Ask HN: Apple workers of HN, do you really use iTunes Sync? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I do. I still sync my music and photos over USB because they're not stored on the cloud and I don't want to pay to store them there nor have to deal with migrating them between various apps/services to retain access or risk them losing data or getting hacked or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER3> [Not an Apple worker, but I use a Mac and an iPhone]

Is there an alternative?

Apple doesn't let you simply add a music file to the Music app (you have to sync it from an iTunes library on the computer if you want a file in there), and the Music app, while it is getting worse as time goes on, is something I have not yet been able to replace.

<comment><USER4> If you purchase music from the iTunes Store, I think it can appear on your iOS device without involving a desktop/laptop. If you subscribe to iTunes Match, music added to iTunes on your desktop/laptop will be transferred to Apple's servers and can then be accessed from iOS devices. Non-music content like contacts and calendar can sync via iCloud, a number of non-Apple apps can only sync using iTunes.

I just use iTunes over USB to sync, my wife syncs over WiFi but not very often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Periodically like once every 2 months. I still have no idea where iCloud stores their stuff (most unintuitive application ever)</comment>


Ask PG: Why not use chatbot interviews as part of application process? - <AUTHOR> Candidates would be required to submit a chatbot for each founder.<p>YC could have a chatbot of its own to interview the founder chatbots. What the YC chatbot will/may say would be kept a secret. <comment><USER2> I am not sure if this is a sharply pointed piece of satire critical of how YC does business, or if it's another "Ask HN" from amichail that's just beyond my modest IQ to grok.

<comment><USER3> Are those mutually exclusive though ?

<comment><USER2> Touche! I am really easy to dumbfound, haven't had my orientation session at Singularity University yet.

<comment><USER3> Maybe that should be a requirement for YC application too ?

<comment><USER2> I have a few tests for people before I can trust them in any professional capacity, and from a quick reflection, I think I developed it to avoid theorists:

Are they able to solve simple logistics problems: How do they deal with missed trains or planes? how do they deal with lack of seats when we go to eat at a busy restaurant? how do they cope with rain, snow, excessive traffic, or crowds if we need to hail a cab? How do they treat bar and waitstaff? how about hotel staff? Are they able to book and change rooms in a sold-out hotel? How fussy are they about limited options for a late night meal? lack of internet? flat tire? a massive brawl nearby? road closures? power outages?

If you want to test someone's will to survive, in this day and age, put them in the stadium part of town immediately after the big game and watch them fetch for themselves and compete for food and transportation, not to mention personal space, with hordes of drunken and volatile masses.

The ones who whine, wince, or the least bit annoyed or confused should be dropped like dead weight.

[Edit: s/smirk/wince]

<comment><USER4> _The ones who whine, smirk, or the least bit annoyed or confused should be dropped like dead weight._

There is a good chance you'll end up dropping the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. In fact, the only kinds that might be able to make past your test may be emotionless robotic types.

Anyone who is not at least a bit annoyed in those circumstances is not human.

<comment><USER3> Nonsense. You can be annoyed without being a jerk.

Showing emotion is quite ok, abusing people is not.

And if that would filter out Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is an open question, I don't know if they would be rude, abusive or simply not nice in such situations.

<comment><USER4> _Nonsense. You can be annoyed without being a jerk._

I believe that position is closer to mine than the OP's.

He is saying that any bit of emotion is bad and a dealbreaker.

<comment><USER3> No, he's saying that _negative_ emotion is all bad and a dealbreaker.

And I fully concur with that. When faced with adversary circumstances you can choose to be active and constructive (and polite to boot), or you can be inactive and negative (complaining, whining, 'why doesn't anybody do something' and so on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Candidates would be required to submit a chatbot for each founder._

This would greatly disadvantage those of us who are smarter than the current limits of AI.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would only be part of the application. And it would make applying more fun.

<comment><USER3> I saw it as an 'Ask PG' so I wasn't going to jump in but I can't resist. Writing a chatbot is not 'fun', it is very hard work, if you want to do a half decent job of it.

HN is as far as I know not recruiting chat bot programmers (though plenty of the YC alumni and current partners could certainly do this), they're recruiting people that are on the verge of starting or have already started a company.

To have those people do all kinds of 'make work' because it is 'fun' would put YC on the map as a frivolous party, not a serious one.

Think about it, if you had to go and interview with a VC and they told you 'you have to go and write this chatbot first or we won't hear your application', at the 'seed' level the overhead of doing that (especially one for each founder!) would be enormous compared to the size of the investment.

I think this is a bad idea.

<comment><USER6> Some one should write this and apply to YC.

<comment><USER7> I think it would be kind of fun to seed a chatbot with pg's essays :-)

(Just give me credit if you go do it!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When, and how, did you get the impression that YC requires their applicants to grok enough AI to be able to write a decent chatbot?

</comment><comment><USER9> I am equally torn between thinking this is a somewhat-good-but-very-original idea and that it is a completely idiotic idea. (grin)

</comment><comment><USER10> What information would a chatbot provide about the founders that you couldn't already get from the application?

Chatbots usually have some sort of factpack that allow them to parrot out responses. Whatever facts you'd want in the factpack would just be the responses to the application questions.

I think it's an really interesting idea actually, but in the general sense of building and training an online agent that could 'stand in' for you in a conversation. I don't see how it solves any problem with the YC application process.

</comment><comment><USER11> How does this better/improve the existing process...i couldn't think of any way...and Chatbot definitely cannot be used to judge someone...

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be sort of like giving everyone an interview. But unlike a normal interview, candidates will need to try to cover a huge chunk of possible conversation space in advance.

Bot performance would show how much thought they have given to the whole matter as well as some indication of their technical proficiency.

Would it require a lot of effort? Sure, but that effort can be amortized across future bot interviews, not just with YC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interviewing a chatbot would be very inefficient. YC has enough work set out for them already.

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://erinkelsey.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/gift.gif>

<comment><USER13> This thread is so blatantly stupid that it must be flamebait. Accordingly, I responded.

To those who are taking it seriously: you will not be successful with YC until you get a better grasp of reality.</comment></comment>


GNU Social, a FLOSS alternative to Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://gnu.io/social/try/ <comment><USER4> Reading the comments here it seems that people are missing the point by just joining one of those instances.

It is not about just using some alternative to Twitter, the real advantage begins when you host it yourself so that you can own your own content and post whatever you want (not what some company wants you to) and (perhaps) syndicate to other services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.

I just gave a small talk about all this last week: [https://jeena.net/media/2016/IndieWeb- Jeena.pdf](https://jeena.net/media/2016/IndieWeb-Jeena.pdf)

<comment><USER5> I don't see hosting myself as an advantage. In the end, all you do all day is to maintain all the tools and apps that you host yourself.

<comment><USER6> Not really. I've been running a Jabber server and a GNU Social node for about a year now and I can tell you it takes maybe 1 hour a week of my time for patching.

I have automatic security updates enabled on both systems but I tend to login from time to time and do a dist-upgrade on them manually.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but I'd say 1 hour/week is quite a bit more than the a normal person would like to spend on maintaining apps (probably 0).

Why someone would want to run their own instance of their favorite web app when most are given away for free, no maintenance required.

<comment><USER6> The average person is not supposed to maintain their own node for these services. That's why they have us who give our free time and our VPS accounts to host such things.

It basically comes down to trusting Big Media or trusting your neighbour with your data.

I personally doubt we'll see a big breakthrough for Big Media alternatives because people go where their friends are.

I am unfortunately expecting fragmentation in that field, sort of like reverting back to the early days of the internet when us nerds who could connect were considered a subculture. Now that everyone can connect we're creating a subculture of people who choose not to use Big Media and instead gravitate towards smaller and less centralized alternatives.

That doesn't matter though, I have always enjoyed being on the fringe and I believe I will continue enjoying my time there. :)

<comment><USER8> * Federated vs Centralized

* Usenet vs Internet.

* IRC vs AOL Instant Messenger

* Email vs Xanga / Myspace / Facebook

* Torrent vs Dropbox / Cloud Storage

Federated has its advantages. Centralized has its advantages. 40 years from now, people will continue to use the federated platform. The centralized platform only stays around as long as it is profitable.

But while the centralized platform is around, things are a lot more convenient and mainstream.

<comment><USER9> Damn good observation -- but it begs the question, why can't federated be as frictionless as centralized? Is this a matter of effort, funding and organization, or something more fundamental?

<comment><USER8> Its a fundamental difference.

Consider HTTPS, SSLv2, SSLv3, and TLS1.0, and TLS1.1. As web security standards evolved, the people who run HTTPS servers flat out refuse to upgrade the security protocols. Federated admins don't necessarily run their servers as a full time job, while centralized organizations are well funded and well paid.

It takes a lot longer for infrastructure in federated networks to upgrade. Facebook can add new features across the entire network immediately.

Imagine if you wanted to add a game protocol to IRC for example. You'd create the protocol, then you'd try to get Freenode to switch over to the new and improved game protocol, and then they won't do it. So you create your own IRC server and no one comes. You give up and open source the project. Years later, some guy finds your open source implementation and maybe the protocol finally becomes popular enough to be used... or maybe they'll use your protocol as a base for their ideas and it will evolve into something else.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

When "federated" works, it is mostly due to the big players agreeing that a particular federated protocol is amazing. Take OAuth for instance, which got Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft support early.

Ultimately, it is very difficult to make money from federated services, so there's no money (or investment) going into those projects. OAuth was a pro- bono non-political effort to make the web better. Such efforts are extremely rare.

In fact, most federated protocols exist to give a particular company an advantage (or to levy disadvantages on a particular company's competitors). So there's a healthy amount of distrust to any newly proposed protocols... for good reason. Ex: Theora / MPEG4 / video tag nonsense, or DRM support in web browsers.

The big daddy federated network: Email / SMTP, was basically a research project from the late 1960s, and received public investment in the 1990s as IMAP and POP3 protocols were developed. (Anyone else remember paying for Juno email on their 33.6kbps modems?). Due to years of use, it has found its niche and no "competitor" will ever really displace it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Before the site has given me any reason to join, it makes me choose between 7 virtually indistinguishable options of providers with subtle technical advantages and disadvantages.

Ah, GNU projects. Never change.

<comment><USER11> [http://imgur.com/4K5rsbO](http://imgur.com/4K5rsbO)

I can't even.

<comment><USER12> "Something which looks like Twitter, great for new users coming over from Twitter"

<comment><USER11> So "Quitter" is obliquely referencing someone that has "quit twitter"?

I guess there's a certain logic behind it, then -- but as a name that (1) creates a positive emotional feeling and (2) is intuitively obvious, it falls very short.

<comment><USER12> Quitter is someone else's interface to GNU social. You'd have to ask them about it.

I'm not sure if the founders of email would care for names like Thunderbird and Icedove, but you'd have to ask them.

<comment><USER11> i love the openness of a protocol approach (like email), but i just don't see how it's going to have a chance if it falls down this badly as a product-as-a- whole.

what lessons can we learn from slack vs irc? from whatsapp vs email? from usenet vs reddit? etc.

<comment><USER12> I've not really used Slack, sorry.

WhatsApp is SMS, isn't it?

But GNU social isn't a product. If you want to take it, add your own interface, marketing, etc... I think you'd have a product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I used StatusNet when it was identi.ca for quite some time, specially because back then Twitter really allowed 3rd party clients and with multi-protocol clients was really easy to use both.

When I was using identi.ca it was pretty much about Linux, Open Source, and basically that was it. I never got the same level of interaction I can enjoy in Twitter; but that's not a technical issue, is just that a social network needs people to interact and identi.ca back then (and I suspect GNU Social today) was not used enough to make it interesting for me.

I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough people using a social network if you don't start using it yourself; but at some point identi.ca got flooded with bots and people "abusing" the API instead of using the social network, and I gave up.

I love twitter because I can meet people based on common interests (eg, 8-bit computers), and also broadcast about my current projects (not sure who finds that interesting though).

To be honest, things should get really bad with Twitter for me to leave it, but then I don't think there will be a substitute (and if there's one, having my own infrastructure would be very low priority, in the same way I don't host my own XMPP server).

<comment><USER14> > I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough > people using a social network if you don't start using it yourself;

No, not at all. That's the Network Effect [1] in a nutshell.

Practically, what this means is that apart from possibly instagram, microblogging is twitter's market to lose. So long as twitter does not abuse the trust users have placed in them to manage the service, then upstart competitors (whether centralized or decentralized) will find it difficult to overcome the network advantage.

However, if twitter does not honor the informal contract and decides to abuse their power for political or social ends, they will be devaluing their product for a large segment of users. Those betrayed users are more likely to decide en masse to join a network not subject to a centralized autocratic authority. This accusation was in fact recently leveled against them [2], so you may see growing support for politically neutral alternatives.

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

[2] [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/16/exclusive- twitter-s...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/02/16/exclusive-twitter- shadowbanning-is-real-say-inside-sources/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, can anybody elaborate on the history of and relationship between StatusNet, identi.ca, GNU social and pump.io? It seems like this fragmentation is another obstacle for success, besides the obvious issue of gaining traction.

And then there's tent.io, which appears to be completely unrelated but have similar goals. Is there anyone with insights on usage numbers, development activity etc. of the different projects? In other words: What's the best bet for federated, open source microblogging?

<comment><USER16> GNU social is, as far as I understand it, just a rebranding of the old StatusNet project after it joined the GNU project.

identi.ca had been the most post popular StatusNet instance until they switched to pump.io, a new project started by at least one of the StatusNet developers.

tent.io is unrelated to the others as far as i know.

<comment><USER17> Correct on all counts.

Identica was a StatusNet instance it is now a Pump instance.

GNUSocial is a re-branding of StatusNet.

<comment><USER12> Not exactly.

GNU social was its own project when StatusNet was still a thing.

GNU social, StatusNet and "Free and Social" merged to become GNU social

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Like others, I used to use StatusNet back when it powered identi.ca, and abandoned it when they switched to pump.io and everything broke.

I considered running my own StatusNet/GNUSocial/pump.io instance, or even writing an OStatus plugin for the CMS I used to run my site on, but have come to the realisation that such software isn't the right path for federation.

If I were running a popular site with many users, e.g. a forum, then such features might be nice to add. But hosting my own multi-user, dynamic, OAuth- based Web app just for myself is crazy; especially when the only other thing my server hosts is a static HTML site (I had the same realisation that a multi-user, dynamic CMS Web app was also insecure overkill). In fact, I never used to use the identi.ca Web site anyway; I used the XMPP bot until it got turned off, then switched to RSS feeds and a custom posting command ( [http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo- utilities/branches/master/we...](http://chriswarbo.net/git/warbo- utilities/branches/master/web/status) )

Unfortunately I've not seen a simple, single-user, no-authentication-required, non-Web-app (preferably commandline) implementation of these protocols (OStatus, Salmon, webmention, etc.) which I could use alongside a standalone, untrusted API endpoint on my server.

I spotted some IndieWeb links on HN a few weeks ago and some of what they say resonates with me, e.g. [https://indiewebcamp.com/monoculture](https://indiewebcamp.com/monoculture) Unfortunately, some of their technology seems heavily focused on non- federated, non-FOSS walled gardens which I don't want to be part of (e.g. IndieAuth can use a Google account, a GitHub account, a Twitter account, etc. It claims to support email, but that seems to have died since Mozilla Persona shut down)

</comment><comment><USER19> The [https://quitter.se](https://quitter.se) anti-capitalist message didn't resonate with me, so I joined the [https://gnusocial.no](https://gnusocial.no) federation. Much friendlier :)

<comment><USER20> I am not familiar with either, but I am curious why does "anti-capitalist message" matter so much? I thought the purpose is to build a messaging network that everybody can use. And even GNU founder can be considered anti- capitalist.

I am asking because to me, to decide to join some (not political) community based on your own political opinion, is a good way to live in your own bubble. The real strength of the Internet is that we are exposed to contrarian positions, even at the expense of our comfort.

<comment><USER21> Before the horde descends, I thought I might respond to the suggestion that RMS is anti-capitalist. This comes up frequently and is a bit of a red herring. I won't try to speak for him (he can obviously do that well enough himself), however I think it is worth considering the free software movement in today's reality.

Back when they only thing that described free software was the GNU manifesto, we still had the idea that writing software that enabled businesses was a good idea. It may be a consequence of free software that it will become difficult to charge money directly for software (as a product), but that shouldn't stop companies from making money.

Especially now when we see how open source software is almost taken for granted, we can see that companies flourish, not die. It is true that you practically can not charge money for a compiler any more, but are we worse off? No. We have different and arguably better business models for that kind of software -- and we haven't given up capitalism at all. My tools are dramatically better than they were 30 years ago (when I first started in this business). The cost has also dropped to nearly zero. We have become efficient.

It is true that the FSF considers software freedom a moral imperative. While it may be true that some kinds of software will be difficult to produce in this manner, we can see that there are several very large companies that thrive producing virtually every kind of software. Personally, I don't think there are many businesses that will be better off with our old software-as-a- product business models -- games being a probable exception. What we have now is better, more efficient, enabling for the general population -- and much better for businesses. I have a hard time seeing it from an "anti-capitalist" position. And, just from my personal perspective, I don't think RMS ever did either.

<comment><USER22> > I have a hard time seeing it from an "anti-capitalist" position.

The FSF position is anti-capitalist in at least one technical sense -- in the domain of software, it morally opposes capitalist model of property rights (and, in practice, uses a hack around the mechanism by which that model is implemented to subvert it.)

<comment><USER23> I always saw intellectual property rights as a hack to try and encourage the production of non-rivalrous goods. The scarcity is in some sense enforced and artificial, and there's a strong argument to be made that they aren't they aren't "natural" property rights in the same sense as you get with rivalrous goods.

I think pro-capitalist (mostly libertarian) thought on this matter is divided.

<comment><USER20> > The scarcity is in some sense enforced and artificial

The problem is, you can mount the very same argument even in the case of normal property rights. At the beginnings of capitalism, the scarcity was in fact enforced by means of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure).

IMHO, most libertarians are used to idea normal property and take it for "natural", but not so in the "intellectual" world of ideas. It is partly because they benefit from intellectual world not yet completely owned by rich people. But I think people outside computing (unless they are distinctly leftist) are unfortunately lot more content with the idea of "intellectual property".

In my view, there is always a balance between "property rights" and other needs of society - availability of resources to the needy and the general public, innovation and growth.

<comment><USER24> You have the draw the line somewhere and using physical boundaries is quite useful. It create a natural distinction.

The problem with IP is that there isn't any limit to it. A driver license is not more or less a property than a patent, but it acts wastingly different. Can I sell a driver license? can I rent it? Can I cut it into two different part and give a friend half of it? What makes the exclusivity of state granted driver license a non-property, in contrast to the state granted exclusivity of an patent?

<comment><USER20> The distinction doesn't look natural to me..

I don't see why anyone should "own" natural resources, or beaches for instance. I understand that we all need a place to live and we want to own our personal possessions, but it doesn't seem to me at all natural to extend this to mines, factories or huge tracts of lands on the other side of the planet, that you perhaps even never see. Maybe the scarcity of natural resources isn't such a big deal unless you have people who simply own to much of it.

In the same vein, I agree that authors and inventors should be compensated for the efforts, but the copyrights and patents shouldn't create more scarcity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The more interesting thing to do (for this crowd, at least) would be to run your own instance: [https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu- social/blob/master/INSTALL](https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu- social/blob/master/INSTALL)

</comment><comment><USER26> How hard/easy is it to switch servers and retain @accountname references (i.e. your username)?

When faced with a big list of servers to choose between, my hesitation is that I'll pick one now and realize later that another one is better. For example, I may someday want to host GNU social myself, but if I do so will I essentially be starting over (even if I can retain my data, will my connections still retain a relationship to the new server?).

A nice little diagram and/or technical details page would be much appreciated :)

<comment><USER27> As with any other service it depends whether your username has already been taken or not.

<comment><USER26> I ask because this is a major hurdle with the Diaspora* model, in my opinion. I just created two accounts with the same username on different servers to test, and the fact that I could do that bummed me out a bit...

It's great that my data can be free, but if my account is tied to a specific host and I must make a separate, unique account with another host later then I'm still substantially locked in. Essentially, switching accounts likely means all my social connections will have out-of-date contact info, urls, etc. when I switch.

If, however, my user ID is global across the distributed network and there is a way to gracefully transfer my account/data/info to another server seamlessly (without my social connections even knowing/caring about it) then I think distributed social networks like GNU Social could be a game changer.

<comment><USER28> It's possible with hubzilla.io you can also have your account data on two different servers for redundancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Diaspora* is also an interesting option.

* [https://diasporafoundation.org](https://diasporafoundation.org)

* [https://the-federation.info](https://the-federation.info)

<comment><USER30> It would be nice if these would interoperate, so that it was not really an either/or choice. Don't they have essentially the same goals?

<comment><USER29> There were some plans for that it seems:

[https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/issues/18](https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu- social/issues/18)

Diaspora is already interoperable with Red Matrix. For better interoperaibility they need to finalize the API.

* [https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Diaspora_API_proposal](https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Diaspora_API_proposal)

* [https://www.loomio.org/d/cedTCbsI/the-api-bounty-deliverable...](https://www.loomio.org/d/cedTCbsI/the-api-bounty-deliverables)

<comment><USER30> Thank you for this informative answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is there a good way to publish to this at the same time as twitter, so I'm already established and can drop twitter when it dies?

<comment><USER13> In my humble opinion, that's what ruined indenti.ca back in the day. If you're mirroring Twitter and losing the interactions you have in GNU Social, your account is just a bot and _you 're not really using the social network_.

<comment><USER32> Does someone have a client that can work with both? Because, lets face it, Twitter is the 800 lb gorilla in the room. Most people, if they want to try this out, would also like to maintain their activity on Twitter. Hopefully there would be some way that you can do both, and be alerted to messages and replies on both, and even have a unified timeline in one app.

(And if you're not interested in maintaining presence on Twitter as well, that's great, I'm happy for you, but please don't reply just to say that. It's not interesting or contributing to the discussion in the least).

<comment><USER13> My point was that mirroring Twitter on identi.ca _made identi.ca worse_. Lots of people were automatically posting their Twitter updates on identi.ca, but never replying or caring about the interactions they had there. Same with blogs RSS feeds being fed to identi.ca.

I don't know where we are with multi-protocol clients. Back then I was using [https://launchpad.net/gwibber](https://launchpad.net/gwibber) (before it was rewritten to use CouchDB and stopped working for me, I don't know what is its current status).

I didn't post like that, I had two accounts and used both; until I got bored of bots on identi.ca and, in practice, I was only using Twitter.

EDIT: changed Gwibber link to launchpad as the .com doesn't seem to be maintained.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> After reading about GNU Social on HN last night I created an account on the first of the 6 provides, loadaverage.org

I like the service and I am considering running my own server. My account is [https://loadaverage.org/markwatson](https://loadaverage.org/markwatson) and I am going to start out by cross posting some of the things I post on Twitter and G+ and see where this goes.

When I quit consulting at Google in 2013 the first thing I did when I got home was to write an article on how to use Twitter, G+, and Facebook while preserving some degree of privacy. If alternatives like GNU Social catch on (a big IF), that will be a good thing!

<comment><USER34> I guess the mentioned article is [http://blog.markwatson.com/2014/07/practical-internet- privac...](http://blog.markwatson.com/2014/07/practical-internet-privacy-and- security.html)

Have you modified your approach since then?

<comment><USER33> I follow about the same procedures now as I did in 2013. One difference: I now do online banking on my iPad. I don't install many apps on my iPad, and I think (hope!) it is a fairly secure device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Neat product but the "familiar user interface" for a Quitter is literally a copy of Twitter. That's not a good look.

<comment><USER36> It implements the 2010 version of twitter, for once being outdated isn't much a regression.

<comment><USER37> If you run/host your own network/instance - which is actually encouraged - <USER2> can design it pretty much however you wish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> List of servers: [http://gstools.org/servers](http://gstools.org/servers)

EDIT, another list: [http://federation.skilledtests.com/select_your_server.html](http://federation.skilledtests.com/select_your_server.html)

LAST EDIT, near complete list: [http://www.skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusn...](http://www.skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusnet_Instances)

</comment><comment><USER39> I've recently been making some debian packages for GNU Social, if anyone wants to try them out.

[https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial- debian](https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-debian) [https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-qvitter- debian](https://git.gnu.io/bashrc/gnusocial-qvitter-debian)

In particular it's the qvitter plugin which makes this system really usable, both on desktop and mobile.

</comment><comment><USER40> I used to be a big Indent.ca fan, it used to run on status.net foss. Apparently now it is pump.io, a foss micro-blogging service.

[https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatusNet](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatusNet)

<comment><USER41> There is also the whole tent protocol and camping.io thing. I stopped trying to follow years ago though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> A bit odd to see them all labeled "runs out of Europe". I understand why they do this, but it's not like European hosting is a bullet proof solution for invasive snooping or data requisition.

<comment><USER43> At least in Germany, we do not have secret courts and gag orders like in the USA.

<comment><USER44> How do you know for sure? Honest question.

<comment><USER45> It's impossible to prove. I think the best you can do is a) no legal basis for that kind of thing, and even more importantly b) a citizenry that remembers totalitarianism and knows the importance of privacy rights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I was excited to learn that GNU Social is in PHP, but quickly turned off because of the quality of the PHP code.

<comment><USER47> Heh, sorry, this made me chuckle. I'm sorry you're right, but ya know, it's a GNU project, so there's always room to contribute. :)

<comment><USER48> found the canadian

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm beginning to think social media is toxic for society as a whole, do we even really want an source alternative to twitter, should twitter cease to exist?

<comment><USER50> That's not really a decision we can make on behalf of the rest of society, is it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I don't get it. I went to gnusocial.no to join, and there's no link to sign up. I eventually found a register link off the help page (not visible on mobile for some reason), and I just get a messsage "Sorry, only invited people can register".

Do they want people to join this or not?

<comment><USER52> You can't expect all GNU Social instances to be open for public registration, that's not what fedaration means. loadaverage.org seems to be open to everyone though. Also, do you have an OpenID?

<comment><USER53> I would be amazed if someone doesn't have an account with _any_ of these websites:

[http://openid.net/get-an-openid/](http://openid.net/get-an-openid/)

Though I do believe Google has gotten rid of their Openid implementation entirely in favor of Openid Connect.

<comment><USER51> From that list, I only have a google account. I tried the link for the Profile URL, but it's sending a 404. Perhaps that's because they've gotten rid of their Openid implementation as you say.

I'm sure there are ways around it. The point I was trying to make is that I thought that there would be more effort put into a frictionless signup.

To be fair, I haven't checked out the other sites linked from the gnu page, so I don't know if they have a better experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm going to need a bunch of "Share it on..." icons to annoyingly slap on all of my web pages :D

</comment><comment><USER47> Wasn't this the initial goal of app.net? I know it's morphed somewhat now, but, if I remember correctly, it came about as a direct response to some Twitter developer in-niceness.

<comment><USER55> Sort of. App.net's big experiment was "charge users money instead of monetizing their eyeballs". Twitter outages and developer alienation helped fuel its initial rise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Chrome complains about [https://micro.vinilox.eu](https://micro.vinilox.eu)

"Attackers might be trying to steal your information from micro.vinilox.eu (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID"

<comment> extropic-engine Many GNU Social servers are hosted by individual users. In this case, it looks like the admin got a certificate from Let's Encrypt for "vinilox.eu", and then tried to use it on "micro.vinilox.eu". It doesn't necessarily mean that the site is not trustworthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> A PHP project without a composer.json?

Say it ain't so!

[https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/tree/master](https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu- social/tree/master)

<comment><USER27> It's so. GNU social is designed to be easily hostable on cheap server slices where ssh-ing in and running composer may not be easy.

<comment><USER57> Sure, but `composer update` is an easier way to pull in dependencies than manually untarring them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I run a GNU social hub for granite-staters, in case anyone's interested...: [https://nhcrossing.com/](https://nhcrossing.com/)

</comment><comment><USER57> [https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu- social/blob/master/lib/util.php#L...](https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu- social/blob/master/lib/util.php#L248)

Oh boy, strcmp() for passwords.

[http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/11/its-all-about- time.html](http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/11/its-all-about-time.html)

</comment><comment><USER59> What's the value proposition over Twitter?

<comment><USER30> What do you mean by "value proposition"? It is free software, not a business opportunity. Not everything is about selling and money.

I read about the project just to answer your question, which you could have answered for yourself by reading.

You can run your own instance. The source is open, which means it is publicly auditable, you can contribute to it, you can fork it. It is federated. There is not one single global point of failure, which has other implications regarding things like censorship. You are not beholden to a proprietary, profit-motivated service which can do whatever it wants with your data or with the service. It is an attempt to move away from walled gardens.

If you distrust US-based services, you can use an instance which is based in Europe or wherever.

If you don't get it, you don't get it.

<comment><USER60> > There is not one single global point of failure, which has other > implications regarding things like censorship.

In other words it doesn't just ignore abuse and harrassment one of the biggest problems - maybe the biggest problem - twitter has a communications platform, it practically encourages it.

<comment><USER61> I haven't used gnusocial, but I'd imagine they have a ignore/block-user feature.

<comment><USER60> You don't want to ignore all abuse and harrassment as it may include death threats and so forth. This makes ignore as a feature unusuable to anyone who actually deals with abuse or harrassment.

It's a stupid feature people who don't care about this topic implement to be able to pretend they've done something.

Blocking only works if the cost of creating new accounts is high enough to turn off harrassers. That's almost never the case unless you're running an MMORPG or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> what leaves me skeptic about these kind of alternative services like GNUSocial and Diaspora is not much when, if ever, or how they will be able to attract the necessary critical mass of users that makes them relevant. Instead, it what would happen _after_ that. The main two questions I would be interested in would be:

(1) do they scale to the size of, say, Twitter (~400M Daily Active Users, Facebook ~1B DAU)? (2) what would be their business model?

The thing is.. hypothetically GNUSocial is very nice. It's free software, it's an open protocol, you are supposedly in perfect control of your personal data. In theory, there's no reason not to prefer it to the current state of things (if only you could make it appealing to your grandma or 14 years-old cousin).

However, when, for instance, the Justin Biebers, the Lady Gagas, the Obamas join it together with their hundreds of millions of followers, or simply when the tweets per minute reach hundreds of thousand or even millions, can the GNUSocial protocol ensure a reliable and responsive (~ real time) service? And if it does, what's the maintenance and hardware cost for the confederations? And how are they supposed to financially cover for it?

Sure, there are services based on open protocols that have been extremely successful at scaling (e.g., email, or bittorrent), still, they have different requirements than a social network. Can we make an open social network of independent confederations scale? Probably yes, but whether GNUSocial is ready for it or not is an open question (as far as I know..).

In any case, take the example of the email. The protocol is open, there's a "confederation" of independent providers taking part to it. It handles a massive amount of data every day. You don't even have necessarily to store your data on a cloud server. That's great.

Still, at the end of the day everyone uses free mail services (GMail, Yahoo, you name it), heavily maintained by hundreds/thousands of dedicated (and skilled, and expensive) engineers, storing gigabytes of your data (backed up and redundantly replicated over different geographical areas), and financing themselves using targeted advertising. Sure, you _can_ pay your own, trusted, mail provider an annual fee and have (apparently?) complete control over your data. But how many people actually use these services outside of the work environment (where your employer actually covers the cost)? And I'm not talking about the community of hackernews readers. I'm talking about your non- techy friends, your relatives, the random guy/gal you meet at the pub, that is, the people that ultimately are necessary for your service to reach a critical mass.

<comment><USER37> I think the world needs more intelligent folks like yourself who have a healthy amount of skepticism. I myself actually consider myself a proponent of these decentralized social networks, and I'm placing plenty of faith on these open networks...Though i don't go in blindly assuming the entire world will eventually adopt these. For me, if i can get my family and friends at least interacting with me - whether through my network or through a pass-through between the 2 systems - that's enough for me. Much like your email example i agree that most will use some free offering because of ease of use, etc. However, there are folks like myself who do wish to host our own...but the expectation - much like email - is to ensure interaction is as seamless as possible between the proprietary and the open networks. I use Gnu Social for now...my hope is that if this stack (Gnu social) fails, i hope it fails fast, just so that the next evolution - whatever that open platform might be - <USER3> iterate and progress faster, again with the goal of ease of use/implementation, more seamless integration (between networks), etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I am excited about it. We can launch own instance for local community and it will be another good communication tool with full control to achieve the goal.

It could be twitter for XYZ institute or university, or for a MMC internal network ? Or I am missing the point?

</comment><comment><USER64> Whatever happened to finger?

<comment><USER18> It inspired [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebFinger) which is apparently being used by GNU Social.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> What an irony to use twitter bootstrap to make a FLOSS twitter :)

<comment><USER66> Bootstrap has not been a part of Twitter for quite some time now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I just realized that decentralization is awesome for privacy and all, but for social networks sucks big time.

<comment><USER33> I have only been using GNU Social for about 18 hours, but so far the decentralization does not seem to be a problem. When you have an account on one person's (or organization's) server, you can "remote follow" people elsewhere and that seems to work just fine.

<comment><USER32> How do they handle the issue of keeping usernames unique? If I were to sign up on one server with my handle, what's to stop someone from signing up on another server with that same handle to impersonate me?

<comment><USER12> What's to stop you from getting email@example.com and pretending to be me in email?

Same thing, really.

<comment><USER33> You get an email that you respond to to finish the registration process.

<comment><USER12> No, I mean... what is the difference between a user called mattl being on two GNU social servers, and a user called mattl being on two common, gratis email servers?

I could go and make a webmail account called firstname.lastname@example.com and people shouldn't assume it was you.

<comment><USER33> Good point. Perhaps better to login with OpenID?

<comment><USER12> OpenID is dead, effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Isn't this what the tent.io guys set out to do? Is that still an active project?

</comment><comment><USER69> This software and discussion miss the reason you can't descentralized a twitter clone: analytics. One of the advantages of centralized services is the capability to quickly analyze what's going on from the content of the messages but you can't do that with a descentralized service.

<comment><USER37> For an enterprise, yes, analytics would certainly be more important; because you'd want to measure success of whatever...but those are goals more for a company. If I only wish to share with, say, my family and a few important friends (without resorting to email blasts) the types of things folks normally share on a centralized social network, then analytics isn't important for me. I just basically need to host "the party" but don't care _as much_ about measuring the success of "the party". My goals are not necessarily all the same as twitter/facebook, etc. ;-)

<comment><USER69> No, it is for something bigger than a company, it is for the world: if there is a earthquake or tsunami you want to receive the alert immediately.

I am not pro Twitter, I am just saying that from the computer science point of view you can't find a distributed solution to one of the problems Twitter is trying to solve.

<comment><USER37> Ah, ok, sorry i think i misunderstood your note because i fixated too much on the term "analytics".

For what i will call "broadcast" events - such as your very valid tsunami, earthquake examples - sure it would be essential for those alerts to get out...But whether you're using a centralized or a decentralized approach shouldn't matter - assuming of course that one of the nodes of the decentralized method gets the needed input about the alert - in order to pass it on to the other peers of the decent. network. Much like email and websites, and to _some degree_ mobile phone carriers, having a decentralized network does not necessarily prevent fast distribution of important/up-to-the- minute/broadcast information such as alerts. In fact, one might argue that having a decentralized approach might help with overall resilience. That being said, as much as i am a proponent of decentralized (and open) social networks, they have many non-trivial obstacles to contend with...but i do hope for one day to _not_ have to exclusively depend on closed and centralized platforms like twitter et al.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Ok, so I'm bad at landing pages, but ... I mean, really.

</comment><comment><USER71> Is GNU against good user experience design?

</comment><comment><USER72> Is that a rebranding of diaspora?

</comment><comment><USER73> Stuff like this is never going to work, because it suffers from the chicken- and-egg problem. Everyone (who cares about Twitter or something like it) uses Twitter because everyone else uses Twitter. You can make an account on Quitter or Diaspora or any other decentralized FLOSS network, but it'll be useless because all your non-nerd friends (and most of your nerd friends too) won't have accounts there, and will continue to use Twitter and Facebook because that's where all their contacts are. There's not really any way around this. The only thing that can happen is that something will somehow become so popular that everyone will just abandon the current service. This is what happened with MySpace: for whatever reasons, everyone moved over to Facebook, and abandoned MySpace, and now it's a dessicated husk that seems to become a place for bands to advertise and that's about it. This could potentially happen with either Facebook or Twitter, but I'm not holding my breath; the masses have shown over and over now that they're happy to chain themselves to highly centralized, proprietary products and services: FB, Twitter, the "app stores", not to mention all the proprietary software out there that intentionally and obviously uses nasty lock-in tactics.

<comment><USER54> > it'll be useless because all your non-nerd friends (and most of your nerd > friends too) won't have accounts there

Call it Eternal September, the unwashed masses, the quality of online communities dropping as they grow, call it whatever, I'm ready for a reboot, desperate even.

You are probably right — there'll be a chicken and egg problem even with hardcore nerdy gnu fans, but if new networks are created that attract nerdy passionate people, they will already be an interesting place, and if they ever happen to go mainstream then we will have at least taken our online "town squares" and public spaces back from private ownership.

An exciting new world where people aren't forced to use their real name (and prove it with government ID), where people can post their photos even if they contain nipples, where you might even have control over who can access your data.

I'm ready to jump ship, just looking for the boat to jump to.

<comment><USER74> If i want to get out of the way of the Eternal September, i just stick to IRC and domain-specific forums.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Copying the design of Twitter and Facebook. What a great way to make a good first impression and to respect the copyright the GNU project cares so much about. I can't imagine a better way to show everyone just how amazing you are.

The free software community must be truly happy to have such amazing supporters on their side.

<comment><USER75> Do you understand that GNU got started by copying Unix?

You can copy a product without violating copyright, although there have been several court cases on this topic.

<comment><USER60> Of course you can copy the product as such, that's fine by me and I think even necessary.

They've gone far beyond that here though, copying not just the product but significant parts of the design. The Quitter thing looks almost exactly like Twitter. If they'd copied the website of a bank like this, it would be considered phishing.

This is well beyond copying an idea or a few design concepts.

<comment><USER76> I thought they where just using bootstrap which was created by twitter. I'd say 50% of the web looks like twitter today...

EDIT: OK, I take that back... After looking at some of these sites, some have really copied the design waaaay to much.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Internet History in Web Browsers - <AUTHOR> https://www.willhallonline.co.uk/blog/2019-04-18-my-internet-history-in-web-browsers/ <comment><USER2> These obviously guesstimated statistics are a thinly veiled attempt to promote Brave, right?

I'm always surprised that Brave is so popular among the HN crowd. I guess that cryptocurrencies are the hot new thing, but Brave's alleged future business model is "hide ads from web pages, _and then show our own_ ". That's shockingly sketchy.

Using a built-in cryptocurrency to convince users to do their marketing for them under the promise that they might get rich in future when the value goes up is, admittedly, clever, if evil.

<comment><USER3> I was initially interested in Brave because of the crypto integration, but as soon as I installed it I all but forgot about it. The real killer features are speed, privacy, and ad blocking by default.

It's not perfect by any stretch. When I was on Android I used it as my default; now I'm on iOS and Safari is fine. I sold my personal MBP, and now I only use my work MBP for light browsing sometimes (Opera) and my home desktop/gaming rig very rarely indeed recently. Brave makes up maybe 5% of my browser usage right now, but I still recommend it to friends. It's good at what it does, and the crypto stuff feels very much like an afterthought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IE -> Firefox -> Opera -> Chrome -> Chromium -> Firefox

Now that Chrome has become the new IE of the web, I sometimes have to switch to a Chromium-based browser for some sites to work. For this, I rely on Ungoogled-Chromium.

</comment><comment><USER5> How does he know his ratio of browser usage 15 years ago? I couldn't even provide that figure for last year let alone more than a decade in the past

<comment><USER6> The article seems like a thinly-veiled advertisement for Brave, in my opinion.

<comment><USER7> Which is, to put it bluntly, a blatant cash-grab that tries to redirect whatever ad cash flow it could catch into their own pocket.

Best of all, their website puts Brave's selling point as 'not letting other browsers treat you as a product'. Yeah, fat chance.

update: a quick look later, nothing I could not have done using standard open source tools like HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger and/or uBlock Origin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like I'm the only person who's skipped chrome all together.

IE(because there wasn't much choice) -> Mozilla -> Firefox -> Palemoon

I keep firefox installed because some sites don't play nice with palemoon, but i've never used chrome for any extended period. I played with chromium a while ago but I didn't like it.

I've never really understood why chrome became so popular, when I tried it, it felt like a step back fromm firefox in every way. Sure it's better than IE, but that's not really a very difficult thing to accomplish. I'd rather use lynx than IE.

</comment><comment><USER9> For me it was

Netscape -> Firefox -> Chrome -> Firefox

But I had to use IE in some jobs.

</comment><comment> grumpy-cowboy Mosaic -> Netscape -> Firefox -> Chrome -> Firefox

IE only if it's REALLY required by badly designed products/sites.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hard to remember, but I think something along the lines of:

lynx -> OS/2 WebExplorer -> Netscape -> IE -> Mozilla Suite -> Camino -> Firefox -> Chrome -> Safari -> Samsung Internet

(also the Emacs browser at some point, but hard to place it into the timeline)

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried to build a timeline, but couldn't. I've switch back and forth too much. At various times, pretty much every browser was ahead in some respect and worth my interest. After a while, some other implementation would pull ahead and I'd switch.

Right now, I'm almost using a different browser on every device:

Safari on my iPhone X and iPad Pro Opera on my MBP for browsing, Firefox sometimes for development Brave on my Windows-based gaming computer

</comment><comment><USER11> early 90's on the Mac: NCSA Mosaic -- my comment at the time: That will never catch on.

late 90's on Mac and Windows: Netscape, Windows95+ on PC: Internet Exploder

2001+ iBook: Safari

2008+ Intel Mac: Firefox

today Ubuntu and Debian on Intel laptops: Firefox and Chromium, Android: Firefox and Chrome, PowerPC Macs: TenFourFox, Roccat (WebKit)

</comment><comment><USER12> Any long time Mac users here? For me it was

IE (for Mac) -> iCab -> Opera -> OmniWeb -> Safari (for a long time) -> Chrome (when it was new) -> Firefox

</comment><comment><USER13> I installed brave to test its crypto implementation, but its not available. Kept using anyway for the adblocking.

</comment><comment><USER14> Pretty sure mine is something like

Firefox -> Opera -> Firefox -> Chrome -> Iridium -> Chrome -> Firefox</comment>


Skype Switched to the MSN Messenger Protocol (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.kirsle.net/blog/entry/skype-switched-to-the-msn-messenger-protocol <comment><USER2> The whole part about being "hacked" is hilarious. It seems way more plausible that Skype internally uses fonts with special glyphs for its icons, and that when it couldn't find them for whatever reason, it defaulted to the next font on the font stack, which had Chinese characters on the codepoints where those glyphs were expected to be.

<comment><USER3> I've had it happen to me, except I see some random wingdings instead of Chinese characters. Being "hacked" never crossed my mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-docs-boast-now-we-can- wiretap-s...](http://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-docs-boast-now-we-can-wiretap- skype-video-calls/)

\-- "In 2008, when the company was owned by eBay instead of Microsoft , a Skype spokeswoman told CNET : "We have not received any subpoenas or court orders asking us to perform a live interception or wiretap of Skype-to-Skype communications. In any event, because of Skype's peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would not be able to comply with such a request."

\-- "After buying Skype, Microsoft dramatically overhauled its architecture, replacing peer-to-peer "super nodes" with thousands of servers run by Microsoft -- a more centralized approach that may have made it easier for government eavesdroppers. Around the same time, Microsoft would no longer stand by Skype's earlier claim to be wiretap-unfriendly."

<comment><USER5> and now skype video calls actually work instead of playing "super node roulette" with quality and connectivity. Not to mention, being deemed a super node randomly at work and watching all your upload bandwidth being eaten by idle skype clients.

I have no idea if the new server-based system is wiretap friendly, but the old system was definitely 100% business unfriendly. Companies pay for GotoMeeting, Webex, Lync, voip video calls, etc for a reason. Skype had to be modernized to compete with other services. I don't see some grand conspiracy here. Why would MS spend all this money to just help the government? Its just asinine.

Those who need encrypted and secure communications were foolish to trust Skype in the first place. If you aren't rolling your own FOSS-based applications on your own hardware, you can expect zero privacy here. I imagine the "old" Skype was just as easily gamed. Sorry if I don't think some spokesperson's PR statement is proof that it was truly secure. Especially considering Skype was originally a Russian company. There's precedence for this, for example Blackberry's "unbreakable" peer-to-peer encryption scheme is regularly downgraded, invisible to the end user, to more breakable bitrates per national law. I believe India and Saudi Arabia do this.

<comment><USER6> > Why would MS spend all this money to just help the government? Its just > asinine.

I was reminded of an old 2009 article [0] that speculated that the NSA was willing to pay big bucks to any company that could make Skype easier for them to intercept.

Maybe Microsoft took them up on that offer, and made a profit with their restructuring of Skype's architecture.

[0]: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/)

<comment><USER7> While that's not unfathomable, it's very much Microsoft's modus operandi to centralise their services... it's a very corporate thing to do.

<comment><USER8> What is quite amusing is that they've basically taken Skype and gutted it down to something that is similar to the old MSN messenger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "third-party Skype client (e.g. to have support in Pidgin)" Funny because recently the old Skype plugin for Pidgin was re-written to utilize the new HTTP Skype. So now you have a nice client-less Skype chat in Pidgin. I'm certain someone could study it to write their own client.

<comment><USER10> I've been using the HTTP-based skype pidgin client. It seems to mostly work - the only show stopper is that file transfer requests fail silently. I had someone trying to send me a file. I had no idea. It was a little awkward.

<comment><USER11> do you mind sharing the link to this plugin ?

<comment><USER10> Certainly:

[https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe...](https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypeweb)

I'm using it from arch, via the AUR package purple-skypeweb-git

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author cites Wikipedia. In the comments a poster claims to have added that bit to Wikipedia but was unable to cite any sources for it.

"Since i could not find any reference for it, I added it to the wikipedia page but was not fully certain i was right and that someone would remove it if i were wrong since i know really very little about how it works on the inside."

</comment><comment><USER13> Really? They are sending messages as plain-text over the wire?

Now I was going to say encryption is pointless anyway as Microsoft (as did Skype previously) happily log everything and give it to more and less democratic governments all over the world. But at least use some encryption to keep the middle man out.

<comment><AUTHOR> The _very_ earliest versions used plaintext, but they started tunneling it over HTTPS a long time ago more due to firewalls than out of privacy reasons. I don't think people ever thought MSNP was end-to-end secured, and treated it more or less like an instant form of email.

On the other hand, authentication was always secured via HTTPS, so passwords were never sent in plaintext.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Adium for OS X hasn't caught up to this fact yet, and still requires a 3rd party plugin[0] that requires Skype to run for it to work.

I wonder if anyone's trying to advance this at all -- the 3rd party plugin doesn't seem to receive updates anymore.

[0] - [http://xtras.adium.im/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=5011](http://xtras.adium.im/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=5011)

<comment><USER9> You could ask Eion about making his SkypeWeb Pidgin plugin for Adium, or look into it yourself. Here's the plugin I'm talking about by the way: [https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe...](https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypeweb)

<comment><USER15> > Q: Does this plugin require Skype to be running? A: Yes.

From the FAQ: [https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin#faq](https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin#faq)

<comment><USER9> The way the GitHub page is set up is weird. Basically two different plugins are hosted on one repo. The root tree you linked to has the original client required plugin. Go under "Skypeweb" folder and you'll see it's an entirely different plugin that you can compile and don't need a client (also has its own README).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wait, it's not encrypted anymore? Anybody can confirm?

</comment><comment><USER17> IF I remember correctly, the P2P patents and technology where not included in the deals, only a licence. My guess is that Microsoft sees that as reason to "align" their technology stacks.

Zennström really made a number of good deals, selling the same thing several times.

</comment><comment><USER18> That's because the MSN Messenger was much more "lawful intercept"-friendly.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft- nsa-c...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa- collaboration-user-data)

Quote:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Should probably have (2014) in title, this is 7 months old.

<comment><USER19> Not just that, but there are still very few third party clients that speak version 24, which makes interop kind of difficult. See [http://ismsndeadyet.com/](http://ismsndeadyet.com/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Compelling reasons for having a website - <AUTHOR>

What are the most compelling reasons for having a website? <comment><USER2> This is sort of like asking, "What are the most compelling reasons for having a sign?"

"Website" covers an awful lot of ground, and sites serve countless purposes.

I mean, there's zero compelling reason to have a Website for the sake of having a Website, and since you haven't said anything at all about what makes you even ask this there's no good answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Establish a stronger online presence, place your portfolio, resume, CV .. etc.

Publish essays/articles/writings/blogs: a permanent place for your opinions instead of having them scattered all over the various forums.</comment>


Scaling the company with the waggle dance - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@makkina/scaling-the-company-with-the-waggle-dance-e6d59737a68#.oeci2si88 <comment><USER2> A great article about how a self organising company actually gets organised!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is our culture. We're strongly influenced by the nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> is there a book that outlines the analogy between corporates and nature?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am working on it. Do you want a preview?</comment></comment>


The Nine Circles of Scientific Hell (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://pps.sagepub.com/content/7/6/643.full.pdf+html

<comment><USER2> Seventh Circle: Nonpublication of Data and Eighth Circle: Partial Publication of Data are particularly egregious, but common sins in the scientific publication world. Supplementary material sections are very small, if non- existent in many peer-reviewed articles.</comment>


Base64 encoding and decoding at almost the speed of a memory copy - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05109 <comment><USER2> The code: [https://github.com/WojciechMula/base64-avx512](https://github.com/WojciechMula/base64-avx512)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great use of AVX-512 VBMI!

Note that not many Intel processors support the two specific CPU instructions used (vpermb and vpmultishiftqb).

Cannon Lake Core i3 (not many of these around due to delays with intel's 10nm fabrication)

Ice Lake Core i3, i5 and i7: Released in September 2019

<comment><USER4> Why do they say then "We use the SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instruction set AVX-512 available on commodity processors" ?

<comment><USER5> Because those _are_ commodity processors nonetheless. The distinction relevant for a research paper is between mainstream processors you can just buy vs. custom made ones, not about market penetration.

<comment><USER6> I still think "commodity" is not the correct word even in that context. Mass- market, or commercially available might be better. How can it be a commodity when there is only one manufacturer?

<comment><USER7> Just going off wikipedia (also other sources support the definition):

> In economics, a commodity is an economic good or service that has full or > substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as > equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.

Basically it's a common good, that is sold and purchased, with no other modifications required for this use-case. This commodity is currently low in supply, but is still a commodity.

<comment><USER8> It's missing the fungibility where it is produced by multiple suppliers and can be treated equivalently by the end buyer. Large grade A eggs are a commodity as it doesn't matter which farm produced them. A specific set of processors from Intel are not a commodity since there are no fungible equivalents. Widely available would probably be a better description in this case.

<comment><USER6> I would argue processors are never commodities anymore (maybe back in the 486 days it was closer). You can't swap an intel for an amd processor into the same motherboard ever today. They don't have the same performance characteristics from one to another. You could have 2 "3.5Ghz 4-core processors" that have wildly different real-world performance. IMO this is the opposite of "fungible"

I think hard drives, memory, power supplies are much closer to being fungible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If base64 decoding speed makes a difference in your application, you should be considering _why_ you are transmitting data in base64, a neat hack from the 1970's, which is non-human-readable, wastes 30% of the network bandwidth, kills compression, wastes RAM, is typically hard to random-access, and is generally a bad idea all round.

<comment><USER10> How does it kill compression?

<comment><USER9> Try it...

        wget http://mattmahoney.net/dc/enwik8.zip -O - | gunzip | head -c 1000000 | gzip -9 | wc -c
        355350
        wget http://mattmahoney.net/dc/enwik8.zip -O - | gunzip | head -c 1000000 | base64 | gzip -9 | wc -c
        528781

base64 is 48.8% larger after compression on english text, whereas it would only be 33.3% larger without compression. The reason is because compression finds and eliminates repeating patterns, but base64 can make the same input data look totally different depending on which of the 4 input alignments it has.

<comment><USER11> oddly enough lz/deflate are as ancient as base64. 16bit deflate is quite poor and slow, yet predominant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wojciech Muła really groks SIMD. It's well worth exploring his other work in that area: [http://0x80.pl/articles/index.html](http://0x80.pl/articles/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is that an achievement? Isn't it so that during a memory copy the CPU is basically idling because memory is so much slower than the CPU? Weren't that hundreds of instructions per memory access? So instead of having it wait it can also do computations (just standard instructions). Or is base64 computationally so heavy that it cannot fit into the "gaps"? I certainly have not tried, just thinking from the high level view that CPUs are incredibly fast and main memory is incredibly slow in comparison. And of course assuming that the data does not fit into any cache.

<comment><USER14> You're mostly right. It's often not that hard to completely saturate memory bus.

However, base64 has weird mappings that take some processing to undo in SIMD – can't use lookup tables and need to regroup bits from 8 bit to 6 bit width. That does take a lot of cycles without specialized bit manipulation instructions.

Also the data you'll need to process is often probably already hot in the CPU caches. Disk/network I/O can be DMA'd directly into L3 cache.

So I think this decoder is a useful contribution. But also somewhat no-brainer once you have those AVX-512 instructions available.

<comment><USER9> Why can't you use lookup tables?

<comment><USER15> Part of the point of this paper is that the lookup tables for base64 fit into a 512 bit vector register.

<comment><USER14> Notably this technique only works in _this_ special case (or other small LUTs). Generic (larger) lookup tables can't be vectorized yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not yet usable asis. Normally AVX-512 instructions are subject to downclocking. Now they tried a very recent CPU which is not subject to downclocking anymore. They didn't add code to test for the CPU revision which stopped downclocking, and they didn't benchmark with those older CPU's. We can only guess the older AVX256 code is faster there, but not how much.

<comment><USER17> Speaking of benchmarking against older CPUs: the paper falls into the "short communication" category, we didn't want to discuss all possible hardware configurations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Many people don't realize this but today's memory is dramatically underpowered for today's CPU. Consider the following: you can, theoretically, get ~80GB/sec of memory bandwidth from a modern Intel CPU (assuming you use all channels, and there are no interrupts, etc). That's 20 billion floats or int32s per second. The same CPU can do ~2.3 fp32 TFLOPS. That's 115 ops for every fp32. And it's getting worse as more and more cores are put on the same memory bus.

<comment> Const-me Your numbers look strange. Did you quoted from a $10000 xeon platinum very few people use?

In my current desktop PC, it's 700 GFlops theoretical compute versus 50GB/sec of theoretical RAM bandwidth.

<comment><USER18> For i9-7980XE Intel quotes 1.3TFLops of fp64. So it ought to do about twice that at fp32. Yours at $1500+tax from Newegg: [https://www.newegg.com/core-i9-x-series-extreme-edition- inte...](https://www.newegg.com/core-i9-x-series-extreme-edition-intel- core-i9-7980xe/p/N82E16819117836). Quad channel RAM, too.

For a flea check, consider that the chip has 18 cores and runs at ~4.2GHz. To achieve the theoretical throughput each core has to do ~30 single precision flops per cycle. Which sounds about right: HEDT intel chips can (theoretically) do 32 of those per cycle.

This, of course, ignores whatever throttling Intel would need to apply to maintain TDP, so a purely theoretical back of the envelope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The authors have been doing good work in this area for a while: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00605](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00605)

</comment><comment><USER20> Turbobase64: A portable scalar implementation can beat SIMD and saturates the fastest networks and fastest SSDs.

It is faster than SSE on Intel/AMD and SIMD NEON on ARM see benchmark at Turbo Base64: [https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBase64](https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBase64)

<comment><USER21> In the readme for Turbobase64, they state:

> Only the non portable AVX2 based libraries are faster

The paper in OP is about 2 times as fast as their previous AVX2 code. I think they are superior to Turbobase64 here (though with more stringent hardware requirements).

<comment><USER20> I agree and according to a steam hardware survey only 1% are using AVX2. AVX-512 is practically unused. And don't forget the billions ARM CPU's.

<comment><USER22> Their numbers are surely wrong? Firstly, AVX2 jumped from 1% to 5% in a month. Secondly, it looks to have been on every Intel processor this decade.

<comment><USER23> Even 5% sounds sketchy indeed. However, AVX2 (or Haswell New Instructions) hasn't quite been on every Intel processor this decade, rather only since the 4th generation (late 2013), and only in Core-branded processors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> iOS 13 allows the Shortcuts app to encode/decode information as Base64 as part of the scripting language.

People are using this to do clever things like encoding a watermark image to overlay on a picture, because the Shortcuts app does not allow file attachments as part of the scripting language.

<comment><USER25> So this could've been done in the past with a manually written decoder but now it's a built in? That's great

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Now show me memory speed SIMD uint8_t histogram, and I'll be happy. Computing histogram is slow and it doesn't really vectorize. Yet it's required by many important algorithms like data compression.

<comment><USER20> Not memory speed but extremely fast: [https://github.com/powturbo/TurboHist](https://github.com/powturbo/TurboHist)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, it's nice, about what you can achieve. I'd be happy if it was about 8 times faster. Less than 0.2 cycles per byte would be good.

Unfortunately, that's just not achievable with current x86 instruction set.

<comment><USER20> There is new AVX512 instruction (_mm512_conflict_epi32) supposed to solve this, but it can't make the histogram construction faster than the scalar functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Unfortunately using AVX512 instructions only gets a speedup in _very_ specific situations and for many real world use cases it actually underperforms due to oddities of scaling and switching delays. Profiling for more than a few milliseconds is one place you see phantom gains, so take care not to be deceived.

See

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels- frequen...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/on-the-dangers-of-intels-frequency- scaling/)

[https://lemire.me/blog/2018/09/07/avx-512-when-and-how-to- us...](https://lemire.me/blog/2018/09/07/avx-512-when-and-how-to-use-these- new-instructions/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21029417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21029417)

Edit: not saying this isn't a true benefit here, just that claims of speed when using AVX512 need to be treated with fair scepticism for actual use cases.

<comment><USER2> _[https://lemire.me/blog/2018/09/07/avx-512-when-and-how-to- us...](https://lemire.me/blog/2018/09/07/avx-512-when-and-how-to-use-these- new-instructions/) _

Considering that the author of that blog is one of the authors of this paper, I think he's very aware of the benchmarking issues.

<comment><USER16> He is aware, but sidestepped these issues. so this code is only recommended on the newest Cannon Lake processors, but we really want to know for which CPU which method is best. What about AMD Rome e.g.?

<comment><USER27> Since AVX-512 does not exist on AMD Rome, that question answers itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Question: with this kind of optimization, how does the program run different functions on different CPUs? Like the ones that don't support AVX512? Some kind of runtime dispatch based on CPU ID?

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if the authors plan to get this merged into commonly used implementations of base64 so that folks can benefit from their research.

<comment><USER17> For instance our SSE/AVX2 algorithms have been included in a great, mature library written and maintained by Alfred Klomp: [https://github.com/aklomp/base64](https://github.com/aklomp/base64) (the library includes also vectorized code for ARM CPUs).

<comment><USER29> Is that library widely used, for example is it used by Firefox or Chromium?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Now this is the programming I like, low-level assembly optimisation of long operations, none of this web development rubbish

<comment><USER31> This is relevant to webdev, though -- binary data in JSON is often encoded as a Base64 string.

<comment><USER32> Why use 6-bit data, if JSON can transport 8-bit (-1 for quoting the ") ?

<comment><USER33> Byte values that are ASCII control characters need to be escaped, and byte values that are not valid UTF-8 can't be represented in JSON strings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Also worth checking out: [https://github.com/superhuman/fast64](https://github.com/superhuman/fast64)

That is what Superhuman uses for decoding base64 in browser.

<comment><USER14> I don't see how that's relevant, it looks pretty standard approach for base64 decoding. You can find thousands of similar examples.

<comment><USER35> Not only it is just a standard approach, it even misses a relatively common optimization for base64 decoding: instead of computing `(lut[a] << 6) | lut[b]` etc., one can precompute `lut6[x] = lut[x] << 6` and compute `lut6[a] | lut[b]` to avoid shifting. This optimization is famously used by Nick Galbreath's MODP_B64 decoder, which is used by Chromium [1] and turns out to be the most performant non-SIMD decoder according to Lemire et al. [2]

[1] [https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/master/third_party...](https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/master/third_party/modp_b64)

[2] [https://github.com/lemire/fastbase64](https://github.com/lemire/fastbase64)

<comment><USER20> You can do better, without SIMD: [https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBase64](https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBase64)

The simple base64 scalar version is also faster the chromium implementation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Attack of the Killer Microseconds (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/4/215032-attack-of-the-killer-microseconds/fulltext <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13959914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13959914)</comment>


Intel's 10nm Cannon Lake chips are delayed again - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/27/17291040/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-chips-delayed-2019-cpu-processor <comment><AUTHOR> This makes me a bit sad. My system is running an i7-3770k that is starting to show its age when I'm using VR. I have high hopes for 10nm Cannon Lake, and have been planning on doing the CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta upgrade once Cannon Lake comes out.</comment>


What Google isn't telling us about its AI demo - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/google-ai-demo-questions-9a57afad-9854-41da-b6e2-5e55b619283e.html <comment><USER2> This is just... Odd. There's not enough to say categorically that Sundar Pichai lied onstage, but it seems that if he didn't these questions could be cleared up _very_ easily - and they haven't...</comment>


Climate Change and Emoji = Climoji - <AUTHOR> https://climoji.org/ <comment><USER2> Thank you for your work! Any thoughts on emoji that indicate the following sentiments:

1\. air miners ([http://airminers.org](http://airminers.org))

2\. the changing climate will create the first trillionaire

3\. climate change is the biggest financial opportunity civilization has ever seen

4\. climate change is an opportunity for passionate people around the world to change the world, right now, right where you are: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4vOmwSms6A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4vOmwSms6A)

5\. give a fuck about climate change: [http://carbondoomsday.com](http://carbondoomsday.com)

6\. together we start: [http://purin.co/In-Three-Emojis](http://purin.co/In- Three-Emojis)

7\. Feel the warming: [http://purin.co/Feel-The-Warming](http://purin.co/Feel- The-Warming)

8\. Connect our efforts: [http://purin.co/Connect-Our- Efforts](http://purin.co/Connect-Our-Efforts)

You are doing important work!</comment>