Google engineer writing Amazon reviews on USB-C cables that don't work - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A25GROL6KJV3QG/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pdp <comment><USER2> I see no reason why to buy anything but Anker.

I once tried to purposely destroy an Anker MicroUSB cable (bought a 5 pack that had three 3ft, one 6ft, one 1ft, didn't need the 1ft), by grabbing the head of it with clamping pliers and yanking the fuck out of it with the cable wrapped around my hand, and bending it to near 180 degrees repeatedly for about 5 minutes.

I could not kill it without straight up taking wire cutters to it, which I decided not to do.

The cable still works perfectly, and sits in my junk drawer for when I need to plug something into the front of my case and leave the thing sitting on top of the computer.

Literally any other brand? Most I would have been able to rip the head off the cable after the first few yanks, the few that survived that would have broken the wire pairs inside either from that or from the repeated 180 degree bend.

Remember those original Monoprice USB cables we all bought and loved back in the day? Those didn't survive that abuse, and Monoprice cables have only gotten worse then. And the AmazonBasics USB cables (that I recommend for non- MicroUSB cables (only because Anker doesn't make them, only MicroUSB, Type C, and Lightning))? Don't survive that level of abuse either.

Anker also has the best damned USB chargers for walls and cars I've ever seen (heaviest USB chargers I've ever had, no coil whine, doesn't EZ-Bake itself, shuts off completely when nothing is plugged in), they're just perfectly glorious.

<comment><USER3> Just keep in mind that all these products are mass produced and are subject to imperfections. Really, the only thing that matters is how good their customer support is and Anker is probably better than most but they still have a long way to go.

I say this because I had one of their USB power ports that my children use to charge their iPads (2x 4th gen) that overheated and burnt up[1]. I completed the contact form on their website and used keywords like "fire" but it took my tweet to get their attention. Even after that, their response was fairly slow. After many weeks and me even shipping the defective product back, they only offered to refund me the cost of the unit, send a replacement power port, Anker brand lightning cables (to replace Apple genuine ones - and those broke), and send me an older generation battery pack. In the end, I did not pursue the replacements because I no longer had faith in their products or brand.

After all of this, I will no longer be purchasing or recommending Anker products.

[1] [https://twitter.com/mathewpeterson/status/603337986495807489](https://twitter.com/mathewpeterson/status/603337986495807489)

<comment><USER4> IMHO there is no reason to ever be loyal to a brand anymore. Brand names are sold, the same two products are built or assembled by different subcontractors, the same two products contain bits and pieces manufactured by different companies at different times... There really is no reliable way to choose the best product without doing some research and often times you have to rely on enthusiasts or experts since frankly it's impossible to know everything about every product...

<comment><USER5> Their point is not that the product was low quality (although it was), but that the brand's resolution of the problem was of low quality.

Although it may not be possible to control an entire production chain, it is entirely possible to control the customer service department or at least the refund policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The average consumer has no idea if one of these cables will actually do what they proclaim. The only way to really know is when other customers review the product, which we know is barely useful most of the time due to fraudulent reviews. Great job on the part of this Google engineer for writing such clear and technical reviews of the products.

Now that an expert has called some of these cables out as not adhering to the spec shouldn't they be taken off of Amazon? Should they be reprimanded for false advertisement?

<comment><USER7> And in a nutshell, that's why people buy stuff from apple. imo, their brand is "here's a good thing, and we promise it will work". Amazon's is "you're on your own, but it's really fucking cheap!" That's not to say amazon doesn't have good customer service, but the whole thing is still shit. I just wanted a [cable|dongle|hdmi adapter|battery|plant spray|charger] that was what it claimed to be and worked correctly the _first fucking time._ The fact that you have a good return policy doesn't fix the fact that I still don't have X.

<comment><USER8> Funny story. I wanted to buy a cheap iPad for my son. I could have got one from Amazon but after hearing so many stories about scams or refurb devices or devices with someone else's state on it I decided not to deal with that headache and ordered direct from the Apple website.

Upon turning on the device for the first time it showed a screen saying it was controlled by the LDS Church and wouldn't proceed through guided setup until I acknowledged that. After some time on the phone with customer service, we determined there was no way to remove this configuration. I ended up having to return it to an Apple store. The rep there said "yeah that happens sometimes" (someone pulled from the wrong pile in fulfillment most likely). So sometimes you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

If anything Amazon's customer service is better - to resolve an issue like this for items they ship I don't have to drive anywhere, just put the box back on my front doorstep. I wish they would make it clearer when you're buying things from them, and would do a better job of associating compatible products. This seems like data they should be able to have, and UI they should be able to build.

<comment><USER9> Am I correct in assuming this is some kind of enterprise managed provisioning? I am surprised that they both ship it that way, and that it can't be removed. I guess Apple doesn't care about killing resale value (in the case of it being unremovable), but you'd think these kind of screw-ups would be a reason not to ship it this way. Do the restrictions extend deep into the hardware, or are they just saving the enterprise customer like 3 minutes per device pushing a profile over USB?

<comment><USER10> It's the Apple Device Enrollment Program ([http://www.apple.com/business/dep/](http://www.apple.com/business/dep/)) and it allows enterprises to exercise "mobile device management" at the time of device activation. Apple says that once devices are enrolled they can't be removed (because, presumably, rows cannot be deleted from a database after being added... >sigh<).

<comment><USER11> It's not that easy. DEP is meant to also protect private property, so it piggy backs on activation lock to bind a device to a certain (company) Apple ID. Obviously, there must also be no way for any person to social engineer an Apple Care representative over the phone to get DEP lifted from a device, and this is why Apple Care can't do that, period. The only possible way to remove that is going through the private key bound to the MDM for that decide, the same MDM that requested DEP while buying the device in the first place.

(Obviously, much like for activation lock, it is indeed possible that someone with "root access" \- so to speak - to Apple systems would be able to manually disable DEP; but the point is that this possibility isn't exposed on any user- level user interface)

<comment><USER12> >Obviously, there must also be no way for any person to social engineer an Apple Care representative over the phone to get DEP lifted from a device, and this is why Apple Care can't do that, period.

That's not obvious to me. Those same people _can_ be social engineered into giving someone access to your data, which is an order of magnitude worse than a device wrongfully moving accounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I find interesting here is that Benson is essentially using his employer as a reputation guarantor.

I guess depending on the company's HR that could fall either way of

a) This is great, we're getting nice PR

b) Mr Benson, we need to have a quiet word about what it is you do here and what Google is not in the business of.

Really interesting.

edit: I assumed this is part of his job. I just find the publishing of the result along with Google's name interesting.

If/when I evaluate software for a solution as part of my job, I wouldnt dream of publishing my findings and referencing my employer - but I like what Benson has done.

<comment> ryan-c My assumption is that he's working on some sort of project where he's buying many cables on Google's dime to test them, then reporting his results on Amazon.

My worry would be the cables that get good reviews being switched out for crappy cables down the line. I've had problems with this for cables and adapters before - I'll re-order from Amazon and get a slightly different product that is not 100% compatible with the old one.

<comment><USER14> Isn't there some kind of SKU/ISBN-like identifier that you could use to prevent that? Enforcing consistency would be tricky, but there should be certain quantifiable properties, especially when proper specifications are involved, to rate against.

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, there is not. Amazon will often group similar unbranded products together under the same ASIN.

(This was a particularly serious issue for Arduino a few years ago, when Amazon started listing genuine Arduino products under the same ASIN as third- party clones: [https://blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the- clones/](https://blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the-clones/))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is cool, but being from the online marketing world, I can already see people copying this in bad ways. "Hi this is Tom, I am from iPhone Development Team 6 here at Apple and we have been testing [product] in our labs. In our opinion, [affiliate link to other releated product] is far better because this product [technical critique that few will understand but will serve to bolster reviewer's credibility, can be copied from random highly technical review site]".

If this is going to be a thing, Amazon should offer the ability to certify that the user at least has an email address for the company they claim they are with (@apple.com, @google.com etc) and show a "certified Googler" or similar logo next to their name.

<comment><USER17> You can pretty safely bet your life this is going to happen if this guy gets any press for what he's doing. Within a month or so, every tech product on Amazon will have glowing reviews by "Josh from Microsoft" or "Brian from Intel"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The current rhetoric when it comes to the failings of online reviews is to point at fraudulent reviews. I posit that, rather, it's the lack of weighting reviews by the expertise of the reviewers. Clearly the reviews of a hardware engineer at Google should have more weight to them than an average consumer (on products like this), because as bkmartin points out, the average consumer has no idea as to the true quality of a product. Perhaps the cable does work for them. Perhaps the cable mostly works, but the wire gauge is under spec and 1 out of 100 people end up with a fire. That won't be reflected in the overall rating of a product.

Case in point, the Juiced Systems product that Benson reviewed as 2 stars is currently listed as an overall 5/5 stars. In Amazon's defence Benson's review is currently displayed at the top of the reviews. So any shoppers that go through the effort of reading the reviews will quickly see it.

But this product shouldn't be rated 5/5 overall, and because it is, many consumers who can't be bothered to check the content of the reviews will be burned.

This, to me, is a greater problem than fraudulent reviews. Fraudulent reviews can be solved by getting more regular customers to review products they buy. Uber is a great example of UX design that gets customers to review the quality of their service nearly every time. But even if Amazon or other retailers achieve a higher rate of reviews by actual costumers, the non-expert bias will remain.

Of course the trick is, how do we determine which reviewers are experts? Most review systems have a helpfulness rating on each review which could be used to weight reviews in the overall average. But that's only a proxy for an expert rating, is easily cheated, and it's harder to get customers to rate reviews than it is to get them to at least review the product.

<comment><USER19> When buying something online, I make a habit of reading a couple of the negative reviews. Sometimes they're, "I meant to buy a toaster, and misclicked on this television instead. Makes poor toast. 2/5." But sometimes they're more like, "It worked great for two years, and then became sentient and strangled my pet fish. 2/5" Rating distributions only tell you part of the story.

<comment><USER20> another really common thing is people rating the shipping instead of the product in their negative reviews

<comment><USER21> Though with some products this is helpful. I was just looking at air compressors on Amazon, and there were a few models that seemed to arrive damaged in the vast majority of reviews. Given that feedback, I might pay a bit of a premium to buy one locally.

<comment><USER22> Perhaps, but it would still be far more helpful to tie that information to the distributor instead of the product. For all you know, those reviews were all due to a different distributor, and the one your were looking at would have been fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> These reviews took me back (and made me laugh). They have the same to-the- point-and-technically-correct tone as code reviews internal to Google.

In all seriousness though, these are important for a non-obvious reason: Nexus 6x devices don't ship with USB2-USB3 adapters (they only have a USB3 cable with a wall charger).

So ... anyone who wants to hook up their Nexus 6x to a laptop will almost certainly to Amazon to buy a cable. This is what I did last week, and just today I discovered that certain cables do not quick charge.

Benson Leung, you are doing the lord's work. May future Nexus 6x owners benefit from your expertise.

<comment><USER24> What I can't work out is am I going to damage my new 5X with any of these cables? There's a limited number that'll ship to Australia

<comment><USER25> You might damage the other end of the connection if the 5X considers it alright to draw 3A (because the cable says so) but the other end isn't prepared to deal with that.

Generally speaking, USB cables won't make the receiving end request more than they can handle. It's always about the power source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> …And on ones that do. Looks very useful for weeding out actual quality from the muddle. Would love to see someone doing this kind of work with other types of cables, too.

<comment><USER27> Reading the headline, it sounded like astroturfing. Instead, he's being helpful and providing some very useful information from his experience as an engineer from google itself. What a thoughful fellow!

<comment><USER28> In one comment thread he does suggest that buying cables from the Play store would be safer.

<comment><USER29> It's probably true, since the Play store only sells one variety of cable, and Google has probably actually vetted it. In which case I can only see that suggestion as a helpful bit of advice for avoiding problems.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, no pitchfork in hand here, but I also wouldn't be surprised if Amazon didn't appreciate that sort of activity.

<comment><USER29> For sure. I'd hope they'll be self-aware enough to realize that it would be crappy to yank the reviews or punish the reviewer for recommending another store where the products aren't broken when Amazon is full of broken products. But I wouldn't be very confident of that.

<comment><USER30> I don't think Amazon worries about bad reviews, as long as they don't see _only_ bad reviews. Bad reviews create trust in the reviews: Seeing bad reviews makes me reasonably certain that products with problems will get called out most of the time.

And often I end up _buying_ products with bad reviews in preference to those with perfect reviews because bad reviews gives me faith a product has been reviewed "enough" by real people, and often the issues brought up are not important to me.

I'd say that for Amazon, these reviews are fantastic: Next time I want a type C cable, I'll check his reviews and buy one of the ones he gives good reviews - probably at Amazon. This is like popping into that store where you trust the staff because they talk shit about "their" own products when they're no good even if it means steering you to less profitable products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The most shocking is that some vendors or manufacturers are blindly criticizing and rejecting Benson's reviews, completely ignoring his technical analysis. This makes me never want to purchase anything from "Cable Savage" for example:

[http://www.amazon.com/review/R2DQ7OH7PQG24F/ref=cm_cr_rev_de...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R2DQ7OH7PQG24F/ref=cm_cr_rev_detmd_pl?ie=UTF8&asin=B013XFANAA&cdForum=Fx2X5W623J3PRPU&cdMsgID=MxT9NT6916AU49&cdMsgNo=4&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx2O5XXKTTD2YAL&store=pc#MxT9NT6916AU49)

"""

 _Benson I can say with confidence this cable has been tested and can provide up to 3AMPs of power. Since you are supposedly on the google team, then you will know that the Pixels original OEM charger actually has an output of 5 AMPS. (What 3rd party charger were you using to attempt to charge a pixel with a 3AMP cable, when the pixel demands 5amp output?_

 _These cables have been confirmed and work great with the Nexus 5x and 6P. It even can replace the 12 " macbooks charging cable with a proper walll charger. The power output is relied on the actual wall charger. The cable with be able to provide ample power given that the wall charger is correctly powered. Also please note, that batteries charge at different mAh intervals depending on the percent full the battery is at._

 _Our cables can charge the 5x and 6P units at the same speeds as the stock oem cables._

"""

Benson's counterreply explains that 3 A is actually a violation of the spec, and that the Pixel charger never outputs 5 A, etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm trying to think if there's anyone else that's doing something similar. I remember a while back I was really impressed by "NLee the Engineer"'s reviews[1] on lights/batteries.

There's also a reviewer Sporty[2] who's done a fair number of reviews on SD cards.

I took a quick look at Amazon's Hall of Fame/Top Reviewers, but sadly, it seems to prize volume vs quantified/focused cross-sectional reviews.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AOEAD7DPLZE53](http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AOEAD7DPLZE53)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2Q6Z6MRTI2RJY](http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2Q6Z6MRTI2RJY)

<comment><USER33> I bought a real piece of garbage battery charger as a result of one of that NLee guy's detailed reviews. Super unimpressed.

<comment><USER34> You haven't really qualified "piece of garbage", so I have no idea what actually happened, but I will note that charger manufacturers have pulled some bait-and-switch tactics in the past. I bought a battery charger based on an NLee review[0], and was very satisfied. A friend later asked for a battery charger recommendation, and I went back to that very review and found that they'd started selling a "revised" model under the same listing, that was basically worthless. Something similar may have happened to you.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/review/RSYHTFQQYEGLG](http://www.amazon.com/review/RSYHTFQQYEGLG)

<comment><USER33> On mobile right now so I'm not feeling verbose. He noted serious problems in his subcomments after the initial review that strike me as quite serious, but didn't alter the item's rating accordingly. Whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reading the reviews, it looks like there's basically one complaint.

Ports/devices with older connectors (USBA, mini-B, micro-B, B) aren't necessarily going to be able to (or supposed to be able to) handle a 3A current draw.

A device that supports USBC should handle current draws this high. But to do so, it must be able to determine if it is safe to draw this much current. That's only doable with a USBC->USBC connection as per spec. So a USBC-USBA cable (or any other USBC->something cable) should use a resistor identifying that the USB3 current draw spec should not be exceeded.

The cables he's reviewing misidentify as being capable of the full current load. This could cause damage to the device your USBC phone or laptop is being plugged into.

<comment><USER36> I've smoked a USB wall-wart that was spec'ed to be able to provide 2A. At the time I had assumed it was a dodgy USB charger, but I now believe that it was the cable which was dodgy.

Benson has posted instructions if you want to test a cable yourself and you have a 2015 pixel: [https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/jGP5249NppF](https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/jGP5249NppF)

The problem is that you'll need a sacrificial USB charger, and if you're lucky, you'll find out from the Pixel's diagnostics whether or not the cable is dodgy. If you're unlucky, you may also find out when the USB charger dies. In Benson's words, "Plug in the suspect USB cable and plug the other end into a DCP charging wall wart (preferably one you don't have any sort of sentimental attachment to)".

Also read all the way through to the end. There are instructions for how to do this without needing to put the Pixel into dev mode, which is useful for those of us who need to use the Pixel in its enterprise enrolled mode to access our corporate accounts. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> We've done a similar analysis of USB 3.0 host controllers and the state of their drivers cross-platform. It's amazing how bad the state of USB 3.0 is, even 5 years after devices started shipping. Even the latest Intel host controllers (8 & 9 series) initially shipped with bad drivers. I look forward to getting our results posted.

<comment><USER38> Haha, if it were only bad drivers. Try bad hardware:

[https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux- usb/msg131265.html](https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-usb/msg131265.html)

[http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux- usb/msg122354.html](http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-usb/msg122354.html)

[http://marc.info/?l=linux- usb&m=134861220631257&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=linux- usb&m=134861220631257&w=2)

[http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux- usb/msg63980.html](http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-usb/msg63980.html)

...shit's so broken I could keep doing this all day long.

<comment><USER37> Absolutely. Data corruption from VIA based host controllers was probably the worst issue we've seen, and the USB 3.0 ASMedia host controllers are probably the worst now that VIA was able to solve their issue with a driver update.

Most hardware on the market today was released before the xhci spec 1.0 was finished, and I agree that ALL hardware on the market does not even properly implement the spec that was available during its design. Fortunately, most issues can be worked around using quirks.

The hardware is the root of the problem, but I would also add that the xhci_hcd kernel module, even in the latest kernels, is well behind Microsoft in terms of handing these device-specific quirks. The Microsoft USB 3.0 stack introduced in Widows 8 solves just about every host-specific issue we've ever seen. ASMedia is the only host controller vendor that bothers to provide their own Windows 8/10 driver (both for their USB 3 Gen1 and Gen2 chips). No one else provides an alternative to the Microsoft provided usbxhci.sys. That said, all of our tests have been limited to bulk transfers, and we're only using existing user space libraries (WinUSB, LibUSB, IOKit). We do push throughput, we have tight latency requirements, and we keep a large number of buffers queued at all times, which does push the host controllers further than your typical storage device. (We make streaming data recording equipment for electrical engineers and embedded developers)

I don't want to bash xhci_hcd though; their progress has been fantastic, despite the minefield of problems created by all these host controller vendors. I would like to say a special thanks to @sarahsharp, for all of the hard work put into the xhci host controller module. Without Sarah, I don't know who will answer when the xhci_hcd doorbell rings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> That's lovely, and exactly the sort of thing a good company would do.

So many companies have a very short list of "approved" compatible devices and get ornery if you use something else; often those approved devices are unavailable under that exact product name or number and so you're left guessing as you replace stuff in two, three, or four years, which is actually when you're likely to find yourself needing to replace components like this. The very worst companies (ahem, Apple) only validate their own devices for inter-operation with their products, and act as though using something else would be the pinnacle of recklessness. Some even threaten it'll void the warranty (which is actually not legal in many cases, but companies do it anyway).

The fact that someone from Google is doing this in a non-Google location for the benefit of the standard and of their customers is just really nice. Certainly, it is in their best interest to have their devices behave reliably and not be damaged by shoddy third party devices; and so Google does benefit. And, yet, many companies just don't see it that way and are willing to screw over their customers just to get that extra few bucks after the sale for accessories that could just as readily be provided by third parties (and often third parties offer more variety, making them more fit for purpose in some cases).

In short, I've lost a lot of trust for Google over the years (mostly as marketing and violation of privacy became their primary revenue sources), but this is a good thing, for the consumer, for the industry (standards are great! implementing standards poorly is bad!), and for Google.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is such a great service to everyone! I wish more companies let their engineers do that. Too few knowledgeable people call out the crap we're being sold.

<comment><USER41> I don't think we know if Google "let" him yet. Most companies have very strong policies against things like this...

<comment><USER42> Google doesn't have a strong policy against things like this. It mostly boils down to using your best judgement. "Would you like to read this on the front page of the New York Times?" is the usual question to ask yourself. I also like to ask myself, "is this factually correct, and am I providing proof?"

On HN, I tend to limit my responses because I usually end up being attacked for something I have nothing to do with, by virtue of some grudge the commenter has with Google. If you want to call me out for my own work, go ahead, I value feedback greatly in areas that I can control. If you have useful commentary, I'll try my hardest to make sure that people with understanding in that area see your comments. But if you just want to yell at me by virtue of who pays my salary, I find that all very unenjoyable and would prefer to not be involved.

I also notice that lurkers with blogs tend to like to take quotes from HN and convey them as the official word of Google out of context, which I also don't like being involved in. Learned that lesson my first week at Google :)

Finally, one also ends up attracting the crazies that email me threats against other Google employees. All those get forwarded directly to Security Operations and don't get a reply from me.

HN is a pretty big community these days and isn't quite the bastion of sanity that it once was. This limits how open many people will be with the community more than any policy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why two star reviews instead of one for the cables that fail to meet the spec? Does Amazon / do people view 1-star reviews as bitter / exaggerated? Are they less visible?

<comment><USER44> Personally, I filter out one and five star reviews. To me, five stars means when you use the product, Jesus appears before you. One star means I ordered a cable and received a dead crab instead (pretty sure there's an XKCD that covers the last one).

But others don't agree with my rating system, so "ordered blue, but it was robin egg blue. Werst company evar!!!11" means one star. Five stars means "I work for the company that makes these, or I'm otherwise being paid to write this, or I simply didn't give a lot of thought to how rating systems work."

In this case, the cable fulfills most of the requirements, misses a some of them, but might work for your use case, so two stars.

<comment><USER45> Really? If a product meets your needs, is a fair price, and seems to be working fine after 30 days, you would not give it 5 stars? It would need to perform miracles to get 5 stars?

<comment><USER44> _If a product meets your needs, is a fair price, and seems to be working fine after 30 days, you would not give it 5 stars?_

And then along comes the cable which, when I plug it in, causes a religious miracle to occur. How do I rate that one? Five stars is already taken. (Or maybe it should be two stars. I want to get my work done without being distracted by a prominent religious figure appearing next to my desk.)

To put it another way, when I purchase something I _expect_ that it will work fine after 30 days and that it meets my needs. That doesn't warrant five stars. That's three stars: does what I expected, doesn't suck but doesn't stand out from the rest all that much. If it were half the price of cables of equal quality, then I'd give it five stars. But IMO the product has to be outstanding in some way to warrant five stars, otherwise why have a rating system at all?

OTOH, Amazon doesn't help with this. Click on "critical reviews" on Amazon, and three star reviews are listed. That's just broken. Three stars is middle of the road, not outstanding in anyway but not deficient, either.

So, no, given your parameters, I would not rate the item five stars. I realize the rest of the world doesn't agree with me, and I'm loathe to participate in such a skewed system (everyone gets a trophy). My concession is I'll give four stars to something I'd normally give three stars, just so it doesn't show up in the "critical review" section, broken as that might be.

<comment><USER46> I'm more inclined to reserve 5 stars for _really_ good films and books (even if they're not in the truly great category). For a cable though? If it does it's job, appears well-made, and is a good price, I'm not sure why I'd hit it in the ratings. I suppose I can leave lower numbers of stars in a quixotic quest against review inflation but doesn't seem really fair to the products involved.

<comment><USER44> _If it does it 's job, appears well-made, and is a good price, I'm not sure why I'd hit it in the ratings._

And hence my quandary; I don't consider three stars to be a "hit...in the ratings". It does the job, doesn't stand out in any other way, three stars. But, as you point out, it's not fair in the inflated system that we have available. So which wins out, an honest review system that benefits consumers, or review inflation that benefits product sellers? I haven't decided, nor figured out any means of compromise.

As I once heard about bug priority, if everything's a Priority 1, then _nothing_ is a Pri 1. And if everything that isn't complete shite is five stars, then really nothing is five stars. Five stars just means it doesn't suck. Then why don't we have just one star or no stars from which to choose? In other words, the precision of the rating system is not what the five choices would imply.

<comment><USER47> Unlike bugs, you are not triaging all products on Amazon together. If I search for a certain type of USB cable, I expect to see 5 star products. I'm not disturbed that Spirited Away is also rated 5 stars. I'm not confused and decide to buy a great film instead of a cable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Looks like Google is doing an amazing service for customers in this area.

Not only they are using a standard plug and thus not locking you into buying accessories from them, which seem reasonably priced anyway, but they even test a lot of other cables in the market and tell you how compatible they are both with their own products and even with the products of competitors with quite different practices.

</comment><comment><USER49> BTW, he put instructions for how to test at [https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/jGP5249NppF](https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/jGP5249NppF)

<comment><USER50> I thought that would be how to test all usb-c's really it's how to test usb-c if you have a pixel (or in other words $1000 in your fun-time budget)

<comment><USER49> True, maybe I should rephrase that as "he wrote down details for how he tested them..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> My favorite is the only other review on his profile from years ago of the Orange Box soundtrack.

<comment><USER52> I was scrolling through the comments thinking "No one else here noticed his rave review for the Orange Box Soundtrack?"

<comment><USER53> Surprised none of the USB cables were a triumph

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Amazon reviews become useless as Amazon allows third-party vendors from China and HK to flood the original listing with clones.

So people buy based on the review and then they find out the vendor shipped a clone, so then they give a bad review but it's not for the original listing.

Amazon made a huge mess with that, they should never allow third parties to sell on the original listing.

<comment><USER55> Another fun thing I saw on Amazon a few months back was items for sale with reviews for another product. Shopping for a small FM transmitter, I found a listing where every review more than a few months old was for a roof-mounted car antenna.

I suppose there is a Ship of Theseus problem when trying to detect tricks like that automatically - surely sellers should be able to reword description, update product image, and change the product name slightly, but where do you draw the line and how do you handle that? Heh.

<comment><USER30> I've had a similar thing, where a vendor had clearly kept the same listing for many years. They were the same type of product (tablets) but the specs referenced for the oldest listings were quite hilarious. For a long time this seemed to have been fine, sort of, as the shipped products consistently were better than those described in older listings.

Until they weren't. We bought one that was a substantial step down (screen resolution in particular, which was exactly why I'd picked it).. Got a refund, but Amazon simply didn't seem to care that the reviews had no relevance to the current model, which was a let down (though a lesson to read the reviews closely and pay attention to their age...)

<comment><USER56> Weird. Any time I've pointed out an obviously wrong listing it has been pulled down almost immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Cool but I don't think he understands how off-brand (meaning not big name brand) products like this change specs and quality on Amazon like Seattle changes weather.

For cases where there is a big brand, and they have a reputation to defend, these reviews seem very valuable. For other cases, buyer beware.

<comment><USER58> > like Seattle changes weather

From the perspective of having grown up in the midwest, Seattle's weather might as well be Old Faithful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Oh hey Benson! _waves_

I worked a little with Benson. He's a fantastic guy with a penchant to veer into epic rants, which he seems to have kept in check on these reviews. Our loss!

Anyways he is a kernel software engineer and surely has some assistance (or at least double checking) from the resident EEs. This feels like a bottom-up initiative, showcasing how Google can empower its engineers. Great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER60> This is awesome, and I really hope more companies do this.

I wonder though: from the few reviews I've looked at, it seems that the main complaint is that the cable does not identify itself as a legacy connector, and can result in the device drawing too much power from the port, potentially damaging whatever is on the other end.

Definitely an unfortunate result, BUT: I wonder, is it still a common concern when the device on the other end is (for example) a wall plug-to-USB connector? Because if it's not too much of an issue in that case, and the device on the USB-C end is not at risk, wouldn't a non-compliant cable result in faster charging?

<comment><USER36> I've smoked two wall warts because of trying to use a dodgy USB-C cable to charge a 2015 Pixel. In one case, the wall wart sim[ply stopped charging.

In the second case the wall wart started charging my Nexus 6 REALLY FAST on one port and the other port has gone dead. I haven't had a chance to check it out with a volt meter, but I suspect it's now putting out substantially more than 5V on one port, and substantially less than 5V on the other. Fortunately the N6 supports Quick Charge 2.0, so as long as the voltage wasn't more than 9V, it probably didn't do any real harm to the phone (although it was actually charging faster than my normal QC charger). But since I also noticed the phone getting really hot, I've stopped using that charger, and it doesn't look like I've significantly damaged the N6 batteries. At least, the battery life hasn't been compromised and it hasn't burst into flames. Yet. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> It would physically pain me to work at a company that sells defective equipment.

I'd like to see amazon just develop in-house testing for certain types of stock. Cables, power supplies...

<comment><USER62> How much more are you willing to pay for that? If you're willing to pay a premium for tested and certified gear, why not just buy from your phone's manufacturer in the first place?

<comment><USER63> Because a lot of the Nexus 6P/5X accessories are sold out or have long delays before shipping. Also, I don't need another wall wart charger, just the cable.

<comment><USER62> Yeah, well it's easier to make things by the million when you don't care about testing, certification or product damage.

Part of the reason the cheap ones have so much availability is that they are cheap and easy to make and have little quality control -- even though they may not work.

<comment><USER63> Not really. I can buy super cheap micro-USB cables that work perfectly.

This seems to happen all the time when there's a new standard out. The disreputable companies whip together something shoddy and try to get those early sales before more reputable companies can move in. Meanwhile, companies like Amazon do nothing to stop this obvious fraud. Amazon should be stopping these sales.

Also, its disingenuous to pretend these are $2 cables. The only ones still available showing price are $14.99. These are much more than $2.

<comment><USER64> Arguably though, if a USB cable is $20 through Google, and $2 through an off- brand, I may want two of them, but buy six and consider any that don't work or stop working disposable. And still be saving money over buying from Google.

Consumers need to be aware of the risks they take when they buy bargain brand, but it doesn't negate the benefits of having bargain brand available.

<comment><USER62> Unless, of course, the $2 cable over-charges your $600 phone and the battery explodes or it burns out the charging circuit, then it's a false economy.

<comment><USER64> That's a risk. But for the millions of people who successfully use $2 cables every single day, many of whom can't afford $20 cables, they're pretty glad $2 cables exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Is there a simple test that someone could do with a multimeter to test these cables themselves? Or is it more than just having a pullup resistor on the right pins?

<comment><USER65> These are very high-speed cables, so there's a lot that can go wrong from a signal integrity standpoint.

<comment><USER62> I can't even remember the last time I used a USB cable on my phone for data, the only time I ever plug it in is for charging, so I don't care too much about signal integrity as long as it will charge my phone without damaging it.

When I do care about signal integrity (i.e. connecting a USB hard drive to my computer, I use name-brand cables)

<comment><USER24> Without root, you need USB to start a connection with adb for debugging on the phone, even if you switch to wifi later.

<comment><USER62> I can count with zero fingers the number of times I've used ADB for debugging my phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> "USB" and the various USB logos are trademarks of the USB-IF. I was under the impression that non-compliant products can be sued for trademark infringement by the USB-IF. Sure, they could be sold without the logo, but not being able to put the word "USB" in their product description would make them unsearchable and kill their online sales...

<comment><USER67> The trouble would be chasing all the cheap manufacturers, distributors, and resellers. It would be rather time consuming and costly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Related: has anyone written reviews of car USB ports, what devices they're capable of charging, and workarounds for charging higher-current devices? Many car USB ports have failure modes similar to those documented in these reviews, and they can't actually deliver high current for charging high-end smartphones, let alone tablets and laptops.

<comment><USER69> Buy an Anker charger rated at 2 Amps. It will live up to it's promises.

<comment><USER68> The kind that plug in to the 12V "accessory" port, skipping the car's own USB entirely?

<comment><USER70> Yes, for example: [http://www.amazon.com/Car-Charger-PowerIQ-Technology- Motorol...](http://www.amazon.com/Car-Charger-PowerIQ-Technology- Motorola/dp/B00SSMRB9A)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71>
        CableCreation Micro-B receptacle to Type-C plug adapter is out of spec.
        May cause damage to your USB charger, PC, or hub.

Still gave it 2/5 stars?!

<comment> ryan-c Didn't burn down Google campus or shoot my dog, +1 star.

Joking aside, I'm somewhat more likely to read a two star review vs a one star review because a lot of the one star reviews are whiny rants and not actually helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> And this exemplifies why (in my eyes) Google seems to have the best engineers - they're willing to go above and beyond in everything they do

<comment><USER44> Other companies have employees just like that. Sadly, if those folk pull a stunt like that, someone will be having a word with them.

I say "sadly", but I've seen the flip-side of this, too. A properly-formed query on usenet will turn up some back-in-the-day posts from Microsoft employees (posting with a microsoft.com reply-to) who were real assholes. (And not to pick on Microsoft, though they certainly have it coming; just the first counter-example that came to mind.)

So I guess I'm conflicted. Yeah, Benson's being really helpful and it looks good for Google, IMO. But with a different employee, it could turn really ugly if someone's back is turned.

<comment><USER64> I've definitely seem some embarrassingly bad attitudes from Googlers on social media. (One recently which basically said every serialization protocol that wasn't Google's was inherently harmful, because Google didn't make them.)

But obviously, there's many people like Benson who provide incredibly sagely advice that do a service not just to Google's own customers, but competitors' like Amazon's customers as well.

Once a company reaches a certain size, they have way too many people to police all of them across the Internet, or ensure all of their hires contribute meaningfully online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Good to see that Benson is a Half-Life man.

</comment><comment><USER74> I bought the TechMatte 2x USB-C to Micro-USB item that he gave two stars for use with my 5X. At least one of the items I got was actually defective. The other worked but charged very slowly. I wish I had seen his post before buying!

Now I am nervous because I subsequently bought a cable that he hasn't reviewed yet...

This has me wondering if there is some way to incentivize good reviewers. There is Consumer Reports and some more tech-specific sites but there is still a long tail of products that you have to buy without good reviews.

<comment><USER28> It's probably more effective to try to weed out the reasonable brands.

For instance, I don't think Amazon is going to sell broken crap using their AmazonBasics brand, and they still charge quite a bit less than Belkin (I don't think they sell USB C yet, but that's besides the point).

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Can someone explain why this topic receives so many upvotes?

Is it just a popular topic getting upvoters who vote for popular items or is there something genuinely interesting about this?

<comment><USER76> I was similarly curious too.

You may find [http://hn.algolia.com](http://hn.algolia.com) of interest to look through, to see the kinds of things HN tends to upvote, and the kind of things that tend to get passed by. Different things attract different levels of attention and fascination on here. It can actually be quite interesting to observe.

This is just a fascinating artefact of the HN hivemind collective interest, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Google screws up cables as well. My Chromecast (V1) came with a dud cable that will provide some charge to some devices, but won't power or charge anything I've tried it on. So my Chromecast is now powered courtesy of Lenovo.

It's a statistic though, just as anything mass-produced. But I found his comment on the quality of 3rd party manufactured cables vs Google and Apple slightly amusing. Apple cables in my household and everywhere I've come across them are no prize pigs. Samsung Galaxy provided cables on the other hand have proved to be exceptionally durable in my experience. Nokia cables and chargers also seem to be made out of solid Kevlar or some flexible Titanium, seeing that every single one I've owned since the late '90s is still working. My blue LED modded Nokia 3310 is still going strong, battery and all, but that's another story.

</comment><comment><USER78> I just bought an HDMI "hub"/duplicator, and just now realized that now all HDMI cables are the same - some support 1.3, others 1.4 (or were these the numbers and such).

Maybe it's okay, so far the Wii/PS4 and ChromeCast work fine through it... I'm just posting this here, as no one informed me about possibly complications at BestBuy, but the great folks at Staples actually forwarded me to BestBuy to look for such device.

My father told me a story about service in Turkey, basically if you go to a store and they don't have right away what you need, they may go out find/buy it for you, just to please you. Or buy you a coffee, while waiting in s shoe shop.

Whether he exaggerates a bit or not, I like this approach. Yes you might lose customers, but you'll always leave a smile in good customers. They might come back, just for that little appreciation...

</comment><comment><USER79> It would be good if he did resistance tests as well. I killed my phone's battery by absentmindedly using a shitty cable that was basically tinsel wire.

(details: I was full-time tethering while plugged in. I assume the charge controller thought the battery was charging but it was actually slowly discharging)

<comment><USER76> That info deserves being tied to the model of the phone, at least. Not because that phone's thus inherently bad, but because that's a buggy design. I understand you're saying that the cable fooled the charge controller into letting the battery fall completely flat? Wow.

Getting said info to the right place so next version's charge controller is fixed would be nigh impossible, but dropping the info in lots of high-exposure places might be a start.

<comment><USER79> It was an HTC EVO 4G (non-"LTE"). Quite old at this point.

I can only surmise what actually happened. I was full-time wifi tethering for a month or two and the symptoms along the way seemed to point to this cause. The phone eventually stopped taking power at all, until I plugged it into a USB port instead of the OEM 1A charger. At which point I realized the higher current was the problem, and investigated the cable.

It actually felt like a really nice cable - very robust and strain-reliefy. But apparently that's because the whole thing was mostly plastic and essentially headphone wires. Lesson learned!

If my theory is correct , it's a pretty stupid design. But I feel like there's probably many weird corner cases in consumer electronics that don't matter because 99% of people won't find them, and the ones that do won't realize it's a bug, and by the time anybody could put it together that specific model has been obsoleted anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Wow. I wish more companies would do this kind of small "public good" incidental to other work.

</comment><comment><USER81> If only there were more of this stuff! The kind of information in his reviews is technically detailed but clear enough for the layperson, and it answers the real question I have in mind when I'm looking at the 1-3 star reviews: does it actually work for what I want it to do?

<comment><USER82> The strange part of these reviews though is that counterintuitively many of these cables would be considered to "work for what you want it to do" when a spec-compliant cable would not.

Usually what people want is to "make my device charge fast" \- in which case the cables not implementing the spec correctly work while compliant cables would not.

Of course, there is a reason that compliance exists! Chances are you are plugging this cable into a wall-wart made in the past few years with higher tolerances than needed, and things will work out fine. Until they don't. Then you may burn out a PC USB port, or potentially I suppose catch a cheap chinese wall wart on fire.

At least that is my current understanding having spent the past few days attempting to decipher how this all works. The correct way to go about this transition to USB-C is to toss out all your USB-A chargers, buy USB-C chargers, and if you need to adapt; adapt in the USB-C -> USB-micro/mini direction vs. the USB-A -> USB-C direction.

The tldr on this is basically if you plug into a USB-A charger, you should not be able to "rapid charge" at 3A. If you are, you are out of spec and could potentially damage something you plug that cable into. Just give up on the dream of using your old chargers and expect to replace them with chargers that implement USB-C there. If you need to charge USB micro devices, invest in some USB-C -> Micro cables (or adapters) instead.

<comment><USER25> Just slapping the "the other end is 3A capable" resistor onto the cable isn't good enough, because a cable has no idea what's on the other end.

You can still rapid charge with a compliant type-C/A cable, but it needs to be negotiated through one of the other specified mechanisms (that directly talk with the other end and thus can figure out what the type-A charging side can actually provide).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Some of these cables are downright dangerous: [http://www.amazon.com/review/R2DQ7OH7PQG24F/ref=cm_aya_cmt?i...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R2DQ7OH7PQG24F/ref=cm_aya_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B013XFANAA)

</comment><comment><USER83> Has there been any uptick in USB-C adoption? Apple skipped it in their latest iMacs. I think they're waiting for the USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 unification.

[https://thunderbolttechnology.net/blog/thunderbolt-3-usb- c-d...](https://thunderbolttechnology.net/blog/thunderbolt-3-usb-c-does-it- all)

I've seen a couple Dell laptops but not much else. It's a much better form factor. Not to mention the elimination of USB superposition: :-)

[http://9gag.com/gag/6756457/usb- superposition](http://9gag.com/gag/6756457/usb-superposition)

<comment><USER84> The recently released Nexus 5x and Nexus 6p phones both have USB-C, as does the Chromebook Pixel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I'm glad somebody is taking the time to do this. I'm going through and marking every one of these reviews as "helpful" so they float to the top of the Amazon reviews for these products.

</comment><comment><USER86> I wish someone would do this for micro-usb2 cables. I've bought so many different ones and found that they don't carry enough current from the charger to properly charge my Nexus 6.

<comment><USER87> Well there you have multiple "issues".

One part is the wire gauge. You need something like 24awg (its the American system, don't ask me why) on the power pins (higher number, thinner wire, iirc). Most use 28 on both power and data pairs.

Then the charger has to actually follow the USB spec, not the very similar Apple one. This means either a microchip that can handle the USB handshake, or a resistor across the data pins at the charger end to signal that this is a charger (Apple has one resistor on each pin, with a slightly different resistance).

Now on top of that you have Qualcomm pushing their fast charge system that involves a chip at both ends, and higher voltage than the 5V that USB normally uses. The higher voltage allows for more watts without upping the ampere (V*A=W, iirc).

Note that the Qualcomm system is similar (but i don't think they are interchangeable) with the USB3 system (the latter can go all the way to 20V, but that requires beefy cables).

Frankly the more i think about it the more i expect to hear about someone getting electrocuted because they mistook their data cable for their dumb laptop charger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Benson is doing God's work. Because of him I was able to purchase a USB-C to USB-A cable (the iOrange cable he reviewed), and I learned that Google's own marketing materials were functionally incorrect, which led users to expect 3.0A charging out of the cable from Google (which is out of stock currently), when it technically only charges at 2.4A (if I understand things correctly). This in turn led people to (incorrectly) poorly review the non-Google cables.

</comment><comment><USER89> I miss a simple page with information om how I can perform tests, like on the USB-C cables, myself. I find reading specs to take to much time to be able know how to perform them. Example is the 57MB zip-file for the USB-C-spec: [http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/](http://www.usb.org/developers/docs/)

</comment><comment><USER90> I'd like to see a technical review of the Nektech cables: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VIWE1ZY](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VIWE1ZY)

They have over 200 positive reviews but I don't think they've been tested to same degree that Benson has been checking.

</comment><comment><USER91> I look forward to reading his review of this USB cable: [http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-feet-Braided- Cable/...](http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-feet-Braided- Cable/dp/B003CT08E4)

I'm sure Google can afford the $1000+ price tag.

</comment><comment><USER92> I don't understand why this is so fascinating that it has 724 upvotes, can someone explain?

<comment><USER93> 1200something now. I agree; this seems interesting enough to be on the homepage for a bit, but not vastly more so than many other stories. Not sure what's going on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Must say it strikes me crazy that they put anything at all into the cable.

How hard would it be to carry the existing A port charging spec forward, so that if a device detected the A form it would go no higher than 2.1A?

Frankly cables should be as dumb as you can make them.

</comment><comment><USER94> One of his reviews brought up an interesting point. Version 3.1 of the spec does not limit the length of a cable, but version 2.0 does. Is a 4 conductor cable with a USB-C connector on one end only required to meet the USB 3.1 standards?

</comment><comment><USER95> Now you know why apply made their own plugs and cables. You can't trust third part manufacturers. Google probably gets lots of complains about devices not charging properly, when it is the cable at fault.

</comment><comment><USER96> The title of this is a bit misleading. It looks like it just reviewing cables. Plenty of them are positive reviews and he recommends the product.

</comment><comment><USER97> I love that he had also reviewed the orange box OST

</comment><comment><USER72> All areas of internet business (ecommerce, publishing, etc) need to be held more accountable. Kudos to this guy for doing his part

</comment><comment><USER98> Well crqp. I just bought a couple of these for my Nexus 5X a week ago. I wonder if I could work an amazon refund.

</comment><comment><USER99> His this is Benson again, Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V...

Doesn't work! I just broke my keyboard keys! Stopped my reviews, damn..

</comment><comment><USER100> What's the "ref=cm_cr_rdp_pdp" on the end of the URL? Is this an affiliate link?

</comment><comment><USER101> Thanks guys, I just bought $80 of assorted USB-C cables 5 hours ago. :-/

</comment><comment><USER102> Why is this one of the all-time most popular posts on HN about Google?

</comment><comment><USER103> You wouldn't get Apple doing this for third party lightening cables .. yeah I know it would be like them giving away their own lunch, but it further underlines that lightening is just a money-spinner not any real technical advance.

<comment><USER104> Actually they have the MFi program [1] and you just have to look for the logo when buying cables. Of course you can criticize the program, but it's just plain wrong that Apple isn't doing something about cable quality.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Benson obviously adds value to the content so I feel bad about whining, but this looks like a severe case of "how can you tell if someone works for google? -Don't worry, they'll let you know".

</comment><comment><USER106> Cablegate 2015!

</comment><comment><USER107> So uh, maybe they can explain why the DisplayPort USB-C adapter for the Chromebook Pixel only works in one orientation? Yes, that's right. You heard me. You have to flip it over 50% of the time to get the screen to come on. (This might be Linux specific, I don't have ChromeOS to check)

<comment><USER42> I don't have one of these adapters but that seems sub-optimal. Perhaps it's an issue fixed by a newer firmware (which CrOS will load to the dongle automatically, but probably not a stock Linux distribution)?

Detailed design for the adapter is here: [https://www.chromium.org/chromium- os/dingdong](https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/dingdong)

If you feel like it, please file a bug.

<comment><USER107> :) I don't come across a lot of ppl that know that one. Googler? Fan/user

Anyway, yeah, I've actually had that thought in the back of my head. I've actually reloaded this laptop 3 times due to the exact situation you mention. (The HDD is too small to leave CrOS on there).

It's been several months since I've let CrOS do it's thing and reflash the firmware... I should give it a shot.

Many moths ago, I was reinstalling CrOS it to try to get it to reflash the adapter so that MST on DP1.2 would work. But it never worked and furthermore, the Dell monitors I have stop working when you enable DP1.2 so all around... it was disappointing.

I wanted my Pixel to be my sole development machine... but when I'm sitting at my desk... I expect dual monitors... So I continue to sync my git repos between 3+ computers at a time. Woohoo.

Whoever wants to make a laptop with 16GB RAM, HiDPI screen (and not the shitty Lenovo panels), and 2x mini-DP out.... boy, I'd sure love to see it. (And the Surface Pro 4 actually falls in that category, but is not Linux friendly)

\----

edit: Checked the dingdong history... not seeing too much relevant but I might give it a shot when I have a slow weekend. Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Really, this is at the top of HN? Must be a slow news day.

<comment><USER109> You made that comment 6 hours ago and it's _still_ at the top. I can't even figure out why it was posted in the first place. "Look, someone is writing reviews on Amazon!" Wow!

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> The best engineers in the world work at Google.

<comment><USER111> [looks at his Android phone] hmmm...

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> This is just one side of an ancient debate: If component A doesn't work with component B, where is the problem? The manufacturer of A blames B, and vice- versa. (The truth is that they are simply incompatible and often it's nobody's fault.)

If many USB-C cables don't work with Google devices, where is the problem? It suits Google to say the problem is with the cables, but maybe creating pressure for better cables or shifting consumer attention to them is just a less expensive solution than altering the devices.

Regarding the violated specifications: 1) In the real world, nobody meets all published specifications and both sides can point to violations. Have you ever built anything that met _all_ specifications? (I laughed a little when I wrote that) 2) If you design your product to work only with other systems that meet all published specifications, your product sucks. If your car only runs safely on roads that meet all specs, your customers are going to die. (Maybe there are exceptions when engineering critical systems components in things like airplanes, but I doubt it.)

That doesn't make our Google engineer wrong; it just means we don't know (unless you know what _realistic_ performance specs are for USB-C cables). However, if in the real world it's hard to find USB cables that work with Google devices then, _ipso facto_ , there's something wrong with the devices.

<comment><USER113> "Realistic" performance specs should include "doesn't have a chance of literally setting something on fire by drawing too much current through it".</comment></comment>


The Do-Not-Track Act of 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://spreadprivacy.com/do-not-track-act-2019/ <comment><USER2> > Our recent study on the Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting indicated that > about a quarter of people have turned on this setting, and most were unaware > big sites do not respect it.

I have not enabled it for this reason. Any site can just ignore it and there's nothing you can do about it.

So I take care of that myself with running a PiHole, uBlock and alike.

<comment><USER3> The reason I don't use it is because it can make your browser fingerprint more unique.

As a result I use uBlock, uMatrix, Temporary containers.

More info about that configuration here: [https://github.com/dngray/ghacks- user.js/tree/fx-desktop](https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-user.js/tree/fx- desktop)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this problem has to be solved by law then the laws should be the reverse, privacy by default, opt-in to tracking, laws about how that opt-in is presented and verified.

<comment><USER5> The EU cookies consent law is a prime example of how worthless this is. Easily 99% of sites either don't display this warning, or display it with no "decline" option.

I can think of 2 instances over the past year where I've been able to "do not accept".

I completely agree with the proposed legislation, but it's pointless without consistent, continuous enforcement. They need to be fining sites a small amount UNFAILINGLY across the board. $10 per violation (being unable to show opt-in consent) with no appeals.

Not the trackers (Facebook, Google et Al), but the actual sites (eg. NYT) who've implemented them. They'll drop it REAL QUICK until it's been properly implemented.

But who actually has the budget for enforcement? I don't know the answer to this.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best personal development and productivity books - <AUTHOR> Hi
I was thinking that HN would be a good source of recommendations for good personal development/motivational/productivity books.
So what books have given the most to your life? <comment><USER2> "The Calm Technique" which is the best no fluff guide to meditation. Note the author's other works are distinctly more woo.

"Structure of Scientific Revolutions" which is critical for understanding how long change really takes, and spotting areas where revolutionary change is overdue.

"Pritikin's Testament" (also published as "Jesus was an Ad Man") which is The Bible on human communication from one of the original Mad Men. The original name was just to attract controversy, it's not a Parable of Jesus the Advertiser or anything dumb like that. The author worships the three martini lunch.

"Angel Tech" by Antero Alli for it's devastating analysis of what makes people tick, and how to rework your own clockwork. Owes more to improv theatre than shamanism, regardless of its name.

"The Outsider" by Colin Wilson. This book has aged strangely, and it's up to you if he's describing adolescence or asberger's syndrome, but you can't get your head around social difference through the ages in an easier way.

$0.02 etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.hnstore.co/> might be useful for seeing the most referenced books on HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie. A classic (the title sounds manipulative, but the book isn't).

</comment><comment><USER5> Aaron Swartz's Raw Nerve.

<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve>

</comment><comment><USER6> Must read books Rework Purple Cow Louder Than Words Mob Rules

Then read my blog when I relaunch it BossTycoon.com a blog about entrepreneur lifestyle

</comment><comment><USER7> Wake Up Productive is an awesome program.

Also books by Tony Shwartz

</comment><comment><USER8> The Four Hour Workweek

<comment><USER6> Def a good book! I want to get 4 hour chef next</comment></comment>


Theoretical vulnerability of Dropbox – platform to quick exchange files - <AUTHOR> http://forwardfeed.pl/index.php/2011/03/23/theoretical-vulnerability-of-dropbox-platform-to-quick-exchange-files/

<comment><USER2> Are you extrapolating from my comment about this yesterday? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354396>

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I thought about this idea about year - from my last article about DB. But it is nice coincidence, thanks for show me that</comment></comment>


Report on Microsoft Office and Windows software: still privacy risks remaining - <AUTHOR> https://www.privacycompany.eu/en/new-dpia-on-microsoft-office-and-windows-software-still-privacy-risks-remaining-short-blog/ <comment><USER2> Microsoft is really shooting themselves in the foot with their terrible approach to privacy ever since Win10. Given that they earn money by selling actual products, they _could_ stand right next to Apple as a defender of privacy if they wanted to (unlike Google, which has a business model which depends on data collection)... but they choose not to.

It's not so long ago, in 2011, they had this video, targeting Google's privacy problems: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0)

Now they're no better than Google. What happened?

<comment><USER3> Indeed, this is surprising for many reasons:

\- B2B is a large part of their income, telemetry has probably damaged their reputation as a business vendor.

\- They have mostly failed at social media (except LinkedIn and Skype, which they have bought). So, there is no strong need for them to collect all this data to profit off (otherwise free) social media.

\- They have a strong developer story with WSL, Azure, etc. They could have replaced Apple as the darling of developers. But not with telemetry, start menu ads, etc.

\- At least in the EU, more privacy is where the puck is going. They could take on Google's weaknesses.

<comment><USER4> > \- At least in the EU, more privacy is where the puck is going. They could > take on Google's weaknesses.

Ironically, it's Europe where privacy championing Apple is way less of a player than Google when it comes to smartphones and services, especially compared to the US market.

So I'm not sure if a privacy conscious approach would buy them much in the EU, at least among consumers.

<comment><USER5> I was not able to find concrete sources but I think that has more to do with the expensive pricing of iPhones and Apple's former image as a somewhat invasive and consumerist company. I remember there being a decent amount of distrust against their vendor-lock-in techniques.

Overall, I would say consumers' privacy-sensitivity in Europe expresses itself largely in the increased usage of Telegram, Tor, Firefox, and Linux compared to the US.

<comment><USER6> None of my friends stick with Telegram for long simply because of andorid's battery saver apps. Notifications simply wont show unless they open the telegram app.

<comment><USER7> I don't use Telegram or Android at the moment and so can't be sure, but I wonder if this would help: [https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to- remove-android-a...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-remove- android-apps-from-the-battery-optimization-list/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is fantastic. Not only have they effectively pushed Microsoft to improve things for everyone (in 1905 of Office and 1903 of Windows specifically, via new [lower] telemetry options), but now Data Viewer supports Microsoft Office's telemetry, and we have more data on what Office's telemetry is doing.

Overall well done PrivacyCompany and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. Still seems to be fights left to have, but this is definitely a step in a positive direction.

<comment><USER9> Agree it's great that the Dutch Government is pushing Microsoft to be more transparent.

> Still seems to be fights left to have, but this is definitely a step in a > positive direction.

Indeed. From the article:

"The Dutch government's new privacy terms and conditions do not (yet) apply to data processing via Windows 10 Enterprise or the mobile Office apps. It is not possible to minimize data traffic in Office Online. From at least three of the mobile apps on iOS, data about the use of the apps goes to a US-American marketing company that specializes in predictive profiling. This is done without providing any information about the purposes of this processing, and without giving the users or administrators any possibility to prevent this processing."

So: use Office on iOS, and it'll send usage data off to some predictive profiling marketing firm.

Why, as a (presumably) paying user, is it OK for Microsoft to do that?

<comment><USER10> Holy shit, that quote. Did absolutely not expect that (even though I assumed thorough telemetry is sent to Microsoft itself).

I've been sitting for months on this article explaining my belief that advertising is a cancer on modern society, and I can't get myself to publish it, because literally every other day brings another thing I want to include on the list of damage being done. I'm not even actively looking for examples anymore; I just open HN and - lo and behold - top story tells me that MS Office mobile apps send data to US predictive profiling company, _because of course they do_.

<comment><USER11> A thought you could add to your article. In the medieval period in Europe, advertising outside your shop was strictly forbidden because it was considered an assault on your senses. I totally agree with this sentiment.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for that thought! Definitely fits in there. Do you have a link to some source about that, though? I'd love to know about this in more detail.

<comment><USER11> Phillip Campbell (aka Boniface) of [http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/](http://unamsanctamcatholicam.blogspot.com/) should be able to point you in the right direction, he is a medieval scholar.

Edit: Sorry I don't have any exact citations, he said it in an interview wit Ryan Grant, so I'm sure he has a source he read somewhere.

<comment><USER12> All good, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > From at least three of the mobile apps on iOS, data about the use of the > apps goes to a US-American marketing company that specializes in predictive > profiling.

Can any MS employees jump in and justify how you find this acceptable?

<comment><USER14> MS employee here (I work with data but not in Office). My opinion: I don't find this acceptable. At the end of the day, sending data to a third party without the customers awareness is a violation of trust, regardless of how narrow in scope that data might be.

I'm curious to see how MS responds. There are several unanswered questions that I'd like answered. Specifically:

1\. Any disputes about the factual nature of these claims?

2\. If not, what is the third party doing with the data?

<comment><USER15> I wish we had more honest opinions like this on HN, from tech workers about their own company's flaws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome, maybe will give data so I can more easily defend my position to refuse Win10 (I was on Win8, hoping Win10 would be better... instead telemetry and forced updates that break everything fairly regularly made me instead uninstall Win8 and install Win7 instead) or convince me Win10 telemetry really, really is fine.

Mind you, where I live, political assassinations, industrial espionage and assassinations and whatnot, although rare, DO exist, so privacy is important (specially for me since I AM actually registered officially as a politician although I never won any election)

<comment><USER17> I sure hope you're keeping on top of all the Win7 telemetry updates, then.

[https://www.overclock.net/forum/132-windows/1587577-windows-...](https://www.overclock.net/forum/132-windows/1587577-windows-7-updates- list-descriptions-telemetry.html)

[https://betanews.com/2019/07/11/microsoft-adds-telemetry- win...](https://betanews.com/2019/07/11/microsoft-adds-telemetry-windows-7/)

<comment><USER18> What's the point of collecting telemetry in Windows 7, if there will be no future versions of Windows 7 (this OS is near its EOL)?

<comment><USER17> That's a good question...

/tinfoilhat

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There are really only two levels of Windows telemetry according to this report's endpoint analysis:

-Minimum ( _Security_ )

-Full

The report goes into lengthy detail explaining the default level is _Full_ :

« The IT-pro's (administrators) of the Enterprise version can choose between three telemetry options (Security, Basic or Full). If the administrator chooses to suppress the privacy-related set-up experience and does not adjust the setting otherwise (e.g., by group policy), the default diagnostic data level setting is Enhanced. 51 At that level, Microsoft explains it collects "Additional insights, including: how Windows, Windows Server, System Center, and apps are used, how they perform, advanced reliability data, and data from both the Basic and the Security levels." 52 . In that case, the setting for diagnostic data presented to end-users is set to Full »

</comment><comment><USER20> Microsoft is all about telemetry to improve its products, and it's a slippery slope and some of the instances pointed out here are way beyond what one would consider useful (for feature developmemt) telemetry. This might cost Microsoft a few billion.

<comment><USER21> The stated purpose of telemetry is to improve their products. Yet the telemetry itself is a massive _problem_ in their products.

Does anyone know what, if any, product improvements have been made thanks to telemetry?

<comment><USER22> Microsoft gave two examples where telemetry helped them in an Arstechnica article a while back. One was fixing a bug in their alarm clock app, the other was fixing an audio driver issue. If these are their go to examples, seems to very much not be worth the price of admission in my opinion.

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/04/micro...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/04/microsoft-opens-up-on-windows-telemetry-tells-us-most-of- what-data-it-collects/)

"As an example the company offered us, there was a problem with the Windows Alarm app. The Alarm app can have more complicated interactions than one might think, due to its interactions with system sleep (it can wake a machine up if necessary) and the notification framework. Some Windows users reported that their alarms weren't consistently going off. As is often the case with annoying bugs, the problem was intermittent, appearing to occur randomly and hence difficult to reproduce for debugging. With information collected at the Full level from a broad range of affected machines, the company's developers were able to ascertain the precise combination of factors leading to problems, and discovered that alarms became more unreliable as they grew older. The bug was fixed, and a patch was deployed.

Another problem the company described to us was that certain combinations of audio drivers and audio hardware were resulting in audio that was broken or missing certain special effects. The telemetry data enabled the exact pairings of drivers and hardware that had issues to be pinpointed, enabling a fix to be developed."

<comment><USER23> > If these are their go to examples, seems to very much not be worth the price > of admission in my opinion

It's an especially hard sell for me as, anecdotally, I've had _far_ more issues with Windows 10 than I ever had with 7. Recent one (1903 update) - virtually all text disappeared (desktop icons, menus, Notepad docs all appeared blank, and it made the address bar in Chrome take up about half the screen for some reason). On about 1/10 reboots, it would _eventually_ work if I restarted explorer.exe (text would start appearing in Task Manager, which was my cue to restart explorer). Safe Made, clean installing my graphics divers (assuming it was some sort of rendering bug), and sfc/DISM all failed to fix it. I eventually fixed it by (which was a shot in the dark more than anything):

1\. Taking ownership of C:\Windows\Fonts

2\. Deleting everything in \Fonts except files that are in use

3\. Using sfc /scannow to restore to contents of \Fonts

4\. Restoring ownership to Trusted Installer

All in all, not a fun process, and a couple of hours lost. I then wasted another 20 minutes or so as subsequent Windows Updates were failing, so I rebooted a few times to retry and was troubleshooting Windows Update. Apparently it was just installing in the background, but didn't feel like telling me that (it was just saying "Install now", then giving me a generic error code).

Similar issues have happened often enough that I'll delay updates until I know I don't _need_ my machine for at least a day. I never got to that stage with XP/Vista/7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The article mentions 12 bullet points for the most important measures organizations should take to mitigate the problem; some seem trivial, others surely are more complicated requiring time and money (this ain't Joe User's home gaming PC) and would offer no guarantee of achieving the goal because it's still closed software. So why not pouring that same amount of money into a single entity whose only purpose would be to integrate, or create where necessary, then document and support, FOSS software that does essentially the same things and services? (ie, not just Linux+Libreoffice).

I would surely donate some quid myself but I'm also 100% sure a lot of big names would follow making the thing self sustainable, as I'm not the only one feeling uncomfortable by knowing that my personal data is managed by companies that profit from people personal data (therefore including Google and others). This problem hits everyone: I may choose not to use any of their software on my machines, but I have no chances of convincing either my doctor or my lawyer to do the same, unless the practice becomes widespread and non technical users too are made aware of the issues.

</comment><comment><USER25> >Upgrade to version 1905 or higher of Office 365 ProPlus and set the telemetry level to the 'Neither' option.

Well that's a dark pattern if I've ever seen one. Worse it suggests that before version 1905 there were only two options for telemetry, and neither of them was _no_ telemetry.

<comment><USER26> A "funny" thing: in Vista and 7 the modal window for Improvement Program had a "Yes, I want to participate in the program." option set as default and you had to press bottom option twice so the save button would reactivate from grayed out state and you could refuse the participation. This little thing worked in such manner each time no matter of the build (original or with service pack), showing up to few hours after setting up fresh Windows installation and I'd say it was aimed at ordinary user who wouldn't try clicking twice on the option to see if it could be changed.

There was this report posted last year [1] where Norwegian Consumer Council was reviewing dark patterns used at facebook, Google and Windows.

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17406186](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17406186)</comment></comment>


The math of gambling  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327202.600-whats-luck-got-to-do-with-it-the-maths-of-gambling.html?full=true <comment><USER2> The way she describes winning at roulette is bogus.

First of all, if your money is doubled when you hit the right colour, you don't make any profit in the long run. You will stay on the same amount.

Second of all, there is a 0, and often also a 00 on the roulette wheel, which is neither red nor black. This means that the chance you're correct is less than 50%, so you stand to make a loss in the long run.

There is no way to win at roulette, without using a computer to predict where the ball is going to be, based on the movement and spinning of the wheel. And I seriously doubt that even that is possible using just human observation and a trigger in your foot.

[edit: the author is female, sorry about that]

<comment><USER3> I think you're misinterpreting the author's point about roulette. She never claimed that you could profit off of roulette in the long run. You can, however, almost certainly profit off of it in the short run. The strategy she describes has one double one's bet if one loses. If you bring enough money to cover 7 losses (which means you would have to have roughly 100 times your initial bet), then you have a >98% chance of coming out ahead. You won't be ahead by much, and the strategy won't work in the long run (i.e. you can only do it a couple of times--when you inevitably end up with 7 consecutive losses it will more than wipe out any earnings you make), but it is nevertheless a legitimate strategy to "beat" roulette in the short term.

<comment><USER2> True, I did misinterpret that. And she does own up to it that after 7 streaks you'd need 1280 pounds if you initially start with 10.

Still, the article states that there's a 50:50 chance of landing on black or red, which is simply not true.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. The article also claims that the outcome of a coin flip is 50:50, which is also not true.

<comment><USER4> You're mixing theoretical odds and practical odds, which might be considered sloppy.

Additionally, unfair coins can trivially be used as fair coins, but unbalanced roulette wheels cannot easily be used as fair roulette wheels.

<comment><USER3> A fair coin has a roughly 51% chance of landing with the same side up as it started with. See the paper by Diaconis et al. "Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss."

<comment><USER4> A fair coin is one on which p = 0.5. A coin that has a 51% chance is clearly not a fair coin. This isn't even what I was talking about, but is still equally easy to turn into a fair coin.

In this case, caller calls in the air after flipper hides the side that starts up. 0.5 * 0.51 + 0.5 * 0.49 = 0.5

For any other case, flip a coin twice. Assign one person HT and the other person TH, reflipping TT and HH. Since p * (1 - p) = (1 - p) * p, the dual flip is a fair flip.

Please don't mention the possibility of sleight of hand next.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One way that I would 'win' at roulette in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was to always bet equal amounts on red/black and even/odd. My reasoning was that there are 4 possible outcomes. I have a 50% chance of breaking even, a 25% chance of winning, and a 25% change of losing.

You probably can't 'win big' with such a strategy, but you've at least minimized the probability of a loss from 50% to 25%. You've also minimized the probability of a win by as much too, though. I'm no stats guru so I don't know how well this would work out on an actual roulette table...

{edit} I should mention that I worked at a casino for a while, and roulette is the game with the highest probability in favor of the house. Blackjack is the lowest. Casinos really only have Blackjack tables because patrons want them, or else they would probably get rid of them pretty quickly. {/edit}

<comment><USER2> _Casinos really only have Blackjack tables because patrons want them, or else they would probably get rid of them pretty quickly._

True, even with a simple strategy you can cut your theoretical loss to about 1-2% (without counting cards). But casinos have blackjack because most players don't know how to play. Most people don't follow that simple strategy (they often have leaflets explaining it too!).

With counting cards you can make it profitable for you. But casinos will make life very difficult for you if they find out you're counting cards. See also the movie about the MIT Blackjack team: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(2008_film)>

<comment><USER5> The casino I worked at used some formula to generate the number of 'points' you would earn towards free stuff based partially on the risk of the game that you were playing. They used the ~1-2% number for blackjack (or whatever the low number of when you play what blackjack players call 'the perfect game') rather than a larger number that might be closer to the 'average' skill of players.

This signaled to me that the casinos -- or at least the one I worked at -- in general treat the overall risk of blackjack as the low risk that skilled (non- counting) players can achieve, regardless of the number of people that might come in and ignore the simple, effective strategies to the game. Personally I think that the casinos would rather reduce the risk to themselves from skilled players as well as card counters and just remove all the blackjack tables, sending all those inexperienced gamblers onto games like roulette where they might lose a larger portion of the money they brought with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Incidentally, if I wanted to put my math skills to work in a casino, I would play poker. This game is one where the odds have not been stacked against me and a little math drastically alters my expected values.

</comment><comment><USER7> I never, ever learned anything from a newscientist.com article. Those articles are cute, but one learns nothing deep. I say we go directly to the source! Here is it, Ed Thorp's _The Mathematics of Gambling_ :

<http://www.bjmath.com/bjmath/thorp/tog.htm>

which is the true "bible" of scientific betting. For the mathematically- inclined, I also recommend:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_and_information_theory>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion>

and if you still have some energy left, try this:

 _A Markov Chain Analysis of Blackjack Strategy_ <http://www.ece.rice.edu/~crozell/courseproj/MCBJ.pdf>

Have fun! And remember: life is too short to read crappy articles!</comment>


Ex-Hacker Calls on Wikileaks Head to Step Down Following [...] Identity Breach - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytech.com/ExHacker+Calls+on+Wikileaks+Head+to+Step+Down+Following+Second+Third+Source+Identity+Breach/article18853.htm

<comment><USER2> _Lamo tells us he sent the logs to Wikileaks "To see if they'd be true to their ethos, and publish something, even if it incriminated a source, or if they'd cover it up. I wanted to pose a catch-22._

Um, yeah...

 _We have since established contact with Nadim Kobeissi, a hacker whose conversations with Adrian Lamo were also leaked._

These are being presented as Wikileaks choosing to identify people who send data to them. While it's a bit difficult to parts what exactly happened, it sounds more like it was really that Wikileaks got hold of some of Lamo's IM sessions and published those. Which seems quite reasonable, given that he's apparently selling people out and spinning inconsistent stories about why.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nadim alleges that he's the one who provided Assange with the IM transcripts, and that Assange outed him along with the transcripts.

<comment><USER2> So, you provide a private chat transcript to someone who is in the business of making things public... and then complain that by making that transcript public, they have identified who sent it to them.

Please tell me that's not accurate, because it's completely retarded.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this logic. "Anything you tell Julian Assange is fair game". Why, Manning could rightly have expected to be outed directly!

<comment><USER2> No, it's the difference between "someone sent me this file" (should always be expected) and "so-and-so sent me this file" (should not be expected). If the file you sent is something that by its intended contents (as opposed to hidden metadata etc) could only have come from you, then WTF are you doing sending it in for publication if you don't want people to put two and two together?

<comment><USER3> I don't think he intended for it to be published. He may have made this insufficiently clear, though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Look, more drama. You know what's something that "ideal wikileaks" wouldn't have that "real wikileaks" clearly does have? This much drama.

<comment><USER4> You seem to really dislike Wikileaks. What is it about them that bothers you so much?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think, in order of importance to their mission, they are:

* A publicity vehicle for their founders.

* A left-wing political cause (note: I say this as a left-liberal).

* A "fuck-you" to the mainstream media.

* An honest broker of leaked information.

I think when you hang up your sign offering to handle the most sensitive information people have to offer, it's incumbent on you to be above reproach. Clearly, Assange doesn't believe that: he's editorialized their most publicized disclosure to date, throwing their bias and handling of everything they do from this point forward into question.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, I have to agree. They have, nonetheless, done some good and interesting things; but with Iceland's new "Wikileaks" law, I'd be perfectly happy to see some "competitors" spring up...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Horrible style. They repeat a good couple times how Wikileaks compromised sources not once but twice and go on rambling how no wikileaks source is secure. More like confused ramblings than anything else. It's impressive what passes for journalism these days.

Surprise: you are not secure. You never were and you'll never be. If you really want to leak confidential info anonymously, you have to hide your identity yourself and trust nobody else to do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a misleading summary of the story. The allegation isn't that Wikileaks has poor operational security; it's that Assange was given documents that later leaked, and that are alleged to only have been leakable by him. This article alleges that Assange _deliberately_ broke opsec.

<comment><USER5> I am curious. If Alice and Bob have a private conversation and Bob knows he leaked this conversation to Adrian and then the conversation is made public, how can Bob be absolutely sure Adrian, but not Alice, leaked the conversation?

It's a tangled mess right now. Anyway, if you are a spook leaking info, you should, at least, cover your steps. During my life I have many times been in possession of secret datasets (not government-lock-me-in-jail-secret, but very secret anyway) and I am quite sure they were tainted in ways they would be traced directly back to me if they ever leaked. It's very easy to watermark files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This whole farce is a blatant and indirect DoD psyops attack on Wikileaks and Assange. So it's okay and even expected now for the US military to attack journalists and the grey-information-area of their domain? I thought only nations like "Communist" China did that. And here we all thought our civil liberties were worse off under Bush...

Remember the WL leaked secret DoD document containing the Pentagon's own plan to counter WL? Their plan was to cause a big enough PR incident to scare any future whistle-blowers into silence by creating the public perception that no matter who you are, if you leak extra-ordinary, critical national security information, then it's 100% guaranteed that you will be publically outed as a whistle-blower.

Isn't it remarkably convenient that the Pentagon's plan is _exactly_ what is now occurring with Lamo's bizarrely out of place participation in this whole fiasco? There sure are a lot of false and scary headlines attacking the credibility of WL! I realize the other logical possibility is that the Pentagon plan to attack WL is itself a fake, and Lamo is doing all of this on purpose to stage an "attack on WL", so that WL can turn around and say "see! the Pentagon is attacking us!" You can't get better PR than that if it really blew up.

But when your lead source is also your lead witness, you have a serious credibility issue and have to assume the entire story is fiction. We may never know the truth.

And much like when you owe Don Corleone a "favor", after you get arrested for the kinds of crimes they did, and then the Feds hook you up with a sweetheart deal with the prosecution, it's pretty obvious who is the master and who is the puppet. Also consider the history of Lamo and Poulsen, and especially go back to Poulsen's self-promoting NYTimes hit pieces on Mitnick in the 90's. Then ask "who is the most probable liar, these guys or WL?"

It's only a bonus that they can also create a media smokescreen around themselves to muddle an already subjective matter. From reading their writings and interviews over the past few years, they both come off as self-promoting fame whore types focused on selling an image of "hackers." Like drunken Hollywood starlets stumbling around a crowd of TMZ paps, their inserting of themselves into whatever issue they are "reporting" makes it impossible to take them seriously as journalists. (Only Hunter S. Thompson can be allowed to get away with that.)

I bet this makes them even _more_ valuable as Federal snitches, since everyone will assume the reason Lamo and Poulsen even have anything to do with this incident is because they're promoting themselves. It's a fantastic cover that prevents the spot light from casting shadows off the puppet strings.</comment>


GoDaddy launches Flare, a community app for sharing and rating business ideas - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/26/godaddy-flare/ <comment><USER2> I suppose as long as you already have your product built before sharing it's probably a good idea. I can't imagine just sharing an idea, having it get traction, and then not immediately having that idea stolen.

<comment><USER3> I would assume you have access to the list of people following it. So you have a huge head start on someone that develops it but has no following.

Beside most people don't blantly steal ideas. They have to their own twists which could completely change the magic.

And if it's that great don't disclose it and patent it.</comment></comment>


I'm on a horse (Gmail search WTF?) - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/37Eaw2Bpoc9

<comment><USER2> Oh my god, this is so good! I especially liked how he put two line breaks between each sentence. The post just went on and on... it felt like it would never end! Man, who are these people? Why would someone take the time to rant about their email client's user interface? What, are you the next Pete Cashmore?

<comment><USER3> Did you watch the video at the bottom? This post is done in the style of the Old Spice commercials.</comment></comment>