Victorian Era Drones: How Model Trains Transformed from Cutting-Edge to Quaint - <AUTHOR> http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-model-trains-transformed-from-cutting-edge-to-quaint/ <comment><USER2> I love how the technology label of the age is used throughout culture to indicate "modernity" and "cool". Everything today must be "digital" (whether that makes sense or not -- consider the rush to "digital voting" in the US in 2001 even though it only, and only potentially, addressed one perceived problem and introduced plenty of others).

You can see this happening to trains in the 1920s and thirties, when the high speed trains of the era adopted a "flyer" moniker (e.g. the "Philadelphia Flyer" express train -- and now "Flyer" apparently lives on as the name of a model train system). The term arrived as flight began to take over as the cool new transportation.

In the Atomic age we had "atomic fireball" cinnamon balls and the "bikini" swimsuit.

But my favorite of all is a toy waggon from the 1930s called the "radio flyer" which, though a simple kids' wagon, managed to adopt two high tech trends in one name, though it had nothing to do with either.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if this is why the Philadelphia hockey team is called the Flyers?

<comment><USER4> Doubtful since the Flyers started as a franchise in 1967.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Flyers#Colors.2C_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Flyers#Colors.2C_name_and_logo)

It was the result of a naming contest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "For the 21st-century kids stuck in the back seat of that car, trains are noisy, antiquated, and irredeemably boring..."

Having been to a model railroad show or two, every model train/town/yard is a model from the 1950's, 1940's or 1930's. Nowhere did I see any bullet trains or maglevs or modern cities being modeled. I always found this depressing, as if the hobby only had a past but not a future.

<comment><USER2> My kid got an ICE (German high speed rail --InterCity Express) train set a few years ago as a present. It came out only at christmas. He was utterly uninterested.

I'm Gen X and my dad wanted me to be into trains, but honestly I never cared much either. His toy steam engine was cool, and powered many inventions, but all the screwing around with train sets to end up with just making it go around and around...yawn.

<comment><USER6> My dad bought me and my sister a train set, when I was about 7 years old, and she was 6.

We both enjoyed playing with it, for a few years. Partly, it was fine to race the trains against each other, and to see how we could reconfigure a limited amount of track into anything more interesting than an oval. But, more importantly, _I think it was the only "toy" my dad would join in with_.

We visited some preserved railways (there are many in the UK). In the 1990s, the old guys volunteering to work in these places didn't mind if a parent took some 10 year olds round the workshops. There would usually be an entire locomotive, disassembled down to the chassis, and we could walk underneath in the inspection pits. I could see _big_ engineering up close, and it wasn't impossible to understand. I remember being unable even to lift one of the massive spanners they used.

Plenty of people work on restoring old cars, trains and planes. When I was about 12 I realised the old train men were rather tiresome -- streams of disparaging remarks about anything newer than 1970, and "electric" was almost a swear word. The engineering was fascinating, but they mostly stood around and grumbled about modern times. I don't think that's the case for people who like old cars and planes -- they tend to appreciate new cars and planes as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The analogy of ham radio and model trains is nearly perfect. Its almost a perfect concern troll as seen in hand wringing ham radio discussions. All thats missing from this article being a ham radio concern troll is a completely unrelated demand at the end. Traditionally the ham radio articles end with "... and thats why we need to change the whole repeater coordination system to benefit me personally" or "... and thats why we need to change the whole radio contesting system to benefit me personally".

We're transitioning from a "large cheap real estate" world to something where we're a lot poorer (someone is certainly collecting a lot of money off it). Also each generation is a little lower on the socioeconomic scale on average which is a reversal of past centuries of growth.

Therefore hobbies that require a lot of physical real estate space and a modest pile of cash such as model trains or ham radio (at least HF work) or serious fine/artistic carpentry are all going to be kind of elderly gentleman- ish. I would theorize recreational gardening would fit on this list. Possibly more exotic cooking techniques fit this, are most sous vide system owners over 50, I bet they are. I bet almost all people remodeling their kitchen spending $50K to do it with commercial grade appliances are over 50.

Who is more likely to have $1000 and an empty basement, a 25 year old college grad living in his parents basement and driving Uber for beer money unable to pay his student loan or ever own a house or have children, or a 50 year old software engineer living in a burb house purchased before the worst of the housing bubble struck? Then take a wild guess what the customer look like at WoodCraft store or HRO (ham radio outlet) store or the friendly local independent hobby train store. Its beginning to have a demographic impact where store opening hours reflect retired people more than the few working age customer's preferred hours, seriously you guys call yourself a retail store but you close at 5:30pm every day? Well there's always Amazon if I need a saw blade or whatever...

Now as long as humanity continues to supply a continuous stream of 50 year old guys who've "made it" financially, those hobbies will continue in perpetuity. In fact ham radio is growing at an impressive rate. The "elder" population is generally predicted to be increasing. I would predict as the odds of "making it" get ever worse for college grads and ever better for skilled craftsmen and building trades, more stereotypical blue collar hobbies for old men will continue to grow, probably good times ahead for recreational carpentry and maybe not so good long run for ham radio.

<comment><USER8> Then again, with VR goggles you could still build a wonderful model train track in your 2 m^2 bedroom.

<comment><USER3> I would love to run a VR model railroad that let me build and detail everything like a real one.

<comment><USER9> 1: [http://www.auran.com/](http://www.auran.com/)

2: [https://train-simulator.com/](https://train-simulator.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Model railroads are interesting little altars to civilization and economics. Railroad expansion, popularity, and use were a by-product of the industrial revolution. And to build a small part of that in your basement demonstrates how those pieces go together.

Personally, it can be a great broad spectrum application of engineering, history, art, programming, electronics, and machining.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Model Railroading is Fun". Said so on the cover of every issue of Model Railroader magazine for decades. They're trying too hard.

Check out Minatur Wunderland, the most elaborate model railroad in the world.[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACkmg3Y64_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACkmg3Y64_s)

</comment><comment><USER12> Apropos of anything else, simple model trains are not cheap. You can easily spend hundreds of dollars on a single train. And hundreds of dollars on track. Which you either have to have somewhere to set up, or be stuck with dismantling steadily on the floor.

A bunch of work to build something that runs around in the carpet on your floor in a slightly elaborate loop? Not so fun.

And so then you might dedicate some space, or a room, or garage to building a scene.

Now you've got more and more time, attention to detail, and oh yes, much more money for building models, decorating, etc.

What might have been worthwhile in older days is now an older person's hobby because it's _really easy_ to spend thousands, if not tens of.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would also toss the word "masculine" into the discussion. In the old days it was very unusual for a kid not to grow up exposed to a culture of masculine hobbies. Of course Dad had some tools and a couple sawhorses in the garage, all Dads did. Exposure to "Dad Hobbies" at age 5 leads to interest in "Dad Hobbies" at age 30. I personally remember swinging a hammer on the plywood underlayment of a HO gauge model railroad layout and lots of hours going ham radio stuff with my Dad, and my kids are having the same experience. In my youth that was a standard experience, today that is every unusual.

Culture changes, and the vast majority of children today are like "Dad? What is a Dad? You mean mommies friend?" or "Dad hobbies? Dad has no hobbies because Mom took all his money and his house in the divorce.". Naturally those kids are not going to grow up interested in "Dad Hobbies" other than by accident. There are other interesting aspects of the de-masculin-ization of childhood.

<comment><USER13> I think you are confusing 'Masculinity' with culture. Pink used to be the manly color as blood is red and you tone that down for polite company you get Pink. Now the manly color is closer to construction yellow or flannel red.

Construction equipment is still a classic boy's toy, where trains are just outside our experience.

<comment><USER7> So you're claiming the number of boys growing up today with a table saw in the basement is constant or increasing because nuclear families are in decline. I donno about that claim.

<comment><USER14> No, they are suggesting that masculine activities change over time just like all of culture has, for all of time.

Given the mens-rights flavored text in your original, I doubt you are actually looking for engagement here, but giving you the benefit of that doubt: Defining "masculinity" in ways that start to sound like "how much better things were when I was a kid" is an almost certain sign you are being superficial in your analysis. If you dig in a little bit (and there is a ton of interesting writing on this and related) you'll find there is a lot to learn.

To your particular scenario: I know men who spend time with kids programming robots. Are they somehow less masculine than other men I know spending time woodworking with kids? Or others who spend time cooking and baking with kids?

If you believe they are, please defend. Honestly, I'd like to hear the reasoning because it sounds laughable to me.

<comment><USER7> Your examples are very peculiar in that in the workplace female programmers are the minority, and some google searching shows female head chefs are nearly unheard of in the food service industry, therefore sure obviously programming and being a chef are culturally obviously very masculine.

I think your point is something like its very Millennial to have no "traditional crafts and skills", low agency, low levels of self help, etc. I'd believe that. You do make a convincing point. See the rebellious response of the Maker movement which decades ago would have merely been called learning to be a responsible "grown up".

The problem with your culturally/economically masculine examples of programming and being a chef is you can pull a graph from images.google.com of something like "children living with mother only" and apparently it varies staggeringly with race and time. Such that when I was a kid less than 1 in 10 of my peers grew up with a single mom and no Dad in the picture, whereas half of black kids today have no "Dad" in the house. So it matters not that we're discussing mere subjects like carpentry vs arduino programming, no Dad at all means neither subject will be in the picture.

I'm sure there are lost feminine arts in the culture. Sewing homemade clothing. Being a stay at home mom. But those were not article topics anyway.

Edited to further point out we're arguing over which binary is the only binary factor to matter, whereas my point is regardless of how much "Dad Hobbies" have cratered culture-wide, getting rid of 40% of Dads from kids lives over the same time period is just going to make whatever decline there is, 40% lower yet. I simply don't understand what could be controversial about that.

<comment><USER15> I am extremely suspicious of your sudden switch to calling out black single- parents as the doom of masculinity.

I'm further more extremely cautious of any approach that wants to talk _solely_ about harm done to men, due to losing 'traditional' masculine hobbies, but not talk about the similar near total loss of 'feminine' hobbies and the cottage industry that widely drove revenue for stay-at-home mothers.

<comment><USER14> I tried to entirely sidestep this, but you are probably right to call it out this way.

I wasn't sure if it was just awkwardly unintentionally worded, or a bit of semaphore for a load of unpleasant nonsense - so wanted to calling it the latter and burying any discourse about the potentially interesting issue of the perception vs. reality of "masculine roles" (and if that even makes sense).

<comment><USER15> I had wanted to give the benefit of the doubt as well, because as another poster suggested---there is a grain of truth within his statements.

Then I remembered that 'grain of truth' is how these sort of philosophies continue to survive, and insinuate themselves into common discourse. So I am ignoring that single grain an focusing on the rotten conclusions that veer _too_ closely to the sort of rhetorical landmines that have historically been damning to society.

If you are going to call out a specific ethnic group, or push politically sensitive buttons then you need to bring out arguments with a much higher standard than 'grain of truth'.

I hope this isn't too much of a rant, I simply wanted to clarify because usually I am the one helpfully playing devils' advocate but I simply couldn't do so this time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cuckoo Filters, Practically Better Than Bloom [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/papers/cuckoo-conext2014.pdf <comment><USER2> The big thing about this paper is deletions. This is the first thing I've seen that seems to be an easy to understand and easy to implement filter that allows deletions. That it is close to Bloom filters in performance is a bonus.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's my attempt at summarizing the paper with the hope that someone who understands it better can correct me.

Cuckoo hashes are a type of closed hash table where any given item has a fixed number of places where it can be located. Unlike other closed hashes, if there is not room for an item in one of its possible locations, an earlier item is evicted (in the style of a cuckoo kicking an egg out of strangers nest and quickly laying its own) and sent to its alternate spot. This repeats until an empty slot is found, or some large number (500) attempts have been made. If no slot is found, the table can be rehashed to try again, or enlarged to make more space available.

Initially cuckoo hashes were proposed to have 2 slots for each item, corresponding to 2 different hashes. Over time, for greater space efficiency (load) it's evolved to have a variable number of hashes >= 2 and a variable number of slots per bucket >= 1. This paper suggests that using 2 hashes and 4 slots per bucket is a good default (a 2,4 cuckoo hash). One of the innovations in this paper is that instead of using 2 independent hashes (the theoretical best case) they use the output of a single hash function and a shorter saved "signature" that can be hashed and xor'ed to find the 'alternate' slot. In this manner, the signature can be used to move an item to its alternate location without actually knowing or saving the original value.

This 'cuckoo filter' can be queried (LOOKUP) to see if an item is already in the hash (INSERT). If an item is present, a 'yes' answer is guaranteed. But if an item is not present, there is a low percentage chance that a false positive 'yes' answer will be returned. The number of bits required to store each signature is comparable to the number of bits required for a Bloom filter with a comparable rate of false positives. Through various optimizations (such as storing the items in a bucket in a known order) the number of bits per item stored drops to slightly below that of a Bloom filter.

Unlike a Bloom filter, deletions are made possible by storing multiple copies of the same signature. But since there only a set number of places that a given value can be stored, only a limited number of copies (minus the number of collisions) can be stored. In this case, that number is 2 * 4 = 8. If more inserts than this are attempted, either the insert must fail or the delete count will be out of sync.

Performance wise, at the same level of space efficiency, insert speeds are better than a standard Bloom filter when the hash is mostly empty (low load), but significantly worse than a Bloom filter at high load when the hash gets filled and many 'evictions' are necessary for each insert. But if a tradeoff for space is acceptable (to stay at ~50% load), the Cuckoo Hash inserts much faster than its Bloom counterpart. Lookup speeds for existing keys are 2-3x the speed of a standard Bloom filter, and about 1.5x than the "Blocked" Bloom filter variant. Negative lookups (key not present) are about 2x faster than Bloom at high load, but about 3/4 the speed at low load.

Overall, it's a nice technique that should probably be used more often.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thoughts:

1\. It doesn't appear to have O(1) lookup or O(1) insertion.

2\. It appears that this filter can become "full", which is very different from a bloom filter.

3\. It appears that this doesn't have false positives on lookup either.

4\. I'm not very confident that this has a constant space requirement either.

This seems like something that I wouldn't compare to a bloom filter.

<comment><USER5> > It appears that this filter can become "full", which is very different from > a bloom filter.

How is this different from a bloom filter?

<comment><USER4> A bloom filter's insert function is basically:

        def insert(x):
            for hash in hashes:
                bloom_filter[hash(x)] = true

The downside is that your false positive rate will increase as you insert elements. But, on the other hand, you get the guarantee of no false negatives.

This cuckoo filter has no false negatives or false positives, but their Insert() function clearly can hit a case where it returns Failure.

<comment><USER6> It has false positives.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla PowerWall 2 Hack - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hackerschoice/thc-tesla-powerwall2-hack <comment><USER3> Can't believe Tesla would ship something with anything resembling a default password. At first glance, I assumed this would be a clear violation of the requirements of CA SB-327 (goes into effect Jan 1).

Reread the bill, and it actually says: "The preprogrammed password is unique to each device manufactured." If the default is based on the serial number, I guess it's "unique" under the letter, but certainly not the spirit.

Link to bill: [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB327)

<comment><USER4> I guess you haven't seen this then.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...](https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/former_tesla_programmers_anecdotes_about_problems/)

<comment><USER5> This is amazing. It is all completely plausible, and clearly includes only the most easily explained horrors, with anything that would require explanation just omitted.

It is worse than I would have been able to invent.

<comment><USER6> IMHO, these stories aren't unexpected from a tech company that grows 80% year over year, developing and expanding as fast as technology and market forces allow. Yes, there are mistakes and unfortunate incidents in the organization of people and tech priorities here, but this is inevitable in an engineering org that moves this fast. You really need to measure this up against Tesla's achievements:

Growing high double digits each year for more than a decade in a brutally competitve space, developed 4 hugely successful vehicles, first US auto company to succeed (knock on wood) or grow to significant size (>700,000 cars sold) since Ford, production constrained continuously, did this with almost zero paid marketing, built global networks of dealers, service and chargers, improved the state of battery tech by a multiple and doubled global li-ion battery pack output, built 3 car factories, made electric cars economically viable, _incidentally_ seriously wounded the car dealership model, succeeded with qualitatively different software approach with OTA updates and tight software integration, designed cars with hitherto unparalleled performance in their class, and others that I couldn't come up with on the spot.

This is only controversial because this is safety-critical tech and it's uncomfortable to see the development pains of consumer grade software affect it. There's no evidence that the approach have led to more injuries or deaths than cars do in general, quite the opposite. Tesla cars are safer than competition, the argument can be made that fast deployment is a net _win_ regarding safety. Even in the absence of any other things they have achieved.

I believe there's also an element of envy, or misunderstood beliefs that the best tech approach is taking things slowly. Yes, in isolation. But then market forces will crush you because someone else was faster, or because you missed the window of opportunity for making things so dramatically better that you manage to unbalance the local maximum of the status quo.

[Edit: To everyone who downvotes this: For the sake of enlightening discussion, could you please express your disagreement in words rather than the downvote button? Note that I'm talking about GP's linked commentary on Tesla's engineering mishaps in general, not this specific vulnerability].

<comment><USER7> > _For the sake of enlightening discussion, could you please express your > disagreement in words rather than the downvote button?_

I'll give it a try: maybe it's because someone made an off-hand comment about Tesla shipping a default password, and you chimed in with an apologetic post that reads a lot like astro-turfing?

> _did this with almost zero paid marketing_

 _Traditional_ marketing. Tesla spends millions on marketing annually, it's right there in their financials. Just recently a pile of pro-Tesla Twitter bot accounts were banned. Did you know that Tesla is paying people to post messages on social media?

<comment><USER6> I am not affiliated with Tesla or paid by them in any way, if you're implying that. Was also not making apologies for shipping devices with guessable passwords, that's obviously a serious screwup that needs to be fixed - <USER2> at a level of changing the engineering culture if that's what it takes. But the rest of this thread treats that subject in depth, and I wouldn't contribute anything material to that discussion beyond piling on, which is a bad use of time and brain power. Thought I made it quite clear in my comment that I was specifically adressing the discussion of sub-par software engineering practices, and how this is a very common consequence of extreme growth.

I know Tesla has a marketing budget and marketing people, that's obvious enough, so traditional marketing was indeed what I meant. Maybe I could have made that more clear.

Wasn't aware that they're paying people to astroturf though; first I hear of this. Do you have proof of it?

<comment><USER8> > Wasn't aware that they're paying people to astroturf though; first I hear of > this. Do you have proof of it?

They are not and he can't/will not be able to provide proof because it's a false claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The PW can store up to 13.5kW of electric power..." No, you store energy, not electric power, and energy is Wh, that's why you have your phone battery with 5V and 8000 mAh as units and not 8A.

"How does the grid feel about me oscilating this and who will die first, the PW or the sub-station?" Definitely the PW. Sub-stations are made to withstand thousand of households switching all at once their light-bulbs at evening and during storms nature electric discharge (ie, lightning strikes). Your measly PW is fully ignored.

"Do not try any of these Grid Codes (really, please do not):

AU ASS4777.2 DE VDE4105 UK GA59 21A, GA83 16A IT CEI-021 NZ NZS47772 US: IEEE1547 Split Phase 240V 60Hz " I'm a bad boy, I tried them. Nothing happened.

<comment><USER10> If you were to try this and somehow cause damage to the sub station, would you be held liable?

Actually, this brings an interesting question with IoT - if devices damage or otherwise exploit your utility company's equipment, is it their fault of yours? Presumably doing anything bad is against your utility's ToS, but if you didn't do it knowingly...

<comment><USER11> I would imagine that unless you were a licensed electrician, you would be liable.

<comment><USER12> I'm sure you'd still be liable if you were a licensed electrician.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only bug here is the default password.

After authentication, the fact you can make it charge or dump power into the grid is by design. If I wanted the grid to suffer, I can do this by plugging in and unplugging a multi-kilowatt heater every few milliseconds too. Residential properties have a fuse (usually 60-100Amps), and anything you can do without blowing that fuse won't damage the grid.

<comment><USER14> > and anything you can do without blowing that fuse won't damage the grid

That's what you'd think. But I have actually done damage to the grid and had that fuse still in one piece. I accidentally connected the -HV line of a neon light installation to ground. After I could see again I realized the power had gone out. I called my boss (landline still worked) who lived more than a kilometer away from the workshop and there too the power had gone out. It turned out my little accident had put a good chunk of the eastern part of Amsterdam out of commission and the fuse was just fine.

Fuses react to current, not to power and when you dump a high enough voltage back into the grid your fuse might not blow before you cause something further upstream to trigger to protect the rest of what's connected.

<comment><USER15> This is exactly what RCDs are for - with a huge earth leak like that (and therefore L/N imbalance) it would have tripped within milliseconds, before cooking the grid.

I am surprised by how infrequently they seem to be used outside of the U.K. - I've just rewired my house in Portugal as it was completely unearthed, and just had fuses, no RCDs.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure how common these are in an industrial setting nowadays, but back then _all_ big electrical tooling would leak at least a little bit and if you hooked them up through ground fault interrupters those would trip all the time.

A typical lathe, mill, plasmacutter or welder (which that particular workshop was full of) would be in the 10KW range with peaks far in excess of that during start-up.

I don't remember if we had the office area (where I was working) on protected circuitry or not, that would have been an interesting bit of data. The building still exists, I'm almost tempted to go and have a look.

That HV supply was a pretty beefy one by the way, the crocodile clamp that made 'first contact' was gone entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _This_ is the mythical power-grid attack that people have been talking about since the concept of cyber-warfare was first dreamt up.

It's lucky we caught this now, before there are enough PowerWalls to seriously destabilise the grid if this attack were to occur.

<comment><USER13> Rate of Change of Frequency protection (ROCOF) in embedded storage and generation systems is what will kill the grid in a massive cascading failure.

ROCOF works well to keep things safe when only a small percentage of the grid demand is met by residential solar/powerwalls.

As soon as any significant proportion is residential solar (and thats already the case in some countries at some times of day) it acts as a cascading failure mechanism. As soon as any failure occurs, embedded generation sees a rapidly decreasing frequency, and rather that increase supply as traditional generators would be instructed to do to stabilise the grid, ROCOF protection requires they cease supply, making the issue far worse.

Within a fraction of a second, all embedded generation will disconnect, likely causing a near total blackout nationwide. Since system frequency that ROCOF measures is nationwide, failures won't be local to one geographic area.

I suspect these rules were made when people thought "consumers feeding energy back into the grid will never be more than 0.1% of the total - we'll always have enough spinning reserve to make up for that". Thats no longer the case, and unless the ROCOF limits are changed, and _the majority of home solar /wind/powerwalls get a firmware update_, expect a few very large blackouts.

<comment><USER13> I believe the solution to this problem is to ban ROCOF protection, and the related phase shift protection, and instead instruct a few big energy producers to transmit a gold code on top of the 50 Hz AC, bandlimited to 48-52Hz and power limited to 0.01% of the system power. Transmitting that code would be easy (cheap) for anyone who does DC/AC conversion with solid state electronics, so that's normally solar, wind farms, and long distance undersea transmission lines.

That gold code could be received and decoded anywhere on the network. If power islanding occurs, embedded generation will detect the loss of the gold code (since they are no longer connected to the generator injecting the code), and cease supply.

The only disadvantage is it introduces a security vulnerability by design: Anyone could transmit the gold code from their house, effectively disabling islanding protection in their neighbourhood. _If_ power islanding were to occur, and _if_ there was sufficient embedded generation to keep a stable power island, grid hardware could be destroyed through overvoltage, overheating, and circuits closing without frequency synchronisation. I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff though - damage will be localized and minimal, and a very unusual set of circumstances have to happen outside the attackers control for the attack to do damage.

<comment><USER17> Would a better long term fix be to upgrade grid hardware such that it can survive an inadvertent largish island?

Sometimes I think that a DC grid would be better. Issues like frequency synchronization wouldn't exist.

<comment><USER18> A DC grid is likely better nowadays, but we're stuck with the historic AC grid. Most of the problems DC faced back in the war of currents have been solved by solid state technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is an amazing lack of security best practices. To me, this screams outsourced. Given how many people hate Tesla, they need to be taking this seriously. This truly blows me away. This is "people should be fired" levels of organizational incompetence. There's no way some of these issues haven't already been noticed and put in the issue tracker. They're just not taking it seriously. It reminds me of Boeing to be perfectly honest.

<comment><USER20> It does not strike me as outsourced, given what we know about software engineering practices at Tesla: [https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376](https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, some random Twitter account that was never substantiated. Fact: He never provided proof he is who he said he was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Did they even try to submit these issues to Tesla? They have a bug bounty program and have been reasonably good about patching issues in vehicle software. If not, this is pretty irresponsible disclosure.

<comment><USER22> "Responsible disclosure" is an invention of vendors who want you conforming to their policies and timelines (and more).

Tesla is also "good" at disabling aspects of people's property (like ethernet ports, or ability to receive future firmware updates) when they dislike what people find "wrong" or otherwise in Tesla software.

<comment><USER23> I think this comment highlights a lack of understanding what responsible disclosure is about. It's there to reach the best possible tradeoffs to protect consumers and force a quick turnaround with fixes. Just publishing vulns, which the vendor might not even see or learn about(!), will not help in getting things improved and puts consumers knowingly at risk at scale.

<comment><USER22> I understand perfectly well what it is. But see my sibling comments, that reflect an agreement with the concept of "coordinated disclosure", rather than "responsible disclosure", which gives an implication that I am being irresponsible if I do not work to the vendor's needs and priorities.

<comment><USER23> Publishing vulnerability details without informing the vendor is irresponsible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there an alternative to the powerwall that is _functionally_ similar, in terms of power density and utility, but doesn't have things like a network stack and other wifi / IoT / "smart" features ?

We are just about to install lithium battery backups in our home and, of course, the Tesla powerwalls are an obvious choice, but I don't look forward to having to disable/reenable the network connectivity on them, manually, in some cat-and-mouse with Tesla for updates or whatever...

In fact, I'll bet that most (all ?) of the updates that Tesla has to send the powerwalls are for the update system, and accompanying network stack, itself ...

<comment><USER25> What is the reason you can't store excess on the grid?

<comment><USER6> Punitive pricing, or at best you're at the mercy of the grid operators and power companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm amazed Tesla went ahead and used easily guessable and unchangeable passwords. It's just such a trivial and obvious issue that it seems strange Tesla engineers let this happen.

I wonder if this was an off-the-shelf solution they're using here, or was developed by external contractors, for lack of a better explanation.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have a couple of PW2s installed, connected via ethernet only (isolated on its own VLAN, though Tesla is total garbage about basics like "what firewall rules are needed"), no cellular here either. But the TEG-$(SERIAL){3} network has always been right there anyway, which is just really lazy design. I happen to be physically far enough away from anyone else that it's very unlikely to be a security issue in practice, but it's still unnecessarily polluting WiFi even beyond that. This has been noticeable for a long time too, it's not hard to find threads going back a long ways with people asking how to disable the gateway WiFi, ie., ( [https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/disable-gateway- wifi...](https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/disable-gateway-wifi.157212/) ), or people speculating about the obvious vuln/interference implications. From that thread back in June:

> _It would be nice to find a way to turn off the TBG 's WiFi hotspot. I > already have too many WiFi hotspots in my area for my taste. TBG's > broadcasting WiFi is just a exploit waiting to happen._

The whole thing is genuinely perplexing. Dependence on WiFi, while regrettable, I guess can sometimes make sense from a "user friendly" perspective for a lot of typical consumer installed gear. But the PowerWalls are absolutely not consumer installable, nor obviously in any way inherently wireless. They represent serious electrical infrastructure, and require professional installation with a lot of run cable. Adding in some shielded cat 5 or whatever along with that is frankly trivial for multi-thousand/ten- thousand dollar professional projects, even when not dealing with people who can do a drop themselves.

Minimizing attack area is really trivial security, and here it's got other bonuses like just being more reliable. The entire IOT space is full of shit of course, but it seems much stranger in this instance to me than something like lightbulbs. And why even have passwords at all for access versus using keys? None of this is supposed to be generally accessible anyway. It's not like this would cost Tesla anything extra.

Edit to add: HOSTNAME INCLUDES THE FULL SERIAL. I thought I'd take a second look at this and just pulled up the client info for the PW2 Gateway on my network, and hostname is 11XXXXX-00-J--S$(SERIAL). So no local physical access is required, the gateway itself just broadcasts the whole serial, which in light of this is an, interesting, decision. I can confirm that using the hostname with an added S at the front (so on mine serial was T[...], I used the password ST[...]) I was able to connect to the WiFi spot, and in turn to the management page described. Incredible.

Incidentally DPI is also kind of wacky now that I look, just running a simple Suricata setup but connections are all over the place (why is YouTube showing up?). About 4.5 GB down and 9 GB up, down I assume would be updates of some kind, up monitoring data though that seems like a significant amount for what should generally be text. I haven't had it that long, must be kind of chatty.

<comment><USER28> >Edit to add: HOSTNAME INCLUDES THE FULL SERIAL. I thought I'd take a second look at this and just pulled up the client info for the PW2 Gateway on my network, and hostname is 11XXXXX-00-J--S$(SERIAL). So no local physical access it required, the gateway itself just broadcasts the whole serial, which in light of this is an, interesting, decision. I can confirm that using the hostname with an added S at the front (so on mine serial was T[...], I used the password ST[...]) I was able to connect to the WiFi spot, and in turn to the management page described. Incredible.

this is staggeringly irresponsible design! thanks for the confirmation

<comment><USER27> I guess in practice it doesn't really matter much anyway because while my serial doesn't specifically follow the format described in the link it'd still be utterly trivial to brute force. So that they leak the whole thing onto LAN anyway just turns it into even more of a joke, but I guess would rarely make a real difference. Some of the HN crowd have security monitoring on their own networks that would detect suspicious hammering patterns, have more device isolation, etc, but I strongly suspect the vast, vast majority of PW installs are pure ISP default setting CPE environments. Using crummy default password routers full of their own holes too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The password configs are clearly documented: [https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/own/monitorin...](https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/own/monitoring- from-home-network)

<comment><USER30> > Step 3: Select your home Wi-Fi network and enter your Password.

So an attacker can even get LAN access from across the street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does anyone have the FCC ID information for a Tesla PowerWall?

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a far cry from a 'hack'. Oof.

</comment><comment><USER6> The criticism of this security vulnerability has been well covered at this point, so I'd just like to point out that this should be trivially solvable in a few hours by changing all passwords from HQ.

It'd be quite irresponsible of this researcher if they didn't give notice beforehand (don't know if they have).

</comment><comment><USER33> So many people like to nitpick when it comes to Tesla, It reminds me of the Apple critics in the early days of the iphone. They assume Tesla should have the highest standard and be absolutely impeccable with all their products.

Just don't buy it if you don't like it. Let the rest of us enjoy a sustainable future with insanely safe full self-driving electric cars.

<comment><USER28> this is an exploit that allows an attacker to disrupt the electrical grid - even if it's only to the substation, that effects all of your neighbors that didn't encourage you to blindly support Tesla's endeavour. it's highly irresponsible to have this kind of control behind such a trivial login on something that connects to your power lines, something extremely dangerous. far from a "nitpick"

<comment><USER34> It doesn't disrupt the grid anymore than turning a heater on and off.

<comment><USER35> Can your heater push power _into_ the grid?

<comment><USER34> An increase in embedded generation is the same as a decrease in load to the system. So turning a heater off is akin to "pushing power in to the system", unless the embedded generation is larger than the load on a feeder, in which case the direction of power flow would be reversed, which may or may not cause problems depending on the protection settings at the substation.

The peak system load and generation on the Western North American grid is 167,000 MW. There is so much inertia there a 10kW power wall isn't going to do anything.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Terry Gilliam's Lost Animations from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/terry-gilliams-lost-animations-from-monty-python-and-the-holy-grail-are-now-online.html <comment><USER2> (October 2015)

<comment><USER3> ... about teatime</comment></comment>


Antonio Salieri's Revenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/antonio-salieris-revenge <comment><USER2> > That arrangement lands particularly hard on contemporary composers, who must > compete with a group of semi-mythical figures who are worshipped as house > gods.

Likewise, it's probably true that the popular history of modern science focuses on too small group of well-known 20th-century scientists. But if you're going to lay out that argument you probably should _not_ choose John von Neumann as your example case.

Same with W.A. Mozart. He's the semi-mythical gods' semi-mythical god. Where another composer might write a menuet Mozart might have three dances with conflicting time signatures sounding at the same time (yet agreeing in their harmonies). And that's just in passing-- it's not even a climactic moment of the opera (which itself manages to exceeds that moment in historical importance).

Or he might throw a wildcard variation into a theme and variations and end up writing a folk-like melody so convincing that it's extracted for a 21st- century commercial to sell Irish whiskey.[1]

The impact of Mozart is that you can strip away all the pretension and hero- worship from the classical world and his music would probably still take up its current proportion of worldwide performance time. It turns out his music really is that striking and stands out when people listen closely.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN2kxy-- UiM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN2kxy--UiM)

<comment><USER3> > That arrangement lands particularly hard on contemporary composers, who must > compete with a group of semi-mythical figures who are worshipped as house > gods.

Hardly a new phenomenon. Brahms could be arguably said to belong to that Pantheon, but he struggled hard with the old composers reputation. Of particular note its first symphony [0]

But also one can do a search for his quotes relating to Beethoven, Mozart or Bach.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._1_(Brahms)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._1_\(Brahms\))

<comment><USER2> Right.

What I'm saying is that any composer who would have struggled with Mozart's reputation would have very quickly hit up against a bigger problem: that nearly no other human beings have the capacity to remember, synthesize, and internalize the amount of music necessary to compose the way he did.

That's why while Mozart was "grandfathered" into the Romantic period by early Romantic composers and writers, everyone emulated Beethoven in practice. At least obsessive motivic transformation is a tractable problem. (One which, btw, is a subset of Mozart's output.)

Bach is in that same ballpark, though I'd argue that Mozart's output also includes examples of clear mastery of Bach's contrapuntal techniques.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's tragic that a man's reputation can be sullied for centuries after his death merely as the result of the overactive imaginations of court gossips. Then again, were it not for his reputation as the murderer of Mozart, who would remember him?

<comment><USER4> Doubtless there were dozens of not hundreds of composers throughout Europe in that timeframe. Surely there were some forgotten or in obscurity who still had music worth listening to? At least Salieri's name and work lives on, even in another's shadow.

<comment><USER5> I was a classical violist, and we don't have a lot of repertoire, so we often rob minor works from other instruments to enrich our stockpiles. I'm amazed at how little of that material is any good. The taste of generations of musicians and audiences has done an amazing job of gathering the wheat and releasing the chaff; there's not much among the productions of minor composers that can stand with Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and the like. Every time I find a new work by Draeseke, Zelter, Sirmen, Juon, or some other mediocrity, I hope this will finally be the one jewel — but it never is.

<comment><USER6> There is definitely a lot of forgettable fluff in the history of music. On the other hand, there are many great composers that deserve to be better known -- not particularly obscure, but at the same time without the kind of name recognition of the top tier, except to serious fans of classical music. C. F. Abel, Biber, Albicastro, Molter, Sances, Marais, Blavet, Leclair, Heinichen, Forqueray, Carbonelli, Carissimi, Cavalli, Bonporti, Busoni, Zelenka, Agricola, the Caccinis, Couperin, Gesualdo... Very hard to find concert programs featuring many of these!

<comment><USER7> I think Couperin stands out on your list. He's better known and more popular than the rest.

<comment><USER5> That may depend on your experience; some of his list are very well known to vocalists, others to violinists, others to keyboard players, and so on.

<comment><USER7> I was speaking from the point of view of non-musician/non-specialist. In my subjective opinion, Couperin would definitely make the top 100 of best classical composers, while I'm not so sure about the rest. Sure, he's no Bach, but he's still one of the top composers of baroque period: [https://www.baroque.org/baroque/composers](https://www.baroque.org/baroque/composers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is something about the Amadeus play and movie that this author, like so many others, does not seem to get: the entire plot is based on the illusions of a madman. Did the author missed the part at the beginning where the character Salieri slashes his own throat and is then put in a madhouse? Every account about Mozart and everyone else in the movie/play is the version of some nut who is clearly out of his mind. "Amadeus" was never meant to be a historical biography.

</comment><comment><USER9> > I struck off into another street for fear of hearing something still worse.

Antonio was smart enough to stay away from social media!

That also sounds like half the reason he's not a big name today: he was more interested in writing and teaching music than self-promotion.

</comment><comment><USER10> Salieri.

It reminds me this quote: "Whenever I want to add new functionality to Sanjay's code, it seems like the hooks are already there. I feel like Salieri. I understand the greatness. I don't understand how it's done."

in the excellent article "The Friendship That Made Google Huge" [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the- friendship...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship- that-made-google-huge)</comment>


New metasearch engine leaves Google, Yahoo crawling - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news157205720.html

<comment><USER2> The key word in the original headline before it was changed ("New metasearch engine may leave Google in the dust") was "may". The truth value of the headline remained unchanged if it was restated as, "New metasearch engine may not leave Google in the dust."</comment>


How to Create Marketing Your Customers Love - <AUTHOR> http://www.bootstrappingindependence.com/bootstrapping/how-to-create-marketing-your-customers-love/

<comment><USER2> I vote for more business help on HN</comment>


Ask YC: Projects that inspire you - <AUTHOR>

Hi YCers,
Sometimes I stumble upon projects / startups really excite me.
Years ago, I was really excited about del.icio.us: so clean, so nicely developed. Now it's been overrun a bit, quality has gone down.
Today I stumbled upon http://weewar.com - So NICE! Well developed, so clean, just sexy.
I'd like to know, what are startups out there that really inspire you, that are really just the cream of the crop - the small little % of stuff that really matters to you?
I've been doing my own startup, and I can't say it has fulfilled me. I'm in a process of turning it around, asking myself what I really care about, what really inspires me. That's why I wanted to check with you guys / girls, what really inspires you.
Thanks, Rob <comment><USER2> In terms of sheer inspiration, I'm not sure startups are what do it for me. Stuff like the mars probes is what I want to stand up and cheer for.

<comment><USER3> /signed

great strides in general science and math inspire me more than startup companies. space travel, deep ocean exploration, etc..

i'm a fans of some startups, but i don't think thats the same as inspiration.

the only exception, i think, is the inspirational kick in the pants you get when someone sells their company and gets rich or reaps some other type of reward/recognition and you think to yourself "i thought of that three years ago!" or somesuch. really makes you want to get out there and innovate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.tinyurl.com>

They're not really a startup since they only accept donations, but I loved the idea so much I made my own version which does not randomly assign a string but instead allows users to pick their own phrase: <http://www.oneryng.com>

<comment><USER5> You may want to disallow reassignment, or at least detect circular assignments.

<comment><USER4> Disallowing reassignment would leave a finite amount of (useful) keyphrases; my business model is to charge for people who wanted to keep their keyphrases for a duration of time.

Maybe I should make that more clear...

Detecting circular assignments is a great idea though, thanks!

<comment><USER5> Isn't that what DNS is for?

I wish you luck, but I can't help thinking rickrolling, goatseing, and spamming other people's links will be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like <http://37signals.com> business model. for me the basic thing that inspire me will the how the business model uniqueness :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have to say its not the project which inspires me. Its the people behind the project.

That being said I do enjoy reading about facebook progress in the world, quite inspirational.

</comment><comment><USER8> I just spent 5 minutes of my life on <http://littlegreatideas.com/willyou/index.php>

A good one I found today was <http://www.zoomii.ca>

Sometimes if I've been working on facebook apps for a while I'll go back to my own site and smile.

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.plurk.com/>

Why? Because they have a service that exists in a field that is hopelessly dominated by a single competitor (twitter). But they think they can do it anyways, and in many ways have created a superior product.

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://www.unfuddle.com>

They have an amazing product and keep adding new features (e.g. recently added git support!). Awsome customer service, a person responded to my feature suggestion within 12h.

Most importantly they have a good business model. Most startup's see a problem that needs solving and solve it with no regards to how to make money from it (ad revenue will not make you a millionarie unless your google!). They will ultimately fail. I like companies which actually have a little bit of business acumen and can actually find ways of making money from their product. 37signals is another company that does this well

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm a big fan of MOO.com

They've got some really cool products and a really slick web site.

I sometimes use them as a reference for my own web apps, which is basically a nice way of saying I've stolen ideas from them before. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://www.librarything.com> Simple, narrow, single guy for a month (initially), subscription model from day one.

<comment><USER13> Go LibraryThing! I used to work there and Tim is, indeed, a very inspiring person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> <http://blinksale.com> has a clean, simple interface and a useful service, that also has great business model built in.

Flickr seems so obvious now that people forget how lame online photo sites were before it. Personally, at least for some time, Flickr made me invest more time and energy in taking better photos. It's naturally social, as opposed to glued on "social networking" features for many apps.

</comment><comment><USER15> rememberthemilk.com is pure cream, pardon the pun. It's a perfect example of a tiny, talented team building something people want (and love), without any fuss.

<comment><USER16> <http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=puns> ;) I can't help but think of this when ever someone says "pardon the pun."

<comment><USER15> hilarious! +1 for you ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really liked <http://twistori.com/> very clean and sexy.

</comment><comment><USER18> <http://getsatisfaction.com>

Because, I can get to learn what people like, dislike, want, need, cry for. It is Feedback 2.0

I am currently subscribed for few feeds for some products on my domain. Very informative.

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://hellomynameise.com> <http://friendfeed.com> , although I believe it solves a problem by slowly creating another (noise)

What I would really love today is an Intelligentsia. Something similar to a closed and secret community of smart people (which you find here) who share ideas, links,thoughts, solutions to our everyday problems. Think of it as a closed, secret invite only HN.

<comment><USER20> barbelith.com might suit your tastes. It's not invite-only, but if you apply then it takes months to get approved. Reasonably intelligent discussion occurs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shaun Inman's <http://haveamint.com> is beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER21> www.everyblock.com

I can't wait to see how far they progress towards very ambitious goals. Definitely seems like they've got the team to succeed. Also can't wait until they roll out to other cities.

<comment><USER22> They've said that they would rather do a few cities very well than do a bunch of cities poorly. Also, one of the biggest obstacle is finding, getting permission to use, cleaning up, and publishing different datasets. This is much more of a social problem than technological, although it might improve when they have good reference implementations in their initial cities. Right now they have different datasets for each city because they take what data they can get.

The good news is that the journalism grant that funded them stipulated that they have to release their code at the end of the project, so when that comes, each city can make their own Everyblock if they have the will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> <http://www.anybots.com>

</comment><comment><USER24> OMeta: <http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/ometa/>

and the rest of VPRI's

"STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming"

q.G.

</comment><comment><USER25> Using <http://www.younoodle.com> in early 2008 was as exciting as any site I used in years, simply because it was clean, functional, fast, responsive and most importantly allowed me to connect with people I was interested in and led to several meetups.

Web communities are great and all that, but as I get older (sound like an old man even though I am a twenty-something) I actually want to meet people, network, and have deeper more meaningful engagements (...ok ...real-world fun & parties ;) ).

<comment><USER25> For me, ironically, as it grows it is also starting to lose its lustre through mass adoption leading to lower quality and fewer connections... connectivity activity diluted? new joiners not so interested in engaging as observing? new joiners _just_ joining because everyone else in their school/college is (...and YouNoodle just want mass membership)?

Hence the fact I am getting bored of it but that, however, seems to be true with most sites after the new-and-shiny phase passes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> <http://wufoo.com/>

<http://www.weebly.com/>

<http://geticeberg.com/>

<http://wordpress.com/>

All sites that let the user build something of his own. I've always been fascinated by this approach.

All very clever and very cool.

(Now all we need is a site that lets the user build a site that lets his user build a something of his own.)

<comment><USER27> I think that can be done with heroku.

<http://heroku.com></comment></comment>


An F-22 Raptor's Crumbling Radar Absorbent Skin - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29218/these-images-of-an-f-22-raptors-crumbling-radar-absorbent-skin-are-fascinating <comment><USER2> And it's impossible to make replacement parts for the F-22 now. The US military paid Lockheed Martin to store all the custom tooling and manuals in case the production line needed to be restarted. A few years later that was attempted and the shipping containers holding all the tooling were empty!

[https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/solution- americas...](https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/solution- americas-f-35-nightmare-why-not-build-more-f-22s-13858)

I'm genuinely fascinated by this, but haven't been able to find more information. Was there an investigation? Did the tooling just get sent to the scrap heap? Who signed off on empty storage containers?

<comment><USER3> There is a semi-follow up article from the same source that says tooling was not lost.

>Moreover, the Air Force is auditing the Sierra Army Depot to make sure that the F-22 manufacturing tooling is secure—and thus far everything is in order. The audit is 85 percent complete and thus far all of the tooling has been found. Earlier, some Air Force officials had expressed concerns that the equipment had been misplaced—however, those concerns were unfounded as it turns out.[1]

[1][https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-air- forces...](https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-air-forces- stealth-f-22-raptor-will-fly-until-2060-21329)

<comment><USER2> Thank you. That's not nearly as exciting as all of it being stolen by Chinese spies, but "we looked in the wrong boxes at first" is a much more believable answer.

<comment><USER4> Maybe they were stolen.... Copied then put back before the Auditors got their.....

<comment><USER5> X-Files theme resumes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it really possible to hide an aircraft from modern radar? Even if the aircraft had a radar footprint of a bird, no bird flies near or over mach 1.

<comment><USER7> There are two types of radar for virtually everything air defense. The first type searches the entire skies and is for finding aircraft. Networked versions of this are much harder for stealth aircraft to hide from entirely however they have the radar signature of small birds. The S400 and upcoming S500 from Russia is an excellent version of this, but is itself vulnerable to electronic warfare countermeasures. Turning the sensitivity down low enough to detect small birds makes it impossible to use the radars from a practical sense.

The second type of radar has an extremely narrow beam and is for targeting. This is the radar that locks onto a plane to direct missiles at it to shoot it down. This is the one that stealth aircraft pretty much entirely defeat. So in short, they can see the planes on occasion, and try to lock, but can't get a target lock. When they try, the stealth airplanes will often release rf tracking missiles and blow them up.

I was a UAV (civilian term: "drone") pilot of the Shadow 200 TUAV in the US Army circa 2001-2005 and Iraq 2003-2004. The Shadow 200 TUAV was what was deemed "effective stealth" in that it had composite material with low radar signature and radar absorbing paint. The exhaust was dampened and came out about 1" from the propeller on the top so unless you were flying above, the thermal footprint was miniscule. We did some drills with our own Patriot air defense units and they said they had to set their radars so low they were picking up big birds. They also told us that simply wasn't possible to do in wartime.

<comment><USER8> Also, the S400 and practically all ground-based long range radar systems have electronic footprints that make them stand out on sensor platforms designed to detect radars like high powered flashlights in a dark room allowing them to be easily mapped (for avoidance) and targeted (for destruction, if necessary) from over the horizon and far beyond the range of the systems themselves.

Systems like the Sx00 are very useful if there are multiple rings of them surrounding a static high-value target and you want to defeat a fleet of B-52s (or certain types of ballistic missiles) that are approaching.

They are borderline useless against any adversary that has low observability aircraft and a modern suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) capability.

Israel has demonstrated this repeatedly, but Russian marketing is very good and (mainly Middle Eastern) countries are still pumping wasted dollars into buying air defense systems.

In years of conflict Israel has launched thousands (2,000 in 2018 alone) of missiles at Syrian targets, and a grand total of one (1) F-16I has been shot down, and that was because the pilots were cocky (both survived) and they were loitering at high altitude doing battle damage assessments.

In response to the shoot-down, the launchers that fired the missile were destroyed the same day. Not only do the Russian missiles keep missing, but Israel keeps using their anti-missile missiles to shoot down the Russian missiles before they can fall on populated areas after missing their targets.

<comment><USER9> Indeed! And form working with guys in the stealth/radar biz, there's a saying about trying to use radar to guide your missiles:

"He who lights up first gets smoked"

As in, once you turn on your tracking radar, you effectively shine a really bright beacon for anyone to see. If you are the ground station trying to get a lock on the thing that the long-range area radar saw, suddenly you are the brightest target in the area. You might have a few seconds before the plane you are trying to hit sends a missile right down your beam. Same for a pilot if he tries to scan for a target.

<comment><USER10> A couple of questions from a civvie: does one physically separate the radar from the (manned) station using it so you only get borked cheapish equipment rather than dead people and expensive ground-based station wrecked? And isn't faking a few radar 'lights' a good way to use up the opposition aircraft's missiles? Naive I know but it's not my area.

<comment><USER7> Excellent question, and it is standard operating procedure. We had ~100m cables for our actual dishes that we used to control the Shadow 200 and always kept them far away from where we were flying if at all feasible. Most nations do this, however some missiles are set to go towards the rf and then switch to visual identification of targets to say blow up the control station.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't look like the actual airframe is degrading, it's the nose it's likely the composite RADOME that is degrading, if it's even material degradation the damage looks almost like a bird or an object strike.

The description of the internal structure also seems to be quite similar to other RADOME even marine ones.

<comment><USER12> Over the last decade or so I've gotten the chance to use a number of antenna /accessories made of uwave RADOME plastic from a few different vendors and in all cases the plastic was cracked, crumbling, taped together, etc. It seems like a systematic problem.

I bet there are a bunch of polymer chemists who know exactly what's going on.

<comment><USER11> I have a feeling that it's a combination of two things.

1) The plastics might need to be made out of a very specific material which might not be very stable in the long term.

2) RADARs get freaking bloody hot and even a few % of absorption might be enough to essentially make them into a microwave oven.

I'm guessing some combination of the material, pure heat and radiation might be the cause of these plastics breaking down but I'm not a material engineer however this is something that I've also encountered.

I have had experience with SAR pods and their RADOMEs have had to be constantly replaced due to degradation as well.

In fact in spot/strip mode it wouldn't be uncommon to see actual discoloration of the RADOME after a few flights.

<comment><USER12> Most of the crumbling RADOME material I've seen has been on receive-only antennae, because that's what I deal with regularly, so I don't think it's purely a power thing.

My working hypothesis is more in line with your (1), that plasticizer is the major absorbing component of the plastic, so to make RADOME plastic you just leave out the plasticizer and live with crumbly plastic. But I'm no polymer chemist, so that's really just speculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They should just call every modern fighter "Icarus".

<comment><USER14> "Modern" \- Move fast and break stuff while delivering crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _flying this aircraft is extremely expensive with an average flight hour > cost of about $60k_

This made me wonder how many disposable small drones could be mass produced for that price. Like in the "slaughterbots" video, or the "hated in the nation" bee drones.

<comment> Whack-kneed Less than you might think.... Drones are (over)priced like jewelry (because they can!) For example, the drone shot down by Iran last month was valued at 85 mil.

<comment><USER16> > Drones are (over)priced like jewelry (because they can!)

That's a pretty dishonest take. Those drones are incredibly complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like what we've been used to from the military industrial complex. Over promised, over budget, under delivered with huge maintenance contracts and terrible shelf life.

It used to be the defense industry produced equipment worth having, just wastefully. Now we can't even produce properly designed planes.

</comment><comment><USER18> And what about what looks like rust smears around the rivets?

This doesn't look like the master of the skies to me. It looks like decadence of the military industrial complex, and bad use of $400 millions of taxpayer money. It looks like the most inefficient way of financing jobs across a country ever...

<comment><USER19> Huh? The F-22 is the most capable manned fighter that exists on the planet, not even US adversaries dispute it being the master of the skies. It allows missions that would be otherwise impossible. Yes, the price of that is high.

<comment><USER20> Do you have a source to back this up?

<comment><USER21> These "source" requests are tiring. What about you do some googling? If this is obviously false it won't take too much time to disprove it, right?

I would be surprised if any credible source claimed that there was something better than the F-22. The possible competitors are either not in the same ballpark or not really ready for anything other than airshows.

<comment><USER20> You are mistaking Hacker news for reddit. The burden of proof lies on the person making fantastic claims. I obviously have sources saying the contrary that's why I disagree with your sentiment. That's why I'm interested to see the sources claiming the contrary.

Maybe you should do some googling yourself and you'll find footage of French Rafale wiping the floor with the raptor in a simulated dogfight.

<comment><USER22> The point of the F22 is that you don't get into a dogfight in the first place, you blow the adversary away from beyond visible range. The Rafale is a very good plane, but is not as stealthy as the Raptor.

In any case, it will be years before we can say which is the superior plane, since all the good stuff is classified.

<comment><USER20> Americans have been saying that wvr combat is over for like over 50 years. Even the US airforce doesn't believe this otherwise they wouldn't be drilling for wvr combat.

The point is, no one has enough data to claim that the raptor is absolutely the most superior and dominant fighter jet. Making that claim simply based on stealth is foolish.

<comment><USER19> Pilots train and will continue to train on wvr combat because those are the basic piloting and combat skills required regardless of what you're flying. They're going to continue drilling wvr even if they had a hypothetical perfectly stealth unobservable plane just because those are the drills that make a fighter pilot.

Spend a couple days learning a flight combat sim like DCS and it will become crystal clear that stealth is not only an advantage, it is almost unbeatable by a 4th gen fighter without additional support. If you're in a 4th gen fighter, your offensive options are pretty much nonexistent against a low observable fighter. The best thing you can do is dodge the first 1/2 fox-3 it throws at you, turn off your radar, and get out while you still have a plane. We're not even talking about standoff weapons yet.

Even if you somehow got into a wvr dogfight against an F-22, you'd still lose because it's one of a handful of fighters capable of supermaneuverability. [1]

There are 187 operational F-22, they've been in service for 14 years, and they've had zero losses. Go ahead and try to find anything that comes even close.

"The F-22 achieved Full Operational Capability (FOC) in December 2007, when General John Corley of Air Combat Command (ACC) officially declared the F-22s of the integrated active duty 1st Fighter Wing and Virginia Air National Guard 192d Fighter Wing fully operational.[151] This was followed by an Operational Readiness Inspection (ORI) of the integrated wing in April 2008, in which it was rated "excellent" in all categories, with a simulated kill-ratio of 221–0.[152]"

Given the fact that there have been 0 losses and those planes haven't been sitting idle in storage for the past decade, it's a pretty good bet that their real world perf is better than the simulated 221-0.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJO0KzTgcMI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJO0KzTgcMI)

<comment><USER20> F22 hasn't seen combat vs a capable airforce so its hard to take the aforementioned "kill ratios" seriously. Basing your reasoning on a video game is also not the best source of information.

The airforce drills for wvr because history has shown that dogfighting is inevitable. That's the basis of Russian airforce program and that's why the flanker airframe is still the most agile and will run literal circles around the raptor.

<comment><USER19> I feel like I stepped in mud for trying to engage in actual conversation with you and getting this drivel back as a response.

<comment><USER20> Right because personal attacks are not drivel /s. You are making completely baseless assertions with nothing to back them up. And you are resorting to personal attacks because you have nothing credible left to say.

[https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-F-22-Raptor-compare-to- th...](https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-F-22-Raptor-compare-to-the-Sukhoi- SU-35)

The raptor is insanely overrated and video games aren't going to convince anyone reasonable. Keep the personal attacks to yourself or I'll report you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does the F35 JSF have the same material? Will that mean spiralling maintenance costs for both fleets (US and allies)?

Surely its better to invest in SEAD (AA suppression) and better counter measures like lasers?

<comment><USER7> The ideal modern SEAD combo is the F22 flying ahead to designate targets and using the F35 as the "gun truck" to launch missiles at targets the F22 sends it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems like it would be cheaper to have non-stealth F-22 coatings for training, and then only apply the costly stealth coatings if doing actual missions?

<comment><USER25> It's mentioned several times in the article that there are various readiness levels that have different requirements for stealth coatings. It mentions that roughly a third of the fleet is not combat coated, etc.

<comment><USER26> Combat "coded."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> who do you have to know to get a joyride in one of these? do the trainers even have two seats?

<comment><USER28> You'll have a much easier time getting a ride in a Russian jet. MiG-29 rides go for something in the neighborhood of $15-20,000.

<comment><USER23> Become friends with Larry Ellison, he has a Mig29 thats fully serviced.

<comment><USER29> "Unofficially", officially he has some Italian clunker. MiG-29 is considered a weapon that can't be held privately.

<comment><USER26> He owns the Fulcrum, he just has been refused an import permit. Lots of private companies own warplanes, but the ownership by individuals is problematic in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I AM THE GHOST OF THE YF-23.

SEE YOU IN HELL, B*TCH.

<comment><USER26> F-23 would have had the same skin coating technology as the F-22. The F-35 has benefitted greatly by research done since the designs were finalized.

<comment><USER30> What on earth made you think I was implying it wouldn't have? It was a joke about an imaginary f-23 ghost having schadenfreude. Sorry to everyone I've offend who down-voted this. LOL. XD

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How much is UV factored into the design of materials in outer surfaces with regards to aircraft is my initial thought here.

Given the effects of UV can be most damaging and aircraft would as higher elevation be at an increased risk of higher UV levels than you would at ground level.

<comment><USER32> It's very factored in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't get it. Why not just keep a smaller part of the fleet with radar absorbent skin in top notch condition (and barely use it outside mission, thus keeping it in a good condition) and keep the other part of the fleet entirely without this feature, for usage in scenarios where it's not needed?

<comment><USER34> The F-22s are already a small part of the U.S. air force fleet, which need to be saved for scenarios that require their unique capabilities. There are 187 F-22s, while the air force has e.g. 473 F-15s and 1,245 F-16s.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't browsers extend "This site wants your location" to all data? - <AUTHOR> Time and again, users on the Internet are shown to be uniquely identifiable through new and old data leakage from their browser.
And I'm wondering: just like browsers already display "do you want to share your location" when websites try to access this info, why don't they have this kind of security mechanism for every information that could make the user uniquely identifiable such as "This site wants to know [the list of installed [fonts|plugins] | the battery status of your device | ...] ?"
Are there some technicalities that make this a particularly hard problem? <comment><USER2> I've been developing and releasing consumer software for a few years now, and the key rule about popup messages is: Nobody reads them.

A significant number of users will, upon seeing any kind of message that does not mean something totally obvious to them (as a non-techie), just click cancel. Either they panic or they don't understand or they don't care. For example our software used to have a particular kind of error that as clearly as possible stated that it could be solved by visiting a URL and installing some update. Cue lots of support messages: "I see some error, what do I do?"

Browsers are consumer software. If it asks "this webpage wants to use your camera", that's just about obvious enough. However if it asks "this webpage wants to run plugins", user thinks "WTF are plugins" and presses cancel, then wonders why their video is not playing. (Reasonable question from the user's perspective: why didn't the browser say "this webpage wants to play video"?) If it asks "this webpage wants to access your WebGL renderer string" or "this webpage wants to know your hardware information" or something, the user thinks "WTF" and presses cancel, then Google Maps can't work around a graphics driver bug on their system and the map glitches up.

So as far as is possible, consumer software should not prompt the user for anything, and if it does, it should be totally obvious to someone with little to no technical knowledge.

<comment><USER3> You are generalizing. Perhaps some users _do_ care about what a popup says?

<comment><USER4> I think you missed the point of his comment. It's not merely that users don't care. It's that most users don't even understand what a popup is saying. The average user doesn't know what a cookie or a plugin is.

<comment><USER5> That kind of misunderstanding is the fault of the _speaker_ , not the listener.

The current paternalistic trend of removing agency from the user and making choices for them is lazy and perpetuates ignorance. Write better popups that do a better job explaining the problem, educating the user, and expressing the necessary information so the user can make an informed choice.

<comment><USER6> A good explanation doesn't matter-- users frequently don't even read the message. They just hit the button, because they just want to get on to whatever it is they want to be doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This website wants to know your screen resolution. [allow] [deny]

This website wants to know the list of fonts installed on your system [allow] [deny]

This website wants to access your location. [allow] [deny]

This website wants to use the css attribute a:visited [allow] [deny]

This website wants to record more than 1 mouse event per second. [allow] [deny]

This website wants to read your battery status. [allow] [deny]

This website wants to disable your ad blocker. [allow] [deny]

This website wants to know your timezone. [allow] [deny]

This website wants to know your device temperature. [allow] [deny]

This website wants to open more permission requests. [allow] [deny]

<comment><USER8> You're exactly right that this would be incredibly annoying, but I think that should be the point. 99% of sites have no business accessing a lot of that stuff and popping up warnings every time they try to would make it a whole lot more obvious when a site is taking advantage of your personal data.

Popups like this act kind of like side effect disclaimers in pharmaceutical advertisements. The ad tries to gloss over them as quickly as possible because they're confusing and scary to the potential customers - for good reason! It's annoying to have to hear that list of crazy side effects in every commercial, but it serves a purpose and it would be a mistake to remove it in the name of "convenience".

<comment><USER7> > 99% of sites have no business accessing a lot of that stuff and popping up > warnings every time they try to would make it a whole lot more obvious when > a site is taking advantage of your personal data.

I agree, sites should not have access to that data. I would prefer if those features would be removed again instead of introducing more popups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do you explain what "this site wants to know the list of installed fonts/plugins" means to the person using the browser? How would they make the decision to allow or disallow this?

If you show too many confusing popups like this, people will get in the habit of clicking "ok" without reading at all.

<comment><USER10> >How do you explain what "this site wants to know the list of installed fonts/plugins" means to the person using the browser?

Do the fonts on the site look wrong? Click here to correct (warning: showing correct fonts may have privacy implications).

<comment><USER11> What privacy implications? Your dialog has either annoyed me or gotten me vaguely scared of something, but I still don't know whether I should click yes or no.

<comment><USER10> Message appears at the top of the screen where it can be safely ignored. Click on the link to see what the privacy implications are.

Not difficult at all... unless you're being intentionally obtuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In Europe we have "This site uses cookies" popups. Not browser based, not asking for permission, but, universally they are annoying. It depends on your definition of 'sensitive data' i guess.

I mean, i have noticed the HN crowd to be trigger happy against paywall popups, imagine if you prevent them from getting to their favorite site every time.

<comment><USER13> The worst is not that they are annoying, it is that I have to give explicit permission to use cookies. I am OK with them using cookies, but I don't want to give them permission. I'd like to leave it a grey area.

They can use cookies all day long. If I don't grant them permission, then I can accept it, but complain about it. But if I click "allow", I feel that they take away my moral right to complain about it.

It's like being pat down / searched by the police. It is annoying, but I'd let it happen, because they probably have good reasons to do it - but I'd still be grumpy about it, and if it happens too often, I'd protest. But if I had to sign a waiver that gave them _explicit permission_ to do so, then I'd have a much worse standing if I wanted to complain.

Does anyone understand what I mean?

<comment><USER14> I do the same. It's definitely irrational, but I often even leave a site, if it wants me to click "Agree" on some (Cookie-)dialog, before I can use the site.

I've also come to hate "truste", whatever company/CDN/thing that is, solely because their Cookie-dialog is one of those offenders that I see the most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the solution is not to ask the user for permission but to automatically create an anonymous sandbox that does what the site requests — except that sensitive information is faked or reduced.

And if a web application is complex and has weird dependencies, it should be necessary to "install" a sandbox ONCE with those dependencies (e.g. needs plug-ins X and Y), and at _that_ time the user can see everything that is being exposed and essentially only has to approve once.

It will not work to constantly ask the user. They will just opt-out, or worse opt-in without really knowing or caring what they have done. And usually, they will not know where to go to change their mind later (probably buried in preferences somewhere).

</comment><comment><USER16> It doesn't seem technically difficult. Many browsers are native applications and can request hardware information the same way that tools like speccy can.

This isn't exactly what you're asking, but I'd say a lot of sites don't or shouldn't need that information anyway. If you're building a web app that requires battery status or processor architecture or what have you, is a web app really the best format for your program?

</comment><comment><USER17> > Are there some technicalities that make this a particularly hard problem?

No but there are major user experience problems with it. Today the web "just works". You go to a site, you read and do stuff with it, you leave. Now imagine going to one of your favorite sites that tracks this after changing the security model. You're going to get multiple pop ups. Pop ups that regular users are not going to understand. It's easy to understand if it's asking for your location but have you ever tried explaining what plugins are to non techies? Absolutely painful.

There is usefulness to this data and there are abuses. Gotta take the good with the bad. Yeah this data can make them _mostly_ identifiable but it's not perfect and unlikely good enough to be admissable in the court system.

If you really wanted to protect this data then in my opinion access would need to be removed completely. But this could break many things.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the solution would not be fine-grained permissions, but very coarse grained. There would be two HTML6 profiles: Document and Application.

Application can do everything a JS app can do now. Examples include Gmail, Dropbox etc.. The browser would clearly show that it is an application, and to access platform APIs it would have to be "activated" / "run" (just click OK). The browser might ask for additional permissions if it tries to do something egregious (access camera, or, what's not possible today, open sockets etc.).

Documents can only use very limited javascript (if at all) for presentation purposes (like DHTML of the 2000s, or Google AMP). A lot of stuff will not be possible, like advanced tracking, silly stuff like access to light sensor / vibration, etc.. Examples of this would be newspapers, blogs, etc..

<comment><USER18> I'm sure the ad companies (and therefore the online news networks) will have no problem with this.

<comment><USER14> No need to ask all ad companies. The biggest ad company in the world owns the most widely used browser. They can single-handedly prevent something like this from being standardized.

<comment><USER19> There's no need to standardize here? This could be implemented purely on client side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In addition to the many replies observing that it would just confuse the user, I would also add that it wouldn't do anything.

I don't worry about the battery API that you are probably posting in response to, because there are already a crapton of ways to track users. Here's a list of ways to "tag" a user with something cookie-like: [http://arctic.org/~dean/tracking-without- cookies.html](http://arctic.org/~dean/tracking-without-cookies.html) There's also a lot of ways to statistically analyze users even without tagging them, if you put your mind to it.

The horses have left the barn, had lots of horse babies together, and grown into a stampeding herd. Bit late to try to close the door.

</comment><comment><USER21> Because most users don't want that level of granularity. Do you really want to have to give every single site you touch permission to know your screen resolution, viewport, browser type, browser version, js enabled/disabled, fonts available, whether jquery/etc. are cached, etc.

There are so many pieces of data like those that you don't even think about which combine to make you uniquely identifiable. Many of them the site is going to have to know for the page to even render properly. Do you really want to have to give permissions for all of them for every host name your browser contacts?

Even if your answer is yes, for the vast majority of people the answer is no.

<comment><USER22> > Many of them the site is going to have to know for the page to even render > properly

Which illustrates that something has gone very wrong in the logical division between "the site" and "the user agent".

Technically, the site has no business asking about screen resolution, cache status or installed fonts etc That is information which should be relevant only to the user agent in constructing the view for the user.

But browsers do not make a distinction between rendering-domain data and those data which _do_ validly dictate what functionality the site provides to the user agent. Except for location, which is somehow perceived as sacred.

Which brings us back to the original question; why are all the data elements thrown into the general Javascript bucket and made fair game for grabbing, _except_ location data? Why not draw the boundary around data that should be private to the user agent? The user should never be interrupted by a prompt to share a list install fonts because, frankly, that information should never be divulged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Given the assorted methods of sniffing a fingerprint, and the tiny subset of people who even go into options to seek privacy settings, blocking this would probably be a good identifier in its own right. Add locale, IP, even if on VPN, and you've probably near uniquely identified yourself.

I don't have an answer, short of a plugin that sends bland global top 5 answers to any such request instead of legit data. I can forsee that breaking some sites though.

I would _really_ like to see a decent solution to this though, but I think it is far too late.

<comment><USER24> Isn't Tor a fairly good solution? They have thousands (at least) of users all using identical user agents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Meta: Is the browser _my_ client, or someone else's?

Increasingly, while I use it, it feels like it is the latter.

As my friend is fond of saying, "No bueno."

<comment><USER26> That's the key issue.

Welcome to the War on General Purpose Computing.

[http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html](http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We do want to take an approach like this in gngr(1). We already have fine- grained permission control in the Request Manager (inspired by uMatrix, nee httpSwitchBoard).

But your question is about even more finer control. Some thoughts:

* I believe some of these APIs shouldn't be implemented at all, or should have very limited precision. Eg, Battery Status need not be implemented at all, or if implemented, should return just two values: [high, low].

* In our Request Manager, we could add an extra column for advanced APIs. This would include, for example, Canvas, WebRTC, etc.

* @captainmuon's idea of having two different profiles (document/app) is interesting. Though the choice of profile should be on client side. The default should be conservative (document) and the user should get to choose if a site should be promoted to app or not.

[1] : [https://github.com/uprootlabs/gngr](https://github.com/uprootlabs/gngr)

</comment><comment><USER27> >Are there some technicalities that make this a particularly hard problem?

I think the hard problem (probably unsolvable) is that the browser is allowed to exfiltrate the collected data.

</comment><comment><USER28> I assume this was prompted by the battery status information leak. That sort of behaviour is likely illegal under EU privacy regulations without explicit concent.

In firefox, you can disable this nasty behaviour by editing the "dom.battery.enabled" setting in about:config. IMO this should be a MUCH more obvious setting in the settings menu, along with any other information that can be accessed without concent.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's a lot of things that a site can access that can be personally identifiable.

Whilst it has good intentions if you think back to UAC in Windows Vista. People just clicked allow for everything without reading after getting tired of the number of requests.

I think there may be demand for a web browser plugin to have this functionality similar to how Ghostery, NoScript etc. have keen users.

</comment><comment><USER30> Prepend an "Ask HN: "

</comment><comment><USER31> They will probably start asking for more things (or just blocking or anonymizing, like the battery level information leak)

But yeah, you don't want to overwhelm the user with popups, that will just make them click ok whenever one appears

</comment><comment><USER32> Popup fatigue.

</comment><comment><USER33> Chrome is made by people who want that information. Mozilla is heavily funded by people who want that information. Safari is made by people who want to keep things as 'simple' as possible. Internet Explorer is made by idiots.

<comment><USER34> I don't use IE, but think the people behind it are far from idiots. Also Edge is actually a nice browser, I just don't use Windows.</comment></comment>


Does Wal-Mart's ShippingPass ($49/year) Stand a Chance Against Amazon Prime? - <AUTHOR> https://earlymoves.com/2016/05/17/shippingpass-does-wal-mart-stand-a-chance-with-two-day-shipping-against-amazon-prime/ <comment><USER2> Wal-Mart has to fix their shipping process. After much nagging about my failure to replace old with new, I ordered a new collection of underwear, undershirts, socks and gym shirts and shorts. I used Wal-Mart's site for it, since they had the tagless shirts I liked.

That started a near-endless procession of white plastic bags containing one and exactly one item in them, arriving at our apartment each day, over a period of two weeks. I ordered something like a dozen different items and not one came packaged with another. Trying to keep track of what I'd received and what I was missing was daunting, not to mention how much they must have spent on shipping.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I can order anything from Wal-Mart's vast selection, I can see this doing exceedly well with the ex-Prime diaspora.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe. But the numbers don't point to a significant departure of Prime subscribers. [https://earlymoves.com/2016/01/29/amazon-prime- memberships-g...](https://earlymoves.com/2016/01/29/amazon-prime-memberships- grew-51-worldwide-in-2015-47-in-u-s/)</comment></comment>


First eBay seller to be prosecuted for false bidding - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/10510086.stm

<comment><USER2> On the dutch site marktplaats (a subsidiary of ebay, they bought it because it was too well entrenched) nonsense bids are pretty much the norm, it's fairly rare to get a significant bid on something and to see the buyer follow through.

<comment><USER3> There must be issues with weak legal backing and poor registration processes that lead to this?

In the UK a bid in an auction is a legal agreement to pay the price bid. One has to register with identifying details in order to receive goods and people often close auctions to those with no reputation unless they get sufficient assurance that the person is genuine they are not allowed to bid.

It's pretty trivial to ID most users from IP+ISP records (+ possibly a little social engineering) and "small claims" in the County Court are it seems up to £100,000 GBP. That sort of regime appears to make frivolous offers worth following up for the legally inclined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't believe it's taken this long to have a prosecution - it must be done all the time! £5,000 is a pretty hefty fine though.

<comment><USER5> Well, he did it multiple times, and on big-ticket items (two Mercedes minivans). Five thousand quid doesn't sound inappropriately high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see a problem there. He still has to pay the ebay fees and everything, so he will loose anyway.

And he won't bid on the item himself if he thinks it's an adaquate price.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that dummy bids by the vendor in an attempt to artificially drive up the price are against the rules of eBay's auction model. Buyers and sellers both agree to abide by certain rules, and one of those rules is that the seller only gets to make one "bid", the reserve, which is secret until it's reached and known when it's surpassed.

Now, you could equally well have a different auction model, whereby the seller gets to make as many bids as he likes. But this model would be much less attractive to buyers, since I know even if I'm the only buyer the seller is just going to keep increasing the price until he thinks he's got to the maximum I'm possibly going to spend. So as a buyer I'm much more inclined to buy on the single-reserve system than on the multiple-seller-bid system.

Dummy bids are a problem as old as auctions themselves, but it's good to see people being prosecuted when they're caught.</comment></comment>


Carnegie Educational Institution Classification - <AUTHOR> http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/index.php <comment><AUTHOR> This system is used to classify colleges and universities into some thirty plus categories based on student population, degree type, and broad area of study. There is a PDF flowchart that explains the classifications: [PDF] [http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/downloads/CCIHE2015-Fl...](http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/downloads/CCIHE2015-FlowCharts-01Feb16.pdf)

I came across this on The Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center (REN-ISAC)'s site as a method of calculating membership fees as a function of institution size. [https://www.ren- isac.net/membership/fees.html](https://www.ren-isac.net/membership/fees.html)</comment>