anything of value in exchange for constantly monitoring and profilingmy behavior online. in fact, as it became ubiquitous,it added a new chore for me: maintaining ever changing privacy options on a defensive profile on their network.

So it takes peoples time, attention, and details on top of behavioral monitoring.

In contrast, Google provides me with a very competent productivity suite, a superb photo-managing software navigation, maps, aggregate traffic data,and a host of tools to actually build a business and educate myself and others.

Plus i get enterprise class security for my account and -arguably- the best web email service.

The day theres a data breach or in this case a breach of trust, im more likely to view google in a better light and give them the benefit of the doubt. Facebook gets my contempt and scorn.

>Inb4 "well then don't use Facebook": I don't. But that doesn't stop FB from building a shadow profile on me, so if I want some measure of control over my digital footprint, I have _no choice or recourse_ but to open and maintain a _defensive profile_ whose only purposes are a) claim my username / URL used on most services where I'm provided with such a srfvixe, b) "squat" my name and likeness so I can't be unknowingly impersonated on their network and c) keep up with their ever changing privacy controls

>Inb4 "sounds like cringe material from Google's social team": -I don't work for Google. I admit I'd love to, but I'm too old, perhaps. OTOH, I don't see how it's "cringe" since I succinctly describe the services the company does provide for me in exchange for my data and observing my behaviour; services I've used in making a living lately. Try making a living by developing on the FB platform, where every API Iteration makes you re-evaluate your business model.

</comment><comment><USER19> In the age of information, Google obviously has disproportionate power. Society must raise awareness about concentration of power, post more about this topic, demand justice and transparency from the rulers. I think Google workers have special ethical responsibility to demand transparency and trust, organize and resist evil orders. We all have responsibility as a society to demand justice if we want a promising future.

</comment><comment><USER20> I absolutely agree Google has a much wider ecosystem they cover: social media with google plus or whatever is left of it, video via YouTube, Images via google Photos, cloud infrastructure via Compute Engine, google work via G Suit, ISP via Google Fiber etc... All these have Term of Services with very broad language they can dragnet collect whatever they want. I don't mind sharing the information and I don't want the government involve and regulate how private entities work. But I also wouldn't mind having this companies put on the spot and have to explain how they handle the data they gather. How they handle ToS and/or Data breach. Facebook is a speck of dust compare to google.

<comment><USER21> You say you don't mind sharing information. Do you mind them collecting information about you outside of what you share?

<comment><USER20> Yes that is the VERY reason why I said wouldn't mind having them put on the spot that way we can ask. Provided the right people are asking the questions. If it comes up through the questioning that they are grabbing information I chose not to share with them. I'll stop using the services and go somewhere else no one has a gun to my head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It is funny that my essay on this exact topic don't seem to get much coverage, even though I have been working on the problem for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER21> The problem I have is the lack of transparency. Google lets you download "all of your data". But it's nothing near the entirety of what they collect about you. It's insulting.

It's time we learn what they know about us. I want to know.

</comment><comment><USER9> I expect we'll see some major leaks about Google by the end of the year, too.

</comment><comment><USER23> Facebook is the perfect company to take all the heat. Mainly because Mark Zuckerberg is such an icon.

[https://hackernoon.com/why-facebook-is-the-perfect- represent...](https://hackernoon.com/why-facebook-is-the-perfect- representative-of-techs-privacy-problem-5e5c29063d47)

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes.

<comment><USER25> And the I's have it.

<comment><USER10> 'Ayes'.

<comment><USER26> Nyes</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you find talent to work on one-off tech problems? - <AUTHOR>

I've used 99designs for graphics design and I like it. But now I have a programming problem that is beyond my own skill and simply not practical for me to spend many hours trying to figure out. Where would you go to hire someone to solve a one-off problem in as direct a way as possible? I know of eLance but I haven't heard the best things.<p>-the problem--<p>I want a working demo of using Adobe's BlazeDS with their JavaScript libraries and a ColdFusion CFC on the backend. <comment><USER2> jobs.freelanceswitch.com

the site itself is a reasonable community of freelancers, and they pay attention to the job board.</comment>