Google Erases Thousands of Links, Tricked by Phony Complaints - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-dmca-copyright-claims-takedown-online-reputation-11589557001 <comment><USER3> This is the expected result of increased scrutiny over Google. Whether or not to respond to claims of abuse is a tradeoff between limiting false negatives or limiting false positives. When there is an increase in the cost of false negative, both monetary and in terms of status and reputation, then Google is going to optimize to reduce false negatives at the expense of creating more false positives.

This should definitely be part of the conversation when discussing regulating content on Google and other large aggregators and social media platforms. I find that the so-called "techlash" has resulted in more stringent policing of content, but also greater opportunity to abuse reporting functionality. Using copyright claims malicious has been a known practice for years now, at least between content creators (e.g. feuding YouTubers having their fans report rivals). I'm not surprised to see governments using the same tactics.

<comment><USER4> Google pretty often refuses to respond to counter-dmcas, there is a lawsuit currently over this. In addition recently lumen database stopped publishing the full list of links in the dmca complaints.

<comment><USER5> > Google pretty often refuses to respond to counter-dmcas,

There is not requirement to respond to DMCA notices or counternotices, doing so merely protects against certain liability you might otherwise have. In the case of counternotices, there generally is no liability to protect against (because providers can usually structure agreements with users to avoid liability for takedowns), and thus no reason to respond.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, hypothetically if you blanket refuse to respond to coutnernotices, could you lose your protection from liability under DMCA _in general_? Like even in cases where no notice has been followed? Don't you have to follow the procedures, including responding to counter notices, to be get the protection from liability under DMCA in the first place?

Even if in theory, in practice we know the risk is vanishingly low of actually being held liable for much.

<comment><USER5> > Hmm, hypothetically if you blanket refuse to respond to coutnernotices, > could you lose your protection from liability under DMCA in general?

No, DMCA safe harbor is transactional: if you respond to a particular takedown, you are protected from liability to the issuer of the takedown for the content. If you respond to a particular counternotice, you are protected from liability to that user for taking down the content addressed by the counternotice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I get emails all the time from Google about DMCA notices and pages from my site being removed from search. They'll just give me a list of 100s of pages that have been removed. The requests make absolutely no sense. For example, it'll be a URL for a comment permalink, which redirects to a comment that says, "Great!". The vast majority of the requests are because someone mentions the name of a TV show or movie. Some company that represents them just issues a DMCA removal for any page that uses their name, claiming it infringes on their copyright. So, I've had thousands of pages removed from Google during the past year. I don't have time to make counterclaims for each of them. Most of them are old pages that receive little to no traffic. Still, it's a shame for anyone trying to search for them.

<comment><USER8> > Still, it's a shame for anyone trying to search for them.

They just have to not use Google. Fortunately, there are other search engines around - such as DuckDuckGo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the result of every "Remove Bad Internet Stuff" law.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's extremely important for the whole world to start to understand - as shown by stories like this - that Google does not hold "the world's information" anymore. Other search engines are increasingly needed. (Do I need to go back to Dogpile?)

Yesterday I even noticed Google censoring an enquiry of mine which I happen to know is a scientifically honest, but politically incorrect thing to apparently ask in Google's particular culture. (It's quite a tame line of enquiry, and not racist at all. In fact, it's information which can save lives, and yet Google was blocking my access to that information.)

I had to use Yandex to even find what I was looking for.

Only Google, no more.

I cannot believe this - but I just tried my query in Dogpile, and it was superior to both Google and Yandex.

<comment><USER11> It's weirdly déjà vu to see this sort of sentiment to appear in every thread about google and it's absolutely true — google's search quality has been on a noticeable decline for years now.

It's especially funny to see headlines like "google achieves quantum superiority" and "google can't understand the word 'without'" next to each other. It almost seems like the search engine is being purposefully sabotaged by google itself.

<comment><USER12> What the average user of Google wants is not what the average user of HN wants, and it shows. The average Google user wants a semi-conversational query engine. What the average HN user wants is probably more like a fuzzy regex matcher. Google has gotten much better over the years for most of their userbase.

If you put in "did the cubs win" you get a custom panel that tells you the results of their latest few non-postponed games as sub-panels, with team logos and everything. If you click though a sub-panel, it gives you some more info and links to news articles. This is obviously a vastly improved experience over previous years for what is clearly the intent behind this search.

Another example that's a favorite of mine. If you search for "gay indiana mayor" the first result is the Wikipedia page for Pete Buttigieg. The next few results are recent high-impact news articles about Pete Buttigieg. Why? Because that's clearly what our hypothetical searcher was looking for. They didn't want webpages that contain the words "gay", "indiana" and "mayor". They wanted Pete Buttigieg, and his name is hard to remember how to spell.

<comment><USER13> I totally have to agree on this.

Who would like to go back to the days where Google results were just a link list? No average user wants that.

Plus not only that even if I Google a question regarding programming errors they usually nails it with a stack overflow answer or any good blog post within the first page.

<comment><USER11> > No average user wants that.

That's a bit ignorant. There are many search terms that are literally impossible to search for in google because it iterprets it as something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Mirror: [http://archive.md/7ShhN](http://archive.md/7ShhN)

</comment><comment><USER15> I think much of this foreshadows how the infrastructure of networks will evolve over the next decade to cope with difficulties of this nature.

There was a project I worked on several years that required becoming familiar with SEO in the earlier days and tactics like this have exploded and become more automated since 2010.

On a global network, enforcement hurdles (real or perceived) are turning the information superhighway into a digital concentration camp.

I personally can enjoy an I.S.H. without having to access a global network and forecast segmentation of networks branching off and web properties poping up on the new canvas to cater to domestic or local norms, rather than accessing a network where lowest common denominator dictatorship engagement/enforcement cancels out any benefit of ease of data retrieval.

We can easily siphon anything from a global network, so IMO, you may still access a network to assist with day-to-day tasks, but Internet 1.0`s days are numbered as being part of many folks daily routine/lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER16> There is a deeper question here of: "Should information about people be trivially easy to find via Google (or any search engine)?"

It's one thing to have the world's information available to learn and improve. It's another to have any mention of your name going back decades easily retrievable, whether that information may be true, false, slanderous, complimentary, or what-have-you.

And what causes the threshold to be crossed? A friend who names you as part of a pub-crawl/bachelor party in Las Vegas in a public social media post is different from someone who is charged in court and found guilty of a crime. But what about someone who is accused of a crime, but then acquitted later? Or someone who is named in a civil suit that is later dropped?

I don't think we can have a blanket policy of these things but it certainly makes sense for some measure of a "right-to-be-forgotten" mechanism to be in place.

</comment><comment><USER17> Zero financial incentive to stop phony complaints , lots of incentive to ensure you comply with government regulations.

</comment><comment><USER18> OK, maybe Google is easily fooled, or maybe it cuts rights holders lots of slack, or whatever.

But why would anyone need to search for pirated stuff using Google? For media I just use TPB, and libgen for books. And I presume that streaming services do their own searching.

</comment><comment><USER19> Reads like a how-to guide for anyone wanting to start their own "web reputation management" company.

I'm guessing interest in this will die down, and Google won't change their automated system.

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like google could use some of that ml magic to determine if a blog post was published four months before the events it describes and maybe flag that for further review.

<comment><USER21> There was a really interesting article posted a year-ish ago about a company/person (I barely remember the details). Someone went and created a random WordPress site, posted the article, and back-dated the post to make it look like the article was stolen from them.

Last I heard, litigation was still on-going. I should probably have beers with that person :soon:...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How come Google can't detect who was there first? Last I checked they had a massive index, timestamped even, of webpages. Dumbfounding.

<comment><USER8> They could if they wanted to. They don't want to. There's no incentive for them to do it right - overreacting protects them from large lawsuits from people who can afford lawyers, and they don't care about anything else. If some innocent blogger gets their blog removed from the index - who cares, certainly not Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google don't negotiate.

I had an Blogger(run by Google) article removed by Google in 2019.

[https://cpplover.blogspot.com/2012/04/blog- post_9853.html](https://cpplover.blogspot.com/2012/04/blog-post_9853.html)

This article quoted an interesting local Japanese news in 2012. It reported an arrest of a suspect(with real name), the suspected crime was copyright infringement for he quoted the local city's official web sites. This is strange as the Japanese copyright clearly stated that the publication from the government body cannot be copyrighted. It seems to me, that the suspect has some kind of mental issues or strong personal dislike toward the local city he is living. His web site blame every move by the local city, like he don't like the recent announcement from the city as it can be interpreted to mean malicious intent or blame the news of the minor crime by the local city's civil servants. So I suspect that local city claimed the bogus copyright violation and let local police arrest him to silence him.

What unusual about this removal is, that the reason they stated was defamation, not the usual copyright violation claim that US infamously force Web service provider to censor the information without the court order. As this is not the usual DMCA takedown notice, they don't give a person who claimed the defamation, so I cannot easily sue back the person who claimed that.

The definition of the defamation varies between jurisdictions, In some jurisdictions, the mere fact does not constitute as the defamation, In my jurisdiction, Japan, simply stating the fact can be a defamation. But not all statements be a defamation off course. The right to be forgotten does not exist in Japan. So simply quoting the news source with real name of suspect widely reported is not a defamation.

As I consulted with my lawyer, they advised me it doesn't worth it to take action. This is the first case they've heard. As I stated in the beginning, Google don't negotiate. It's so hard to negotiate with the real living human from the Google as all the response from the Google is BOT. But at least, the Google comply with the law and the court order. If it's DMCA takedown notice, it should be trivial to reveal the claimer, as the law requires to reveal the claimer.

There was interesting techniques to let google censor the information wide spreading in the wild. That you sue without explicitly specify the defendant in a minor country, win because there is no defendant to argue, using that court order to let Google censor the information as Google at least comply with the court order.

In my jurisdiction, Japan, there is a procedure to sue without specifying the defendant, but it's rarely used. The court usually won't allow such procedure. And in my case, I revealed my real name and address in my blog so it's unlikely Japanese court allow such lawsuit to happen. I don't know about the foreign countries but I cannot practically know the lawsuit of all the countries in the world.

With the unusual defamation claim, and google don't reveal the information, because of the rule "Google don't negotiate". If I were to sue the claimer, First I have to sue the Google to reveal the information of claimers. It costs so much money and time. This is my personal blog with no ad revenue. It doesn't worth it.

Still, it's interesting who is the claimer. The local city and police won't do this. No matter how corrupt they are, they can't do this. That leave the suspect, but the article was written in favour to the suspect and if he has the sane literacy and mental state, he won't interpret it as the defamation toward him. But his web site was full of strange interpretation and hateful interpretation on the local city's publication, I'm not so sure about this. Still, it's strange he successfully let the Google remove the article of him with unusual defamation claim.

There is another possibility that the third person, a complete stranger claimed it just to screw me. But it's a tiny achievement considering the fact that I have hundreds of article in Blogger, mirroring it to GitHub Pages, and I can simply repost the same article to anywhere if I want to(with the consequence on me if this really, legally constitute the defamation).

The moral is, Google don't negotiate.

</comment><comment><USER24> FWIW, the last Google's transparency report said 4.6B URLs removed. I wonder how many were like like this. I suppose we would never know, since no human can audit 4.6B URLs.

</comment><comment><USER25> Not sure I believe Google is that gullible.

</comment><comment><USER26> wsj clickbait. tell us news.

</comment><comment><USER27> It is funny how no one ever speaks of Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google - <USER2> never hear anything from him. About the only time I've seen Sundar say anything is a few mins of pre-rehearsed teleprompted speech at Google I/O, mostly about AI buzzwords.

Sundar - if you're reading this, get on talk shows. Talk about your company and it's future in candid, off-the-cuff manner. Put the corporate lingo behind and speak in honest, truthful and unambiguous ways. You should be on Joe Rogan, you should be doing more interviews and generally have a lively presence. Look at how Stripe founders defend their company: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22937303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22937303)

What kind of leadership is this? In my opinion, Google's image and its opinion has gone down hill since Sundar's appointment as CEO, but that's just a general emotion I have - not sure if it is financially or more widely true.

<comment><USER28> A large part of Google's zeitgeist is the idea that they're these spunky mysterious geniuses with bicycle meetings and volleyball courts. A really smart engineer going on Joe Rogan would be an unmitigated disaster as Rogan would constantly cut off his rhetoric knowing his audience would be completely uninterested in any substantial technical speak.

It's people like Musk who understand PR and market manipulation who benefit from talkshow rounds.

Don't get me wrong I'd love to see the real Google on full display, piercing the veil of youtube DRM, Dragonfly, and Android app store permissions. But Google will intelligently avoid that at all costs.

<comment><USER29> Someone once called Rogan's podcast intellectual tourism and I haven't been able to prove them wrong.

<comment><USER30> Maybe I'm stupid but could someone enlighten me as to what "intellectual tourism" might mean? Is that like, a normal person pretending to be intellectual, or is it like browsing Wikipedia with no specific purpose except for the brain snacks? I can't even tell if that's an insult to Joe Rogan or not.

<comment><USER31> Agree with the other poster, not an insult at all. Think pop-science books or discussing Mayan art over beers.

I'd personally be thrilled if more people were intellectual tourists. In my professional technical life, I'd far rather talk to people with a superficial understanding than people who's mental model is part TV-hackers, part magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not to mention the army of gatekeepers and moderators employed by the likes of Twitter often in countries not know for democracy or free speech to take down individuals.

At least some of it can be attributed to oil money greasing their palms.</comment>


Gleick's new book on information theory - <AUTHOR> http://around.com/the-information <comment><USER2> I'm reading "The Information" right now.

Gleick's book takes a wide and multidisciplinary view of information. It traces our history through the lens of information and then turns to examine the cultural impact of Shannon's work. It's fascinating how the formalization of information just 60 years ago has so deeply impacted our world.

The prologue about Shannon's time at Bell Labs is an elegant, even beautiful, exposition of information theory's importance. As introductions go, I'd rank it up there with the introductions to Will Durant's "Story of Philosophy"[1] or Andrew Steane's "Quantum Computing" [2].

So far, at least, "The Information" hasn't dug into the technical details of information theory. That's probably fine and does not appear to be Gleick's intent.

\---

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Story-Philosophy-Opinions-Greatest- Phi...](http://www.amazon.com/Story-Philosophy-Opinions-Greatest- Philosophers/dp/0671739166)

[2] <http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9708022>

</comment><comment><USER3> Kevin Kelly interviewed Gleick about the book in last month's Wired:

<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1>

Kelly: The extreme view would be that all these bits that make up atoms are running on a very big computer called the universe, an idea first espoused by Babbage.

Gleick: That makes sense as long as this metaphor does not diminish our sense of what the universe is but expands our sense of what a computer is.

Kelly: But as you note, some scientists say that this is not a metaphor: The universe we know is only information.

Gleick: I'm not a physicist, but that concept resonates with something that we all recognize: Information is the thing that we care most about. The more we understand the role that information plays in our world, the more skillful citizens we will be.

<comment><USER4> _And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires. When we look back through history, we can see that a lot of different stories all turn out to be stories about information._

It's these kind of statements that drive me nuts about Gleick. If you don't pay much attention, it almost sounds profound. But when you examine it, you realize the statement is almost devoid of meaning.

And, to top it off, he gets the facts wrong, and implies a causal relation when there is none to be found. Galvani did experments on the muscles of frogs in 1791, and proved that electrical impulses could animate movement. The telegraph invention came several decades later.

I just get the feeling Gleick doesn't really understand what he's writing about, or dumbs it down so much for a lay audience that the facts get mangled.

<comment><USER5> > _Galvani did experiments on the muscles of frogs in 1791, and proved that > electrical impulses could animate movement._

Galvani show us that there is _something_ , but it was only after the invention of telegraph that we understand, that it's _information_ , what's transferred on nerves.

<comment><USER4> But there is no evidence to show any sort of causal cross over between the two. You can wave your hands, and say that "obviously" people didn't understand X until we had Y - but there is no historical reference being made to support this claim. Gleick just throws it out because it "sounds right" to him (and us) given our current historical context.

A popular science writer is not a trained historian or academic; but I do think readers of this genre deserve a level of journalistic integrity and depth that is missing here (note: I've NOT read The Information - and am basing my opinion on Gleick's past work and a recent interview about the book).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool - I just bought it for my Kindle. Gleick is a master of digging into some interesting branch of science and how it affects society. In the 1980s, I added Common Lisp chaos theory examples to my first Springer Verlag book, inspired by his wonderful book _Chaos_. I can't wait to savor the new book.

<comment><USER4> Why did you find Chaos to be wonderful? I found many inaccuracies when I read it. Seemed more like a fluff piece designed to ride a popular wave about the topic at the time it came out.

<comment><USER7> Do you always eat only the finest meals, freshly prepared, with only the highest-quality meats and produce?

Sometimes an In-n-Out burger can be "wonderful".

I, too, enjoyed Chaos. Regardless of its inaccuracies -- wherever they are -- it presents the topic very well, introducing it without being dry or unreadable. It held my attention throughout the book, and I still remember specific parts of it. I wouldn't mind reading it again, either.

Books, like business, can have different markets and do different things well. I think what Gleick lacks in writing a textbook, he makes up for in approachability.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough. I was just a bit surprised by the effusive comments on this thread when my experience was quite the opposite.

For my money, I've much more enjoyed the writings of Martin Gardner, or Bill Bryson.

<comment><USER8> if you like gardner and bryson, you should like ian stewart too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worked in the non-linear dynamics field for a few years and was never impressed by Gleick's book on Chaos. Maybe this one is better ...

<comment><USER10> I'd be interested in any recommendations you have for books about chaos/non- linear systems. I read Chaos in high school and it was a starting point for me to later explore fractals, IFSs, and attractors. My math skills were never good enough to study dynamic systems in college, but I still enjoyed learning about it at some level.

Since I've read several of Shannon's papers and other mathematical treatments of information theory (e.g. Kullback), I suspect this book will not shed additional technical light for me. However I can't deny that Gleick's writing has an inspirational quality to it that is engaging, as long as you are not reading it as a scientific treatment. I also read Genius and I understand why Gleick is considered almost along the lines of nonfiction fanfic.

<comment><USER11> > I'd be interested in any recommendations you have for books about chaos/non- > linear systems

Strogatz's Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos might be a good place to start. It's not mathematically sophisticated at all, e.g. there are few proofs and topological methods are at best implicitly present; but it still has some real mathematical meat on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Enjoying reading the book so far, but also worth checking out, and what turned me on to it in the first place, is Freeman Dyson's review in NY Books.

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how- we-...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we- know/?pagination=false)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm just on page 4 of 426 and I've already got an intellectual boner for this book. Gleick's Chaos (technically perfect or not) was a huge revelation for me and gave me a truckload of rich metaphors to better understand the world. I'm expecting the same from The Information. AT&T in 1950 sounds a lot like Google. "[It] did not demand instant gratification from its research division."

</comment><comment><USER14> Also the author of "Chaos: Making a New Science"

<comment><USER4> I didn't like Chaos or Feynman - and haven't read Gleick since. I find his type of popular science writing to be imprecise and even inaccurate.</comment></comment>


Find the quotes you like, save and share them - <AUTHOR> http://www.wirgool.com/if-you-bring-forth-what-is-within-you-what-you-bring-forth-will-save-you-if-you-do-not-bri

<comment><USER2> Yesterday several users gave feedback in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8738672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8738672) I think you're not reading the comments and instead submitted another 4 URLs today. I think that's spammy behavior.</comment>


Ask HN: What can i do with a malicious email? - <AUTHOR>

My brother has been working in the Film Industry on both coasts for ~10 years, so when he clicked on a link telling him to sign in to verify that he could access important documents [i know, i know...] he ended up blasting ~500 people with the same email. His work, and his reputation, is such that many people, like him, thought it was a script or contract or somesuch. Many people were tagged. I was on the list as well, but it seems obvious to me that anything that asks you to log in to a service you are currently logged into is instinctively a bad idea.
My question is: Is there anywhere i can send the malicious email so that someone can safely look at it and potentially expose the [IMO crafty] jerk who did this? I tried to send it to Google but i could not find a logical place to submit it.
I know this may seem like a pleb tier problem, but there were a lot of people with very sensitive info that potentially got tagged. <comment><USER2> Let's say the person in question had a gmail address and you contact Google via abuse@ or customer service. They won't investigate much based on a claim from another user. Maybe delete the user for breaching terms of service, but expect no follow up.

Best option for you or your brother is going to the police. They have processes to then ask (again just an example) Google for further information. That's usually a list of IP addresses and any information the user gave during sign-up (often fake). The IP addresses might also lead to nothing.

<comment><USER2> That's also the reason why "cybercrime" is increasing and police force is asking for more funds. Be it ebay fraud, identify theft or stolen/misdirected funds from a credit card payment, it's all called cybercrime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If the link leads to a phishing page (or some other attack website) it is usually easy enough to get those taken offline effectively neutralizing the email. Find out who is hosting the page using a domain lookup tool[1] and notify those responsible about the site. This doesn't always work, but its usually pretty effective.

[1][http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx?net_whois=true](http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx?net_whois=true)

</comment><comment><USER4> Its hard to really give a meaningful answer without seeing the email. You could check if the attacker was sloppy, and allowed information to leak in the email headers, but its quite likely that your brother was emailed by another victim.

Its much more important right now to assess the impact, and to contain any breaches that have occurred. If your brother and his colleagues were infected by malware upon clicking the link, their IP may be in jeopardy.

</comment><comment><USER5> Send it to the CERT of your country. e.g. [https://www.us- cert.gov/](https://www.us-cert.gov/)</comment>


What Happens When a Country Bans Spanking? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/10/25/660191806/what-happens-when-a-country-bans-spanking <comment><USER4> On one hand quantitative data seems to suggest spanking had zero merit. On the other hand one I've heard from many parents that spanking was the only disincentive that could stop certain seriously bad behavior - <USER3> privileges, assigning chores, etc. did not solve the problem. The more extreme examples involved actions that put siblings in the ER, or behavior that would easily get kid expelled. I think it's possible for spanking to be ineffective in aggregate, but effective from the point of view of parents. If you need to stop your child from doing something _right now_ because it could seriously impact their future life prospects, it may be a worthwhile trade-off to risk the chance that a child adopts more aggressive (but not intolerably so) behavior down the road. I'd be interesting in seeing the types and magnitude of behavior that instigated the spanking vs. the behavior spanked children do later in childhood.

While the quantitative data seems to suggest spanking is negative, the question still remains: when all other disciplinary options are exhausted, what can a parent do to stop truly intolerable behavior? The article suggests using other options, but does not list any.

<comment><USER5> > On the other hand one I've heard from many parents that spanking was the > only disincentive that could stop certain seriously bad behavior - <USER3> > privileges, assigning chores, etc. did not solve the problem.

Bad behavior is often not a root problem, but a symptom. Spanking may be the most effective way of treating the symptom (but even that is probably a post hoc rationalization that is not factually supportable), but it mostly adds to, or at best ignores, the underlying problem. Other punitive measures also tend to ignore the problem, though they tend not to make things worse in the way that the use of physical violence does.

<comment><USER6> Anecdote time: every time me and my wife have been busy and not had enough fun family time for a couple of days, my 2 year old starts breaking things and having tantrums. Sure, small kid, small problems, but actually spending time with him is waaay more productive than getting angry. It becomes a positive spiral.

Sure, i am tired and stressed out sometimes and that makes actually being above thinking he's just a shit kid very hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm happy to say these guys are the experts and know better than me but this really flies in the face of all the anecdotal evidence I've seen.

From my peers those that grew up in strict Muslim and Christian homes, where they did get corporal punishment, they were much better behaved. That has also translated into their success now they're in their 30s.

But those who also got corporal punishment in more dysfunctional households have had terrible outcomes. Their "punishment" was probably much closer to child abuse that those from the other group.

I was not spanked my self so I have no personal reference, only that I was far worse in self discipline than the first group. I'd have expected this study to show some correlation between self discipline and spanking. I can't help but think they've conflated child abuse and hitting out of anger with spanking.

That said, I'm no expert.

<comment><USER8> All spanking is child abuse. Full stop.

From what you've described, there is zero reason to believe that the spankings your peers in the strict Muslim and Christian homes was a factor in their later success.

<comment><USER7> >All spanking is child abuse

I hope you understand the distinction I was trying to make.

I'd have expected a correlation to show up.

<comment><USER9> Do you think when Christian or Muslim parents are spanking their children that they are not angry?

<comment><USER7> I'm not assuming they are good at it but my understanding of traditional Christian doctrine is that it should never be done in anger. I'm not sure about the Muslim teaching on it but thought Jewish, Muslim and Christian teaching on this was similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is just another data point in a long, long line of research demonstrating that spanking and corporal punishment in general is harmful. It is very frustrating to watch people (in this thread and elsewhere) blithely continue to believe what they want to believe contrary to the large bulk of evidence-- it's as if, confronted with truth and reality, they think that there can be some argument or rhetorical gambit that makes the conclusions that they would prefer correct. That's not how truth works.

<comment><USER7> Do you have any links to this long line of research?

<comment><USER10> I see this kind of response a lot, and unfortunately it's difficult to respond to you without taking what I feel you would interpret as a patronizing tone.

If you read the article, you would find links to research articles and additional literature related to the topic at hand. If you were in turn to read each of those articles, you would find that they are thoroughly researched and contain a large number of citations themselves. If you truly did not understand that you can educate yourself about a topic in this manner, I hope you are ecstatic upon learning to follow this great chain of research, as this is how every scientist educates themselves.

So, here's a link to the article that we are all discussing, go ahead and read it if you haven't already:

[https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/10/25/6601918...](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/10/25/660191806/what- happens-when-a-country-bans-spanking)

Here are some sources linked in the article. Some are peer-reviewed research articles, while others describe and cite peer-reviewed research:

[https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/9/e021616?int_source=trend...](https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/9/e021616?int_source=trendmd&int_medium=trendmd&int_campaign=trendmd)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/)

[https://www.unicef.org/publications/index_101397.html](https://www.unicef.org/publications/index_101397.html)

Now here's the key insight into this process of learning--if you read the articles linked above, you will find citations of additional research in this area. These publications are usually not too difficult to find. Here are a few pertinent publications, but there are many more cited in the publications linked above--which I remind you were themselves linked from the original NPR article that we are all discussing.

Gershoff ET. Corporal punishment by parents and associated child behaviors and experiences: A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin. 2002;128:539–579.

Gershoff ET. More harm than good: A summary of scientific research on the intended and unintended effects of corporal punishment on children. Law and Contemporary Problems. 2010;73:33–58.

Sheehan MJ, Watson MW. Reciprocal influences between maternal discipline techniques and aggression in children and adolescents. Aggressive Behavior. 2008;34:245–255. doi:10.1002/ab.20241.

Hoffman ML. Affective and cognitive processes in moral internalization. In: Higgins ET, Ruble DN, Hartup WW, editors. Social cognition and social development. Cambridge University Press; New York: 1983. pp. 236–274.

Eron LD, Walder LO, Lefkowitz MM. Learning of aggression in children. Little, Brown, & Co.; Boston: 1971.

Durrant J, Trocmé N, Fallon B, Milne C, Black T, Knoke D. CECW Information Sheet #41E. University of Toronto, Faculty of Social Work; Toronto, ON: 2006. Punitive violence against children in Canada. Retrieved from www.cecw- cepb.ca/DocsEng/PunitiveViolence41E.pdf.

Obviously this is just a tiny selection based on a few minutes of research (which I remind you you could have easily done yourself!)

Now, I leave you with a question: did you really not know how to do this yourself, or were you trying to imply that because this "long line of research" was not handed to you on a silver platter it does not exist? Am I right in thinking that you might also be a little pleased that I wasted my time educating you when you transparently have no interest in being educated?

To conclude, I can't read for you, I can't learn for you, I can't think for you (and I don't mean thinking of clever little rhetorical gotchas, I mean real thinking with the aim of comprehending truth and reality), and unless you have at least attempted to read and learn and think for yourself, you have no foot to stand on when you argue against research that you (for some reason) disagree with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Although spanking is traditionally supposed to teach a lesson to correct bad > behavior, children who were spanked were neither more compliant nor better > behaved.

This accords with my experience of primary school in the UK in the early 1960s. It was nearly always a specific small subset of the pupils who were punished and they continued to misbehave while those who were generally well behaved anyway but once did something stupid became more careful.</comment>


IE10 for Windows 7 Globally Available - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/02/26/ie10-for-windows-7-globally-available-for-consumers-and-businesses.aspx <comment><USER2> One of the nicest things about Windows 8 is that each copy shipped is a guaranteed person who is not using I.E 7/8/9.

Hopefully the companies just now upgrading to Windows 7 from XP will also deploy I.E 10, but I'm not holding my breath. On the other hand maybe Windows 7 install media will come with I.E 10 incorporated into it. A man can dream.

<comment><USER3> Have web developers stopped supporting IE 7 yet? I remember a bunch of stories about Apple/Google/etc. dropping IE 6 support a while ago.

<comment><USER4> Google doesn't support officially support IE8 anymore, much less 7 ([http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=3...](http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33864)).

For my company that's just not practical. We sell to schools and many of them are still running XP.

<comment><USER5> It's important to note that Google's apps do not support legacy browsers any more. Last time I checked on my VM, the main Google search engine works perfectly fine in IE6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Uhh... has anyone else been through that Minesweeper demo source code? There's some weird stuff in there. See [http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/Minesweeper/De...](http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/Minesweeper/Demo.js) \- in solve():

         //run some webkit sunspider code before solving a square
        webkitPartialBaseBenchmark();

In solvenextsquare():

        // run some webkit sunspider code a few times before continuing
        ...
         //not done solving, run more webkit sunspider, we hear that's what users want

It looks like the "benchmark" is to run bits of sunspider while running a minesweeper game. I think this is kind of misleading, since it makes IE10 look good at graphics and game rendering, when really it's running unrelated code.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure this isn't just to introduce some artificial delay to make it seem like it is "processing"? Imagine a slot machine that gave you a result in 10ms as opposed to rolling around for effect.

<comment><USER8> Looks like they're just causing computation and JIT'ing in Chakra and V8 before moving to the next square. SunSpider is a terrible metric and they're just poking fun. Pretty funny when you think about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> From <http://windows.microsoft.com/ie>

"Internet Explorer 10 takes the lead in browser privacy" —Geek.com

"Greatly enhanced and is simply delightful" —Gizmodo

"Flip ahead feature in Internet Explorer 10 is slick" —Tweet

Sources for the first two might actually be findable. "Tweet" as a front-page endorsement? I'm not sure if they're trying to be funny or serious. That looks more like something theonion.com would use.

<comment><USER10> I'd take a random tweet a lot more seriously than Gizmodo.

<comment><USER11> A random tweet possibly made by a person working at Microsoft? Or maybe the tweet doesn't actually exist.

I've seen companies (gaming companies, mostly) that display tweets as endorsements for a game and then, when I try to find the tweet in Twitter, that user mysteriously doesn't exist.

<comment><USER12> > A random tweet possibly made by a person working at Microsoft? Or maybe the > tweet doesn't actually exist.

Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish IE would move away from big waterfall-esque versions-numbers and just go to frequent bite sized automatic updates.

I understand the corporate need for browser version locking but that should be the exception (Active Directory overriding) not the norm.

As an aside the latest versions of IE seem just fine. I no longer have any skin in that game like I did in 2006-2010 where every computer I happened across would instantly have FF installed and IE hidden.

<comment><USER14> IE 10 does automatic updates now independent from the OS update cycle.

<comment><USER15> Wow, that's actually pretty great. One of the biggest reasons why people are still stuck on old versions of IE is because they don't want to run OS upgrades. Making the upgrades independent of everything else is quite sensible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> " We will begin auto updating Windows 7 customers to IE10 in the weeks ahead, starting today with customers running the IE10 Release Preview. "

Does this mean they'll try to update everyone on Windows 7 to IE10? I'm hoping so, but don't know enough about the policies around MS updates to grok what the impact will be in the coming weeks.

<comment><USER16> This has been the case for the previous few IE versions too. There is a tool to block automatic deployment, mostly meant for corporate environments where you probably first need to test all your intranet apps.

It won't reach those who don't update their Windows, though. And that's probably a large part of users who are still on older IE versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wait a minute. They are demonstrating the performance capabilities of IE with a _minesweeper_ ?

<comment><USER18> The benchmark actually has a pretty reasonable workload: rendering, playing sound effects, doing some basic flood-fill searching, etc. And it's much faster in IE10 than Firefox for me, so...

<comment><USER19> With graphics-intensive things, I tend to find that IE9 and IE10 always come out on top, followed by Chrome and Safari. Firefox is usually horribly slow.

<comment><USER20> Probably hardware acceleration

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/07/a-closer- look-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/07/a-closer-look-at- internet-explorer-9-hardware-acceleration-through-flying-images.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As an aside, does anyone know of a way to install this _alongside_ IE9 on a testing machine? I should have started testing in IE10 months ago, but I'm loath to set up a separate VM for every IE version.

<comment><USER22> Sorry, separate VM's are the only way.

But I use VirtualBox and take advantage of "snapshots" -- this way I have a virtual hard drive with "XP" and separate snapshots with IE6, 7, and 8 installed. And I have a separate virtual hard drive with Windows 8 installed, with separate snapshots for IE8, 9, and now 10.

This way you can save a LOT of disk space. And as a side benefit, once you set your snapshot point, every time you switch between snapshots, you lose the VM history since the snapshot, so you can start testing sites with a "clean" version of IE everytime, uncluttered with cache, history, etc.

<comment><USER23> +1 for this. We just set up 20 of our people with this set up. With Hyper-V built into Windows 8, it's actually quite pleasant (compared to dealing with VMware).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The newest versions of Chrome and Firefox has been working on Windows 7 for quite some time already.

This is my major objection when people insist that "Internet Explorer has caught up". It's true that the latest IE isn't light-years behind it's rivals anymore, but it doesn't matter if people are forced to use older versions of the browser because they don't constantly change their OS.

My family's laptop runs Windows 7. What's the point of talking about all the advantages IE10 offers if they couldn't even use it?

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm looking now side by side Chrome, IE10, Firefox.

IE10 is doing something weird with fonts: everything is bolded and blurred.

When I switch to Compatibility view - it looks better less blurred but strange anyway.

<comment><USER26> ClearType?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm anxious to know if <http://www.crashie.com/> brings it down, it doesn't in Win8 but I suspect Win7 is still vulnerable...

<comment><USER28> Doh! That site is blocked by the msft corp firewall. And here I was going to test it for you.

<comment><USER27> You can try my original version of the site - crashie8.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Best thing about IE10? "Automatically install updates" is an option, checked by default.

</comment><comment><USER30> Man, what's up with Microsoft. Their button text isn't even vertically centered, looks horrid.

<http://cl.ly/image/2F1k2E1F0e47>

</comment><comment><USER31> It took Microsoft 6 months to port one version of IE to another version of Windows, while Chrome and Firefox are available not only on all versions of Windows (XP included, which is 40% of the market), but also on Linux and Mac OS. I thought Microsoft wanted to be taken seriously in the browser market?

<comment><USER32> Honestly, how is this a fair argument at all?

And also, to make it more complete let's add in Safari. Released (as a beta) in 2003, with its first Windows version in 2007. The Windows version's last (read: no more releases after this) release was Safari 5.[1]

Are we to take Apple seriously since they only support iOS and OSX?

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)>

<comment><USER33> Chrome, Firefox and Opera provide more than enough credibility to the argument, even if Safari no longer works on Windows.

Besides, OS X has moved towards multi-touch gestures, for example, which Safari supports. It makes sense that they'd have to give up on Windows.

<comment><USER34> Why? Most Windows devices being sold have touchscreens. Most Macs do not.

<comment><USER35> I think you'd have trouble buying a Mac that doesn't have multitouch support today, considering that Macbooks come with multitouch trackpads and iMacs come with Magic Mouses (with desktop trackpads advertised alongside them).

<comment><USER34> If the trackpad counts, then virtually every Windows device supports multitouch too. So why is this a reason for Apple to stop supporting Safari on Windows? I don't think it has anything to do with gestures.

<comment><USER36> I think it has to do with webkit2 which safari uses. I think they haven't ported webkit2 to work on windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> One day they'll realize it wasn't worth it, like Opera did recently.

They should focus on perfect support of web standards already, instead of trying to invent the next big thing.

</comment><comment><USER38> IE10 just asked me to reboot my computer in order to complete my install. Did we just go back in time and nobody told me?

<comment><USER39> Hah, last time I tried to install IE10 it asked me to install a new operating system. This is the future man!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> How long before IE10 hits the update channel for Windows 7 users? This should be enough to send IE9 to low single digit and IE10 to double-digit market share.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww- monthly-201201...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww- monthly-201201-201301)

<comment><USER41> IE9 auto-updates have been enabled for over a year, and IE8 has yet to fall to a single-digit percentage of page views... (Of course, IE8 share is kept high by the large number of users still on Windows XP, which won't be the case for IE9.)

[http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Internet-Explorer- Windows-U...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Internet-Explorer-Windows- Update-Google-Chrome-Cloud-Print,14308.html)

<comment><USER40> As you stated, it's because XP has almost 40% Windows market share so IE8 will persist for quite some time.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems)

It doesn't mean that most consumers won't take the IE10 upgrade. IE10 will be double-digit by this time next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Does anyone here know if and if yes, when the 'Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images' ([http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=11575)) will be updated?

<comment><USER43> They've been newly posted on modern.ie: <http://www.modern.ie/en- us/virtualization-tools> \- one for each version of IE from 6 to 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The original link doesn't work. This does [http://windows.microsoft.com/en- us/internet-explorer/downloa...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet- explorer/downloads/ie-10/worldwide-languages)

</comment><comment><USER45> > the Do Not Track (DNT) signal is turned on in IE10 for Windows 7

Nice. But getting this flag on by default in most browsers will give the advertisers the excuse to keep doing the same old practices even with DNT on.

<comment><USER46> That's simply not the point of DNT. It's entirely voluntary server side, so it will never be useful if it's opt-out.

It should be opt-in, as the spec says. Microsoft made DNT useless on IE to get some good PR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> It would be more useful to see Kraken / Octane scores[1] side-by-side with FF and Chrome than touting SunSpider.

[1] <http://arewefastyet.com/>

<comment><USER48> I did a single Octane run on each for my own amusement. Totally unscientific methodology but the results are good enough for me. Chromium is v. 27.0.1424.0 rev 184630 (probably the latest build) from a zipfile (Google makes it practically impossible to download zips of anything else).

IE still has to do a lot to catch up and the Windows 7 desktop version's GUI is same old IE9 without any changes.

<http://ompldr.org/vaGxnZQ/browsers.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Still can't place an order with pizzahut.co.uk with IE10.

I raised this with them 4 months ago: both Pizza Hut and Microsoft and neither give a shit about their customers.

<comment><USER49> Just tried after your seeing your comment. It throws out a useless generic error "We are experiencing problems with our site...". I think it has something to do with Cookie/ViewState validation to prevent automated attacks.

Fix: Clicked on the "Compatibility View" icon at the top on the browser and the order went through fine.

<comment><USER23> Good call. For some reason I didn't get the compatibility view button for this site. I noticed I don't get it for any sites. After some digging, it appears something has turned it off on this box. I've turned it back on and it works in compat view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Its about time MS woke up and smelled the web standards coffee. You're now about 2 years behind - good job

</comment><comment><USER51> Now if only we could get every single IE user to upgrade, including IE7/8 users, that'd be perfect.

</comment><comment><USER52> Still with no support of __proto__ which means it's unusable for sophisticated stuff.

</comment><comment><USER53> Interesting... IE compatibility error occurs when logging into gmail.

</comment><comment><USER54> I don't believe the download link for that is working just yet.

<comment><USER55> This works: <http://g.msn.com/1me10IE10ENUS/WOL_Win7_64Full>

<comment><USER56> A link to a 32 bit version is possible ?

<comment><USER57> <http://g.msn.com/1me10IE10ENUS/WOL_Win7_32Full>

<comment><USER56> I appreciate it! It seems it requires SP1 .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Lets employ new experts to fix the new layout problems.

</comment><comment><USER59> In the meantime, IE6 is still used by 6% of users :-(

<comment><USER60> Only because of China, and to a lesser extent, India. Everywhere else, the numbers are negligible.

<comment><USER5> It depends on your site. One of my clients in the legal sector in the UK and Europe still gets 4-5% of its visitors visiting from IE6.

You are largely correct in the bigger picture, but it's still surprising how popular it is in some areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> No love for the poor Vista people?

</comment><comment><USER62> Is there an easy way to run IE9 and IE10 without IEtester?

IEtester has started to crash on me lately.

<comment><USER15> I used BrowserStack on a trial basis and I absolutely loved it. Would pay for access but my usage doesn't justify the cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> From their site:

 _"Incredibly fast" —Tweet_

OK, who sent that tweet ;) ?

It sneakily wanted me to make Bing and MSN defaults so I'll wait.

</comment><comment><USER64> What for?)</comment>


UNC campuses must submit plans for 50% budget cuts as Covid worst case scenario - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article244321897.html <comment><USER2> A 50% budget cut would almost shut the campus down.</comment>


The new TrueType interpreter in FreeType 2.7.0 - <AUTHOR> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2016-07/msg00091.html <comment><USER2> "Switching to the new mode might take some getting used to though, so if you think your fonts are suddenly fat, fuzzy or weird, give your brain some time to adjust."

This is true, and IMO it's the reason font rendering is much less important than people think. When I got a new pair of glasses I disabled font anti- aliasing to make the edges as sharp as possible. I did this so I could more quickly learn to focus my eyes correctly with the new glasses. By the time I had mastered the glasses I was used to the font rendering, and I have not switched it back. I now prefer fonts with no anti-aliasing. If you'd told me in the past that I'd end up preferring that I might not have believed it.

The most legible font is the one you're used to. People can read Blackletter or Spencerian like it's a normal font if they're used to it. I think vector fonts were a mistake. It's a lot of software complexity for very little value.

<comment><USER3> > The most legible font is the one you're used to.

Yes, and in my case on Linux I switched off hinting a long time ago (but retained anti-aliasing)

We even did it on our network at work by default as users liked the fonts when they were more "Mac like".

Personally I have never understood the whole font hinting thing. It seems rather unscientific and the result is that fonts look fundamentally different at slight size differences; seems hinting is part of the problem, not the solution.

<comment><USER4> > Personally I have never understood the whole font hinting thing. It seems > rather unscientific and the result is that fonts look fundamentally > different at slight size differences; seems hinting is part of the problem, > not the solution.

Hinting exists because displays don't have infinite resolution. Mac-style rendering has always acted like displays have paper-like resolutions, and respects a font's letter shapes more, favoring the original designer's intended font appearance on paper. Windows-style rendering has always acknowledged that displays have pixels, and that smearing fonts across pixels can decrease readability on average-DPI displays. Linux font rendering has historically offered a choice between the two, but typically defaulted to Windows-style rendering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Must-read regarding smoothing and hinting: [http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.h...](http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/index.html)

<comment><USER6> The world of font rendering lost a great developer when Maxim Shemanarev passed away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh no, why would they do this? You could already achieve something similar (and superior IMO) with the old FreeType by enabling "loose hinting" (ignoring hinting in x-direction) and using RGBA subpixel hinting. Ignoring horizontal hinting only really works when you have subpixel hinting, because of the ~tripled horizontal resolution.

I don't understand why anybody (MS, the FreeType devs, ...) would choose DirectWrite style rendering. It just looks blurry to me. Even on a hidpi display, where it shouldn't make a difference, it looks wierd compared to GDI rendering. One major reason I don't like Edge, and also find Metro and XAML apps somehow yucky (just a gut reaction, I'm not judging them technically).

<comment> mark-r Some people really dislike subpixel rendering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What? As someone who hates Windows' Font rendering, why would you want this?

The OS X font rendering is awesome, on Linux, Infinality can be tweaked to look even better, but windows? It's hideous, inconsistent and terrible to change...

<comment><USER9> I agree with that assessment (although I think OS X font render has problems as well). I'm a bit worried because now Infinality is removed from the code base by default, so I suspect I'm going to have to stick to customer builds to get the font rendering that I prefer.

I suffer from ocular migraines and as hard as it is to believe (even for me), the way fonts are rendered makes a difference. I will literally go blind looking at badly rendered fonts. I'm going to take a wait and see attitude, though. Not all fonts will be affected, so perhaps it will be OK.

<comment><USER10> Have you tried a retina display? I find that the higher DPI panel reduces my eye strain.

<comment><USER9> Yeah. I have the most bizarre setup up. I have a 13.3" display (with about 165 DPI), so not retinal, but still relatively high resolution. Anything bigger than this seems to trigger my migraines. I'm really waiting for the day when I can get 30 fps on an e-ink display. Something about staring into the light seems to be a problem. But low contrast is also a huge problem. So I usually have my backlight set at around 10% (!!) and my colour themes are set so that you would think that I subscribe to the clown school of programming. Everything is done in a 16 colour console with a 25 point font. You have no idea how many hours I've spent comparing the contrast ratios of various 16 colour schemes. All I can say is that it's a good thing that I come from a time where 80x25 column terminals were state of the art ;-)

I'm considering moving to very large wall mounted TV and sitting far enough away so that the display angle of the screen is about the same as my 13.3" laptop. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to wall mount a TV in my current apartment, so it may have to wait until I buy a house (I bet the e-ink display comes first ;-) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Meanwhile Microsoft has basically given up on sub-pixel smoothing: it's missing from Windows Store/Modern/Metro apps (including Edge) and IE10 and newer and is mostly absent from Office 2013 and newer when running on Windows 8 and above†. More's the pity - not all of us have high DPI screens yet.

† [https://www.quppa.net/blog/2012/07/17/office-2013-further- ev...](https://www.quppa.net/blog/2012/07/17/office-2013-further-evidence-of- the-demise-of-cleartype/)

<comment><USER12> I believe part of the reason is that it was never fully compatible with screen rotation, often still assuming RGB order from text-left to text-right. Another part would be that the world is moving towards much higher resolution displays, where the effect of subpixel rendering is negligible.

<comment><USER11> It's a combination of what you mentioned and incompatibility with APIs like Direct Manipulation. Raymond Chen explains it here: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=44803)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Man, all these years I assumed FreeType's "slight" hinting setting was secretly the 'ignore horizontal hinting' option.

<comment><USER14> Yes, IIUC [https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering- gener...](https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-general.html) the difference is what provides the vertical hinting:

FreeType < 2.6.2 hint=slight: use auto-hinter for vertical hinting

FreeType 2.6.2+ hint=slight: use native "vertical-grid-only-snapping" for OpenType/CFF, fallback to autohinter "vertical-grid-only"

FreeType 2.7.0 v40 default: support TrueType too for native "vertical-grid- only-snapping", and enable this by default (regardless if hint is set to slight or not?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally. To be honest I switched back to using Windows on my private machine because font rendering on Linux (using Chromium and Firefox) was more like a lottery than something readable without enough alcohol.

A pity it will take some time to ship to Debian Testing, I'd love to try it without having to recompile the whole system.

<comment><USER16> What Linux distribution did you use? In my experience the font rendering in the common distributions, like Ubuntu, is rather good these days. Personally I use Debian stable with a simple window manager (Blackbox) and no X display manager. In this case I need to set a few variables in ~/.Xresources to get good results:

        Xft.antialias: true
        Xft.autohint: false
        Xft.dpi: 100
        Xft.hinting: true
        Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
        Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
        Xft.rgba: rgb

<comment><USER17> most modern apps use fontconfig to, well, configure fonts, and afaik ignore these Xft X resources.

So something like this is needed in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf:

      <?xml version='1.0'?>
      <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
      <fontconfig>
      <match target="font">
      <edit mode="assign" name="rgba"><const>rgb</const></edit>
      <edit mode="assign" name="hinting"><bool>true</bool></edit>
      <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle"><const>hintfull</const></edit>
      <edit mode="assign" name="antialias"><bool>true</bool></edit>
      <edit name="lcdfilter" mode="assign"><const>lcddefault</const></edit>
      </match>
      </fontconfig>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is fantastic news. FreeType rendering was already pretty good for common FOSS fonts in the recent versions unless the distribution crippled it, but a pet peeve of mine was that Microsoft fonts have never seemed quite right (as demonstrated by the OP in [https://s31.postimg.org/t5trkfd2x/freetype_264_consolas_v35_...](https://s31.postimg.org/t5trkfd2x/freetype_264_consolas_v35_v40.png)).

KUDOS to all contributors, especially for the last few release of FreeType which really rocked!

</comment><comment><USER19> Autohinting is hard, especially for ideographs. My hinter even used differential evolution to calculate how strokes should be placed. (link: github.com/be5invis/sfdhanautohint)

<comment><USER20> In the future, somebody will develop an AI-based auto-hinter that's so good it makes Comic Sans look like Helvetica.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Subpixel hinting mode can be chosen by setting the right value in your environment, for example /etc/environment or ~/.pam_environment

Available settings:

          FT2_SUBPIXEL_HINTING=0  # Classic mode (default in 2.6)
          FT2_SUBPIXEL_HINTING=1  # Infinality mode
          FT2_SUBPIXEL_HINTING=2  # Minimal mode (default in 2.7)

</comment><comment><USER22> FreeType is not "Linux" software but "UNIX" software. I don't understand why this keeps happening.

<comment><USER23> A randomly selected unix system has a 99.999% chance of being a Linux system. Nobody cares about the other variants except for their own developers and a few historians and hobbyists.

For that matter I have no idea why you think freetype is even unix software. It builds and runs on numerous non-unix platforms.

<comment><USER24> A randomly-selected UNIX _workstation_ has a pretty high chance of being an OSX system, I'd think. UNIX servers are 99.999% Linux, though, yes.

<comment><USER25> Surely *BSD accounts for more than 0.0001% of UNIX-like servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the announcement, they explicitly state that the performance changes will make Arial and other very common fonts render less well. Is this a sound decision, in an age where these fonts are still very widely explicitly used?

<comment><USER26> Arial looks ugly no matter what rendering hacks you apply. The sooner it will be extinct the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Linux has had subpixel rendering for years now. What does this mean, better hinting?

</comment><comment><USER28> Can somebody explain this to me? In low resolutions, you can easily, with current memory sizes and bandwidths, store all the fonts in pixel format (compressed of course). At high resolutions, you don't need any hinting, so you can just render the font as svg paths for example.

So why do we still need an interpreter?

<comment><USER12> If you use a particular version of each letter at each size, you start to accumulate positioning error as you go along a line (or end up with odd gaps if you try to avoid it). Nowadays, we tend to aim for precise reproduction of the font's sizing, even where the size ends up not being a round number of pixels, for consistency. You'd then need at least 16 versions of each letter to approximately cover each subpixel position, and it starts not really being a win.

<comment><USER28> True, but at least the artist has complete control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does this mean that now Java-based GUI software (e.g. Android Studio) run using OpenJDK will display much better fonts?

<comment><USER18> No, not at all. The problem was never on FreeType side, it was always on Java side.

Recent versions of IntelliJ are bundled with a patched version of OpenJDK though, so that particular case should not be a problem anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> No. No stop. I install MacType, which hacks windows's font rendering and replaces it with freetype, SPECIFICALLY so I can /avoid/ cleartype's ugly rendering on windows. I don't want it to invade my linux/mac as well!

<comment><USER31> It's not a mandatory feature. It provides options that it didn't have before without having lost anything.

<comment><USER32> Nikolaus Waxweiler writes in the announcement that he was led "to strip the v38 Infinality code to the bare minimum and remove all configurability in the name of speed and simplicity".

<comment><USER31> There were 2 interpreters before. Now there are 3. You're misunderstanding the announcement. Regardless, the Infinality interpreter is the closest to Windows rendering so it isn't what the OP wants. In all likelihood they want hinting disabled if they want it to be like OS X... so this stuff isn't relevant at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Direct link to the announcement: [http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype- devel/2016-07/...](http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype- devel/2016-07/msg00091.html) (includes images with the old/new renderings)

<comment><USER34> Impressive. Serious kudos to all involved.

<comment><USER35> Pardon my ignorance, but for me these look different, of course, but i have no idea which one looks best.

<comment><USER34> I meant more about revamping an easy to forget piece of IO infrastructure that is far from trivial.</comment></comment></comment></comment>