Companies that buy data derived from scraping the contents of email - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/pkekmb/free-email-apps-spying-on-you-edison-slice-cleanfox <comment><USER2> Edison posted a response[0] with this amazing sentence:

> to protect your privacy by rejecting an advertising-based business model, > our company Edison Software, measures e-commerce through a technology that > automatically recognizes commercial emails and extracts anonymous purchase > information from them

[0]: [https://medium.com/changing-communications/a-reminder-of- how...](https://medium.com/changing-communications/a-reminder-of-how-we-use- data-and-protect-privacy-8b0cb2c5af71) (non-Medium: [https://outline.com/7K3TAL](https://outline.com/7K3TAL))

<comment><USER3> Sounds pretty silly to extract your data instead of showing you ads — all in the name of protecting your privacy.

But to play devil's advocate, some ads do actually invade your privacy because they come from malicious malvertisers. If they are actually treating the purchase price information 100% anonymously (never linking it to PII), then there's an argument that they're protecting your privacy by doing this.

Or they could just run an ad platform that blocks malvertisements...

<comment><USER4> > If they are actually treating the purchase price information 100% > anonymously (never linking it to PII), then there's an argument that they're > protecting your privacy by doing this.

There is no privacy benefit here because you'd have even better privacy protections if they didn't trawl through your emails and extract data from them in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I installed Edison on iOS somewhat recently. At the end of setting up my server info, there was a question asking if I approved them using/sharing my data. I tapped NO. My information was all deleted like I had just installed the app brand new. I thought it was a bug so I went through set up again. Selected NO again. Account info deleted. You can't use the app without agreeing they can use your info/data.

I uninstalled.

</comment><comment><USER4> This sort of thing is why I don't trust any apps that I haven't built myself, and keep them firewalled off from the internet to they can't phone home. I trust commercial applications on the desktop to exactly the same degree, for the same reasons.

In terms of privacy and respecting the users, the state of software today is deplorable.

<comment><USER6> A colleague of mine is attending a conference this week where attendees are 'required' to install an app to their personal phones so that they can get the latest updates to changes to the conference agenda.

No doubt this is a data-mining platform marketed to conference organizers who probably don't have much of a clue what the real value add is for the app creator.

I have strongly encouraged them to not install the 'app'.

<comment><USER7> I get the average person and majority in general won't do this. Just wondering. if you don't give the app any permissions. And only open it once or twice the entire time. Does it have any real effect on your privacy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also relevant:

Google Admits: Third-Party Apps Can Still Access Your Gmail Data

[https://fossbytes.com/google-admits-third-party-apps-can- sti...](https://fossbytes.com/google-admits-third-party-apps-can-still-access- your-gmail-data/)

<comment><USER9> Well... no shit? If you gave someone permissions to read your emails, obviously they can read your emails. And because they can read it, they can also copy your emails and/or share it with other companies. This isn't something that can be stopped by google.

<comment><USER10> Ya, the entire process is only to vet companies' policies on data access, retention, etc.

[https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/9110914](https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/9110914)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One great feature of gsuite, in my opinion, is the ability to prevent oauth- authenticated access to the email APIs, IMAP, and POP for your organization. These shady apps are ALL stealing your data. Literally every single one of them. And just telling your users to be careful about what apps they use isn't going to cut it, someone in your organization will leak everything.

</comment><comment><USER12> From their T&C's page "you may provide us with information about your contacts (such as names, email addresses, etc.)"

Whoever installs this app consents to sharing the information of their contacts, who might not consent to having their data shared.

Ultimately, this could lead to giving disposable contact details to friends and relatives, in order to (try to) preserve one's privacy.

<comment><USER13> That's a tough problem to solve, "Import your Address Book" has been a feature of communications platforms as far back as I can remember.

<comment><USER4> And it's been a terrible practice from day 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People should really read the privacy policies before using any email app these days. Many popular ones state that they, at minimum, will keep access tokens on their servers, and many outright cache copies of your messages.

<comment><USER15> My lack of trust is the sole reason I never had email on my phone until a few months ago. I moved to ProtonMail and I use their app (which is great). I trust them. It's possible I'm wrong, but I know how they make money and if I use them long enough I'll be a paying customer when my free space runs out. They also open-sourced their codebase and I have a friend in law enforcement who has delivered warrants to them and they truly don't keep any data or have access to emails at all.

<comment><USER16> There have been accusations however

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/29/protonmail_dismisse...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/29/protonmail_dismisses_spying/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If something is free on the internet, there is a good chance you are the product.

<comment><USER4> And if you're paying for something on the internet, there is a good chance that you are the product.

<comment><USER18> for the most part, these days, if you're on the internet you are the product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Edison

Are there really no good open source email clients on iphones?

<comment><USER3> The app review process can be very time-consuming. I imagine this is at least part of the reason there are not more open-source apps on iOS.

Also, there's no way to change your default mail client, so that makes it somewhat less likely that we'd see someone develop one of these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The HN title of this article, cf. the true title on the vice.com web page, fails to consider that this article is also about the companies that _sell_ data derived from scraping the contents of email. Arguably the sellers are more interesting here as they are the ones doing the scraping and creating the market.

<comment><USER21> Someone changed the title. The original submission title matched the article title [1]. Feels like an intentional re-characterization to place the blame on the ones purchasing the data, as opposed to the ones harvesting and selling. This journalist is the same who exposed Jumpshot [2] for similar tactics (selling highly-sensitive user-level data), and a few days later the entire company (~230 employees) shut down.

I asked about a similar problem [3] on a "Who's Hiring" last week to a YC- funded company and dang was quick to detach that comment, as it was off-topic for the context of the thread.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+inurl%3A22291484)

[2] [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdkq7/avast-antivirus- se...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdkq7/avast-antivirus-sells-user- browsing-data-investigation)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229267](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229267)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems it's time again for the reminder that if you aren't paying you are the product, not the customer. I don't understand how people don't understand this in 2020, after at least 2 decades of this nonsense. Or do they just not care?</comment>


Ask HN: Who is hiring (May 2019) - <AUTHOR> Oncora Medical is hiring for several engineer positions!
- Staff Software Engineer (Platform) - Software Engineer (Platform) - Software Engineer (Imaging)
About us: Oncora is an oncology software and data company dedicated to helping physicians and scientists collect and use real-world data to improve outcomes for cancer patients. Our products include: a workflow integrated data capture software system for radiation oncology, a data warehouse to amass real-world, regulatory-grade oncology data, a predictive model API with machine learning algorithms to power partner software, and a life sciences partner product leveraging automated medical image analysis to advance new technologies in the fight to cure cancer.  We work with world-leading cancer centers such as MD Anderson and Northwell Health, and our team is mission-driven to its core.
We are looking for an experienced engineer to join our mission driven team to help develop our data platform that integrates and transforms multiple imperfect and messy data sources into clean, usable data so that we can learn from every cancer patient.
Learn more here: https://oncoramedical.com/careers/ <comment><USER2> Please don't post like this here. Job posts can't be submissions, and you need to wait for the automated Who Is Hiring post to appear on Monday June 3. This is in the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).</comment>


Amazon Didn't Kill Toys 'R' Us. KKR, Bain, and Vornado Did - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/15/news/companies/toys-r-us-closing-blame/index.html <comment><USER2> This is a surprisingly large scale example of a very, very common problem in small businesses. People forget to invest in the appearance of their place of business.

You'll see Joe's RV dealership with a sign out front that's mouldering and falling off of its post, trying to advertise a million dollars of inventory. You'll see a restaurant with greasy, disintegrating tables and chipped floors, but the food is amazing, and the _kitchen_ is decent and clean.

Your tools and stock are not the only thing you need to reinvest in, and if your shop/store/site isn't clean, professional, and pleasing to visit, you cannot justify drawing a paycheck from the business, because the ship is going down.</comment>


Apple's Social Network - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2018/apples-social-network/ <comment><USER2> I don't think he mentioned it, but the easy way for Apple to grow to a $2T company is to get my household, a typical locked-in Apple household with an iPad or iPhone for every person and a computer for each adult and an AppleTV at every TV, to start paying for ever more services through those Apple devices. TV service. Ubiquitous internet service. Financial services like payments but grow into banking. manage all my regularly scheduled bills like utilities, rent or mortgages. I would love for a trusted intermediary to handle these things.

I was recently taken aback by the amount of money I was paying for high- quality subscriptions "oh my god, I've paid $20/month for the last 12 months to subscribe to high quality streaming to Phish concerts via their app?!?" I signed up for it thinking I would only do it for a month. I forgot. I spent $240 on Phish audio, more than I spent on my Apple Watch. Apple's real social network could be just getting started. Imagine if those "luxury" expenses were intermixed with a dozen other large, more legitimate bills? Apple could be processing $1000s a month per household, taking a hefty fee from some of them. And then launch a loyalty program :).

If I had to guess, I'd say this comment resembles Buffet's view of Apple's opportunity.

<comment><USER3> I completely agree. Apple needs to move into full banking.

Mint, 401k Management, Bill Pay, TAXES, Yahoo Finance, Student Loans, the old Manilla (collecting ALL aggregate statements in one place forever.)

They should buy Schwab, Envestnet, Personal Capital, YNAB, and Motif and slap a Robinhood/Monzo coat of paint on a new frontend. They could go from Apple Pay to Best Banking Experience in the World, in no time. As far as "Services" go apple competes in Music, Health, Maps, Messaging. They dont compete in Backups, Photos, or Banking. I would love for Apple/Google/Facebook to move aggressively against Intuit/TurboTax, if for no other reason to create a more competitive environment.

Imagine Apple getting into LENDING. They have cash up the wazoo. They should be able to determine who is most likely to pay back a loan, and come up with pretty accurate interest rates. And at that point, why is apple just a personal bank, and not a corporate bank as well, fully taking on QuickBooks. And if they dont want to get into business logic programming, become a Financial version of AWS and offer finanance, accounting, and banking APIs as a service, for App Developers to build on top of, like a AWS/Firebase/Pulse meets Chase/WF/Intuit.

I find it VERY odd that none of the big players (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Samsung, Sony, Facebook, Apple) have done anything more than a Wallet and Money Transfer. Why is Mint/Personal Capital/YNAB not on everyones radar. Why are TurboTax and 401K management not being looked into by ANY of the major tech companys? So many people have a bunch of accounts that need individual management. Make my life easier Apple/Microsoft/Google/Facebook.

Ive outlined this idea before. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12868316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12868316)

I ALSO think SOMEONE should come up with a "financial ID." Instead of signing into banking sites with "Facebook" or "Google" each one has its own unique login, password, security questions, validation. One Financial ID, isolated from Social IDs could drastically cut down on phishing, hacking etc. Smaller institutions would not be running their own Identity/Trust silos in isolation. Resources to build trust over who is who could be shared. Intuit has something like that for their services, but it really needs to be a Chase/WF/BoA effort like Zelle. "Sign in with your Pony ID"

<comment><USER4> I think becoming a bank was a big hassle and being a bank is less profitable than core Microsoft or Google activity. Having said that, PSD2 regulation in EU might change all of this - any institution will be able to do banking operations on behalf of the customer. There are some requirement too, but the bar is significantly lowered.

<comment><USER5> The banking and payments infrastructure is such that most of it is handled by intermediaries and other companies anyway. Most banks, for instance, do not issue their own cards or process their own payments - this is done by an intermediary. It's probably easier for Apple to break into banking by making the right partnerships than you think.

<comment><USER6> They already have the partnerships in place with ApplePay, I don't think they would every want to open themselves up to the type of scrutiny/regulation chartered banks face

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I appreciate that Ben took the time to read between the lines of what Apple has been saying, to tease out how Apple is thinking about Apple. It's clear that's why he has a successful business.

This article made me stop and think about Apple's future, and to be honest, the future of computing. I think it is clear that in 10 years mobile computing has reached maturity (which is astounding). There is no broad use-case advantage that iOS has over Android (ie, I can communicate on both of them, I can get directions on both, etc).

It seems as if we have reached a valley of sorts, in which the use-cases and potential businesses that can be built on top of a computing platform that is always connected, always with us are mostly tilled ground. Discovering and inventing new ones takes an enormous amount of effort and ingenuity. It would be easy to think that most of the disruption has already happened.

However, what surprises me is that Apple is doubling down on performance. The processing capability of iPhones continues to rise, even when we see that the software that uses that capability has diminishing returns.

My best guess is that Apple is playing the long game, and that they see the investments that they are making in performance will pay off greatly in the coming years, because suddenly our phone will be more powerful than our desktop. And, while it is easy to scoff at that as being unnecessary, I think it actually will begin to unlock new use-cases that will lead us out of the current "valley of diminishing returns."

The obvious candidate here is AR, but I think it actually is broader than that. It is clear that Apple is moving towards a system in which the iPhone is a computational Sun, around which multiple accessories "orbit". I think such a system, taken into consideration along with cloud computing is actually incredibly exciting, and I think (as much as this audience might dislike it) that desktops and laptops truly are the current past.

<comment><USER8> > However, what surprises me is that Apple is doubling down on performance. > The processing capability of iPhones continues to rise, even when we see > that the software that uses that capability has diminishing returns.

Moving the goal posts on performance, beyond what is reasonably necessary, simply incentivizes and challenges developers to start making bigger and better app experiences. This is a passive form of ecosystem insulation that further separates Apple customers from Android customers.

There was a meme a couple years ago, maybe, that on Snapchat you could tell which one of your friends used and iPhone and which ones used Android purely based on the image quality of their photos/videos (I don't think this is still true). If Apple can silently get devs to start developing apps for the A12, the gap between an Apple experience and an Android experience gets wider and wider IMO.

<comment><USER9> Apple is a bit strange when it comes to creativity tools. They have Final Cut and Logic, both basically major professional production frameworks for film and music, yet they don't have such thing for 3D content, something like a more intuitive Blender, Modo or Cinema 4D, full 3D production suites. Getting into 3D art & design and operating those tools is still quite hard, harder than it should be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you are a developer with a SaaS business, be very afraid. Apple is going to do everything possible to collect a 30% tax on your business to fix their growth problem. It's ironic, really. The company that mastered tax evasion is about to become the world's most determined tax collector.

<comment><USER11> Ib4 apple downvote storm.

Dev here, I actively campaign against Apple (and FAAG) products.

They seem like a danger to our capitalistic system as they have enough power to sway politics.

Apple has always been anti-dev from my point of view, forcing users to use their hardware and pay to produce apps.

While there doesnt seem to be many 'good guys', Apple has used their weight to constantly do unpopular things for their customers and developers.

My only hope is that Apple will fail to innovate, and users will begin to go toward more consumer and dev friendly high end products.

<comment><USER12> What about the fact that Apple is the only big guy not profiting off the mass harvesting of personal data? I think the market is significantly worse off without their influence (although this article does raise alarm bells).

<comment><USER11> They have hostile business tactics, does that wash that they use your data internally at Apple only?

For someone that doesnt mind getting tailored ads, the privacy argument is a non-issue. I am curious how long this will last at Apple as well, they don't strike me as a company that wouldnt sell your data.

EDIT: HN is very weak when it comes to critical thinking on Apple products...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given that Apple just reported a .4% unit sales increase I find the sheer volume of gloom and doom interesting.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/13540/apple- announces-q4-fy-2...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13540/apple- announces-q4-fy-2018-earnings-revenue-up-sales-not)

IDC just reported that during the same period the overall smartphone market shrank by 6%.

[https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44425818](https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44425818)

Samsung just reported a 33% year on year smartphone sales drop.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/31/samsung- re...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/10/31/samsung-reports- record-profit-despite-smartphone-sales-slump/)

Growing unit sales while the market is contracting doesn't really scream "doom" to me.

<comment><USER14> Relative success can still mean absolute stagnation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think Apple has some serious issues with growth; they have expanded a huge amount based on a few key and impressive products and ideas at the right time and in the right way, but I think they've ridden that pony almost as far as it can go [but they've done a better job than most at it]. They have done very well with it, but like most corporations who do that, they usually miss the next big thing, because it is some scrappy underdog, or just another competitor with a little bit more insight, who sees the next big thing. I think they will do just fine with their current market and design ethic for their current audience, but I don't think they are going to see any more rapid expansion unless they get some major revitalization. They've lost some of the key risk-takers and creatives and I think they've entered the management mode once more.

<comment><USER16> What is the next big thing that they have missed?

<comment><USER17> I think it's pretty clear that online video slipped right through their fingers. They were early with Apple TV and Steve Jobs' assertion that he had "cracked" TV back in 2011. And what happened? They did almost nothing and let Netflix run away with it. Apple wasn't even a contender. Same thing goes for mapping, which was highlighted in that recent blog post. They came out with Apple Maps years ago but almost did nothing with it...it feels like they half- assed the whole project and are now flailing in catch-up mode. It seems their status as also-ran is now permanent. They shut down their router business while Ubiquiti (run by a former Apple engineer) has run wild in the networking world and looks primed to completely disrupt Cisco over time. They clung onto Apple Music, pot-committed to a model that looked outdated the moment Spotify launched in the US.

They've had some successes like Apple Watch, so I wouldn't write Apple off just yet. But yeah, the things they've missed which they should've known better about is a bit concerning.

<comment><USER18> > They shut down their router business while Ubiquiti (run by a former Apple > engineer) has run wild in the networking world and looks primed to > completely disrupt Cisco over time.

Out of everything you listed this is the one that I don't think Apple is really missing out on, as they were never positioned to be a major player outside the prosumer space which often has needs beyond what Apple was providing. The average consumer is an idiot when it comes to networking, most of them run ISP-provided equipment, and those that don't are often informed enough to get hardware to run DD-WRT/etc. or buy a proper prosumer solution like Ubiquiti's.

Back when wireless routers weren't provided by default with your internet service, a half-decent one wasn't cheap, and people just wanted a simple solution that "worked" then the Airport had value in ensuring Apple's other products had connectivity. There's no benefit to them doing this now, and Apple is not positioned to get into the prosumer/business SDN market that Ubiquiti is in.

<comment><USER17> You're right, one of these things is not like the other. However, I think in the next ten years, Apple will regret having neglected this product category, and Ubiquiti is making inroads into consumer-grade products as well as service providers and enterprise-level networking. I just think it's interesting that Ubiquiti was born out of Apple and was able to turn this into a super interesting and profitable business even though there is a perfectly logical reason as you note. I suppose I just think Ubiquiti is so fascinating that it will be evident one day what a mistake Apple made.

<comment><USER19> Two brief points:

1) Just because the Ubiquiti founder came from Apple, doesn't mean that Apple should be in the quasi-enterprise networking space that Ubiquiti is. Apple's networking gear was always aiming to be simple, plug-and-play hardware for people who don't want to think about networking. That's pretty much the opposite of Ubiquiti's products.

2) When Apple was still doing things like networking, we had a lot of people complaining that their focus was spread too widely, and their core products were suffering.

<comment><USER18> > Apple's networking gear was always aiming to be simple, plug-and-play > hardware for people who don't want to think about networking.

This is the real kicker in today's landscape and why it doesn't make sense for Apple to even be in this market, there's no such thing as "plug-and-play" for the majority of consumers these days when for proper functionality you must go into your ISP-provided equipment and disable the WLAN radio, put it into passthrough mode (if that's even possible, some ISP's like AT&T don't even provide equipment with proper passthrough mode), god help you if you use DSL and need to get PPPoE credentials which are automagically configured for you these days by some captive portal when you first plug your equipment in.

It's literally harder to use your own equipment these days than it used to be before every ISP started providing integrated gateways, so the current market for standalone equipment is people who need something other than "plug-and- play" \- because they already get that from their ISP (even if the hardware usually sucks, it's good enough for the average consumer who thinks they get "their WiFi from Comcast").

Apple doesn't need to be in networking anymore, there's not a large enough market for products like the Airport AP's anymore and if they actually want to compete they have to battle with the likes of Ubiquiti, Cisco, Ruckus, HP (Aruba), etc. - not ASUS, TP-Link, Buffalo, Netgear, etc. Seeing as they have no plans to revive the Xserve, I doubt they care about having a foothold in wiring closets and datacenters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I only skimmed the article until I realized they weren't talking about Apple starting a privacy focused actual social network. That's what I thought the article would be about.

So this is off topic but what I'm imagining is letting people connect with other iCloud users (aka friends and family) to share pics, videos and comment on them. Maybe they can link iTunes/App store content (apps, music, movies, etc.) with each other and comment on them too.

This might take a huge amount of more people off Facebook and bring them into Apple eco-system of services than meet-up like events at their brick and mortar stores. There are probably millions of FB users that just use it to connect with distant close friends & family to share pics, etc.

Edit: just to build on this idea a little, pulling people's actual social network (not acquaintances or long lost people they never see) could boost sales of their content. Let people share, like and comment on their favorite music, tv shows, movies, and apps with no ads.

<comment><USER21> They've had that for years -- iMessage.

IMO Facebook is for aspirational connectivity... you stalk your high school friends from afar. iMessage is for the people whom you actually talk to, and the green vs. blue bubble is a subtle peer pressure factor to get people to flip.

As more applications expose functionality via iMessage, that will get more powerful.

<comment><USER22> Shared Albums in the Photos app lets you do just that.

<comment><USER21> Agree, alot of the pieces are there, but Apple has done a not so great job at discovery. That's slowly getting better imo.

I use my kid's school as a proxy for the average joe. About 60% of the moms have no idea that Shared Albums exist, and most of them don't really understand how they work. The UI is a little weird.

<comment><USER23> _Apple has done a not so great job at discovery._

Except... maybe they shouldn't? Maybe real life can be the discovery part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In the essay, the "social network" stands for the new initiative of customer gatherings & sessions at Apple Stores. What Apple dubs _" Today at Apple"_.

I'm having a hard time thinking of historical business examples where in-store "educational" events really moved the needle on sales.

Maybe one example is Home Depot stores with their free demonstrations of various home improvement tasks. Do they actually change store visits or total sales? Or are they a loss leader? I have no idea. (Home Depot isn't an exact comparison to Apple because it doesn't require buying HomeDepot-branded tools to benefit from the demos.)

Remember 20 years ago when some industry observers thought Amazon online bookstore couldn't compete with Barnes & Noble because the brick&mortar store had the sofas and lounge chairs to browse books, the cafe area, the children's area where people read aloud, etc. It turns out those in-store social experiences weren't as advantageous as people thought.

Yes, there are other customer gathering experiences that happen such as video game e-sports leagues (or LAN parties) or Harley Davidson motorcycle meetups. But those social events seem organically created bottom-up by the customers rather than top-down by a hardware company. E.g. As far as I know, the e-sports league _membership_ isn't tied to a hardware manufacturer like NVIDIA or ATI. (A particular hardware vendor may provide _sponsorship_ but that's not the same as _membership_ which is what Apple's _" Today at Apple"_ is doing.)

 _> , this explains CFO Luca Maestri reasoning on the earnings call for no longer reporting unit sales: [...] I just wish Apple would show it with its reporting._

I think it's interesting that even if Apple wants to keep industry analysts in the dark, other entities like Amazon and Facebook can estimate iPhone unit sales by proxy statistics.

E.g. Amazon can run data analytics on sales of iPhone accessories (how many the new iPhone Xs cases sold and how does it compare to previous iPhone 8 case sales at launch?)

E.g. Facebook's popular iOS apps used by billions can send telemetry data on the particular iPhone models hitting their servers. ([https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26028918/how-to- determin...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26028918/how-to-determine- the-current-iphone-device-model))

<comment><USER25> > As far as I know, the e-sports league isn't tied to a hardware manufacturer > like NVIDIA or ATI.

Yes, but most of the largest ones are put on/heavily funded by the manufacturer of the game:

\- CS:GO Majors

\- Overwatch League is put on by Blizzard

\- Riot Hiring for esports operations - [https://www.riotgames.com/en/work- with-us/disciplines/esport...](https://www.riotgames.com/en/work-with- us/disciplines/esports-operations)

\-----

Apple is moving "down market" and the biggest win for them right now is for those to understand "what apple means." I've shifted 90% of my family to mac from whatever PC they were using before because of the reality of the physical store. Go there and get help. They know more than I do, and they will be helpful. For the most part, that's true, and I no longer do tech support for my family.

Grandma wants to learn how to photo edit? Now apple gives her a class and a community of other learners. It may turn out to be a loss leader, but it's "more of the same" of what separates apple from any of the other Manufacturers. Google/Samsung/Dell can't do anything close. Microsoft _might_ be able to, but lets see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been shocked that Apple hasn't stepped more in to the home automation market. Homekit is one thing, but an entire product line that is highly integrated with the Apple ecosystem and has the Apple design, feel, and ease of use seems like a smart strategic move in a market that is so highly fragmented.

<comment><USER27> This is because another company has not done it well enough yet for Apple to borrow their idea and improve upon it. That is largely how Apple works (Look at HomePod, iPhone, etc...), let someone invent an idea/process/service, then take that idea and make it better. Home automation is still trying to take root, give it a few years and Apple will have a strong product here I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This strategy seems at least orthogonal, if not contradictory, to their positioning themselves as a privacy-focused company that can be trusted _because_ their business-model is based on hard products rather than on engagement.

<comment> noir-york A real world social network preserves privacy, no?

<comment><USER28> I was more referring to the article's extrapolation from Apple's intended focus on "Services" and move away from reporting device sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It seems like apple can continue to grow 'unit sales' by introducing new products like the watch at a regular pace.

<comment><USER30> Came here to make this exact point.

Of course, the iPhone was a unique product in terms of how it changed the trajectory of Apple's fortunes, and likely can't be replicated. It's dominated 24% of the company's history. (10 years between 2007 and 2017; Apple was founded in 1976)

If iPhone sales are flat, goosing the price makes sense, but it isn't the future of the company.

To be honest, as a technologist, I'm sort of relieved. I'm interested in what's next, and now that the iPhone (and smartphones in general) is a refined product, I'm really interested in what's next in tech.

<comment><USER31> Look for the next in flat computers. Seriously. AR/VR glasses might count.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> One way Apple could continue to grow their revenue would be iPhone as a Services, or basically the Apple upgrade programme but available world wide. For a basic monthly price, you get iPhone, AppleCare+ Theft, Your iPhone Storage Size iCloud Backup. You can choose whether you want to spread this as 24 months or 36 months, interest free. This makes good uses of Apple's constant overflowing of cash, and no other players on the market could easily copy such programme because of their cash flow and cost of money. Apple are also earning extra on iCloud and AppleCare+ which is also high margin services.

Apple could then offer options on top of the basic services, AirPod, Apple Music, Apple TV Subscription, and may be even your monthly iTunes Store Credit ( Apple save more on less per-transition cost ), all in one monthly bill.

This way Apple could transition into a Services company, and services tends to be very sticky and can be valued as such, while the current Apple Stock, despite all the brand loyalty it is still valued as a hardware company based on unit sales. Apple would have been 2T company if it were valued anything like Microsoft , Google, or Amazon.

I also believe iPad Pro being able to have an external monitor, and hopefully someday keyboard and mouse will take over the current PC market with little to no competition right now. That is assuming Apple wants the iPad to do that, a replacement as Desktop. iPad Pro, being portable for field sales and mobile, iOS security and double as Desktop could be the perfect fit for All businesses. The TCO in managing these must be dramatically lower than Laptop or PCs.

</comment><comment><USER33> As far as Apple's 'real world social network', any time I hang out in upscale or hip coffee shops or bars, the laptops are >80% Macs. Observed this in RiNo in Denver the past few days, for instance, after buying a Chromebook (actually so far it's 100% Macs) Apple's conspicuous branding definitely serves a socioeconomic signal, like driving a luxury car. It's as if everyone has a BMW, though and other luxury cars don't exist.

Next, "Apple's culture and approach to products is antithetical to the culture and approach necessary to create and grow a traditional social network. Apple wants total control and to release as perfect a product it can; a social network requires an iterative approach that is designed to deal with constant variability and edge cases."

I disagree with the last sentence. Does the author believe that simply because that's how Facebook chooses to operate - eternal bleeding edge? Constant mission shift, like Instagram?

Twitter seems fairly stable to me. I also recall when we used software like VBulletin for years without updates for very successful social networking. I don't see why this software has a special need to cope with variability and edge cases, just to share photos and messages with people.

</comment><comment><USER34> > Apple said it would stop providing unit sales for iPhones, iPads, and Macs > in fiscal 2019, a step toward becoming more of a services business. While > some pundits praised the move as a way to highlight a potent new business > model, many analysts complained it was an attempt to hide the pain of a > stagnant smartphone market.

Can companies just pull this sort of "yeah those numbers look bad, so we're not publishing them anymore" moves with impunity? I'd have thought this was something the SEC could step in to stop.

Is the only tool shareholders have to oppose this to vote in an entirely new board? Which of course won't happen for such a "minor" issue?

<comment><USER7> what regulation forces a company to report how much it sells of X? Most regulation requires reporting around revenue, not units.

As the article notes, Apple was unique in reporting unit sales at all.

<comment><USER35> > what regulation forces a company to report how much it sells of X?

That's not what was asked. What was asked is if they can just change what they usually report because it looks bad.

<comment><USER7> Semantics, and the answer is the same. The parent was asking if the SEC could step in, and the only way they could do that is if government regulation has granted them purview and authority to. There is no such regulation.

<comment><USER35> I read it as asking whether the SEC could step in on misleading information disclosure change, not the information itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I am bad at the economy thing so I have a question:

Is Apple increasing the price of iPhones to keep up with revenue growth ?

<comment><USER37> Yes. Units sold is down across the market and Apple is no exception, but Apple's revenue is at record highs.

<comment><USER36> Okay, thanks.

So in the end, when a consumer wants to replace his iphone 6s that is finally too much out of date he'll have to pay more than if everyone (him included) had bought the iphone that came after the iphone 6s, right ?

So basically selling a product that last too long is a problem for Apple (who has to report to shareholders why revenue is growing less than before) and the consumers (who pays basically more for the same since standard usage between an iphone6s and an iphone7/8 stays the same overall) ?

Apple can't take a drop in revenue growth to the benefit of consumers by selling the next crop of iphone at the same price. So they are condemned to get a more expensive (than the last one) premium iphone out or raise the prices across the line-up. And if I understand correctly they did both, correct ?

That would explain why it seems to me that apple products are getting more expensive and less of a commodity (which high volume would suggest).

<comment><USER38> The one thing I would add is that everyone on the planet has a smart phone now, more or less.

So it's very difficult for Apple to find more customers (just Android switchers, mostly), so they raise prices for their existing customers instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The day Apple begins serious flirtation with ad revenue is the day I bail on them.

</comment><comment><USER40> > Apple Inc. shares had their worst day since 2014 amid concerns that growth > in its powerhouse product, the iPhone, is slowing. In the fiscal fourth > quarter, Apple said iPhone unit sales barely grew from a year earlier

Why do sales always need to grow, why sustaining is not enough?

Also wouldn't it be a good idea to change the focus product periodically? I.e. we've sold so much iPhones that everybody who ever wanted one has one already, let's focus on making MacBooks great again so more people would consider getting one or upgrading their old one, then once some time has passed and everybody has a new Mac let's start selling new iPhones we were developing during this time that is so much better thst everybody is willing to upgrade again... IMHO inflating sales growth by releasing a new not-much-better model of the same product every year or two is hardly a healthy sustainable practice.

<comment><USER12> Our financial system is entirely predicated on the assumption of perpetual growth. It's likely to bite us in the end if we can't get ahold of the externalities and find a way to build sustainable systems, but unfortunately we don't have the scaffolding in place for that and Apple is just another cog in the existing system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I always enjoy Ben Thompson's insights, and I think he may have something here. But does anyone really feel comfortable that this strategy is going to keep them at the top?

<comment><USER42> They are not on top in phones or computers. Android devices outsell iPhones by a significant margin and for computers, apple basically owns an insignificant portion of the market.

<comment><USER43> It doesn't matter what the market share is. As long as their margins are hefty and iOS remains the OS where consumers are willing to pay for apps etc. You don't need market share, if your margins are sky high.

<comment><USER44> They do need a significant market share (which they clearly have at >1 billion active devices) to make it worthwhile for content creators to target their platforms and users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> one of the few companies who consistently keeps bumming it's users with higher prices for the same shit and no one is complaining :')... look at most tech giants out there, and you will see only Apple and Nvidia keep cranking up prices for same product range. only companies where you need to pay MORE to get the same tomorrow. buying a relationship with apple? first treat your users like they have value, thank you.! no one wants to be in a toxic abusive relationship!

<comment><USER19> Google Pixel 2: $649 Google Pixel 3: $799

hmmm ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> When you can buy Chinese phones like Oneplus 6 that are just as good as the XS but half the price, the writing is on the wall. Jack up prices, exploit naive customers, and max out those stock options while you still can. Then let the company die by mediocrity again, no Jobs to save you this time.</comment>


TikTok and 53 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/tiktok-and-53-other-ios-apps-still-snoop-your-sensitive-clipboard-data/ <comment><USER2> I mean how big of a deal is this?

UIPasteboard.general.string gives you access to what the user copied. I'm sure some apps are just trying to provide a better user experience...

Example: they've copied a website make it easy for them to share it

<comment><USER3> Honestly I think a lot of this is overblown as if apps used the old API to merely detect whether clipboard data is available it would trigger this. Although some apps are probably doing bad things with this data - most will not be

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bitcoin addresses could be up for the taking! However they are just published on the blockchain for anyone to see!</comment>


Open Sourcing a Deep Learning Solution for Detecting NSFW Images - <AUTHOR> https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/151148689421/open-sourcing-a-deep-learning-solution-for <comment><USER2> So can it be reversed to become the ultimate porn-finding neural network?

<comment><USER3> When you said "reversed" I thought about it being a porn-generative neural network. Just enter your favorite keywords and an unique, tailored to your needs scene will be generated just for you!

<comment><USER4> As long as what you need is a nightmarish version of the requested scene.

What happens here with generating illegal content? If you put a public text->image gan up, and someone uses it to generate child porn, are you responsible?

How could you make sure it couldn't?

<comment><USER5> I would imagine if you're generating then no real people were part of its creation therefore it would be legal. If I remember correctly cartoons of children having sex is not illegal (in the United States as far as I know).

Though that then raises the question: when happens when it can be generated so realistically that it looks indistinguishable from the real thing? Would it still be treated like cartoons? How could you prove one way or the other? Lots of questions here.

<comment><USER6> In the USA:

Provisions against simulated child pornography were found to be unconstitutional in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition [0] in 2002.

From wiki [1]:

> Referring to [New York v. Ferber, 1982: child pornography is not protected > speech], the court stated that "the CPPA prohibits speech that records no > crime and creates no victims by its production. Virtual child pornography is > not 'intrinsically related' to the sexual abuse of children".

IANAL, but following that logic alone, the degree of realism doesn't seem to be relevant to the legal precedent insofar as photorealistic imagery would still "record no crime" nor "create victims by its production." As to whether it's dangerous for such material to exist because it would create plausible deniability for the production of actual photography while claiming it's simulated...I guess that would be a different matter.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalition)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_the_United_States#Simulated_pornography)

<comment><USER7> They actually fixed this with the 2003 PROTECT act which only makes obscene simulated child pornography illegal. Because obscenity isn't protected by the first amendment this has been found to be constitutional.

<comment><USER8> It's hard to say that changed anything. Obscenity is a notoriously thorny subject in American constitutional law. The legal test for determining obscenity[0] is highly subjective and in the context of the internet very difficult to apply.

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

<comment><USER9> Highlights from: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test)

The test:

* Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,

* Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,

* Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Also:

Critics of obscenity law argue that defining what is obscene is paradoxical, arbitrary, and subjective.

\---

I think it would be hard to not find generated child porn obscene by this test, unless you have a good lawyer, at which point there is plenty of wiggle room.

<comment><USER8> I think the technical feats involved in creating such a text-to-image program might allow a talented laywer to make an argument for scientific value.

There's also the issue that "contemporary community standards" are hard to determine, because what community you're talking about is hard to determine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I should update my sexy map finder: [http://exclav.es/2016/05/20/sexy- maps/](http://exclav.es/2016/05/20/sexy-maps/)

<comment><USER11> Those are some hot map pictures!

I don't understand how Google's algorithm can be misled into finding sexiness in those. I imagine it has something to do with skin tones or flesh colors, but then what about the high-contrast patchwork of green and brown fields Google finds "likely to contain adult content"? That's totally puzzling.

The confusion with medical images is way more understandable. If you squint, you can almost imagine those are pics of skin cancer or lesions.

Oddly enough, I even see violence in the "violent" picture. In an abstract, Rorschach Test sort of way. Well done, Google!

<comment><USER12> > I don't understand how Google's algorithm can be misled into finding > sexiness in those.

I'm reminded of a paper for which the authors generated different pictures of static that fooled neural network image classifiers into confidently identifying them as different objects: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897](https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897)

Wired summary: [https://www.wired.com/2015/01/simple-pictures-state-art- ai-s...](https://www.wired.com/2015/01/simple-pictures-state-art-ai-still- cant-recognize/)

> Computer vision and human vision are nothing alike. And yet, since it > increasingly relies on neural networks that teach themselves to see, we're > not sure precisely how computer vision differs from our own. As Jeff Clune, > one of the researchers who conducted the study, puts it, when it comes to > AI, "we can get the results without knowing how we're getting those > results."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Forgive my ignorance of ML but the last bit: "you'll need your own porn to train on" confused me. Does this mean that they're just exposing the rough topology of their neutral net (eg depth) and not the actual weights between nodes? I'm curious to learn from an ML expert how much this actually offers.

<comment><USER4> It looks like they are sharing the trained network, but they aren't sharing the training data set.

<comment><USER6> The training set is almost certainly composed of copyrighted material.

<comment><USER14> Interesting thought - doesn't every single porn producer now have a valid copyright claim on the trained network? I don't see how you can argue this isn't a derivative work based on the movies they produced.

<comment><USER15> I was debating with a friend about just this: whether a text-to-speech model is a derivative work of audio recordings by a given speaker, such that they'd then have claim on ownership of it. (You could almost certainly create an [overfit] model that could _re-generate_ the original performance of a text from said text.)

Moot if it was a work-for-hire, of course; but if I, say, created a Samuel L. Jackson speech model by training on samples from his movies, and sold it as one of those car-navigation voices, could I be sued? By Mr. Jackson? By the copyright-holders of the movies?

And if I _could_ , what does that imply about impersonators, who do the same thing, but with their brains?

<comment><USER16> I imagine you couldn't put his name on it which would be a huge deal if you wanted to sell it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Direct link to Github: [https://github.com/yahoo/open_nsfw](https://github.com/yahoo/open_nsfw)

</comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone tried taking the features that are learned at the various layers of a neural net and feeding them into something like this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612246)?

I imagine we would get some really interesting images back...

</comment><comment><USER19> Can you run deep dream on this? That would be quite fascinating.

<comment><USER20> I think you misspelled "horrifying". I can only imagine that producing something akin to the human centipede ... "Infinite Girls, One Cup" ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We are not releasing the training images or other details due to the nature of the data, but instead we open source the output model which can be used for classification by a developer.

I'm guessing the one who had to input the data/images had a fun time at work :p

<comment><USER22> I used to work in a company which had a division doing manual image classification next door. Not a fun time at all, the people who worked there regularly burned out on relentlessly seeing terrible things.

<comment><USER23> I've often thought that it would be even more helpful to automatically filter violent images. Particularly to spare humans from having to be the filters (and "relentlessly see terrible things").

However, I imagine that's far more difficult to accomplish. How do you detect graphic violence? Looking for blood isn't going to cut it. Also, I can't imagine how you'd separate the fictional from the real - I can watch horror movies with realistic special effects all day, but real violence/mutilation/death bothers me deeply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They acknowledge that NSFW (or pornographic) is hard to define, a la 'I recognize it if I see it'.

But looking at the meager 3 sample images I'm confused about the scoring already. Why is the one in the middle scoring the highest?

The question is an honest one. The two rightmost images seem to be interchangeable to me and are ~boring~: People at the beach. Is this network therefor already trained to include the biases of the creators?

<comment><USER25> All ML networks are inherently biased towards its creators. My colleague recently described this issue to me as the "Old, white, male" problem. This is why most voice recognition services drastically fail when they are shown foreign accents.

<comment><USER26> > This is why most voice recognition services drastically fail when they are > shown foreign accents

As someone with a broad Norwegian accent: This has gotten massively better over the last few years.

Not that long ago, my local cinema chain started using voice recognition to discriminate between a list of city names, and it would consistently think I said "Birmingham" when I said "London" (!).

These days, both my Amazon Fire and the Youtube app will correctly recognise most things I throw at it, including e.g. names of random Youtube channels that bear no relation to real English words.

It's by no means perfect, but it's getting there. In relation to the "old, white, male" problem (well, I do somewhat fit that), presumably because these systems are now finally trained on huge and varied data sets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if anyone at Yahoo tried using this to "deconvolute" noise into Cronenberg nightmare porn?

</comment><comment><USER28> Sit back grab some popcorn. Lets see how long it takes people to start running data backwards to get new original porn.

<comment><USER29> I see you never have seen what kind of images that tends to generate.

Or you're really into R'lyehian porn.

<comment><USER30> Cthulhu has nice tentacles. So I guess it will be run of the mill hentai.

<comment><USER29> You have no idea. Try googling for "deep dream porn".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My first thought was from years ago, when I was pitching open source forensic services to London police (did not get far, bad Salesman that I am)

Cataloging, categorising pornography seized is a nasty job and one that cops across the planet might do better with good common OSS tools.

Hopefully this will help

</comment><comment><USER32> My first thought: would probably be very useful for sites to crack down on inappropriate content.

My second thought: I could probably use this to find porn in unexpected places via a webscraping Python program.

</comment><comment> m-i-l Good to see they've automated this (beyond the initial classification of training data). In the early days of the web, such filters were typically based on manually maintained lists of sites. I actually met someone at a party once whose full-time job was to surf for porn, to maintain the filter for a provider of IT services to schools (he worked for a company now called RM Education). He said it was his ideal job for the first few days, but soon grew tiresome (note that back in those days there wasn't really any extremely objectionable material on the web).

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone else see the irony in acknowledging that NFSW is subjective and contextual, but assuming that pornographic images are not?

<comment><USER34> There's no definition of "ironic" that I can think of applying to that. It's like saying that "beautiful painting" is subjective and contextual, but "still life painting" isn't. It just happens that pornography is almost[1] always considered NFSW, but again, I can't see how that is ironic.

[1] Almost, because porn is SFW when your work involves porn.

<comment><USER33> I think it's easier to agree that a picture of a naked person is NSFW than that it's pornographic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm not a deep learning person whatsoever, but I do have an interesting use case that I won't disclose publicly: Is there a way to build this, and output detections based on the, ugh, object it has detected?

e.g.

penis 0.94

vagina 0.01

<comment><USER36> Yes. You would have to have a large training set with these labels but it would be pretty straightforward to train. You would probably want a tagging model not a classifier because there could be multiple objects of interest in the same image. If you get me the training data I could train a model for you pretty quickly.

<comment><USER37> And it would be an... interesting job to tag the training set. Although for higher level content, I suppose lots of porn videos have very specific category tags that could be an interesting data set to play with. Uh, to analyze.

<comment><USER13> Iirc you can use ML to learn the tags as well. They tend to be in text surrounding the media

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think I'll pass on browsing the the deep dream visualizations for this.

</comment><comment><USER39> With access to Flickr and Tumblr it must have been very easy to create a huge training set for such a task.

</comment><comment><USER40> Aren't there more important problems to work on than worrying about someone looking at naked people? This is just what we need: more effort spent on censoring and controlling people.

<comment><USER41> Won't you say that preventing a kid from accidentally viewing porn while searching images with `Safe Search: On` an important problem?

<comment><USER40> Well, considering the other shit they look at and participate in, like video games with people killing each other and blood spattering everywhere, I'd rather they were viewing naked, non-violent people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Reminds me of this post from hackerfactor where he describes his own porn filter based on pHash.

[http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/529-Kin...](http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/529-Kind- of-Like-That.html)

It'd be interesting to see a direct comparison of the two. Off the cuff, I'd expect the deep neural network to be more accurate and better at generalizing, but much more expensive to train.

</comment><comment><USER43> another work in this field: "Adult video content detection using Machine Learning Techniques" PDF: [http://colorlab.no/content/download/37238/470343/file/Victor...](http://colorlab.no/content/download/37238/470343/file/VictorTorres_MasterThesis.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER44> I'll bet this would be a good tool for sysadmins or network administrators to run against their network and see what it finds.

</comment><comment><USER45> Awesome!

I have been using nude.js to do this ( [http://s.codepen.io/icodeforlove/debug/gMrEKV](http://s.codepen.io/icodeforlove/debug/gMrEKV) ), which is hit or miss.

</comment><comment><USER46> To be precise they are only releasing the already trained model. The associated dataset is not being made public.

Thus, it is meant to be for off the shelf use rather than being able to tinker with the network to produce nuanced results.

<comment><USER47> Or they just don't want to be distributing gigabytes of porn... most of which is probably under copyright.

Making the data set available and whether you can tinker with or retrain it are very different things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I wonder what would happen if we stopped firing people for watching NSFW images. I mean bosses look at NSFW images all the time and it sounds like a shallow reason to fire someone.

<comment><USER49> Creates a hostile work environment, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Are there any other fairly basic image recognition problems that people want? I'd be happy to provide as long as a dataset is easy to collect.

</comment><comment><USER50> Has anyone run this NN on the censored Facebook image?

</comment><comment><USER51> Interesting that the photo of two women on the beach is given a higher NSFW rating than the photo of a man on the beach.

</comment><comment><USER52> Could this work on mobile to detect 18+ content in images or video? Or would it be a trained library of 50mb+?

</comment><comment><USER53> I literally just started working on this problem 2 hours ago >_<

</comment><comment><USER54> That's it! That's what I'm looking for.

</comment><comment><USER55> is this just the network or is it a fully trained model? The TechCrunch article suggests the former but the yahoo post the latter...

<comment><USER56> It's the trained model. You can use it out of the box or refine it to tailor to your environment.

<comment><USER55> Nice, was on phone only at the time and not able to dig deeper.

Took a couple hours to get it all up and running but indeed it works, and not half badly at that!

This is obviously a way cheaper alternative to [https://sightengine.com](https://sightengine.com) or [http://imagevision.com](http://imagevision.com)

Kudos to Yahoo for releasing this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I hope this is ported to TensorFlow soon!

</comment><comment><USER58> oh silly Americans, its just tits

</comment><comment><USER59> I would suggest, that the link should go to Yahoo's blog post

[https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/151148689421/open- sourcing-...](https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/151148689421/open-sourcing-a- deep-learning-solution-for)

which contains some technical details. (And furthermore, I guess the HN crowd has enough Internet experience to come up with stupid jokes of their own design.)

</comment><comment><USER5> The Yahoo blog[1] post is far more interesting than this techcrunch "article". Suggest changing URL to the Yahoo Blog please.

[1] [https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/151148689421/open- sourcing-...](https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/151148689421/open-sourcing-a- deep-learning-solution-for)

<comment><USER60> OK, we've updated the link from [https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/30/yahoo-open- sources-its-por...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/30/yahoo-open-sources-its- porn-detecting-neural-network/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> So this is what Yahoo was up to for the last 10 years, instead of building any sort of security, keeping Yahoo Messenger working properly, or anything else of value? Heckuva job, Yahoo.</comment>


How to 1-Click Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 12.10 with DigitalOcean - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-1-click-install-ruby-on-rails-on-ubuntu-12-10-with-digitalocean

<comment><USER2> This is great and will help people move away from Heroku very, very quickly.</comment>


If-statements in Smalltalk (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/94558.html <comment><USER2> The explanation is almost correct, but misses a tiny, but interesting detail. Subclasses of Boolean do implement #ifTrue: and #ifFalse:, wich each take a block (a no-argument function) as an argument. But they also implement #ifTrue:ifFalse:, which takes two blocks as arguments. In

        a < b:
            ifTrue: [...]
            ifFalse: [...]

a single message (#ifTrue:ifFalse:) is sent to the boolean that results from evaluating 'a < b'. A true, being the singleton instance of the True subclass of Boolean, evaluations the first argument and ignores the second. False has a singleton instance, false, that does the opposite.

Coming from Pascal and C, seeing that IF/ELSE could be implement without special syntax was a real mind warper.

<comment><USER3> There should be no colon after the predicate (i.e., after the "b").

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone interested in playing around with Smalltalk can use [https://pharo.org](https://pharo.org) \- I recently tried it and was pretty amazed with the quality of documentation available. It is quite a different experience working in an interactive live environment.

<comment><USER5> I briefly looked into it, but I can't seem to figure out what to make with it. It looked like you couldn't write an application with any portability, and any user would basically have to run a smalltalk vm to use your application. Am I mistaken?

<comment><USER6> This is my understanding, yes - [http://wiki.c2.com/?ImageBasedLanguage](http://wiki.c2.com/?ImageBasedLanguage) . Some Lisp systems and the Factor language also work like this (though Factor does a lot of work to ensure that the contents of your image matches the code on disk). I believe it's possible to strip down your image for deployment so it only includes code required by your application.

Then again, we live in the era of Docker, in which it's commonplace to ship an entire Linux filesystem along with your web app. So shipping a Smalltalk VM (2.6MB for Pharo 5.0) shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This applies to loops as well. Numbers are objects that accept the `timesRepeat:` message:

        10 timesRepeat: [ n := n*2 ].

Not only that, you can send messages to blocks, to implement loops.

        [ n < 10 ] whileTrue: [ n := n + 1 ]

<comment><USER7> Compare to Ruby:

        10.times { n = n * 2 }

The latter isn't possible "out of the box", but easy enough to implement:

        class Proc
            def whileTrue; yield while self.call; end
        end

        # And use:
        n = 1
        ->{ n < 10 }.whileTrue { n = n + 1 }

        puts n

Ruby syntax does get in the way of some of the more succint ways of defining control structures in Smalltalk, but the above shows some of the Smalltalk heritage of Ruby quite well, I think (though, while "10.times" is fairly idiomatic Ruby, implementing constructs like the one below certainly is not).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> if statements considered harmful: [https://blog.deprogramandis.co.uk/2013/03/20/if- statements-c...](https://blog.deprogramandis.co.uk/2013/03/20/if-statements- considered-harmful-or-gotos-evil-twin-or-how-to-achieve-coding-happiness- using-null-objects/)

<comment><USER9> That title is very clickbaity, but the article was quite good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since if-statements are built out of blocks and message sending, you can easily do some cool things. One of them is building up an abstract syntax tree (AST) of an expression without parsing that expression.

E.g. suppose you want to build up an AST of the statement

      (x < 0) ifTrue:[-x] ifFalse:[x]

Instead of starting with an x of type Number, you would start with an object of type ASTVariable, that responds to the message < by creating and returning an object ASTLessThan instead of the Boolean True or False. When that object is sent the ifTrue:ifFalse: message it evaluates both branches to create the ASTs for both branches and then creates an ASTIfStatement.

As an sexp:

      (ASTIfStatement
        :condition (ASTLessThan #1=(ASTVariable :name x) (ASTConstant :value 0))
        :consequent (ASTUnaryMinus #1#)
        :alternative #1#)

I've seen it used in a number of embedded languages in Smalltalk, such as SQL.

<comment><USER11> This technique is limited by the fact that it only works if all the messages are sent to x, rather than x being sent some message.

<comment><USER10> You mean "rather than x being sent _to_ some message"? E.g. 0 > x wouldn't work, because the message #> is sent to 0 with x as an argument? In a case like that you can still make it work by exploiting the fact that arithmetic and comparison operators implement double dispatch. The implementation of > for an Integer would send a message to x:

      Integer::> aNumber
        ^x adaptToInteger: self andCompare: #<

Even if x is passed as an argument, to interact with it at some point somebody has to send a message to it. I agree that it can become unwieldy to intercept all possible messages, but for a well-defined subset in your DSL, this can usually be done.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! I didn't consider the fact that objects are opaque.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> First, I did not know this, it's pretty cool.

But, for all the fangled cool things that the more powerful languages of yesteryears (like lisp), what seems to actually precipitate adoption is simply history, not necessarily expressiveness/powerful abstractions, etc. See C, sh and friends, javascript. Arguably, python is one where its ease made it popular and it continues to develop language wise, albeit not without controversy.

<comment><USER13> I was drawn to python because of the culture (simple, documentation) and I stay because of the libraries (machine learning, scientific). The language just needs to be better than Matlab or R (not Scheme, Clojure, Scala or pick your favorite one). As in nature the language that thrives is the fittest for its environment, not the most powerful.

<comment><USER14> > As in nature the language that thrives is the fittest for its environment, > not the most powerful.

Now hold on. The most successful sprog of nature is humanity[citation needed] and we're a case study in the fact that raw intelligence is more effective than fitness for any particular niche. So: as in nature, there may be a bunch of niche languages, but in time they'll find themselves with a conservation status while a smart language rules the earth.

<comment><USER15> So tell me, how is it that Python and JavaScript now seem to rule the Earth, instead of being locked up in a nature reserve?

<comment><USER16> When programming languages evolve, "can a human being understand this code?" is part of the fitness function, and more succinct and powerful languages aren't always best for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fascinating. An amazing point about design patterns, and yet...

Declarative statements are a pattern in ruby - you see them everywhere (`attr_accessor`). They're library code - you're intended to write them. I can't imagine trying to write ruby _without_ that pattern, and I can't imagine them not being a design pattern.

Similarly - the MVC of Rails. The lines get way fuzzier, but you still might try to draw similar lines to separate the core framework (badly analogous to the language) from, I guess, all the gems you end up using (badly analogous to the library). Is MVC a pattern? Or under this bad analogy, a language construct...?

<comment><USER6> I was really trying to make a narrower point here - that there is a reasonable way to distinguish "part of the language" from "part of the (standard) library" \- but I'll bite :-)

attr_accessor, as it happens ([http://ruby- doc.org/core-2.0.0/Module.html#method-i-attr_acc...](http://ruby- doc.org/core-2.0.0/Module.html#method-i-attr_accessor)) is implemented in C code, but one _could_ implement it in Ruby, so I'd count it as part of the (standard) library, and creating accessors is just using a library method. In, say, Java setters and getters have to be written by hand (or autogenerated by some external system like an IDE), so they're a pattern. On the other hand, the way Ruby translates `foo.bar = 3` into a call to `foo`'s `bar=` method is not alterable by user code, so it's part of the language.

MVC in Rails is an interesting case. You have to create new classes according to the pattern (either by hand or using `rails generate`), but there's also some library support in the form of Model and Controller classes you're expected to inherit from, and which handle much of the View/Controller plumbing for you. I'd say it's still a pattern, though.

<comment><USER17> Oh, neat! It's always cool when the authors of content pop onto HN (I see from you karma you're new here, welcome!)

Yeah - I heard your point when I first read your post, but it took some more time and reading to understand it. It's a good distinction.

What I'm not getting is... So you've got a really precise and elegant line between "language" and "library", but it's not clear what the difference is between patterns and.... maybe idioms?

attr_accessor, has_many, and carrierwave's mount_uploader (to provide many examples) are all examples of a "pattern" (in the sense of a repeated thing, not a design pattern) in Ruby, but I can't determine what's then in need of "fixing" or what abstraction features could be added to remove the "pattern".

<comment><USER6> > I see from your karma you're new here, welcome!

You missed the "created: 3246 days ago" bit, then? :-) But you're right that I don't spend much time here - thanks for the welcome!

> it's not clear what the difference is between patterns and.... maybe idioms?

You're right, it's not a clear distinction. But for our purposes, the important point about design patterns is "must be reimplemented from scratch for each use". Have you read the Gang of Four book? Their patterns all require the programmer to define a bunch of new classes from scratch each time the pattern is used. Compare the Decorator pattern ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorator_pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decorator_pattern)) to Python's decorators - the pattern requires the programmer to create new classes, forward methods, etc, but the Python feature requires the programmer to write one line of code (which then does all the class-creation and method- forwarding under the hood). The Python feature has successfully obviated the need for the pattern. You still need to write the same amount of application- specific business-logic code, but the machine handles all the tedious plumbing for you. Similarly, attr_accessor and has_many handle the tedious plumbing of getters/setters and collections-backed-by-join-queries, respectively. So the necessary abstraction features have already been added, and there's nothing left to fix. An interesting intermediate case is the Iterator pattern in Python ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterator_pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterator_pattern)). Python still has explicit iterators, but standardises the interface so library code can make use of user-provided iterators. It also provides a convenient language-level facility for building iterators, using generator syntax. Haskell, arguably, has entirely absorbed iterators into the language, replacing them with lazy lists.

It's worth noting that the key property of Ruby that allows for things like attr_accessor is the ability to add methods and fields to an object or class at runtime, and thus to do so programmatically. Lisp can similarly dispense with a lot of patterns that are necessary in Java, because Lisp has compile- time code generation in the form of macros. Peter Norvig's talk on this is great: [http://norvig.com/design- patterns/ppframe.htm](http://norvig.com/design-patterns/ppframe.htm)

<comment><USER17> > You missed the "created: 3246 days ago" bit, then? :-)

Tots did. Errr... welcome, travelling from the land of Lurk?

> You're right, it's not a clear distinction...

Still, does the naming sound right? Patterns that get "encoded" into the language, or made trivial by abstraction features within the language, are idioms?

> Have you read the Gang of Four book?

No :/ The closest I've come, weirdly, was _tutoring_ a friend through a design pattern class. Each time she'd come up and say, "The name of this week's pattern is such-and-such", and from that, I'd get 90% of the way to knowing that pattern was. I've always wanted just a simple list of the names, maybe with linked single paragraph descriptions, but every prior time I've looked I haven't been able to find one.

> add methods and fields to an object or class at runtime

Yes! That's a favorite Ruby trick. Straight up tho - what is the formal name of doing that, specifically, the formal name of the category to which attr_accessor and has_many belong to?

<comment><USER6> > Patterns that get "encoded" into the language, or made trivial by > abstraction features within the language, are idioms?

Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable term to use.

> The closest I've come, weirdly, was tutoring a friend through a design > pattern class.

It's a bit old now, but I think it's probably still worth reading the GoF book - it's clearly written, and much better than most subsequent imitators. In particular, each pattern comes with a "when not to use this" discussion, that more people should pay attention to :-/

> I've always wanted just a simple list of the names, maybe with linked single > paragraph descriptions

Would [http://wiki.c2.com/?CategoryPattern](http://wiki.c2.com/?CategoryPattern) do?

> what is the formal name of doing that, specifically, the formal name of the > category to which attr_accessor and has_many belong to?

I'm not sure. Adding methods to a class at runtime is called "metaprogramming" (which has the more general meaning of "writing code that writes or modifies code"). I don't know of a name for a method that performs metaprogramming, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Years ago I started (and didn't get very far) on a pointless project to make Smalltalk look a bit more conventional without breaking how it works.

Including an if message that looks like if in C or similar language and and unless construct that looks like Ruby.

[https://github.com/threehv/gstr/blob/master/README.markdown](https://github.com/threehv/gstr/blob/master/README.markdown)

</comment><comment><USER19> I wish some of these ideas would bleed into the mainstream. A small simple powerful core language and the minimum possible special syntax.

<comment><USER20> Clojure? It certainly has more syntax than many lisps, but still quite small. (And used in the mainstream world).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The "response by Ralph Johnson" link is dead: [http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView?entr...](http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/ralph/blogView?entry=3335803396) :/

<comment><USER6> Thanks - I've noted that in the post.

<comment><USER17> Do you remember what the title of that post was? We may be able to track down a copy, given more information.

<comment><USER6> I'm afraid not, and Googling for quotes from the post only shows up Mark Dominus' post. Also, the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is a MOOC on Pharo available [http://files.pharo.org/mooc/](http://files.pharo.org/mooc/)

French speaking but PDFs are in english.

</comment><comment><USER22> Somewhat relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MAL8pJImQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MAL8pJImQ)

</comment><comment><USER23> Date: 2008

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think it's now invalid? Do you think anything has changed? I'd be interested to hear of any news that you think would update this.

<comment><USER23> Not at all, and that's why I upvoted it.

I mentioned the date because it is traditional in titles. Here it might put comparisons to ES9 and complaints about display on the iPhone 10s in context (I'm optimistic). Pessimistically, it might give fair warning that hyperlinks from the page 404.

<comment><USER6> Thanks! I've now updated the post to reflect some corrections here, and to point out the 404ing link.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ruby 1.9.2 is released - <AUTHOR> http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2010/08/18/ruby-1-9-2-is-released/ <comment><AUTHOR> doh - a dupe of mailing list announcement that's already on here.</comment>


2M Users Impacted by New Data Collection Policy in Stylish Browser Add-On - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/2-million-users-impacted-by-new-data-collection-policy-in-stylish-browser-add-on/ <comment><USER2> Luckily there is a way to opt out.</comment>


D-Wave Computer's Solution Raises More Questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidescience.org/content/d-wave-computers-solution-raises-more-questions/1453 <comment><USER2> How about the more practical question: does it solve any classes of problems faster than an equivalently priced classic computer? What are these problems?

...if they don't come up with answers to this questions that are easy for business persons to understand, then we can only think that they are playing "fake it 'till we make it" on US gov's money. And if, god forbid, they don't make it, we'll be in for a "quantum computing winter(s)" just like we had the "AI winter(s)" because of smart assholes that played a similar game... and boy we have a lot to "thank" them for!

<comment><USER3> If the D-Wave is actually using quantum annealing for it's algorithms, how is it playing "fake it till we make it" simply by not having optimized its output to be currently faster than classical systems? I think it's pretty easy to see how the government and private institutions that are purchasing D-Wave Two's (universities and research divisions) see them as potentially great tools separate from their processing output. Business people are a separate entity and I would be surprised, and doubtful of their acumen, if any were actually purchasing any.

 _If_ they turn out to be quantum in origin, I think you are way off base in this prediction.

<comment><USER4> It's not able to do full quantum annealing; it's only able to use stoquastic Hamiltonians on a fixed topology. Even if truly quantum effects were present (which is unclear at the moment, see Smolin and Smith arxiv posts), it's not known to be a useful quantum computing model. So it's not just an issue of "optimizing output".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > One researcher did find D-Wave performed 3600 times faster than a classical > device.

Well, that was done with the 128-qubit version, right? And now they have one that is _2^384 faster_ than that one, so we'll see what happens next.

If it was the 512-qubit one, then we'll need to wait for the 2048-qubit D-Wave Three that should come out in 2015 (they seem to double the qubits every year, but only release a new model every 2 years or so). That one should be 2^1536 faster than the current model.

<comment><USER6> Just like 64 bit computers are twice as fast as 32 bit computers, right?

<comment><USER7> More like 64 bit computers are 2^32 times as fast as 32 bit computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> do people not understand that this is just fake it til you make it? it doesn't matter if it's an emulator if they are paying the right people and working on it. do you think reddit just hoped it would get better at posting as bots? that's ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER9> hhahaha, this question is so ironic!! It's a Quantum Computer and it's not, at the same time. hahaha :)

hang on: I know that they proved that it's a quantum computer, so this article only criticizes the degree of it's Quantumcomputerness.

</comment><comment><USER10> Curious as to why the quantumness matters.

<comment><USER11> It is actually a very crucial question: If the D-Wave machine is a just quantum computer emulator supported by classical hardware, we cannot expect much improvement in the future due to the inherent limitations of classical physics.

On the other hand, if it _does_ behave like a quantum computer, it may end up being a lot faster than any classical computer.

<comment><USER12> just curious but, why would you expect _any_ appreciable improvement from the emulator version?

<comment><USER13> You wouldn't, and right now, it's debatable whether there is any or not. Hence the entire controversy</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some exercises/projects that have made you a better programmer? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,<p>What are some of the exercises/projects you have worked on that have made you a better programmer or helped you gain a better understanding of how things work? Thanks <comment><USER2> Premature and unnecessary optimisations.

I spent a lot of time optimising things and looking back it was pointless/a waste of time. But it did teach me how to write better code, since now I incorporate a lot of optimisations into my code for "free" because I simply know what makes things run faster (or how things are working under the hood).

They say the root of all evil is premature optimisation, and they may be correct, but it does teach you a thing or two about how your code runs. In particular in higher level environments where there is a dozen levels of misdirection before it hits metal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Working with more experienced colleagues, and having them code review my stuff. Not always easy on the ego, but it made me a much better programmer.

Note well, though, that they need to actually know better than you do, not just have different opinions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Reading the code for shrinkr. It is a good example for application architecture in the .NET world.</comment>


Ask HN: Is building an application dependent on an IDE a thing? - <AUTHOR> I was speaking to a colleague the other day about an issue he encountered working on an app. It took me a while to understand that the issue he was talking about had nothing to do with the application but with the IDE he was using. I asked him to just switch to a different IDE and he mentioned he can't compile the app without the IDE.
I've been in web development for close to 10 years and this is my first encounter with such a ridiculous notion. Every job I've had I've been able to choose my IDE of choice for working on the business app. I've never come across an application that was dependent on running on a specific IDE to build.
How common is this? Have I just been lucky in jobs that don't care what you develop in? Why would a company build an application that their engineers need to utilize a specific IDE in order to build their company?
NOTE: My colleague and I work on different projects/teams. I'm new to this job and this is the first time I'm hearing about such woes.
I started my career with emacs, then VIM, then sublime (with VIM bindings), then atom (with VIM bindings) and now I'm using VSCode (with VIM bindings), and planning on just going back to plain VIM. [on Linux or OSX] <comment><USER2> > he mentioned he can't compile the app without the IDE.

Very likely this should be translated to mean:

"he does not know how to compile the app without the IDE".</comment>


Chinese scientists use gene-editing techniques (CRISPR-Cas9) in humans - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/15/health/china-human-gene-testing-crispr-cas9/index.html <comment><USER2> Any bio-engineers want to weigh in on a timeline before we see super-soliders (from China)?</comment>


Tell HN: How to keep CA Security Suite from breaking your app - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN:
I've been lurking for a long time but tonight I discovered interesting that I thought I should share.
I run a large site with lots of users, and we occasionally get mysterious bug reports about things just plain not working. We got one of these a couple days ago so I decided I'd try to get to the bottom of it. I got on the phone with this user and spent 45 minutes trying to figure out the problem. She had the latest firefox and a 6-month-old computer, so that checked out. Her other home computer had the same problem. She also had CA Security Suite installed, which I understand is reasonably popular (approx ~10% market share). She had gotten it bundled free with her RoadRunner ISP. When she turned off its firewall, the site worked, so the firewall was doing something my app didn't like. I asked her to open her firefox error console and she found errors like this:
http://qdaq.com/zzR.png
Ok, strange. I then asked her to open the file causing this error, which was at 127.0.0.1:37935/xpopup.js -- and had her email me the code. CA Security Suite is injecting some JS into the page (which is bad, yes, but not fatal). See if you can spot the problem in this js code:
http://pastie.org/801433
They're remapping the window.open, window.setTimeout, and window.setInterval to their "safe" versions of the code. Their "safe" version wraps the original setInterval() ("secretly" remembered as _orig_windowSetInterval) with some popup blocking code. It's all rather clever, and could even work transparently (apart from blocking your popups) if not for a code error in both _safe_setTimeout and _safe_setInterval:

  function _safe_setInterval( sCode, iMilliSeconds )
  {
        // first block window.open -> execute the code -> unblock window.open
        return (_orig_windowSetInterval("_block_windowOpen(); " + sCode + "; _unblock_windowOpen();", iMilliSeconds ));
  }
 They use the "eval" mode of setTimeout and setInterval, to which you pass a string. They rely on the idea that whatever function you used setInterval() for will work when it's been toString()ed. For example, setTimeout(function() { alert('test'); }, 100); will work just fine because its toString() value will work. But any function with bound properties will break because toString() will lose them. In my case, it was any function on which I used bind() or similar in Mootools, included default mootools stuff like style tweening. I would imagine JQuery would be similarly affected, though I don't use it. Thus, anything that relied on css fade-ins or anything else with timers was broken.
Fortunately, they made it easy to circumvent. Here's how I fixed it.

  function undoBrokenBlockers() { 	if (typeof _orig_windowOpen != 'undefined') { 		window.open = _orig_windowOpen; 		window.setTimeout = _orig_windowSetTimeout; 		window.setInterval = _orig_windowSetInterval; 	}
  }
  undoBrokenBlockers();
 ...with another call to that code onDOMReady (I'm not sure where they insert their script tag in html).
SO, I would recommend thinking about adding this code to your site, because you may have users who are broken right now as well.
After figuring all this out, I googled it and found someone who had reported it to CA four months ago: http://homeofficeforum.ca.com/homeofficeforum/showthread.php?t=5365 ... Who knows when they'll fix it.
moral: be careful when you mess with JS internals! Or don't mess at all! <comment><USER2> I have encountered a similar problem with JS injection. There are HTTP proxy servers that inject JavaScript into HTML and JS documents ... I believe the purpose of the injected snippets is to examine the DOM and/or the JS code to try and squelch malicious behavior.

The problem is that this particular proxy observes the MIME type in the content-type header very strictly when deciding to inject raw JS or JS bounded by HTML "script" and "/script" tags.

I've found that a number of sites return a content-type of "text/html" for pure JS documents ... documents often referred to in HTML documents via "script src=xxx". The appliance then injects the HTML "script" tags into the raw JS document, breaking the legal JS code.

This causes the JS runtime to halt processing for a number of sites. For many, the sites become unusable as event-handlers are either not in place or refer to functions that did not have a chance to solidify. Some don't render correctly.

I built a pair of documents illustrating the problem and showed the proxy vendor the difference in behavior when the JS document had a MIME type of "text/javascript" as opposed to "text/html". They told me that their proxy is behaving correctly and that the sites are broken as they are returning incorrect content-type headers.

Their advice was to contact the offending site when I encountered such a problem and ask them to correct the issue.

I should note that this proxy server does have a programming interface. It is possible to alter the behavior of the proxy via this interface to more intelligently inspect documents with "text/html" to determine if they contain HTML markup. My concern was that while I could fix it for my use of the proxy, other users out in the wild would be subject to the same problem.

I'm not a fan of this trend of script-injection, even under the guise of making computing safe for the end-user. I've begun to wonder if it's time to include self-checks in JavaScript code to ensure that no alteration has occurred in transit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice find. I've been foraying into where these strange xpopup.js errors filling my web server logs have been coming from for awhile now...

I've run into too many cases over the years in which web-browsing computers' security software made strange presumptions in tinkering with incoming web pages' HTML. All too often, those presumptuous tinkerings result in breakages in some cases or others, and the "secured" web-browsing users (and the web developers to which they complain) are left wondering why stuff doesn't work right.

 _sigh_

Thanks.</comment>