When Craigslist Blocks Innovations - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/when-craigslist-blocks-innovations-disruptions/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty black-and-white issue for me, and I don't quite understand how so many are defending Padmapper. Much like the arguments for pirating music, it all boils down to weak justifications for taking something that's not yours.

I get that you may need to bend rules to innovate and that they were pulling CL's data in a way that did not affect their bandwidth, but at the end of the day, it's _Craigslist_ that has attracted the users, _Craigslist_ that has engaged the user, and it's _Craigslist_ that has acquired and recorded that data.

The fact that Padmapper's UI is better is totally irrelevant and is just a way to distract from the real issue – blatant disregard of CL's wishes to hold on to its data.

EDIT: Replies have made some good points, so this isn't so black-and-white to me anymore.

<comment><USER3> One thing that makes it not so black and white is that it's not Craigslist's data. The posts belong to the users who submitted them; they just grant a license to Craigslist. And the users clearly don't want or expect this license to be an exclusive one, because the posts are indexed by all the major search engines.

The other is that Craig has in the past stated publicly that they didn't take issue with other sites using this data except when it caused increased bandwidth costs for CL. Now it's clear either that they've changed their position, or that the bandwidth argument was just an excuse for shutting down sites they felt might one day compete with them.

<comment><USER4> Hmm, I posted a job ad last week and saw this at the bottom of the submission form:

"Clicking "Continue" confirms that craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing or preparing derivative works without its consent. "

I'm not sure whether your assumption or information was taken first hand from from Craigslist guys, but it doesn't look like that's the current implementation.

<comment><USER3> This is just deliberately overstated language written by lawyers, to give CL maximum legal power if they ever need it. In practice they let search engines index them, and users know and expect that.

<comment><USER5> That's really irrelevant, though, isn't it?

CL could allow search engines to index but could explicitly disallow third parties (fourth parties?) from using the content, _regardless of how that additional party retrieved that content_.

<comment><USER6> > That's really irrelevant, though, isn't it?

To me, it sounds a lot like the MLB statements before every ballgame and I question whether they have any actual legal force.

If CL had any sense, they'd try to buy PadMapper to improve their service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This anti Craigslist crusade is just ridiculous. The most impressive thing to me is how some startups that a knowingly violating TOS and intentionally abusing another site are able to gain that much traction for their "cause". Impressive PR/Buzz work!

<comment><AUTHOR> The press that you see is the result of users being disappointed at the current-state-of-affairs. They don't see it as being helpful for the long term innovation, or short term utility. Some of these users happen to be journalists. Other journalists are reporting it because how this is ruled will be precedence for future cases. I would say that's news.

If you've ever met Eric (Padmapper is a one-man shop), you'll quickly get the sense that he isn't a slick-talkin' kind of guy. I can tell you that it is journalists that approached Eric, not the other way around.

<comment><USER8> It's not like the press (ie paper newspapers like the NYT) is a neutral party in this - craigslist has pretty much destroyed one of their largest traditional sources of revenue (classifieds).

<comment><AUTHOR> Whether press is a neutral party or not is a separate issue of the assumption that it's PR work on Padmapper's part. The press may be having a field day, but it's not Eric's doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone who supports Craigslist show me how, their selection and arrangement of facts are _creative_ and original?

Because if they aren't, their data isn't copyrightable.

They don't select anything--there is no one at Craigslist performing a creative act of selection.

Their arrangement of apartment listings isn't creative or original. It's based solely on geography, and time. I also don't think Padmapper is actually copying the arrangement.

Furthermore even if there were actually copyrightable text within the individual ads, Padmapper doesn't copy the text, just the facts.

You should read the Feist v. Rural decision if you want more information on copyrighting collections of facts.

</comment><comment><USER10> I kind of feel bad for Craigslist. Everyone is attacking them for wanting to hold onto their data. I don't think that they should be obligated to let just anyone scrape it

<comment><USER11> But does that mean its okay for them to sue anyone who does? If they make the information public, how could they think they have a right to keep their data private from applications they think could be a competitive threat? Should Walmart sue Target if target scrapes walmart prices to help make decisions about their own online pricing schemes?

In what way is it "their data" if they release it to the public? The law is pretty clear about this--facts can't be copyrighted. They don't own the facts. They don't own the bits that padmapper is referencing. All they own is the db records for the posts that originated the information.

Imagine if they had a CL user meetup in public somewhere, and then they charged users to use a megaphone to announce that they were selling something. Someone writes down the information and has their own meetup for people who couldn't make it to the free, public CL meetup. Whats the difference between that and what padmapper is doing, except that padmapper is getting the information second hand?

If CL thinks they have a right to their data, they should be suing google should they?

<comment><USER12> > The law is pretty clear about this--facts can't be copyrighted.

While it is true that "facts can't be copyrighted", it's unclear that Craigslist listings qualify as facts in the relevant sense. (The singles listings, for example, surely don't.)

> Someone writes down the information and has their own meetup for people who > couldn't make it to the free, public CL meetup. Whats the difference between > that and what padmapper is doing, except that padmapper is getting the > information second hand?

Getting the information second-hand seems fairly significant.

Don't get me wrong - I think that craigslist should be disrupted, but I don't think that you should just do the easy parts.

Note that the NYT has a dog in this fight - Craigslist has "disrupted" the newspaper biz.

<comment><USER11> >Getting the information second-hand seems fairly significant.

I meant to suggest that that made it even _less_ significant. The information is already widely disseminated across multiple platforms because its public information. Sure, everyone knows that CL is the original source for the information, but that doesn't meant that only people they say can have the information should have the information. Its public, broadcasted information.

Sure, they can put something on their website along the lines of "You're not allowed to distribute this information", but why does that have any weight if they don't own the information?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The thing that strikes me is that it would have been a lot smarter for craigslist to either buy padmapper or create their own version of it. I get craigslist general stance of keeping things simple because its hard to predict the consequences of changes (something that's been brought up in interviews w/ craig in the past), and the upsides of keeping the site as basic as possible, but with something like padmapper you can almost view it as being a real life proof of concept that's been shown to work.

Obviously it's something people want, so why wouldn't they integrate it? I don't get the business goal here.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's ironic that the post claims Craigslist cultivates an exaggerated image of doing public good, but then repeats without question Padmapper's claim that it's all about doing more good and saving people time.

I strongly suspect both sites are pretty equal in their overstated desire to "just do good".

<comment><USER15> That's not the only motivating factor, it's more complicated than that (not wanting to see something I've worked on for a few years become less useful, for example), but it was the main one in starting PadMapper, and the main one in deciding to do this. He was saying that CL's actions seem to contradict that mission.

<comment><USER14> I'm curious, are you saying that you have no commercial plans for this at all?

<comment><USER15> I'm not saying that. Like any person, I'm more than 2D and have a whole bunch of motivations, but unlike most companies, making oodles of money isn't my main one for this, and so I don't prioritize it very much when it conflicts with other things. I find doing things that solve problems for people interesting and fulfilling, and that's primarily what motivated the creation of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When, specifically, did taking another company's data and trying to build your own company around it become "innovating"?

I am _not_ saying such apps are useless; I'm building one now for a marketplace with pretty shitty UI.

But it's not an innovation.

</comment><comment><USER17> Disagree. Everyone is open to compete against Craigslist... and good luck!

<comment><USER18> You disagree with what? You don't think the lawsuits are real?

<comment><USER19> I think what the OP is saying is that there's no right, stated or implied, to wrap Craigslist data in your own UI. If you want to write your own front end for classified ads, you're going to have to bring your own ads to the table as well.

<comment><USER20> I don't think even Bilton is arguing that CL is not within their legal rights. He is just pointing out that it seems contradictory to their claimed culture of being community-driven, anti-SOPA, wanting to be a public good, and all that jazz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently saw a Toronto area Craigslist job posting for a 3Tap/Padmapper type of scraping contract, where it required the developer to have experience in spidering Craigslist, despite the whole ongoing debacle. Oh the irony.

The whole thing stinks and Craigslist is completely right in putting a stop to data leeching. There isn't enough CSS3 candy that you can slap on top stolen data to wash it clean. It's a red herring argument that distracts from the main issue that they don't obey they rules of the site that feeds them.

</comment><comment><USER21> PadMapper seems to be on relatively solid legal ground here. They are only copying facts (address, price, contact info) and the post title (which is likely too short to qualify for copyright). And as they aren't accessing Craigslist directly, they aren't subject to its TOU.

But what 3Taps, the other lawsuit target, is doing seems far less defensible. They use the trademarked name "Craigslist" prominently and repeatedly on their site to promote their service. See <http://3taps.com> (screenshot at <http://oi48.tinypic.com/1zx2qkk.jpg> in case the design changes).

Worse, the website Craiggers.com that's described in the lawsuit (and indeed registered to 3Taps) not only uses the trademark, but reproduces posts wholesale with the entire content and photographs. (Example: <http://oi50.tinypic.com/5l9cvb.jpg>) At the bottom of each post it has a "public domain" mark and says "This work ([name] by [poster email]), identified by craigslist, is free of known copyright restrictions." This is clearly untrue: the photographs are creative and original works copyrighted to the poster (and licensed to Craigslist), as are the prose descriptions whenever they carry more than a bare minimum of information.

I can't imagine what 3Taps is thinking. In contrast to the relatively cautious approach of PadMapper, they're being extremely brazen in copying _everything_ from Craigslist and using its name to promote themselves. And if they get smacked down, PadMapper's lost its data source.

</comment><comment><USER22> Something I think is being overlooked is that Craigslist's belligerent lawyers and antediluvian website hurt the people who really do own the ads, as much as they hurt the millions of users who have to sift through them.

So... how about if Padmapper were to change its approach, and start acting like a value-added front end to Craigslist? Landlords and realtors could post their ads on Padmapper instead of going directly to Craigslist. Padmapper would then do two things: first, it would immediately forward a copy of each ad to Craigslist on the user's behalf, as if it had been posted there originally, and second, it would host the same ad itself, with all of the accompanying maps and metadata that Craigslist refuses to support.

If a given ad was originally _submitted_ to Padmapper, their right to show it would be absolutely indisputable. If Padmapper is indeed more user-friendly than Craigslist, then more and more users will come to rely on them, and ignore Craigslist altogether. At the same time, users who prefer to stick with Craigslist wouldn't see any disruption at all.

<comment><USER15> PadLister lets you submit to PadMapper and repost to other places, but I think that may actually be the sticking point, and might be harming PadMapper's efforts to be an effective search engine if it's viewed as competitive with other sources. So, I may need to shut it down to keep going with PadMapper's mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's a lot of discussions about the rights and wrongs of Craigslist approach. It seems to me though the seeds to destroying it are all here. When you enable a powerful ecosystem around your core offering you get a network effect. Whomever decides to build a replacement to Craigslist should put at the top of their list "Enable 3rd party developers to prosper from our core offering".</comment>


Reproducible Signal builds for Android - <AUTHOR> https://whispersystems.org/blog/reproducible-android/ <comment><USER2> > Reproducible builds help to verify that the source code in our GitHub > repository is the exact source code used to build the compiled Signal APK > being distributed through Google Play.

This is huge; it eliminates one of the biggest issues with distributing through third-party app stores.

> Just to head off the inevitable deluge of GPG encrypted emails with dramatic > subject lines, we are not doing this in response to any kind of legal threat > or presssure. This is just a weekend hack, please don't make us regret it.

I wonder what kinds of mails like these they've received in the past to prompt this disclaimer?

<comment><USER3> >I wonder what kinds of mails like these they've received in the past to prompt this disclaimer?

I believe he is being a bit tongue-in-cheek. Moxie has previously mentioned his dislike of the typical emails he gets from the type of people that use GPG ([http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/gpg-and- me/](http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/gpg-and-me/))

<comment><USER4> And a more recent statement: "Was reflecting on how the quality of my email inbox had become less awful lately, then remembered I added a rule to drop pgp encrypted mail." [https://twitter.com/moxie/status/709492776635752448](https://twitter.com/moxie/status/709492776635752448)

<comment><USER5> Reading that, and the blog post linked to by sigmar, his stance comes across as rather belligerent; perhaps even childish. I would expect that if you wanted to communicate with someone who is privacy-conscious, and provides a public e-mail address linked to a GPG-identity, encrypting and signing your message to him or her is only civil and is to be expected.

I understand Moxie's criticism of existing crypto-tools, GnuPG in particular, and he makes some valid points, but dismissing anyone who mails you and uses GPG (because you have published your GPG public key) as nutjobs seems overly antagonistic. That to me seems at odds with the greater goal of facilitating easily attainable privacy and digital freedom for all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are two trust problems that verifiable builds are supposed to solve:

1\. Did the authors manipulate the source code compared to what they published?

2\. Did a third party manipulate the binaries on the distribution channel?

 _The process of verifying a build can be done through a Docker image containing an Android build environment that we 've published._

For the verification, you now depend on a _complex_ binary blob provided by the authors, that is distributed through a different channel (Docker images instead of Google Play).

This is a good solution to the second problem, but it does not preclude OWS insiders from injecting malicious code (they merely need to add the backdoor at the SDK level[0] and use that same SDK for the public releases). Such a manipulation could be performed by an evil insider, or be part of a "government cooperation". I am not saying that OWS is or will be doing this. This is merely an observation of the shortcomings of the overall solution.

[0] "Reflections on Trusting Trust" [https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...](https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf)

<comment><USER7> > For the verification, you now depend on a complex binary blob provided by > the authors, that is distributed through a different channel (Docker images > instead of Google Play).

Nothing stops you from building the Docker image yourself using the Dockerfile provided in the repo. [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- Android/blob/master...](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- Android/blob/master/Dockerfile)

<comment><USER8> But those Docker images are _not_ reproducible. They don't build everything from source from a trusted, well-known set of bootstrap binaries, nor will they produce bit-identical binaries. Docker does absolutely nothing to aid in the task of reproducible builds. See [https://reproducible- builds.org](https://reproducible-builds.org) for more information about initiatives that are helping.

Using something like GNU Guix instead of Docker, one could make good progress towards a reproducible Android tool chain that produces bit-identical APKs. Reproducibility is an ongoing problem, but Guix has been carefully designed to maximize reproducibility and to help identify what _isn 't_ reproducible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As much as I like this, I'm refusing to use Signal for Moxie's[1] stance on requiring access to the address book on iOS [2].

Regretfully I'm not skilled enough to modify the code and create a branch.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11288169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11288169)

[2] [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- iOS/search?utf8=&q=...](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal- iOS/search?utf8=&q=ADDRESSBOOK_RESTRICTED_ALERT_BODY)

<comment><USER10> Oddly, the Android version _seems_ to work just fine if it doesn't have access to your contacts. (Like -ferinstance- if you use Cyanogenmod's Privacy Guard stuff to deny access.)

I don't _know_ , but I've heard Internet Rumors that OWS has been having difficulty finding folks to work on the iOS version of Signal.

Not that you asked for it, but my stance on the read-contacts issue is this: if I can't trust OWS to treat the contacts information that the Signal client transfers to their server as confidential, then I sure as fuck can't trust them to actually resist the urge to subvert either their client or their server code (whether for financial gain, or because someone with a gun comes knocking). Given that I trust OWS to act with integrity, I don't see any significant harm in how they currently handle contact data.

<comment><USER11> CM's privacy guard doesn't deny access to the contacts, it returns a valid address book listing... just an empty one instead of your real contacts.

Privacy Guard was implemented well before the idea of individual permissions being denied made its way into the Android base, so most apps were not implemented with this expectation and would explode completely if the call to fetch the address book entries failed.

Which is just to say that that's not really a valid comparison.

<comment><USER10> > CM's privacy guard doesn't deny access to the contacts, it returns a valid > address book listing... just an empty one instead of your real contacts. ... > Which is just to say that that's not really a valid comparison.

Wot? It's _totally_ a valid comparison.

The problem is transmission of contact information from your phone to a third party. Telling Signal that you have an empty contact list solves that problem, and it solves it _far_ better than just throwing a permissions error or whatever when the software goes to request a contacts list.

<comment><USER11> > Oddly, the Android version seems to work just fine if it doesn't have access > to your contacts.

You're specifically calling out CM's Privacy Guard where the app is unaware that it doesn't have access to your contacts. the difference in behaviour between "Android" and iOS is not "odd" because it's not a 1:1 comparison, and the CM way of doing it specifically mitigates the issue that arises.

A consistent comparison would be seeing what the app does when permission is denied via the runtime permissions in Android 6, because that - like iOS - informs the app that you've denied permission. There is no obvious incongruity between the apps here.

<comment><USER10> > A consistent comparison would be...

Ah! I see what you're saying (and the source of your objection) now. Thanks for clarifying!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Intercept is broadening access to Snowden archive - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/05/16/the-intercept-is-broadening-access-to-the-snowden-archive-heres-why/ <comment><USER2> Call me cynical, but I feel like Greenwald is heading into the territory of just milking what he has now. All of the big revelations have been dropped already, but whenever the Intercept/Greenwald need more clicks or media attention, they just trickle out some more documents.

I detest having to defend the NSA here. I mean, the internal newsletters and other stuff may be an interesting curiosity, but unless they are documenting government crimes or violations or rights, I'm not even sure its right to release them. The NSA does actually an authorized function besides spying on Americans, and that function does require some degree of operational security.

The fact that the NSA provided assistance to interrogations at GITMO is not surprising at all and would be expected. After all, if the CIA is interrogating suspects, the NSA obviously wants to know about phone numbers, methods of communication they're using, passwords, so they can target their SIGINT, so they're going to be providing the CIA/FBI with a list of questions they would want answers to.

On the scale of damaging information, most of the damage has already been done, and I don't think these newsletters really hurt NSA operations. But one wonders, what else does Greenwald have that could be really damaging, and when they run out of other things to release, will they risk releasing stuff that has nothing to do with the abuses that lead Snowden to take action.

<comment><USER3> It's also getting so old that most of this stuff is really out of date anyway. I doubt most of it could do any harm to their OPSEC, unless they held back some noteworthy stuff. My guess is it's mostly just political fuel rather than technical insight, such as the CIA interrogations.

Most of these will just be for historical perspective soon. It's not like there is going to be any punishment for the participants of the potential wrong-doing. So it's always just served as a journalistic window into the operations and not serving some higher legal matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well I guess it is something. But newsletters from 2003...meh. Although the Kryptos Society seems like fun.</comment>


HipChat outage - <AUTHOR> https://status.hipchat.com/ <comment><USER2> A little disappointing this has been going on for approaching 4 hours now. Services like this, Slack, and GitHub, have a big impact on businesses when they're down.</comment>


Overcoming Anonymity - <AUTHOR> http://tgolson.com/blog/overcoming-anonymity/

<comment><AUTHOR> Quick note: I realize I have a bad habit of trying to talk about business school stuff on HackerNews. Basically that's like trying to put a square peg in a round, or something. But it's pretty much the intersection of two major parts of my life right now, and so the two seem to cross paths more than they should.

Anyway, this seems like a pertinent topic as it relates to a great deal of general life and career topics - such as that exec from Microsoft that just resigned because of his Twitter comments.

</comment><comment><USER2> Am I the only one who listens to Depeche Mode?

 _"You'd better learn your lesson well

Hide what you have to hide

And tell what you have to tell

You'll see your problems multiplied

If you continually decide

To faithfully pursue

The policy of truth

Never again

Is what you swore

The time before"_</comment>


templayed.js - The Fastest & Smallest Mustache Compliant Templating Library - <AUTHOR> http://archan937.github.com/templayed.js/

<comment><AUTHOR> BENCHMARK RESULTS can be found here: <https://github.com/archan937/templayed.js/>

BENCHMARK TESTS can be run here: <http://jsperf.com/mustache-compliant- libraries/7>

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

via Functionn - Open Source Resources For Web Developers & Designers: [http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/10/templayedjs-fastest- an...](http://functionn.blogspot.com/2012/10/templayedjs-fastest-and- smallest.html)

P.S. Functionn contains a whole lot more of awesome resources like templayed.js. There only a fraction of them I can post here at a time. Take a look if you're interested, and subscribe:

<http://functionn.blogspot.com>

</comment><comment><USER2> I noticed after reading the repo that it doesn't support partials or streaming. Still a pretty nice effort, but I suspect for many lack of partial support is a big issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, on the semi-ridiculous yet fantastic side of things: <https://gist.github.com/1347239>

<comment><USER4> not as ridiculous as this. <https://gist.github.com/969788>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sorta fails on the list example. The ul's are always displayed even with nothing in the list. It's missing the template definition for lists.

{{#names}}
{#item}
{{name}}
{{/item}}
{{/names}}

</comment><comment><USER6> This is also the most unreadable one: [https://raw.github.com/archan937/templayed.js/master/src/tem...](https://raw.github.com/archan937/templayed.js/master/src/templayed.js)

</comment><comment><USER7> Resig wrote about micro templating in 2008, and his code is much more terse plus it'd be trivial to add interpolation for {{ }}.

Source: <http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/>

(Tip: read through all the comments)

<comment><USER8> Used it for years. Not sure that something else can match its speed.

The only downside is the tricky debugging.</comment></comment>


Prenda Law: EFF has "the same goals" as "terrorist group Wikileaks" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/prenda-law-eff-has-the-same-goals-as-terrorist-group-wikileaks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+arstechnica/index+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content) <comment><USER2> See also Popehat's article on the latest developments in the Prenda Circus:

<http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/21/angry-prenda-is-angry></comment>


Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> I miss Google Reader. I used to read ~100 longer-form blogs that didn't publish daily. After Google Reader went away, I tried other RSS readers but they just weren't as convenient, and my online reading habits shifted to more Twitter. At first that seemed fine but over time it has become hard to keep my Twitter feed free of distracting trivia. Nowadays I just have a much smaller list of blogs I read regularly.

I also miss the way Slashdot made me feel near the dawn of the internet. Before I had the internet, I got my tech news from CNN or from newspapers. Once I got the internet and could read Slashdot, that was just amazing.

<comment><USER4> What did you try?

I used Inoreader and it's now better than Google Reader ever was.

<comment><USER5> +1 for Inoreader. After Google Reader shut down there was a lull where no RSS reader was good enough or similar enough to be satisfactory, but Inoreader is now the proper replacement for me

<comment><USER6> How is Inoreader sustained? The account is free, but TINSTAFL ... is their an upcharge for some services? Are they doing in-system advertising?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Back in the day, there was something called a personal home page. These were simple html pages, sometimes with <blink> tags, where a person would present themselves to the internet. Often there would be a list of bands, or hobbies, a picture, or whatever.

There was a company that maintained an index of home pages made by women. Clearly adolescent in intent, it was otherwise completely benign. There was no leering in the text on the index page, nothing slightly pornographic, nor any apparent selection criteria except that the person represented was female.

Back then, the internet was dialup and very slow. A page took long enough to load that one could perceive the elements as they arrived. It was great. There were hundreds of them. Each page was a little drama of revelation.

The page color would show first (what made her choose vivid purple?). Then headline (Roxie's Place on the Web - who is she?). Then the first text (back then, people admitted to some pretty mundane stuff). A picture probably started loading (duck lips wasn't yet a thing, nor digital cameras). Each detail revealing a portrait painted by some person who wanted to be seen. There was an innocence to the stories told in those early days, before porn, before fake news, even, to some extent, before cynicism.

I think the page might have been maintained by Tucows, now a successful internet company. I have always felt the need to defend the idea that someone could be interested in women on the web without any pornographic intention but, that's what this was. I look back on it fondly and, thanks to whoever did it.

</comment><comment><USER8> For me it's not so much websites as it is the old BBSes I spent my early teens calling up, and of course the door games. MajorMUD, LORD, TradeWars 2002, Usurper, Fazuul. You can still play these games, but playing with the other nerds in my town was really something special. There was also a MUD I played called MUME which is actually still up and still has an active playerbase [0]. Then there were the phone conferences which I dialed into when I could. And of course the old Unix systems I had access to. Probably the most nostalgic and fun of them all was Telenet. For anyone else that remembers Telenet fondly, there's actually a pretty true-to-life Telenet simulator with tens of thousands of systems to explore, and a quite active userbase [1].

[0] [http://mume.org/](http://mume.org/)

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

<comment><USER9> Yes, Telenet! And Tymnet! <3

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What.CD - not because of the free music but because of the community, recommendations by friends and discovering new music on a daily basis.

Right now I'm just listening to the "For You" section of Apple Music and very rarely discover something new. I also don't really have a way to keep things that I like around as there's no nice way to put things in your library if you don't use iCloud Music library. Streaming services also miss a lot of editions or different recordings and their meta tags are usually very bad.

<comment><USER11> A very large portion of the WCD community, especially the more active members of the forums, have largely moved to [Redacted] or [God of Music]. In case you never found out and would like to possibly re-unite with some old friends from WCD.

<comment><USER10> I'm on all of these and it's not the same and I think it will never be. Mostly because torrenting in general is getting less popular and with the raise of streaming services and them getting "good enough" a lot of heavy users including myself moved on. It was also apparent in the forum activity on What that went down steadily over the last years. I also experienced that a lot of my social circle wasn't that active any more at the end as they got older / out of university and started to work. I used to be on the site for hours every day interviewing people but once you start working you just want to do something that doesn't involve a screen in the evening, at least in my experience.

<comment><USER11> I agree it's not the same - but wanted to put that offer on the table in case you weren't and wanted to contact people you may have lost touch with because of the shutdown. Losing touch with friends because you cannot contact them is terrible.

<comment><USER10> I figured, thanks for that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Forums in general.

I'd just check them daily(ish) and participate in various conversations. These days this kind of communication is either in chat groups on Telegram or ephemeral threads on HN and reddit. Rarely are those threads referred back to, unlike topics were. I still do things online that last, such as blogging, pushing to Github and writing stackexchange answers, but none of those are very informal and include joking around sometimes, like we did on forums.

<comment><USER11> I used to be the Administrator of several different iPBFree forums before iPBFree suddenly disappeared.

I really miss the graphics/writing communities that were scattered around forums - it's actually how I learned how to use Photoshop and do front-end programming with HTML/CSS/JS!

Messing around with free forums is what landed me my career today - but forums are all but dead due to social media platforms. Even dedicated forums for games are either dead or have moved to Reddit.

<comment><USER13> Actually, you might find something on JCInk, a lot of the IPBFree communities moved there (having abandoned Invisionfree/Zetaboards).

<comment><USER11> I actually knew John quite well and helped write plenty of tutorials for how to use their ACP back in the day. Since Vipul (the admin of iPBFree) was basically M.I.A for 80% of the time I had been on iPBFree I had once thought of switching over to jcink. Even since not using the forum since 2008 I'm one of the Top 10 pages of posters on the support forum. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have a lot of fond memories of Harmony Central. It was a guitar / musician / gear site. It had a bunch of gear reviews.

I pretty much learned to play guitar off that site and off the early web in general. I took one year of guitar lessons, and then after that it was all learning on the web. This was 1994-1997 or so.

EDIT: Woah I just checked and they're still around!

[http://www.harmonycentral.com/](http://www.harmonycentral.com/)

But they got acquired a long time ago, and the site changed. IIRC it was started by an MIT student, and was acquired around 2000.

Oh it appears that Harmony Central used to be owned by Guitar Center, and then Gibson Guitars in 2015. I had no idea!!!

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

</comment><comment><USER15> OLGA.net : On-Line Guitar Archive. Basically a collection of text files people submitted of guitar tablature for popular songs. If I remember right, they got slammed with DMCA and were forced to shut down. Now we have fantastic tools like Songsterr and anti-user pieces of shit like UltimateGuitar.

I miss OLGA.

<comment><USER16> OLGA was heaven. I still have the print-outs of Metallica tabs I made all those years ago. My first experience of bitterly hating the 'thorities... Iirc there was a torrent which had hundreds of thousands of tabs saved in plaintext from OLGA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This was probably around 1995, I was a young kid just starting to be interested in computers and the internet, and we had a typical slow loading connection.

I remember at one point my dad and I found this random choose your own adventure set of webpages staring Paper Bag Head Man (or something similar) which often left him dead in comical ways. It wasn't a cartoon, just a photo of (presumably) the creator with a paper bag happy face on his head, with some descriptive text, that would take far too long to load on our slow connection.

It was one of the first "internet is weird" moments in my life, and it was fun exploring it with my dad. Ive remembered it in my adult life and have never been able to find any reference to it.

</comment><comment><USER18> fuckedcompany.com - it was full of brilliant stories about the crazy things dotcom companies were up to. I'm sure a version for current startups would be equally fun.

<comment><USER9> I've wondered the same thing: would a site like FC survive these days?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Homestarrunner.com

</comment><comment><USER20> Not a website, but I miss IRC from the early/mid 90's. I managed to discover it via mIRC and spent a lot of time chatting with other kids from around the world (in lieu of face to face communication of course). It exposed me to a lot of things, from programming to the hacker mentality (both white hat and black hat) to just talking to people from different cultures. Well, and seedier things like stolen credit cards, pornography and warez, of course.

It was an interesting place then, as hardly anyone in real life was aware what IRC was and online communication was virtually non-existent, but here was this place where people from all over the world could meet in one place and form groups in channels.

It still exists now, but I haven't found a channel that has the same stable group feel of like-minded individuals since the mid-2000's. I have less time, there's more distractions on the internet in general and people tend to communicate with those they already know.

<comment><USER21> I have been using IRC for as long as you, I guess (mid 90's). And I am active on a large set of channels with very active and stable groups.

They're mostly centred around various technologies on Freenode, so I'd recommend you check there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> * Personal websites from before blogging become commonplace - often part of web rings where you could visit one after another page.

* My own and my friends silly pages.

* Not a page but a feature: referrers weren't blocked so we could check who sent us traffic and visit their pages.

* searching with the old google.com before SEO became popular.

<comment><USER23> "searching with the old google.com before SEO became popular"

I wish I could give people these days an idea of what this was like.

<comment><USER9> ah, you made me remember my visits to google.stanford.edu... :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There used to be a really good comic strip called Angst Technology, hosted at inktank.com. Then it stopped, and I was sad. The funny thing is that a bit later the domain got reused by a different group of people I also know - <USER2> company formed to commercialize Ceph, then bought by Red Hat. All cool, but I still miss the comic strip.

...or missed, I should say. I couldn't remember the exact name of the fictional company, so I googled, and it turns out there's an archive.

[https://comics.beardedcoffeemonkey.com/chapter/angst- technol...](https://comics.beardedcoffeemonkey.com/chapter/angst-technology/)

Yay! I'm happy again. So I cheated on answering this question, but if you love tech then you should check out this strip.

</comment><comment><USER25> I miss the old fandom communities, like pre-strikethru LJ. Currently the bulk of fandom activity takes place on Tumblr, which is awful for a variety of reasons (the platform as designed isn't a good fit for the type of activity, and the community is terrible)

</comment><comment><USER26> For people that respond, could you also give reasons to why you miss the site?

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't recall the domain, but circa 1994 "what's new" was a succinct, daily list of new websites. Like, almost all of them :)

I distinctly remember the original website for the Twinkie torture test...

<comment><USER28> I remember when there was a weekly text file listing all web sites. It was distributed primarily through e-mail (back when we had bang paths), but I think I picked up mine through Usenet.

Also, a revival of Gopher is certainly in order. Hypertext without the hype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Google reader, not really early days but I miss it very much.

When they stopped it I couldn't find a good alternative and my reading habits changed, now I don't read as many blogs as I did.

</comment><comment><USER30> slashdot -- it used to be really useful, interesting, etc. Now HN is much better.

<comment> white-flame Yeah, I do like Slashdot's time-linear format better than HN's fluid ranking, in that you can catch up from where you left off. However, the discussion in /. has gotten really old and bitter. HN has its own pervasive negative community aspects from the other direction, but certainly has more meaningful content in the discussions overall.

The two sites still share a large percentage of links, though, and I read stories on /. that I didn't happen to catch on HN's ephemeral front page.

<comment><USER31> If you want a chronological sort of HN, try [https://hckrnews.com/](https://hckrnews.com/) . I don't go straight to the HN main page anymore.

<comment><USER21> Or just use the RSS feed. It also gives you a chronological views, and your reader will keep track of which ones you've already seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The Yahoo! directory, especially the editor's picks.

<comment><USER33> I was a Yahoo site of the day, equivalent to reddit/hn/sd/ph hug now. It was bonkers. No notification just BLAMMO!

<comment><USER34> excuse me, but what's ph standing for?

<comment><USER35> Producthunt.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd like to mention Geocities. And not in a completely jokingly manner as others have.

I'm not mentioning them because of the quality of the content on there, which was mostly terrible. I'm mentioning them because they represent a different time, they represent all that was particular about the Internet of that time.

Today's Internet is faster, easier to access, with better services and if really want the weird stuff that used to live on Geocities it's still out there.

But Geocities represents more than just its content. They represent a time when the Internet was literally that. A place where you could do anything you want, and where all content producers were playing on the same playing field.

I believe Geocities is one of the best sites to represent that era.

<comment><USER36> Geocities was my gateway to learning basics of HTML & JavaScript. Didn't take much to impress friends with coding in those days (high school / early 00's).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> EZBoard[0], a hosted forums website where you could register a forum for free and IIRC pay to remove ads. (from 98/99 to ~2004)

For me it was social media before social media. I'm just barely old enough to have used newsgroups in the late 90s, but I was never a friend of the interfaces to that medium (which is interesting, I usually prefer CLI over GUI, just not for communication). The web, on the other hand, was very very interesting.

Long story short, made a ton of friends on various of the board communities (mostly digital artists, graphic/screen designers, and web developers (before that was a term)).

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

</comment><comment><USER38> Zombo.com

It solved all my Web 2.0 concerns but unfortunately was authored in Flash and not a modern framework. Alas.

<comment><USER39> [http://html5zombo.com/](http://html5zombo.com/)

<comment><USER38> No mobile audio. I wonder if it works on desktop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The original del.icio.us

</comment><comment><USER41> It's too long ago for me to remember the site's name but the subscription to it came when you signed up for a free Hotmail account back in the late 90s.

You would get an email each day that would take you to the site where you had to solve a reasonably cryptic whodunnit. I've never been good at these sorts of things but I would spend ages reading the story trying to solve the riddle. Pretty fun but years later I can't remember its name and I do miss it from time to time. It was a comfort to know these puzzles were being created and solved in the background but now is no more.

</comment><comment><USER42> cjb.net - I forget if they only allowed http forwarding, or actually gave you a real DNS entry (might have been either?), but you could get a hostname.cjb.net for free, as long as you kept your account active.

</comment><comment><USER43> I really miss the "Q&A sites" like The Conversatron from the late 90's/early 00's [https://www.everything2.com/title/The+Conversatron](https://www.everything2.com/title/The+Conversatron)

Hours of enjoyment from a very simple concept.

EDIT: Oh, who can forget the Purity Test sites! [https://everything2.com/title/Purity+Test](https://everything2.com/title/Purity+Test)

</comment><comment><USER44> Geocities, the "Bob Ross" of websites. It taught us we all can create and that making a website is not something done by professionals somewhere, all it takes is a motivation and willingness to learn a thing or two.

everything2, which is still around

All the forums of yesteryears. These are the neighborhoods where I grew up and to which I can never return. There were no "kids on my street." My school graduating class was 21 people. I met and talked to people and learned online, instead.

</comment><comment><USER7> There was also a site called "A FISH, A BARREL, AND A SMOKING GUN". (I just googled it.) It was iconoclastic back when that was unusual. I liked reading it.

<comment><USER45> That site was < suck.com >. It's the first one that came to mind for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Back in the late 90s and early 2000s I spent a lot of time reading these articles about a guy who'd travel to train martial arts all over the world. It was hosted on Geocities. I thought the site was gone forever, but because of this thread I did a search and found that it's now on its own domain. [http://www.global-training-report.com/](http://www.global-training- report.com/)

</comment><comment><USER47> HotGames. I started on computers playing games, and I remember spending a lot of time on game review websites downloading demo's, trying out cheat-codes, and utilizing the walkthroughs to get through tough spots. It was HotGames that got me into web design by inspiring me to make a website for my own game reviews. After that it was Joe Cartoon and all the similar Flash animators that got me interested in Flash.

</comment><comment><USER48> The one I miss is one that may still be around, but not for long since it was a Flash page. It was, if I recall, a demo page to highlight the designers skills. I don't even remember the name. It was an anime style video that ended with a girl standing on a cliff with flower pedals flowing along the breeze that was blowing her hair as she stared off in the distance. I would love to find that site.

<comment><USER31> Try asking on [https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/](https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/)

Sometimes they get very obscure stuff from vague descriptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The old Youtube, before the fake pranks, fake news, stupid kids doing Minecraft, and no suggestion algorithms that prioritize clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER50> Sunsite (and FTP sites in general). Hitoshi Doi's anime page (which is actually still up). MIDI Farm. Maz Sound. Damaged Cybernetics. HappyPuppy back before Jennifer Diane Reitz really lost the plot. FreshMeat. The GIA. I miss webrings. I miss hand-crufted HTML. I miss <BODY BACKGROUND="....">. I miss Gopher and Archie.

</comment><comment><USER51> Old games forums like BluesNews and TheShack.

<comment><USER37> [https://www.bluesnews.com](https://www.bluesnews.com) is still running, which I learned like 1-2 years ago. But I (like you, I suppose) stopped reading a very long time ago. Can't comment if it's the same team, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> geocities and OG digg.com

</comment><comment><USER53> fark.com even though its demise was relatively recent. I missed the early days when the site wasn't sanitized (and that content, or easy access to it, still felt novel). Felt like one of many "wild west" sites of that time. Before our advertising overlords had come into power.

</comment><comment><USER28> The Keepers of Lists.

Each day there would be a list title, and the public would add funny items to the list.

Things like "Top xx reasons a grilled cheese is better than a taco."

People could vote entries up and down, helping bury the spam.

I'm not sure when it went away, but I don't think it survived past about 1999.

</comment><comment><USER54> A site with free handwriting lessons. It taught Italic as a solution for people with serious handwriting problems who could not learn cursive effectively.

They took all the free stuff down and became a consultant. They would still teach you the same thing, but for a fee.

</comment><comment><USER55> About 2e-1 centuries ago, there was this website called ars-technica.com. Had a pretty good forum, if sometimes kind of rowdy in that early-days-of-the- internet way. East Coast financiers built a suburb in its place, after the closing of the frontier.

</comment><comment><USER56> webmonkey.com because that's where I learnt a lot of my craft, and TalkCity (which probably still exists) because of the community I discovered when I was going through a rough personal patch, and that community no longer exists.

<comment><USER57> Was going to say webmonkey too, internet connections at that time were dial up and pretty expensive at the time in Spain (you were charged by the minute)

So I downloaded the entire archive using a shareware scraper , and learned a lot from that offline copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> menwholooklikekennyrogers.com

That was the sort of site that made the early Internet such a majestic time waster. I used to stay up all night in the university CS lab on a Sun SPARCstation surfing with Mosaic.

Yes, kids, there was a web browser before Netscape.

</comment><comment><USER59> Hmm, I'd say CheatEngine Forums used to be a pretty great place in terms of a bunch of geeks, finding various exploits in video games. It's what got me interested in computing in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER60> I am on Internet since 1992 and I do miss absolutely nothing. Websites were horrible, with limited usability and you then had to send a cheque or call.

Today internet life is simply better, with much much more choice.

</comment><comment><USER61> the original myspace.com

it was a colorful and public social media platform, not this monochromous closed bullshit called facebook. as a user 'you were allowed' (keep that in mind in todays world of restricted fb!) to customize the entire look of your page with strange css/html/javascript hacks. that was really fun to do! things started to get odd when they regularly changed website mechanisms like location based services to invite people to a concert/party. that's how this web service got unreliable and frustrating

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm still traumatized from the time I would spend on rotten.com

</comment><comment><USER63> Astalavista.com - Was a site for hackers and script kiddies. Loved it because I wanted to be a "hacker". Google Reader. Best free, web based RSS reader ever.

</comment><comment><USER64> fatbabies.com was a dotcom era gossip site for people working .com startups to spill the beans on the outrageous behavior at their companies. Often times the person trying to spill beans is turned inside out for being wrong in their position. Very sarcastic and stress relieving. And as side entertainment, you and your coworkers try figure out which posts are about your company.

</comment><comment><USER65> kuro5hin & MetaFilter ...

</comment><comment><USER66> SK8CHAT.com. It was a very 1.0 chat room. It was so pure. Early days for me meant 8-9 years old. My first real instances of the internet.

</comment><comment><USER57> I miss gigposters.com a lot, the community there was awesome with all the big poster artists hanging around and giving beginners advice.

</comment><comment><USER67> Cybertown.com. So much ahead of its time. 3D social network using VRML through a browser plugin called Blaxxun Contact.

<comment><USER50> Fun fact: Blaxxun was named for the Black Sun, the virtual club from Snow Crash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I miss segfault.org. It is still there on the wayback machine. It contained well written parody tech stories.

</comment><comment><USER69> "Mr. T Ate My Balls" \- probably the original "meme" as it would be defined today

</comment><comment><USER70> Mirsky's Worst of the Web, because Gabocorp and FuckedCompany were already mentioned =)

</comment><comment><USER71> sunsite.unc.edu

I used to check it almost daily for new Linux software, because maybe that next editor, scripting language or window manager would be just what I want -- or at least an interesting experience.

</comment><comment><USER72> hell.com, gabocorp.com

</comment><comment><USER73> Eric Conveys an Emotion, still there but not updated

</comment><comment><USER74> The "Decapitate an Angel" page, of course.

</comment><comment><USER75> neverside.com // tutorialforums.com

<comment><USER76> Was going to post this! That was a great community. I bet many of us are still here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> The Fake Steve Jobs Diary comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER78> meebo.com

There's nothing like it anymore (web-based, quick, secure). It was fast and excellent. Google killed it.

</comment><comment><USER79> kopikol.net, an early (2005 until 2007) very nicely designed digg-like

</comment><comment><USER80> stickdeath.com

Can't find a mirror or archive of it, nor the creator. :(

<comment><USER81> I'm not sure if they still exist as I won't risk checking them at work, but stickdeath.com, albinoblacksheep.com, neopets.com, rotten.com, portalofevil.com, lemonadestand.com, oilwars/gangwars and others were a big part of my middle school years

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Fuckedcompany.com

</comment><comment><USER83> Lowbrow.com

</comment><comment><USER84> Web Monkey

</comment><comment><USER85> Geocities

</comment><comment><USER86> goatse.cx .... or not!

</comment><comment><USER87> www.fravia.org

</comment><comment><USER88> av.com</comment>


CopBlock.org Founder Faces 21 Years in Prison for Reporting Police Brutality - <AUTHOR> http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-824678 <comment><USER2> He is not being charged for posting the (mentioned) publicly recorded video of the cop slamming the kids face into the table.

What he is being charged for is calling police officials and others on the phone after this, and recording the conversations _without getting the other parties permission to record the phone call_... Then posting those recordings online.

This is how 95% of these stories are. Facts are hidden, what happened is misrepresented; stories to fit narratives are made up.

Don't get me wrong, if you call an on-duty police official at the police station maybe they shouldn't be given/expect privacy, but this story makes it seem that this guy is being charged for posting the mentioned video. Clearly he is not.

<comment><USER3> This makes much more sense. Still... I should be able to record my own phone calls, right? I think by picking up a phone you should be ready to be recorded especially as a police officer/prominent public figure.

<comment><USER4> It's something of a relic of early-20th-c debates on wiretapping. Some states came to the conclusion that it's "wiretapping" unless _both_ sides of a conversation agree, which has a certain privacy-law type feel to it. In other states, it's only wiretapping if you're doing it unbeknownst to both participants, which is closer to the normal definition of wiretapping, looking more at the "sneaking onto a phone line you don't belong on" aspect rather than privacy concerns.

It can produce some oddities in companies as well. It's now assumed that a corporation can read employees' email, for example, or record their internet or IM traffic. But in a two-party-consent state, it would be illegal for your employer to record telephone calls made from your office phone, unless they get the consent of each person you talk to.

<comment><USER5> > But in a two-party-consent state, it would be illegal for your employer to > record telephone calls made from your office phone, unless they get the > consent of each person you talk to.

My understanding is that the most restrictive state applies, so you don't even have to be in a two-party state, you just need to be calling one.

In any case, this is why every call center you talk to says "this call may be recorded" when you first connect. It's not just a courtesy!

<comment><USER6> I've been told the opposite. If your call is interstate, then federal rules (one party consent) apply.

<comment><USER5> According to this page, it's not 100% clear or consistent, but the more restrictive state's laws applying is definitely a possibility: <http://www.rcfp.org/can-we-tape/interstate-phone-calls>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While "crowdsourced" reporting is kind of cool, this report strikes me as an example of that idea gone awry. It took some googling to find a reasonable account, from the Reporters Committee For Freedom of the Press[0]. This would, if anything, be biased toward Mr. Mueller, but it put the above article in an entirely different light.

1) As others have pointed out, he's on trial for allegedly recording three telephone calls to the police, a school principal, and a school secretary, without the consent of all parties, then made them publicly available. This is a felony under NH law. The iReport article implies, via quotations from multiple sources, that Mr. Mueller is on trial for filming police brutality. In fact, it appears that _he called these parties_ for comment, so this doesn't even seem to be an issue of the right to record your arrest, or interested interactions with the state.

2) CopBlock.org and other "citizen watch" type sites might be a great idea, but performances like Mr. Mueller's, who apparently insists on the court calling him "Ademo Freeman", says things like "Bring on the Circus", and represents himself in a criminal case just paint these movements in a bad light. Police brutality, over-reaching state authority, etc. might be big problems; this kind of misguided moral crusade does not help.

3) I can understand the frustration supporters might find with inconsistent applications of wiretapping laws: I am not sure the state would care if a random citizen made three phone calls public, if no one pressed charges or there weren't some other reason. This article in no way communicates any of these issues and instead implements a tirade of misdirection and indignation.

Finally, I'd like to say something in defense of professional journalists. I know they often get a bad rap as being either extensions of the state vying for "influence" or sensationalists chasing controversy in every corner, but reports like this make me appreciate journalists who:

\- call for comment \- search for credible sources, preferably ones with opposing viewpoints \- read or link to actual court documents

EDIT: You can find the video where he publishes the recordings here: <http://youtu.be/sEhFwI6IyMU> . Both the principal and the police officer made it reasonably clear they did not wish to discuss the matter. While the principal did respond to Mueller's questions, it seems unlikely she implied any consent to record.

[0][http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/nh- blogg...](http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/nh-blogger- charged-felony-wiretapping-could-receive-21-year-prison-s)

<comment><USER8> I'm with you on the disgust for these Assange-personas, but what he did should not be illegal.

He was talking to public servants over a line owned by the state. He was specifically contacting them because of their respective roles in public departments. He was contacting them to talk about things that fall squarely into their responsibilities as public servants.

Public servants have no expectation of privacy in fulfilling their duties, why should it be different when you talk to them over the phone about said duties?

So yes, these wiretapping laws need to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> According to the one other source I found, it wasn't the video which led to the charges.

He recorded a subsequent phone call with the police department without notifying them that the call was being recorded. According to Wikipedia, regarding the recording of telephone conversations, New Hampshire is an 'all parties consent' state, and seemingly by his own admission he broke this law. Thus the calls for jury nullification, to ignore a law which they find unjust.

<comment><USER10> So recording a phone call (without consent) is a reason for locking someone up for 21 years?

<comment><USER11> Good question. Here is a complete transcript that I have typed up of the 24 second long phone call that is the controversial call in question. (source: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEhFwI6IyMU>)

Patrol Captain Office, can I help you?

Ah yes, I was calling to see if there was a comment about a video that is surfacing on line of Detective Murphy slamming a 17 year old child on top of a table.

Well, I haven't seen the video. Where is it?

It's on a web site called CopBlock.org.

OK, I'll take a look. (Click.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One observation and one question.

First... this guy is gonna be a hero with a capital H if they send him to prison for recording the cops. Hero with the left and the libertarian right. Hero with the other prisoners... probably beyond that whole black-white gang thing. He will be untouchable.

Anyway...

I would also like to try to get an idea of the reasoning behind making it illegal to record the police, or indeed ANY public servant, in the execution of their duties. Suppose I make a phone call to, let's say, a public school. During this call I inquire about something erroneous that they may have been telling my child... as I understand this, it is illegal for me to record that call to use as documentary evidence of the challenges the child may face in that school.

I am wondering why that is the case? There must be some 'bad' way that can be used, so they don't allow it. I just can't see what 'bad' thing it s the government is worried about. Any lawyers out there able to address that quickly?

<comment><USER13> The main reasons behind this law have nothing to do with police work or public officials, actually. Two-party consent wiretapping laws generally apply regardless of who's on the other end. You could get charged for recording your own grandmother, not just a cop. (At least in principle you could, though it probably wouldn't happen.)

So why were these laws enacted? Basically to protect privacy. State legislatures decided that surreptitious recording of one's one phone calls was an invasion of the other person's privacy. I personally am against these laws, but that's the rationale behind them. It's not about protecting cops in particular.

<comment><USER14> I think these laws were enacted solely to protect deeply corrupt systems, but I might be biased because I live in Illinois. With laws like this, administration-connected people can be openly corrupt, because the collection of evidence against them is in itself evidence of a crime.

No one is prosecuted for corruption in Illinois unless they become a roadblock in some way to someone with more clout (after which they resign and charges are quietly dropped), or the Feds come to town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This certainly sounds egregious, and it may very well be, but all of the posts I can find on the subject appear to be written with approximately the same tone (one on prwire, which takes any press release folks want to post) and this one from iReport (which is crowdsourced).

I would be interested in reading any sources folks know about about this that are external to the Free Ademo movement.

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't find a good one so I posted the link to CNN, I am with you on needing a better source

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The controversial felony wiretapping charges journalist and CopBlock.org > founder Adam 'Ademo' Mueller is facing will go to trial, a situation that > has stirred up a hornet's nest of free speech advocates in New Hampshire.

Not on the topic of the article, but this must be the worst-written sentence I've read in weeks; I had to read it three times before I finally figured out what it meant (a dude is going to trial).

<comment><USER17> I think the implication is that the felony wiretapping charges will be one of the things on trial, due to the efforts towards jury nullification.

But, yes, that is a horrible sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 21 years for wiretapping? This surely sounds extreme, to the point of being incredible - can somebody with some expertise in legal system evaluate how probably is to get such sentence? Given no priors, no history of violence, no harm to property or any person and no criminal intent - even if he violated the law I don't see how it can even warrant one year in jail, let alone 21. Is US judicial system really that screwed up or is it just imagination of article writers?

<comment><USER11> It's very simple to understand. The person charged is a human rights and justice blogger who runs a site called CopBlock where for years he has posted videos of police brutality, lawlessness and thuggery. He is a thorn in the side of the police and they are highly aware of him and watch him closely looking for slip-ups.

In November 2011 he recorded a 24 second long call devoid of content where the person on the other end was a desk officer in a two-party consent state. This act of recording gave them probable cause for arrest, and he is in fact guilty of the "crime". This is a popular tactic for dealing with social justice advocates in authoritarian regimes: watch them closely and surely they will be guilty of something eventually.

As Cardinal Richelieu said, "Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre." (If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.) In the US there are so many laws on the books, that all of us are violating some of them almost daily. This is discussed in Harvey Silverglate's book "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent", Gene Healy's "Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything", and Paul Rosenzweig's "One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty".

Much more shocking than this incident are the people who benefit from living in a free and just society, but who are supporting and defending the charges and proposed prison sentence in this travesty, this abomination, this violation of humanity and of human rights. 21 years in prison for a human rights activist, where he will be subjected to the endemic prison rape and violence that the inmates of the american justice system enjoy? All because of recording a 24 second call with police? To see members of the public supporting this in any way whatsoever is utterly nauseating and those people supporting even any sentence at all are vile monsters, devoid of any decency or reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, to put this into perspective if you kill someone in Australia you're looking at a sentence of about 15 years in comparison to recording someone without their permission and getting 21 years... This is seriously a joke and given the outrage being generated by almost everyone you know he'll walk free. The fact CNN is writing about this and by the language used in the article they agree he shouldn't be jailed it'll be interesting to see what comes of all of this.

<comment><USER20> Also to put things in perspective, Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed 69 teenagers last summer, will get a maximum of 21 years in prison. This is the highest sentence possible under Norwegian law.

<comment><USER21> That isn't quite right. The 21 year sentence can be extended to keep him in prison for life [0].

He is not going to be walking out of jail free 21 years from now.

[0] <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17724535>

<comment><USER20> Yes, but the point was the "punishment" part is 21 years maximum. Any additional time will be only to protect the lives of other citizens.

<comment><USER22> Not sure if its fair to call you out on this but what would any additional "punishment" bring anyone ? 21 years is a long long time.

Extending the prison term seems like the right way to go and keep the issues of punishment and safekeeping separate.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I agree with this. 20+ sentences seem redundant - anything more is basically a life sentence.

Don't know if you're from Norway, but Norwegian criminal law has a distinction between 21 years, which is the maximum sentence permitted by law, and "forvaring", which is explicitly defined as additional, indefinite custody with the express purpose of protecting society from violent criminals which have a very high risk of doing repeat offenses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For the curious, I believe these are the videos in question: <http://www.copblock.org/8754/manchh/>

(Second video is the phone calls, third video is the high school recording)

</comment><comment><USER24> I wish this article was written by an actual journalist. Seems to be very one- sided.</comment>


Ember.js Screencasts - <AUTHOR> http://www.emberscreencasts.com/

<comment><USER2> I will sign up in a heartbeat because I EmberJS is my primary workhorse framework. Please tag things that are Ember CLI though. Things pre-CLI are of no use to me because of how drastic the changes are.

<comment><USER3> Hey, glad you're enjoying the screencast! I've been using ember-cli in everything past episode 14. They don't always call attention to that fact, but everything is meant for use in ember-cli.

If you're looking for things that specifically address ember-cli features, I made a tag for that: [http://www.emberscreencasts.com/tags/ember- cli](http://www.emberscreencasts.com/tags/ember-cli)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It'd be useful to identify with tags or something the version. There's a lot of pre-Ember CLI tutorials and videos out there, and it'd be good to know that these videos are targeting the latest and greatest, not techniques from 2 years ago.

<comment><USER3> When I make the screencasts, I try to use the latest version release, as well as ember-cli. Occasionally I'll miss that the week or two after a new version comes out, due to my recording schedule, but in general the release date will tell you what version I've been using.

With that said, labelling the version used in the screencasts isn't a bad idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

<comment><USER4> Cool - I assumed so. I wouldn't worry about a week or two old, as long as your viewing have a baseline for knowing that you're tracking releases pretty regularly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It amazes me that Ember is not more popular than it is. Still, I can't complain -- it doesn't seem to have slowed those guys down in the slightest.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is Ember the cool JS framework now? It seems nice enough to me. I have such a headache from thinking about this front-end framework idealogy. I've used a few tools but I generally don't make one-page apps so I stick to JQuery + micro frameworks and maybe some React.

<comment><USER7>
        >Is Ember the cool JS framework now?

My casual following of various frameworks (through HN and Twitter signals) seems that ~12-18 months ago Angular and Ember were duking it out for current "cool kid" status with Angular seeming to edge Ember out. But framework trendiness comes and goes like seasons of American Idol (or maybe Eurovision) and ~6-9 months ago React took the top spot for now.

<comment><USER8> I'd say this is fairly accurate from my standpoint compiling trends[1] from whoishiring threads here on HN. Ember has not really taken off like Angular and React. Angular was a rocket, but React is now rising even faster than Angular did, while Ember just goes along at a pretty flat pace.

[1] [http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring- trends/2015/...](http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring- trends/2015/may.html?compare1=AngularJS&compare2=Backbone&compare3=Ember&compare4=React)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Javascript is not an Object-Oriented language, but Ember is"

Javascript is pretty clearly object-oriented, though the inheritance method (prototypal) is very different from classic OOP. Moreover I don't think Ember is actually doing anything crazy under the hood, so it's distinct "object system" is probably leveraging mixins and maybe some prototypal inheritance?

<comment><USER3> Ember is definitely leveraging prototypal inheritance under the hood... the object system is "just" some syntactic sugar so we can more easily reason about our code using the thought patterns we learned in other OO languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps you should use something other than YouTube to host, given the videos that are displayed at the end of the video? (Something like Wistia lets you embed an action, like an email signup, etc, and gives you analytics, and more)

<comment><USER10> Youtube does allow you to disable the recommended videos that shows at the end of the video in your embeds (also, YT does provide some basic analytics on your videos like how many views, how long people watched and such).

<comment><USER3> Both of these comments are helpful. Thank you!

I'm going to disable the recommended videos for now, and then investigate Wystia for a higher quality long-term solution.</comment></comment></comment>


Google plans to give slow websites a new badge of shame in Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/11/20959865/google-chrome-slow-sites-badge-system-chrome-dev-summit-2019 <comment><USER2> Interesting, will they also penalize slow loading due to egregious ad networks?

<comment><USER3> on mobile at least, i ended up disabling javascript because most big sites have recently become unusable. I have the feeling analytics and ads are the main culprits, because not much new has happened content wise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > authored in a way that makes them slow generally

I feel like there is some kind of vehicle for promoting AMP in here somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER5> Previously, on Hacker News:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508339)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508401)

</comment><comment><USER6> Excelente idea. Its like gamefication but at the other way around.

IMHO, the badge of shame should be bigger!

Regardless the cause (bad programming or bad network), the fact is that some sites are a shame.

<comment><USER7> From my understanding when networks are mentioned there are two types. The internal networks of the website (talking between containers, databases and what not) and the users mobile, fiber, or hopefully nor DSL network. It's the internal network that they want to punish.</comment></comment>


Men Only: Inside the charity fundraiser where hostesses are put on show - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/075d679e-0033-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5 <comment><USER2> It's about time someone reported it.</comment>


A Breaking Fever: Apple, Lies and Videotape - <AUTHOR> http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/a_breaking_fever_apple_lies_and_videotape/ <comment><USER2> _The fact that most of us have ditched all our VHS tapes and perhaps even DVDs and converted to Blu-ray discs is a testament to that human need for modern, elegant, complete solutions._

What? I've done no such thing, and know of no who has. I know people who may buy new stuff on Blu-ray, but most people I know are happy to watch something via some stream and never bother with storing a physical. Of those who _do_ buy movies quite a few (such as myself) are quite happy with plain old DVD. I know nobody who is interesting in re-buying something they have on DVD to get it on Blu-ray.

His point about TV show skepticism is dead-on for me. I've learned not to get invested in any show that hasn't made it to season 2. Sadly this leads to a self-fulfilling end; fewer people watch the first season because they have no confidence their attention will be rewarded, so ratings are poor and shows are not renewed for season 2.</comment>


Ask HN: API design practices - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I'm currently designing a couple of web services (1 will be for public use, another is mainly for mobile integration with an app I am developing but with possibility of opening it up for public consumption depending on what my client says).
Are there any resources from which I can read up on web design best practices/patterns? For example, how to handle versioning (compatibility between client and api). StackOverflow released an article documenting some of the lessons they learnt and they are fixing for the next version; more of this would be nice.
Essentially, what I am looking for is a checklist of things a Web Service API should have.
Regards, Daryl <comment><USER2> Not specifically about web service APIs, but you might enjoy this talk by Joshua Bloch [1]:

"How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw>

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bloch>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > For example, how to handle versioning (compatibility between client and api)

Whatever you do, please have a distinguishable api versioning.

i.e:

example.com/api/1.0/

or:

api.example.com/1.0/

In this way you can add other versions very easily (api.example.com/2.0/) and avoid clinet-side confusions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I do have this planned (followed StackOverflow).

What I'm looking for is a resource where these kinds of things are pointed out.

Any ideas regarding Authentication? Roll your own, or implement OAuth? When would be a good time to use OAuth?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This document was immensely helpful to me <http://chaos.troll.no/~shausman/api-design/api-design.pdf>

Related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2796371></comment>


Sugar substitutes may mess with gut bacteria–causing obesity in the process - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21613311-sugar-substitutes-may-mess-gut-bacteriacausing-obesity

<comment><USER2> Discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8331474](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8331474).</comment>


New Overtime Rules Will Make Life Much Harder for Young Workers - <AUTHOR> https://mises.org/blog/new-overtime-rules-will-make-life-much-harder-young-workers <comment><USER2> What a bunch of FUD, the author should grow some balls and come out and say they believe $23k a year means McDonalds should be able to demand 80hr weeks from you.

Not that the major abusers are going to pay any more than they already do, Amazon at their Bellevue, WA warehouse "asks" hourly employees to come in early and work at least an hour off the clock before some shifts, plus since they are in Bellevue, they pay state minimum wage.</comment>


SoundYouNeed.com - unique search engine - <AUTHOR> http://soundyouneed.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Today soundyouneed.com is responsive. Check this out ! Or you can add SYN as app to your Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/soundyouneed/bhebp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/soundyouneed/bhebpdpaeogninadnbhlkcdpcpmdkgom)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 90% our visits are from Japan! Because we was on lifehacker.jp ;)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please give us some feedback!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Nobody?</comment>


Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now Its Falling Apart - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/our-government-runs-on-a-60-year-old-coding-language-and-now-its-falling-apart-61ec0bc8e121 <comment><USER2> COBOL isn't falling apart, the systems are exceeding their design limits. "Oh if it were just written in a modern language everything would be fine". Not true - we create modern systems every day that would choke and die if they had to scale several orders of magnitude instantly - in fact it happens about weekly when an unsuspecting link hits the HN front page. Also, I would wager 90%+ of software written today is 10-100x more fragile over time than whatever COBOL software is on these machines. What do you think the chances are of those 100 fancifully orchestrated micro-services running 10 abstraction layers up on 3rd party infrastructure are of running at all a decade from now, never mind within their original design constraints.

Old doesn't necessarily mean worse and newer doesn't necessarily mean better, but that logical foundation is easy to forget in a tech culture so often myopically focused on innovation(tm) and short-term profit or austerity above robustness.

The relative rarity of COBOL programmers aside, this is a just an garden variety f* up of keeping legacy systems around too long because they aren't "broken". And like technical debt, the money and effort to fix them, despite many warnings and pleas, is called a waste because there is no immediate benefit or profit.

Then something like this happens, and everyone forgets the shortsighted management or decision makers that ignored the risk and collected bonuses and praise for saving the Corp/taxpayers money. Those who warned about the debt coming due get nothing except being able to say "I told you so" for a few weeks until the whole thing blows over.

<comment><USER3> I agree with what you wrote, this is not a problem with the COBOL language, except in the narrow sense that it's not taught anymore and probably 95% of programmers working today have never seen COBOL. A professional programmer with some experience can learn COBOL in a few weeks. It's not Linear A.

The cost of fixing technical debt has to outweigh the cost and risks of replacing legacy systems. Most ground-up rewrites fail, and that's even more of a problem in the government sector. A working system with problems is still better than an imaginary system that will probably never go live. Google IRS, California DMV, Oregon utilities, etc. etc. for examples of how these rewrites actually work out.

<comment><USER2> Yes I do remember reading the one - maybe it was Google IRS - that they tried replacing cobol with Java.

Maybe in some cases they just need a new IBM mainframe instead of re-written software.

<comment><USER4> Emulating mainframes isn't an uncommon approach.

But, switching to something like Java would be far better. COBOL on mainframes has nothing to recommend it. There are good reasons nobody chooses to write new systems that way. For one, it's a single vendor tech in which that vendor is a huge firm in terminal decline and thus highly incentivised to squeeze customers financially as hard as possible; government IT spending is already wasteful without propping up the IBM share price.

There are few paths forward to improve such systems. Beyond the lack of skilled personnel, there's no real open source community or any community producing libraries or integrations.

The problems with these sorts of rewrites are that non-technical managers don't really understand the concept of tech debt until it's way too late and you have a situation like this one. There's no sense that constant improvement should be expected, like what you find in the tech industry, indeed they usually take pride in avoiding projects that are "technology for technologies sake". And that _sounds_ very reasonable, right up until you discover people have basic expectations that you can't fulfil in any plausibly fast manner, or everyone who understands your system has retired and died.

So to justify any replatforming or upgrade project, it has to be done via promising lots of new features as part of the rewrite and that screws with the sequencing. Now it's not a tech upgrade project but rather a total upgrade of many different things simultaneously, including often rigid business processes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Attributing these problems to COBOL is short sighted. While COBOL is obsolete for good reasons, it does provide high performance and makes it relatively easy to construct new batch-processing tasks quickly, due to its built-in data model (a concept which is largely absent from modern programming languages but does pop up from time to time in forms like MS LINQ - historically it was far more common, see also MUMPS). Because COBOL applications run predominantly in batch-mode they are also fairly robust and easy to troubleshoot compared to many modern systems, isolating a problem being a matter of running the batch jobs individually and finding the bad intermediary state, and recovering from a failure being a matter of just restarting the job. Intermediate state is almost always persisted to storage so it's easy to work back to where the problem occurred, unlike in e.g. a microservice architecture where doing so can require a dedicated tracing system and still be quite difficult.

Consider that we could write a headline like "Amazon runs on a 50-year-old operating system, and now it's falling apart." The sentence is not entirely untrue but rather misses the point.

The problem is this: these systems are old and, more significantly, have received extremely limited maintenance and enhancement over their lifetimes. This means that there are few people familiar with each system (a "bus factor" problem) and, more broadly, that the talent-base of COBOL programmers has been allowed to recede to near-zero. While a common modernization (or "recapitalization," a term preferred in government contracting) route in the tech industry might be to take a legacy system written in e.g. Java and progressively reimplement it in e.g. Python with a simplified architecture, a common recap route in government is to take a legacy system written in COBOL or s/370 assembly and transition it to an s/370 emulator running on HPUX on NonStop. I've been involved in such processes a couple of times. It has the advantage of maintaining the reliability properties of the legacy system at relatively low-cost since very little software work is involved. It has the tremendous disadvantage of allowing the organization to continue to not touch the software, with much of the work often outsourced to a vendor who need not be very familiar with the codebase either

You certainly wouldn't write anything in COBOL in 2020, but COBOL itself does have a robust and even fairly maintainable design. The problem is that any application written 20 years ago or more, regardless of language, is going to be tremendously difficult to modify to meet changing requirements and increased demand. Unemployment insurance applications reaching six million per week, for example, would strain a system designed using the most modern methodology which was specified for a few hundred thousand. The difference is that, with a newer system, there are likely to be in-house engineers or vendors who are very familiar with the system and will be able to expand its capacity more rapidly.

Another underlying problem is that legacy systems designed using a mainframe methodology are intended for vertical scaling - to process more records you buy a bigger machine (or expand the LPAR or what have you). While horizontal scaling has its own disadvantages there's a reason it's so popular today - it's a lot faster to buy more capacity from a cloud provider than to requisition a larger mainframe^w midcomputer^w emulation host. There are few vendors and government acquisitions are slow at the best of times, even under emergency sole-source rules.

In a way the whole thing is ironic, because a lot of COBOL application interfaces are faster than any software we use today. From the perspective of a human operator they can be absolutely outstanding once you get over a learning curve. However, the lack of any enhancements made to these systems mean that requirements changes are often "patched in peopleware" if you will, and you end up with clerks that can enter data an order of magnitude more efficiently than with a likely modern solution, but they then have to send the records to a virtual printer to be ingested into a Java EE solution... this kind of "enterprise patching" rapidly adds up to an extremely inefficient system.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is far more scary than the old stuff our government is running in COBOL, is the new stuff running in Excel. Excel became a de facto Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), accessibly to anybody. Old COBOL programs were still developed with some software engineering discipline. Current Excel spreadsheets have none of that. And, this doesn't apply to the government only - private enterprise runs bazillions(?) untested, unverified spreadsheets. Wish I could share what I've seen.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true. I used to work in one of the biggest banks in the world. More than half the divisions were dependent on Excel. Every time there was an audit, a huge bunch of spreadsheets were automated. By the time the automation was complete, another hundred spreadsheets would have popped up. It was like trying to spray weeds. I remember one spreadsheet that contained the only formula for calculating risk in an almost billion dollar portfolio. Genuinely scary stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My first computing job, many years ago, was maintaining a large, COBOL program for an insurance company. I doubt the problem the American government is now facing has much to do with COBOL in itself.

It probably has much more to do with the fact that these COBOL programs were designed to run on IBM mainframe computers and to interact with various proprietary IBM subsystems (with names like CICS, VSAM, VTAM, DB2, etc.) These subsystems are non-trivial to learn and there's been little/no incentive for anyone new to learn them for the last (at least) twenty years.

Finally, back in the 80's and 90's, some programs were written in IBM assembler language instead of COBOL, for example when there was a need for greater speed. Understanding and maintaining (or porting these programs to a non-mainframe environment) is also non-trivial.

I left the IBM mainframe world completely 20 years ago, switched over to working only on Unix/Linux systems, did that for 20 years, and am now happily retired. However I'm sure there are still lots of older IBM mainframe people around to handle these problems, they just cost money.

<comment><USER3> A lot of the problem stems from the databases. COBOL, and these legacy systems, pre-date relational databases. They work with proprietary and custom file formats, which COBOL was designed to work well with. Regardless of technical debt or scaling problems, the data in these systems has tremendous value, and converting it to a modern relational structure is a bigger job than fixing some bugs in COBOL code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not a great headline really, C is nearly 50, but most people wouldn't consider it a disaster for everything to be written in C. The problem isn't that COBOL is old, it's that it's largely obsolete.

<comment><USER9> Who would not consider a information system application written in C a disaster? Can't think of anyone who who would want to work on that.

I agree with your point though.

<comment><USER10> no, because literally every application except the most trivial touch c.

every major RBMS is c or c++.

you don't write frontend's with c/c++ but if you're interacting with a datastore most are c.

the problem with c and c++'s age are legacy behaviors related to them we've since determined are not beneficial to actual programs and make reasoning about them harder.

<comment><USER11> Of course everything touches c. But it's mostly all open source stuff that is maintained by a large community of coders and is mostly underlying dependencies.

When you are developing software, you just want that stuff to work. You don't want to have to dig around in the internals to figure things out.

That's why scripting languages have become so popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem with rewriting the COBOL code base in a newer, sexier language, is that this new language will itself become obsolete in ten or twenty years. Then you're back to square one re-writing the app in another newer language.

So businesses faced with this problem have a choice: accept that their code is written in an old language, and train programmers to learn it. Or pay big money to convert their code into... a language that will soon be obsolete, in an endless treadmill.

Isn't it better to be obsolete and not pay conversion costs, rather than be obsolete and pay perpetual conversion costs?

Yes, programmers are more productive in newer languages. However, you are never going to get rid of the old stuff, so you will always need some programmers versed in every language, at every stage of your conversion hamster wheel.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think that The Onion should run an article: "Coders Shocked to Find Accounting Systems Written in a Language Designed for Accounting Systems."

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems like the age of something is the argument.

I starting thinking of this and thought:

\- Much modern AI software depends on 63-year old fortran numerical methods code.

\- the Brooklyn Bridge is 137 years old.

\- the White House is 220 years old

\- Aristotle was using logical reasoning over 2300 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now I know how to reply when someone posts "I have a week with nothing to do. What language should I learn next?" COBOL.

Seriously, anyone with some programming experience can learn COBOL or any other language in a few weeks. Maybe with so many hip startups for concierge cat sitting closing down more programmers with time on their hands and no paycheck will crack the McCracken book (the one I learned COBOL from ages ago).

<comment> non-entity If i could get hired with a good rate after just learning the COBOL language maybe. Unfortunately, I don't have a mainframe for me to learn the rest of the environment in.

<comment><USER15> IBM give away free year-long z/OS accounts:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20873531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20873531)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Informative comments. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER17> *60-Year-Old software systems</comment>