Notice of Data Breach - <AUTHOR> https://content.myfitnesspal.com/security-information/notice.html <comment><USER2> Somebody is about to come across 250 pictures of me in my boxers standing in front of a dirty mirror with my belly popping out. I only hope they don't judge me for the size of my belly not really changing over those 250 days...

<comment><USER3> Hi, even if a data breach hadn't happened, did you have any concerns about people within the company having access to those photos? I also use myfitnesspal and strava but I have a strong aversion to sharing that kind of info with anyone, period.

I'm 36, is this a generational thing?

<comment><USER4> Did you used to care that some dude at CVS would have possession of your photographs for hours at a time when you went to get them developed?

<comment><USER5> So it seems that yes - this is a generational thing :-)

(I'd be curious to run a straw-poll to find out how many Hackernews ever actually got "photographs developed"...)

<comment><USER6> I'm 34 and I've never had photos developed. When I was old enough (14-15?) to care about taking pictures of things I had one of those Sony Mavica floppy disk cameras that could hold something like, I dunno, 30-50 pictures.

But, on the flip side, every time I goto Walgreens there's people getting photos developed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The affected data did not include government-issued identifiers, such as > Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers, information that the > _app does not collect from users_

Well, I suppose it wouldn't, would it? Is this supposed to be impressive?

How many more of these before serious legislation gets through?

<comment><USER8> The article is likely to be repeating what was in a press release or statement from the company. It's there to bound above the impact of the breach.

<comment><USER9> This _is_ the statement from the company.

<comment><USER8> I'm reasonably certain that the link was changed from an article about the breach to the company's post.

I'm not completely certain, but that was my impression at the time I wrote the post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's unfortunate.

At least we didn't get the stereotypical "your passwords are hashed, so nothing to worry about" one liner I've been reading from a lot of companies during disclosures. All they said here is that the passwords are hashed and with a reasonably secure method -- bcrypt (although without knowing work- factor and percentage of passwords, it is hard to know just how strongly).

It has become pretty difficult to operate online these days without password managers. Password reuse has become a massive problem that worsens with each breach at a popular service. With a password manager you can just rotate the randomly generated password since you likely didn't know your old one anyway.

Off Topic: I'm surprised nobody makes a hardware "pepper"[0] that supports popular algorithms. Meaning you hash the password as you normally would (inc. salt) and then send it through the pepper-ing device for another round before storing it. That way even if someone stole the database, knew the salt, and the hashing algorithm+work-factor, they'd still lack the hardware pepper making their job significantly harder.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(cryptography)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_\(cryptography\))

<comment><USER11> > All they said here is that the passwords are hashed and with a reasonably > secure method -- bcrypt (although without knowing work-factor and percentage > of passwords, it is hard to know just how strongly)

Speaking of proper password hashing--are there any methods similar to bcrypt but where you can increase the work factor on the currently stored passwords without having to have access to the plain password?

E.g., suppose you have a database of hashed passwords with work factor 4. You want to up the work factor to 6. The usual way to do this that I've seen is to start using 6 for new passwords, and when people with existing passwords log in you verify the password with the 4 hash, and then before discarding the plain password you 6 hash it and update the database with that.

But that leaves 4 hash password still working for however long it takes people to get around to logging in. If you are raising the work factor it is presumably because you think the old work factor is no longer secure enough, so you probably don't want the old 4 hashes to keep working.

You could remove the 4 hashes of anyone who doesn't login and get updated within a reasonable time, making them go through the "forgot my password" routine, but that will annoy them. Hence, my curiosity about ways to updated the work factor more directly.

There's a kludge way to kind of do it. Go through the database, take all the 4 hashes, and treat those hashes as if they were the passwords, and 6 hash those and store them, along with a flag that marks this as a transitional password. When a user with such a password logs in, you 4 hash their plain password, 6 hash the result, and if it matches, you then 6 hash the plain text password and store the hash, and remove the transitional flag. But this is really quite ugly.

<comment><USER12> I think at least Django stores passwords with an additional field that defines the algorithm used to generate the hash of the password. One could think of a case where instead of algorithm selection you could properly define a simplistic DSL that actually defines how the hash is generated:

      algo | hash
      bcrypt(hardness=2,input=INPUT + 23423526) | 938240
      bcrypt(hardness=3,input=INPUT + 342352643) | 239223

Now the only thing that one needs to do is convert this table to:

      algo | hash
      bcrypt(hardness=3,bcrypt(hardness=2,input=INPUT + 23423526)) | 23423423
      bcrypt(hardness=3,bcrypt(hardness=3,input=INPUT + 342352643)) | 90192902

Where

      bcrypt(hardness=3,938240) = 23423423
      bcrypt(hardness=3,239223) = 90192902

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Should be a fine every time this happens and a major fine if it was found due to negligence or not having the appropriate security measures aka yahoo. Yahoo leadership new they were understaffed, cut staffing anyways, got rid of any executive who disagreed, and got no penalty for their mistakes.

Make it more costly to get fined than it is to get hacked. Or some white collar jail time if it wss negligence or covering it up.

<comment><USER14> The GDPR will cover that. And those fines are _massive_. It's not going to be a magic bullet against breaches but the effect will definitely be that companies will start to see security no longer as optional or an afterthought but a direct liability if not taken care of properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The MyFitnessPal database has been compromised for _years_. I register with a unique email address for every website and app that I use so that I can tell when somebody's database gets compromised or they sell my data. I started getting an influx of spam to my MyFitnessPal email years ago. I told them about it at the time but they didn't care.

<comment><USER16> How do you do this ?

<comment><USER15> The way most people do this is with plus addressing. If your mail provider supports it (e.g. Gmail does), you can send email to email@example.com and it will be delivered to firstname.lastname@example.com. There are a minority of websites and apps that reject emails like that, but they are quite rare and the vast majority don't have any issue with it.

If you have your own domain name, you can set up a catch-all address, so if you own example.com, then you can register on websites and in apps with email@example.com instead. This works everywhere.

You can then look at what email address an email was addressed to to see how the sender got hold of your email address, and you can filter and block future emails based on that address as well. So if, for instance, you've registered with MyFitnessPal with email@example.com, then you can cut off everybody who's got hold of your email address via the MyFitnessPal breach with 100% effectiveness using one spam rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Imagine this happening in any other industry.

"Oh hi users, the things you gave to us and we were supposed to keep safe, well, someone came and took them."

Say the bank sent all their customers a similar message, how would their customers be expected to react? Why is it any different in the tech industry?

Basically these apology messages amount to: "Someone accessed your private stuff, please change the special key you use to access your stuff. End."

Should there be more to this than just that? Yes you'll make sure the locks are stronger, but what about that thing I've now lost? What are you going to do about that?

<comment><USER18> > Imagine this happening in any other industry.

You mean like when Home Depot lost thousands of credit card numbers? Or when Target did the same? Or when Equifax lost millions of people's private data?

The response is always "Welp, sorry! We'll do better next time!" and the tech industry isn't alone here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if the daily progress photos were leaked as well. I imagine most people won't be thrilled to have their not-too-flattering progress selfies be out in public for the whole world to see.

Side note: MyFitnessPal the app is awful, but many of us still use it because it has the most extensive database of food products out there. Outside of that it has no merit and has felt abandoned in forever. Can someone recommend an actually superior alternative?

<comment><USER20> What's wrong with it, out of interest? It seems to work perfectly reliably for me, and I'm super happy that they aren't getting all change-happy with it.

<comment><USER21> The iOS app has been pretty good (if a bit buggy and slow), but the desktop web interface is so bad to the point that I haven't used it in over a year -- and I use myfitnesspal daily.

<comment><USER19> I've definitely had the app perma-crash on me recently, where the only way to get out of the boot-then-crash loop was to delete and reinstall it.

It also fails at the iOS quick access menu about 80% of the time. e.g. you hard-press the app icon, go to "log food" and it goes back to the home page. Or you do the same for "scan barcode" and again most of the time it opens the app and sends you to the home page again. This has been the case for months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> No info either way about whether peoples very personal fitness data was breached, eating habits, weight, other measurements. Appaling PR speak.

<comment><USER23> I hope the log of my sex activity resulting in losing 20 lbs wasn't breached!

<comment><USER22> The other comment was flagged but the point I was trying to make is that these two data points of lots of sex and radical weight loss can be interpreted as being promiscuous and getting HIV. Or obviously as a success and success.

Which is just why breach of this data is dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> MyFitnessPal was horribly written app when I used it. The idea was good but God was it slow as hell when doing simple things.

<comment><USER25> I started using the app in 2012. I still use it.

I'm under the impression it's the best nutrition tracking app.

I've moved on to iHealth for tracking weight and exercise amounts, which I used MyFitnessPal in the past. This information is still in MyFitnessPal, and I will sometimes look at the graphs there, but not often. Apple Watch and a Bluetooth scale are great for the quantified self.

<comment><USER26> MFP is extremely limited when it comes to tracking micronutrients. If all you care about are very basic facts it's alright.

If you care about much more then Cronometer is commonly considered the best.

<comment><USER27> thanks! cronometer founder here :-) my indie hackers interview for anyone that cares: [https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/03874047f2](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/03874047f2)

<comment><USER28> Awesome, I didn't realize you did an interview! I have a ton of respect for the high standards you've been maintaining with data quality, keep it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _The affected information included usernames, email addresses, and hashed > passwords - the majority with the hashing function called bcrypt used to > secure passwords._

I really appreciate them including this information. It shows they're following best practices and I don't need to read the rest of the article with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER30> Except when you get to the part about "the rest of the passwords were hashed with SHA1"...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> No notification via email or app for me as of yet... Seems like the sort of thing I should hear from them first, rather than the Baltimore Sun.

<comment><USER32> I got an email an hour ago, but I signed up fairly recently. Maybe emails are in batch, reverse order.

<comment><USER33> I got an email at 9:54 EST (half an hour ago), and I've been a user for years now. So it's not exactly the most prompt email I've ever received.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Perhaps this will also prompt them to start using HTTPS as well?

<comment><USER35> It's funny you would mention that because I also got annoyed by this and submitted a feature request for https. This is the response I received:

Hello,

Thanks for writing into us regarding https on MyFitnessPal.

We have technical and organizational measures in place to protect your information. Specifically, we have a secure login process designed to protect your information as you access MyFitnessPal (i.e., login and profile data are submitted using HTTPS POST actions).

The login pages of the MyFitnessPal that are encrypted via https include:

[http://www.myfitnesspal.com](http://www.myfitnesspal.com) [http://www.myfitnesspal.com/login](http://www.myfitnesspal.com/login) [http://www.myfitnesspal.com/logout](http://www.myfitnesspal.com/logout)

Although our home page at [http://www.myfitnesspal.com](http://www.myfitnesspal.com) may not indicate the presence of https in your browser's interface, the actual login "lightbox" or pop-over window on the home page does send your login credentials via https.

After login, the MyFitnessPal website does not always load in HTTPS only mode (i.e. padlock not fully closed or green). This is because we sometimes load public content like images, public text from Under Armour, images & text from our advertising partners, and other non-user data using HTTP. While we load that public content using HTTP, we load user content using HTTPS.

We also continue to evaluate the security of our platforms, and have a dedicated team of cybersecurity professionals focused on this area. We will continue to review our security protocols to protect personal data.

Please let us know if you have additional questions or concerns.

<comment><USER36> It's hard to believe that not only are they _this_ clueless, but they also are trying to justify their idiotic decisions. Jesus, how hard can it be to set up TLS? Let's Encrypt, anyone?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is how transparent an organization should be when breached. Kudos to Under Armour.

<comment><USER38> GDPR, the new EU Data Protection legislation, will actually require companies to issue notification of a breach of PII, within 7 days of becoming aware of it, I believe.

<comment><USER39> That only applies to notification to the data protection authority unless the breach "is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Any free MyFitnessPal alternatives with an open API for retrieving diet/exercise activity?

<comment><USER41> Check out Lifesum [https://lifesum.com/](https://lifesum.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Signed up to MFP yesterday to test it out. Immediately noticed they don't use https (though the login forms appear to be submitted over https).

I thought to myself - on the face of it they don't seem to hot on security, I wonder how long it will be before they get hacked or something?

Well, I wasn't expecting less than 24 hours.

</comment><comment><USER43> This breach notification is very mealy mouthed.

>The affected information included usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords

It _included_ usernames, emails, and hashed passwords? So what else was breached? This seems like they are implying nothing serious was stolen without giving specific info.

<comment><USER44> I'm 99% certain it included everything.

From what I have seen very very few companies have strictly separated databases for different types of data and so on.

For the vast majority of companies a compromise is an all or nothing event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "On March 25, 2018, we became aware that during February of this year an unauthorized party acquired data associated with MyFitnessPal user accounts" => highly likely they stole more than what MFP thinks they stole.. we don't know what we don't know. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER46> Ah, I had an account here. Checked Lastpass, and, great! They've got my six character don't-care-about-MyFitnessPal-security password. bcrypt will not save its secrecy in any way, but it hardly matters.

</comment><comment><USER47> Props for them doing the right thing and hopefully nothing bad comes out of it - looks like they've built a useful product. One thing that's odd to me on many levels though is that it was their Chief Digital Officer signing the announcement and not their head of security. Don't they have one? Wasn't this severe enough? I know it's just perception but still!

</comment><comment><USER48> I wonder, can I get a dump of the data collected on me based on the European Law? Similar, that Facebook provides to everyone.

<comment><USER49> Presumably yes. The site of the guy who sued FB has a template you might be able to reuse[1], although it mentions the Irish implementation of the Data Protection directive, whereas Under Armour Europe B.V. is Dutch, so you should probably change that.

[1] [http://europe-v- facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data...](http://europe-v- facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Does anyone have a good offline FOSS for macro-nutrient lookup and tracking? Been thinking about starting one for myself.

<comment><USER10> The biggest limitation seems to be getting the nutrient information itself. MyFitnessPal has a huge database of off the shelf food products built in (and restaurants) from all over the world. Much of that information provided to the company for free by its users.

MyFitnessPal has a similar advantage to Google, they have the most and richest data, and anyone else entering that market starts at a huge disadvantage. You could definitely make a FOSS app of the core tracking concept, it is just going to be super painful to use compared to MyFitnessPal.

<comment><USER51> You're absolutely right about datasets being a constraint for any new entrant. The USDA SR28 is free and open but limited scope. OpenFoodFacts has a great dataset overall but ~~you can't download it (other than rate-limited scraping),~~ the license is ~~strict~~ share-alike; and there isn't an OFF personal consumption tracker.

<comment><USER52> No need to scrape Open Food Facts, they kindly offer a download of the whole database as csv, rdf or mongodb dump: [https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data](https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data)

It is 100% crowd sourced open data under the ODbL licence (same as OpenStreetMap).

<comment><USER51> Thanks for that correction. I recall there being a clear reason why I couldn't use their data in my app. But maybe I had it wrong. I remember reading that if my app collected new data about foods and I was using the OFF db, I had to commit to making all my data free and open. I was worried about the possible case that personal food consumption data would be vulnerable to that share- alike constraint.

<comment><USER53> No, no worries about personal consumption. What the OdBL requires you to do is to add missing products. Not add data outside the scope of the original database. (I'm a Open Food Facts admin)

Also please don't scrape us, since we release nightly dumps of the DB :)

<comment><USER51> Thanks for clarifying that. And that's great that those DB downloads are available. I didn't like the idea of scraping the data in the first place so never went that route.

<comment><USER53> Feel free to ping me at pierre openfoodfacts.org We have a online discussion chat, if you want to integrate OFF at some point, and have questions about the OdBL

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> People are so numb to these data breaches, companies will soon report such breaches just for the free press they get.

</comment><comment><USER55> The next thing people will check may be insider trading: [https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ua/insider- trades](https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/ua/insider-trades)

Can anyone more versed in this do a quick look for abnormal behavior?

</comment><comment><USER56> The breach notice indicates that hashed passwords were compromised but doesn't mention whether a salt was used when computing the hashes.

Use of a salt makes all the difference, guarding against the use of rainbow tables to look up precomputed hashes of common passwords.

<comment><USER57> > The affected information included usernames, email addresses, and hashed > passwords - the majority with the hashing function called bcrypt used to > secure passwords.

If they're using bcrypt, then they're using salts since salts are built in to bcrypt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Tried to change my password just now but can't. Clicking on 'change password' logs me out again, anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER59> Announcing it after markets close and right before a long weekend (markets are closed on Good Friday). Classy.

</comment><comment><USER60> I assume it's a bigger problem for females, because of the different way society perceives female or male sexuality.

E.g. I don't think i would really care about pics of my dick being made public, but plenty of women get routinely harrassed (often to the point of sexual assault or suicide) because of sexy selfies some idiot shared with friends.

</comment><comment><USER61> hm anyone know if they are salted as well?

</comment><comment><USER62> Mods, there's a better article on Reuters: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-under-armour- databreach/u...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-under-armour- databreach/under-armour-discloses-breach-of-150-million-myfitnesspal-user- accounts-idUSKBN1H532W)

<comment><USER63> Better in what way? This is notable because it is the official word of the company, so we can discuss how forthcoming they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Official release [https://content.myfitnesspal.com/security- information/notice...](https://content.myfitnesspal.com/security- information/notice.html)

<comment><USER65> Thanks, we've updated the link from [http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/under-armour-blog/bs- bz...](http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/under-armour-blog/bs-bz-under- armour-myfitnesspal-breach-20180329-story.html).

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I use my Facebook as the login mechanism for MyFitnessPal, I wonder if that means my Facebook password has been stolen as well.

Better change it, sigh...

<comment><USER67> MyFitnessPal never had your Facebook password, so there's no way for it to be stolen by a breach.

<comment><USER68> They would have had a long lived token though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Should we actually care? I really didn't care even when my OPM info got hacked. Just make this shit public and stop believing in secrets.

<comment><USER70> Zuck?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Would be interesting to know how they identified the breach. It is exactly these situations that I produced Breach Insider[0], in the hope to try and reduce the time to detection down from months to days.

Those of you affected by this breach, have you noticed any unusual spam/emails recently, that may be related to MFP? I'm wondering if they got the tip-off from their users.

[0] [https://breachinsider.com](https://breachinsider.com)

</comment><comment><USER72> I received an email notification of the MyFitnessPal breach. I don't use that package or any other related products or service. Should I be concerned.</comment>


Safety Check for Brussels - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/brusselsexplosions-march2016/ <comment><USER3> What happens if there is _another_ bomb, after someone has reported as "safe"? Are the "safe" statuses updated somehow, since the state of that person is now unknown?

<comment><USER4> It's not happened, so I don't know if they already have it in- but it would be incredibly easy to look at the people who were reported as safe and specifically message them to see if they are or not, with a reset and a secondary check.

After all, you've got a perfect list of those who already responded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I grew up in Belgium, and have family and childhood friends there. I was pleasantly surprised when I got random notifications from Facebook this morning as people I am friends with added themselves to the safety check list - it made it easy for me to quickly know who was OK.

<comment><USER6> I had the same thought/feeling after the latest Ankara bombing. I didn't even realize a fairly close friend was in Turkey until I got a notification that they were okay. I think it's underappreciated how much smaller the world feels when you see something on the news and nearly immediately know someone affected. It's my hope that this breeds empathy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Please login to Facebook to access this Safety Check."

Can anyone tell me what this is about?

<comment><USER8> [http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/22/europe/brussels- explosions/](http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/22/europe/brussels-explosions/)

<comment><USER7> I am aware of that but what's the facebook site about?

<comment><USER9> It looks like this. [http://cl.ly/243T3c1u1g3M](http://cl.ly/243T3c1u1g3M)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Working in japan all the big companies feature systems like this. You get a e-mail and a call by a automated system. Then you have to respond with your status and if you can come to work :)

<comment><USER11> I'm sure Japan has. This is a normal continuity of business protocol, with a cascade down reporting lines. If one fails to respond, cascade to the next layer of reporting down. And have an actual cascade plan in-hand, at home, at work, and on mobile.

All businesses should have one, and they are useful for many reasons. Test it annually or more, depending on business. And have results posted back - <USER2> responds, who doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Facebook is being heavily used by inhabitants in Brussels to communicate right now. I have a friend asking for someone to check on his mother who lives downtown. He can't reach her because the phones systems are completely saturated. He found a neighbor able to go and check on her. For me, being able to log on and see that my friends are OK was helpful beyond description.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Take me in oh tender woman, Take me in, for heaven's sake, Take me in oh tender woman," sighed the vicious snake.

This was Reddit's advice three days ago: [http://i.imgur.com/M9umIy2g.png](http://i.imgur.com/M9umIy2g.png)

<comment><USER14> And it's still true advice. What you're feeling now is just fear and panic. This is the entire point of a terrorist attack: it's psychological warfare. Make people _think_ they are in grave, imminent danger, to coerce them into some action.

If you were actually more likely to die in a terrorist attack than being shot by a toddler in the USA, it probably wouldn't be a terrorist attack, it'd be something more like... an actual war.

<comment><USER15> Im sure statistics helped the people who died today

<comment><USER16> I wish I could automatically block any account that has throwaway in its handle

<comment><USER15> I wish I could automatically block any account that has SF in its bio

<comment><USER17> Have you ever clicked on that Y in the box at the top left of this page? There might be some valuable information about this site for you there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm really sorry for being a Debbie downer here but I find the lack of such initiatives for Turkish (or similar) blasts in past week appalling. Were the lives of the non-European victims not worth FaceBook/HNs attention?

Is this selective outrage really suits a rational platform like HackerNews?

<comment><USER19> Truth is that most first-world citizens, including myself, can only relate to other first-world citizens. If a tragic event hits Nigeria, Pakistan or even Turkey, I will probably ignore it.

Hypocrisy? Yes.

Surprising? Not really.

<comment><USER20> And it's not only Facebook.

These Brussels attacks have wall-to-wall coverage on all news stations, including local ones, unlike the Turkish blasts which were covered much less and only by the major outlets.

<comment><USER21> Maybe it is because such blasts are more common in country which wages a civil war against a part of his inhabitants.

<comment><USER22> beyin.dll not found

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Log in required; classy.

<comment><USER24> How else would you, a Facebook user, alert your Facebook friends using a Facebook feature that tells them you're safe on Facebook?

Kinda hard to avoid the log in.

<comment><USER25> It's not clear from the submitted title nor the page requesting login what the feature is for. I only know now because you've explained it here.

EDIT: I'm not the grandparent poster, I wouldn't have written it like that, just trying to explain that I was puzzled about what this all meant.</comment></comment></comment>


Fix your shit, or I'll steal your customers from you - <AUTHOR> http://bitchasscode.com/?p=158

<comment><USER2> Yeah! Damn right, basic but good post!</comment>


LLVM Founder Chris Lattner Joins SiFive to Lead Platform Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chris-Lattner-Joins-SiFive <comment><USER2> What's it say about a talented engineer who can't stay put?

Swift languishes without someone to firmly shove it towards crossplatform progress, and the rest of the Apple ecosystem doesn't exactly inspire confidence either. I thought swift was our chance to bring Apple into the new FOSS golden age, as .NET has brought Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> I think this is a relatively unfounded opinion of Swift. I can see the things you'd pick on to say that it's languishing, but I think there are many more aspects one can point at times show it coming along very well.

Yes compared to .NET, Swift is far behind, but we have the benefit of having seen 20 years of .NET, and Microsoft have a larger user base, developer base, market for paid software tooling/IDEs, support, developer advocates, and more. I think they're very different ecosystems and to use .NET as an example of what Swift could have been is to ignore what the Apple developer ecosystem is and is for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will this impact Swift for TensorFlow?

[https://www.tensorflow.org/swift](https://www.tensorflow.org/swift)</comment>


Trump bans all travel from Europe to US for 30 days - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k19WyNDHlmY <comment><USER2> Closing the door after the horse left the barn.

It's already spreading unchecked here. We need internal controls now.

<comment><USER3> Those are obviously also being worked on. If you watch the video, he strongly encourages Americans to listen to their local authorities for guidance on mitigation. In the U.S. that is how our system works. Local governments are empowered to respond appropriately and they work in conjunction with the Federal government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What an incredibly dumb decision. All this is gonna do is make the economy implode even harder and cause some nasty chain reactions when we needed internal controls and testing 30 days ago.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for linking to a youtube video but this is the official source. No transcript on the White House website yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> Funny how he is blaming europe for spreading the virus</comment>


Some Google employees defect, then rebel - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/12/24/ex.google.employees/

<comment><USER2> I had heard of facebook disconnect, but not of his newer chrome extension simply called "disconnect":

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

 _If you're a typical web user, you're unintentionally sending your browsing and search history with your name and other personal information to third parties and search engines whenever you're online.

Take control of the data you share with Disconnect!

From the developer of the top-10-rated Facebook Disconnect extension, Disconnect lets you:

• Disable tracking by third parties like Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, without requiring any setup or significantly degrading the usability of the web.

• Truly depersonalize searches on search engines like Google and Yahoo (by blocking identifying cookies not just changing the appearance of results pages), while staying logged into other services — e.g., so you can search anonymously on Google and access iGoogle at once.

• See how many resource and cookie requests are blocked, in real time.

• Easily unblock services, by clicking the toolbar button then services (and reloading current pages) — e.g., so you can play games on Facebook._

<comment><USER3> Anything like this for Safari? All I could find is <http://www.orbicule.com/incognito/>

edit: Ghostery (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) works with Safari. <http://www.ghostery.com/download>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "To name a few practices, Google can track search queries over time, target ads to its Gmail users based on the contents of e-mails, and use a person's location data to determine which shops' ads it will show."

Not only are they common knowledge (not just in the tech community but even known by people such as my mother, who's extent of computer abilities is being able to use Skype/Gmail/Google), but it's often easy to notice even with no technical knowledge at all, just by looking at what the adverts actually are. Seems odd, even if he never worked directly in that area, or cared much about privacy, that he never knew that kind of stuff.

(Or possible he's talking on levels way and above, and the writer of the article was just listing the most basic examples for readers.)

</comment><comment><USER5> That was a good article. I just installed both Disconnect and Facebook Disconnect on Chrome, which I mostly use. I enabled Google text adds but blocked everything else.

I would like the Internet to evolve as both a free source of information and also as a platform for great commercial products like Netflix streaming movies, Hulu Plus, etc.

For information blocking to not affect the web experience, enough people need to be willing to donate money if they choose to do so. For example, Salon.com runs interesting articles and I have made small donations over the years (and one earlier today).

<comment><USER6> look at Ghostery - works with crome, FF etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

</comment><comment><USER8> Just install EasyPrivacy [1] and Fanboy Annoyances [2] for Adblock Plus.

[1] <http://easylist.adblockplus.org/>

[2] <http://www.fanboy.co.nz/>

</comment><comment><USER9> i get a kick out of these multi-million dollar packages that are strikingly similar to the signing bonuses that professional athletes receive. it's about time professional startup-ers get the same treatment. we're stimulating the economy as much as anybody.

</comment><comment><USER10> I just installed Disconnect on Chrome. I thought this was funny: (but not surpising)

Mashable.com - 48 blocked requests

I have no idea how that site even loads today with that much "crap" on it's site.

</comment><comment><USER11> The article doesn't lack in sensationalism, and very much inline with the recent Internet scare stories running in major publications, one could argue about the motives of these newspapers in trying to demonize online advertising as it's arguably hurting their bottom line.

Privacy is important but we need to keep things in prospective, ads are propelling a huge wave of innovation and a huge industry. The reasonable way to preserve the rights of users is to grand them control over their data, and not just demonize ads altogether.

I personally prefer relevant (targeted) ads. Online ads are also measurable and such are fairer to the advertiser than a hail-merry print ad.

This aversion towards smart ads seems a bit anti-progressive, it's obvious that personalization in devices, media and of course the advertising to monetize the ecosystem is the logical evolution of consumer technology.

And It's not just a case of paying with 'privacy' instead of money, many of the webservices available today won't exist unless they are free, and are used by many people which their usage patterns are collected as feedback.</comment>


Woz on Apple: 'I'm a little afraid' - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20120726-71/woz-on-apple-im-a-little-afraid/

<comment><USER2> "I can't go back"

Speaking as a man with friends and loved ones, not an Apple fan (per se), that really got me. Woz gets more than just Apple's direction: he gets what's important.

He wants one more dinner with his friend and that's really inspiring. It's hard to think there's a chance you'll outlive the people you love and I, for one, have decided mid-post to go seize those moments rather than type here. Ciao.

</comment><comment><USER3> What an annoying reporter doing the interview. Ask an open-ended question and let him talk about it, don't constantly interrupt him and put words into his mouth...

<comment><USER4> I couldn't agree more. Woz is a guy who will talk forever if you give him the right cues. STFU and get out of his way.

<comment><USER5> It was excruciating to listen to the interviewer's little interjections. These little affirmations are what you're supposedly "supposed to do" in conversation, but boy does it sound _awful_ for an interview.

It was eye opening for me in this regard as well - know your setting.

<comment><USER6> I thought the questions were great, and I suspect you're being a little sexist and ageist. Sexist in that if Charlie Rose asked exactly the same questions with his Charlie Rose manner, you wouldn't be as upset, and ageist in that the interviewer was clearly quite young. Woz is a lifelong teacher, and is as dedicated to supporting young people learn as anyone, and you're here shitting on their work. She's not Oprah yet, because she's not 40 yet.

My hunch is that you are all objecting, in part, to the fact that a _woman_ is interjecting and according to our cultural norms, women aren't supposed to do that. If a man was doing it, you'd care less. It's a hunch based on 30 years of listening to people, and I'm hopeful you or someone will take this suggestion seriously, although if history is any guide you'll interpret this as a personal attack, go into defense mode and deny any wrongdoing. Fun times.

Also worth noting is that neither TechCrunch nor C|net gave credit to this woman for doing the interview. That's great journalism there, fellas.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, you couldn't be further from the truth. I was objecting to her because she was _bad_ , not because she's a young woman.

Also, as to the whole "taking it seriously" part: please don't confuse genuine disagreement (I think you're very, very wrong) with prejudice. I don't take your comment as a personal attack, but rather as grossly misguided. I'm not offended by the labels of sexism and ageism, principally because I think they have no merit.

There're plenty of young women who could have done a great job in this interview; she is not one of them.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your reply. Like I said, all I have is my suspicions. I don't claim to know the truth. I don't think any of us really does.

However, when you say "you couldn't be further from the truth", is that the result of you rewatching the video, while considering the possibility that you might, _in part_ , as I qualified from the beginning, be seeing her differently than you'd see a man? Or is it the result of your immediate reaction, because of your uninterruptable certainty that you surely would never do something so sexist?

Just curious. If you've genuinely considered the possibility, that's all I can reasonably ask. For my part, I'm happy to have raised my suspicion, even though HN obviously thinks quite lowly of this line of thought.

<comment><USER7> Man up and own your words. You went on for several paragraphs calling hkmurakami out for sexism and ageism, yet you now backpedal and claim not to know the truth and that nobody does. If you really believed that you would not have posted your original reply since you wouldn't have known the truth about what hkmurakami was thinking.

<comment><USER6> "I suspect"

"my hunch"

And I stand by it. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss further (email@example.com) but I'm backpedaling on nothing. And all three of them of course were thinking totally innocent thoughts. Sexism is rarely conscious these days.

<comment> mike-cardwell I suspect that you're an ass, and my hunch is that you're smug and self righteous.

<comment><USER4> That's not particularly helpful.

<comment> mike-cardwell He claimed that sticking "I suspect" and "my hunch" in his comment meant that his comment wasn't an insult. I demonstrated how his claim was false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > quintessential engineer

If you have not yet read JL's interview of Woz in "Founders at Work", I encourage you to read it now. One of the best in her book.

<http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html>

<comment><USER9> Awesome interview. Great excerpt:

 _"When you get very very tired—and I had been up four nights all night long; Steve and I got mononucleosis—your head gets in this real creative state and it thinks of ideas that you'd normally just throw out. I came up with this idea of taking one little cheap (less than $1) part with 4 bits in it. If I spun it around at the right rate, the data that comes out of that chip looks like color TV. And I could put 16 different patterns and they all look like different colors, sort of. Would a digital signal that goes up and down actually work on a color TV the way there are sine waves and complicated calculus to develop how color TV was established in the television world? Would it work?

Man, when I actually finally put together this little circuit and put some data into memory that should show up as color and it showed up color, it was just one of those eureka moments and you're just shaking inside. It was just unbelievable. Here we had it in just a couple of chips. I had color, and then I had graphics, and then I had hi-res, and then I had paddles and sound to put games into the machine. It had dynamic memory—it had the newest right type of dynamic memory that could expand almost forever. All sorts of slots with a little mini operating system that actually worked incredibly well. The Apple II was just one of those designs. Anybody could build things to add on to it, anybody could write programs, they could write sophisticated programs, they could write it in machine language, they could write it in my Basic. So that machine, there was just nothing stopping it."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh Woz, I'd wait in a line for days just to talk to you.

Being a technical man, I'm surprised in how he reacted to those 'technical terms' that were mentioned. Listening to this, I felt he knew exactly what Apple was/is and strives to be. If he still elicits respect from the current Apple camp, wouldn't he be a good choice to take over Steve Job's role? If not a CEO, an advisor? I say this not knowing a thing about corporate structure so excuse my ignorance.

<comment><USER11> I'm reading his book iWoz at the moment. In that he makes it clear he's never wanted to be a manager. He didn't/doesn't want to control other people etc. In fact, he only agreed to leave HP and join apple (after designing and building the apple I and II in his spare time) when he realized he could be in his own company and still stay as an engineer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reporter sounds very ersatz. Constantly interrupting, interjecting with "huh", "oh", "yeah", and "ah, interesting". She pretends to know what she's talking about, although it's obvious that she doesn't.

Anyways, the parallel to Sony is interesting. Many have mentioned it before, but only time will tell.

<comment><USER13> Haha my favorite part is around 2:35.

Woz: "...one mind still in control to keep products so..."

Interviewer: "Advancing?"

Woz: "small."

<comment><USER14> Good catch

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I sat next to Woz during the keynote where the iPod with video was introduced (I believe the event where Madonna was called, as I was working on her project at the time).

The guy had such enthusiasm for everything around him, especially while Steve was on stage. It was inspiring. He also had time for everyone, which was equally so.

I like to think of him as evangelist in chief. I mean, the guy checks in wherever he is on Foursquare and from what I understand is really kind to anyone that says hello.

</comment><comment><USER16> I for one would love to see Woz back to Apple as an über-advisor. He is half of the company's soul and is the only person who can gather as much respect (and authority to say no) as Jobs could. He also seems to get Apple better than most. I agree completely with his objections on the technical aspects of the 4S presentation - people don't want to know of antenna switching. Just say "you can hold it anyway you want and it won't lose reception". People don't want to know about dual cores - just say it's a much faster processor that enables things that were considered previously impossible and then introduce Siri.

</comment><comment><USER17> I agree whole heartedly with the conclusion of the article, that " _the things that matter to engineers aren't the things that matter to real human beings._ "

I also noticed immediately at the end of the keynote that there wasn't an explicit mention of "corrected reception" in the new iPhone (there was mention of a new antennae design, but it wasn't explicit and not emphasised). I would have thought that this was an important reason, and perhaps why they opted for the new antennae design that they did - because of the poor reception issues with the "original" iPhone 4.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't fear for Apple — I fear for the entire industry. Tonight I got my new toy and of course I wasted a few hours exploring every inch of the iPhone 4s. But the more I did it, the more empty I found myself feeling. It hit me hard that I didn't give a damn about the thing and I was still upset about Jobs. It's the very notion that there will never be another "and just one more thing".

Walking home tonight I kept rattling over the many impersonal things he touched and made human. Even if Jobs had just done the Apple II that would would have been enough for one lifetime, yet he did it again and again. And I'm ten years younger than Jobs so my entire concept of technology was shaped by him and now I'm feeling like an orphan. And while he's not eloquent that's what our friend Woz is really saying...

<comment><USER19> I would take that even a step further... The entire consumerist culture is under threat (at least in this hemisphere). Think of how excited you are when you get any new toy (car, brand new jacket, tv, shoes..) and all the euphoria and emotional investment involved in the point and time of purchase. Then you take it home, play with it for a little while and while you realize that this "thing" doesn't completely and fully satisfy you, the excitement fizzles out over time and you go looking for the next high. Apple is like the Vatican of consumerism so they are able to sustain this emotional euphoria in their customers for much much longer than most brands.

I say good riddance.. The time we spend obsessing over a phone, computer, car, right type of clothing would be much better spent meeting and connecting with new people, solving problems, reflecting on life and teaching younger people.

I'm starting to sound like a Yogi on an acid trip so I'll end there.

<comment><USER20> +1 you as it is true, yet only half of it. This consumerist culture fueled technology development so it become possible for the millions of people also to get excited by, for example, seeing Hubble photos and discussing the screwdup of CERN/Gran Sasso scientists across the world - the details of SR and GR application in this case became normal topic of discussion in wide audiences.

>Apple is like the Vatican of consumerism so they are able to sustain this emotional euphoria in their customers for much much longer than most brands.

the rest of industry is following them thus driving technology development, wide accessibility and price decrease. It isn't Apple who is to be blamed that human race can move forward only through consumption economy. (Btw, before you object (if) - i come from the country that made huge attempt to move forward bypassing the consumerism and we all know the results of the experiment <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union> . "mladenkovacevic" - if you aren't too young, it sounds like you may be familiar first hand with how it looks like when country tries to bypass the consumerism driver)

<comment><USER19> hello Comrade lol. Yes I am indeed just old enough to remember the old ways. Although, perhaps ours wasn't so much a failed experiment as the Soviet one was.

Up until the 1980s when the western countries imposed strict trading restrictions with Yugoslavia (despite our friendly stance towards both the West and the East) my country was an economic power in the region. Wikipedia informs me that our annual GDP growth averaged 6.1 percent, health care was free, literacy was 91 percent, and life expectancy was 72 years.

We were simply broken as a casualty of the US effort to overthrow various communist governments in Eastern Europe. It was by no means an organic/natural effect of our socialism being dysfunctional.

<comment><USER20> >It was by no means an organic/natural effect of our socialism being dysfunctional.

as in some humor underground song of 70's (written by a musician who traveled internationally with official Soviet Union folk choir) "you can find everything in Yugoslavia - condoms, TVs, clothes, watches - everything, except f&cking socialism " :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Apple's best move would probably be to immediately bring back Woz in a more hands-on role.

<comment><USER22> Unless that role were an engineering role, I don't think he'd be interested.

<comment> johnx123-up Interview suggests that he's equally capable on marketing too.

<comment><USER22> I'm sure he's quite capable, since he is a generally smart dude, but just the same, everything I've ever read makes me think he only likes building things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Somewhat off-topic, but in order for Woz to get an iPhone he has to stand in line at an Apple store? Am I understanding that right...or is it just for publicity sake? I would've thought he would have enough connections inside to get a phone long before launch day and certainly not through a retail store.

<comment><USER24> As he said himself, he can get an iPhone mailed to his house if he wants one. He said he just likes the experience of waiting in line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is what scares me. Apple is going to become a "good enough" company. The fact is that no one at Apple is going to have both the vision to see what matters, and the clout within the company to actually affect change. As Woz said, the product line for the near future will be fine, but the true test will come when they have to come up with what's next.

<comment><USER26> Apple will be fine for the next decade. There are a few areas where Apple can enter where disruption is easy and desperately needed such as vehicle entertainment systems and televisions.

As for what's next, I think it's wearable computing. It's still a long way off but it has clearly entered their thoughts with the iPod nano and patents that have surfaced over the past few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> the person asking the questions wasn't a reporter. just a member of the public asking him some questions. cut her some slack!

</comment><comment><USER28> How come Pixar was still able to make great movies after Steve left?

<comment><USER29> Seen Cars? Up?

<comment><USER30> Cars and UP were far from failures.

<comment><USER31> Cars 2 was a Pixar failure, though.

<comment><USER32> I respect your decision to not have kids, but in this case that is clouding your judgement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Personally I use the best products available to me at any given time. Today they are Apples products, but I'm well aware that tomorrow they may not be. And this could have been the case irrespective of Jobs passing. Graham Bell died. Edison died. But innovation never died. As Tim OReilly said, there will continue to be revolutions, and revolutionaries.

</comment><comment><USER34> Anyone else find it odd that _Steve Wozniak_ has to stand in line to get the latest device from Apple? Is it just that he enjoys the meet & greet, or is he not enough of a living legend for Apple to ship him a complimentary one for free?

<comment><USER35> He does it because he doesn't like the preferential treatment. He loves the whole atmosphere of waiting in line and being a part of the buzz. I think he values fair more than anything; he gave away a sizable part of his money to the early employees because it wasn't fair for him to have so much while they worked hard and got so little.

<comment><USER36> Ya, I read about that and I really, really, really respect him for that.

kaffeinecoma - Google "The Woz Plan" for more.

<comment><USER35> Yeah that was very impressive too but I was actually more impressed with was the fact that he gave the first 5 employees a million dollars worth of his stock.

see the second to last question in the founders at work article:

<http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html>

<comment><USER36> Just read through the whole interview. Wow. Had no idea he did all that. That is just amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Video doesn't work for me :(</comment>


Tiddly Backpack - Store, reference and organize your notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.tiddlybackpack.com/ <comment><USER2> Cute idea, but in firefox it asks me if I want to allow it to install and/or run "UNSAFE" software on my machine. What's this about?

</comment><comment><USER3> * Doesn't work in Safari for me.

* Page titles don't properly work with UTF-8.</comment>


Home-made drones now threaten conventional armed forces - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21736498-their-small-size-and-large-numbers-can-overwhelm-defences-home-made-drones-now <comment><USER2> Reminds me of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA)

Which is one of the scariest things I've seen in a while. The video glosses over the fact that EMPs would probably make for a viable (if collateral- damage-inducing) defense, but still pretty terrifying.

<comment><USER3> Ever since I saw that video I've been wondering how effective it would be to use essentially an upgraded fire suppression system to take on the drones.

Essentially instead of spraying water out of the sprinklers, spray paint or other liquids that would block the vision of the drones. I think that would be a lot cheaper and harder to build defences for than an EMP.

(Just realised that you could also spray a opaque gas which would also block vision and might make less of a mess to clean up).

<comment><USER4> I imagine instead of liquids or silly string, we'll witness the first robot wars.

A military base might have robotic sentry guns [1] to begin with, as they are already armed with these today to defend against incoming mortars. Later on, I imagine with offensive drone capabilities being developed, it will lead to repurposing the drones in a defensive posture. Perhaps the best answer is to scale with the threat.

The defensive drone fleet circle the base. Upon a detection of an incoming fleet, rather than one sentry gun taking on 100 or 1000 drones, a defensive swarm targets the incoming swarm. More of a one-to-one fight or perhaps 1:4 if your drones are more capable fighters.

This is all a bit of a bummer. We talk about how we'll get robots to obey the three laws of robotics, but it'd be nice if we could just get humans to follow the first law. "A robot (human) may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4PXou0aGiE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4PXou0aGiE)

<comment><USER3> I've seen the robotically controlled Lockheed Martin laser that is meant to be able to take on drone swarms which is very similar to what you are talking about.

The question to me is how do you defend civilian targets like universities, city halls and malls? You can't build military style defences around these targets and the budget is going to be pretty low. Also you need a exceptionally low response time since the drones can deploy and kill in seconds.

<comment><USER4> That's difficult to answer. Soft targets are, well, soft. If you arm the state capital, they'll move to the university, museum, or large landmark. Protect those, and they'll move to further down the chain. Perhaps one of the best option is to try to prevent social unrest before it happens. Maybe we can repurpose tech to help us communicate better with each other.

Beyond that, you might see people purchasing defensive measures once attacks become more of a threat. Whether that's lasers, other drones or something we haven't thought of. There would be a demand for counter measures - you can already see the market forming for such counter measures.

<comment><USER5> Another approach is to criminalise possession and sale of ROV components and prosecute with extreme prejudice.

<comment><USER6> And another brick on the wall...

Do you really think that it would work to avoid to someone grab the necessary components to build a cheap drone ?

What must criminalise is the components to make drones a weapon. Aka, EXPLOSIVES and WEAPONS. And restrict access to chemicals to make explosives.

And this would not work when the guys building it, are living on anarchy place where the effective law are made by they.

<comment><USER7> Some kind of explosives are trivially made, a fact which is severely complicating basic STEM education as common materials that have other uses but happen to be usable for making weapons are increasingly difficult to obtain...

<comment><USER8> It also comes up in STEM education _content_. For example, industrial dust explosions could be a good illustration of several principles (including the importance of surface to volume ratio), but... there are potential downsides to using it. More generally, STEM education remains innocuous only as long as it pervasively fails. If that ever changes, society will have some issues to decide. And not a great track record of handling similar ones. Even a simple matrix of "what do you get when you mix one common household material with another" has some "seriously: don't do that" nodes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The War Zone had a good article about the recent attacks that ISIS executed using cheap commercial drones.

[http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/7155/isis-drone- droppin...](http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/7155/isis-drone-dropping- bomblet-on-abrams-tank-is-a-sign-of-whats-to-come)

The US Army has had to react by rebuilding short-range air defense capabilities. They used to be able to depend on the US Air Force to protect ground forces from aerial attack but now those days are gone.

[http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17747/us-army-rushes- to...](http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/17747/us-army-rushes-to-add- hundreds-of-stinger-missile-teams-as-threat-of-small-drones-evolves)

<comment><USER10> They literally need a bunch of bird hunters with shotguns lurking about.

<comment><USER9> Shotguns don't have enough range. Modern drones move too fast and are hard to spot.

<comment><USER10> Are they harder to spot/hit than a dove flying at over 50mph? I'd guess not, but maybe they are deploying super small and fast drones?

<comment><USER9> Some drones can move faster than 50mph now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When my university wanted to keep sea gulls away from the patio they strung fishing line all over.

<comment><USER12> That is a really good idea. My first thought was basically start with the tree, a drone's natural enemy, and amplify the stuff that makes it so dangerous to a drone - tiny sticks that are hard to see. Fishing line would pretty much accomplish that.

<comment><USER13> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon)

<comment> King-Aaron I was thinking along these lines, but with more of a BallonFest '89 flavour to it

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloonfest_%2786](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloonfest_%2786)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related: "Kill Decision" by Daniel Suarez. Talked about this exact thing. What happens when drones become so cheap and able to be armed, that a swarm of drones could come out of nowhere, commit a crime, and no one would have a clue where they came form.

<comment><USER15> Similar technology like using a gun from a car [1], or putting a bomb in a rubbish bin, or mailing antrax, already exists and does cause occasional mass killings. The main the stopping it is humans usually don't want to do that. Even with drones, there will still be evidence and police hunting for who did it. It's not going to be anarchy.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks)

<comment><USER16> 19 people decided to fly planes into buildings and we invaded two countries, massively expanded and accelerated the most powerful surveillance apparatus that has ever existed, and invented a gargantuan bureaucracy that carries out tens of millions of man-hours a year of security screenings. it doens't take anarchy to shift the security calculus enough to greatly alter culture.

<comment><USER15> Sure, there might be overreaction. I'm saying we don't need to worry about criminals or terrorists using them any more than we do conventional weapons. Of course people will still worry too much if it's on the news, just like 911.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I think, is why no body weaponized aircraft model before. Since 80's/90's small aircraft models had enough capacity to carry grenades and small explosives.

Also, I'm impressed that a cheap drone can use optical navigation. The last time that someone talked about it, was about it's usage on Tomahawk cruise missiles, since 80's, as a tech miracle of electronics.

<comment><USER17> ...aircraft have been weaponized for a longgg time. Kamikaze pilots! That's been the problem, though. They cant be self-guided, you have to lose a human life in order to use them. And that's where rockets came from, the Germans started trying to figure out how to weaponize flight without losing soldiers (see V2 rockets). That's why autonomous control is so scary, it's the first time that this sort of thing is actually realistically hitting the point of being cost-effective, and especially scary when we're talking about it become cost-effective for really small forces to use. (I feel awful using a term like "cost-effective" when talking about human life, but that's the way military- types think about these things. Yuck.)

<comment><USER18> Seems like the parent comment is referring to model aircraft, which would be radio controlled passengerless fast aircraft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel the headline is too attention-seeking.

It is natural that if one side starts to develop a new technology and employs it successfully, that the other parties will follow as well. This changes the landscape, sure. But it's not threatening. That's the normal process of development.

Every army is better of if they can use machines to do their attacks for them. At least between both armies this should also decrease the overall casualties I hope. I'm not so naive to assume that this would decrease civilian casualties, though.

<comment><USER20> Asymmetric is the keyword in the article.

Unless US military comes up with relieable and cheap solution they will eventually starve themselves as the parts to make attack drones gets cheaper and cheaper. Like the stinger missiles in the article, they cost almost $200k while a drone costs $2k + whatever they are dropping. Obviously US has money to spend, but for how long?

There are plenty of examples of asymmetric warfare like what happened to US in Vietnam or what happened to Russians in Finland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've always figured the Chinese, if they went to a total war footing, would be able to shift their supply/production chains to mass produce effective swarms of drones.

<comment><USER22> The thing is, defending against small drones is pretty cheap. Air-to-air missiles aren't needed. A simple 50 cal rifle will probably destroy these planes with 1 or 2 shots.

<comment><USER23> Not even 50 cal, a regular old assault rifle will do.

The problem is _hitting_ the damn things. They're small, can turn on a dime, don't reflect radar very well, and run cold enough to give IR tracking some issues. Army manuals like [1] typically call for a coordinated fire of small arms across a large volume of airspace to hit a drone, but advise commanders that hit probabilities are low. Their most urgent advice is to keep spotters looking for enemy drones, and to use concealment and camouflage as much as possible to avoid enemy drone surveillance.

[1] [https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/atp3-01-8.pdf](https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/atp3-01-8.pdf), search for "UAS" (Unmanned Aerial System)

<comment><USER24> _Not even 50 cal, a regular old assault rifle will do._

Could you hit a moving drone with a rifle? Even when I shot competitively at 500m, I probably couldn't. You can hit clay pigeons with a shotgun but a drone can easily manoeuvre beyond range.

<comment><USER6> I think that He was talking about firepower, not about easiness to hit the target. Even, you can strike down a drone throwing a small stone. Other thing is hitting it.

<comment><USER22> Right. And with missiles, missed shots cost a lot of money. With a high powered rifle round that has a relatively straight trajectory -- the cost is miniscule. So firing many times is no problem in the case of minor errors in accuracy. Even a gatling gun could be used -- warthog style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Drones are still a lot more expensive than a 60 or 80mm mortar tube, though. I haven't seen many drones that could put an equivalent payload on target, and unless batteries get wildly better, I don't see much advantage in range for small, home-brew drones.

</comment><comment><USER26> Reminded me of this [https://youtu.be/SNPJMk2fgJU](https://youtu.be/SNPJMk2fgJU)

I don't think it is real, but it shows the future.

<comment><USER27> Why do you think it is fake? It seems like something you could easily build

<comment><USER28> Seems like a bad 3D render to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've heard from some of my fellow Marines they were starting to get back into camouflaged outposts and such after mostly forgetting those skills in the (early) GWOT days.

There is nothing new under the sun.

</comment><comment><USER30> Couldn't we just use bird netting around our military bases?

<comment><USER31> Sure, but then a certain percentage of drone swarms will come with razor blades on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder what will happen when lasers as drone defense system becomes a reality.

I guess terrorists will use them against US drones, and military and commercial aircrafts.

<comment><USER33> I can imagine the effects of false positive on birds will be interesting to watch

<comment><USER34> Considering that flapping-wing ornithopter drones exist[1], zapping everything that flies would be the safest bet.

1\. [https://youtu.be/w6VLzKACnS8?t=37s](https://youtu.be/w6VLzKACnS8?t=37s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> [http://archive.is/5686t](http://archive.is/5686t)

</comment><comment><USER36> Eerily similar to Black Mirror season 3 episode 6 "Hated in the Nation"

</comment><comment><USER37> That attack was way too sophisticated beyond the capability of any home-made effort. The attackers tried to cover it behind "home-made" veil. At any rate it threatens any conventional army.

<comment><USER38> The article is somewhat misleading because the Russians claim that the technology was provided by a state actor and that it was only made to look primitive in order to provide deniability.

\----

On Tuesday, the Russian Defence Ministry appeared to accuse the US of being involved in the latest attack, claiming that an American Poseidon intelligence aircraft patrolling over the base during the attack was a "strange coincidence".

It also said in an earlier post that the perpetrators needed technology from "countries with high-technological capabilities" and the drones' explosive devices had "foreign detonating fuses".

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle- east/russia-m...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/russia- military-bases-drones-syria-armed-attacks-tartus-uavs-latakia-a8151066.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Unpassable paywall, web search link doesn't skip it, mobile. Can we for the love of god stop posting or at least flag these?

<comment><USER40> Please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989) and don't post comments like this.

Users often post workaround URLs in these threads, but even if they don't, in most cases there are standard ways of reading the articles that work fine.

<comment><USER39> Sorry to disappoint you, but they don't work fine.

I've been saying this for months. If you browse HN using a mobile device it is not easy to work around a paywall. Publishers are constantly making it more difficult, coming from google search doesn't give you a free pass anymore. I can't "focus on the content" if there is no way to access it.

Notice how the top voted comment in the thread you posted is asking for the same (a paywall tag). Maybe you could try going mobile-only for a few weeks to understand the pain?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Globally, that might not be a bad thing. The 20th Century has many examples of genocide and mass murder committed by armed State- or State-backed actors against their own population.

Democratizing a means of preventing that might help prevent similar atrocities in the 21st Century.

A second amendment for the 3D printed drone age, if you will.</comment>


The Singularity is here and she goes by Cadie - <AUTHOR> http://cadiesingularity.blogspot.com/

<comment><USER2> This is an obvious April fools prank and the phony Google announcement which links to this site is already on the front page. The announcement also provides more context for the blogspot page. Flagged.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541393>

<comment><AUTHOR> Uh, yeah, I know it is an April fools prank. Geez, I hope when the singularity really arrives our successors will have more humor than some of us apes did!

<comment><USER2> Some of us don't like the site being all junked up with phony articles and basically useless for a day. Besides, it's not very funny without any context and the original link was already posted.</comment></comment></comment>


My experiments with online marketing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@umenmactech/my-experiments-with-online-marketing-335875bb1846#.9ha28yjcf <comment><USER2> Im sure youre a very worthwhile individual but 81 clicks is not a decent sample for success, nor is 40% open on 170 mails sent.</comment>


The UK's tech sector faces a tougher talent battle post-Brexit UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-tech-faces-tougher-talent-battle-post-brexit?utm_content=buffer86a80&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> Conversely, whilst it may become harder to attract talent from outside the UK, UK talent may become cheaper if the pound stays at its post-brexit-vote lows.

UK tech graduates are increasingly looking outside finance for jobs these days. Combine this with the reduction in the size of the City of London and there could be lots of talent on the market within the UK.

[IMHO this doesn't balance out the harm caused by leaving the EU, but might offer a glimmer of hope - we can still be attractive as an outsourcing hub.]</comment>


Ask HN: mass-manufacture plastic - <AUTHOR> I have a physical product with a finished design that I'd like to sell. Making the circuit is easy enough, but the way I made the plastic isn't scalable. I'd like to make 10-20 copies of my product. Ideally, there's some kind of cheap moldable plastic, anybody out there have any idea what I should use? <comment><USER2> I've studied industrial design for a few years, here is what I can tell you:

Plastics is a very large subject and there are a lot of criteria that can be involved. You criteria apparantly are:

      - Can be made in small series. (ie. no injection molding or extrusion)
      - Holds electrical circuitry.
      - Serves mainly the purpose of container.
      (no exceptional stresses, no special features,
      must be able to open and close in some way.)
      - Consumer product, so must have somewhat nice finish.
      - Should be tappable for screws?
      - Production accuracy within 1-2 millimeters?
      - Can be made in your own workshop?

Here are some small-series techniques you could look into:

      - (Resin) casting
      - Dip molding/casting
      - Heat molding
      - Spin casting
      - Vacuum forming
      - Hand laminating or spraying

I don't know what materials are exactly applicable to what technique, but for your purpose some common materials are: PP, PS, Styrene-butadiene, ABS (especially), PA6, Polyester (resin).

Goodluck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Protomold.com is your best bet, ultimately you can make a larger run off the molds where as milling won't tell you anything about the viability of it as an injection molded product. Also injection molding is a bit more complicated than just drawing up a shape so you might need some expertise if you are going down that road.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been doing some home molding with High Impact Polystyrene (HIPS) and with clear PETG. The polystyrene is opaque, white, strong, and particularly easy to work with. It's also cheap (about $50 for a 1/8" 4'x8' sheet).

Vacuum molding at home with an oven and a vacuum cleaner can produce surprisingly good results. Searching the web for "vacuum molding" or "vacuum forming" should turn up some decent tutorials.

TAPPlastics.com is pretty good for small quantities (especially if you are near one of their stores), but others (like Interstate Plastics) have better prices on full sheets. TAP has HIPS at their store near me, although I don't see it listed on their web site.

</comment><comment><USER5> I always try and find a way to make it out of metal in smaller quantities (and larger for that matter).

</comment><comment><USER6> Do you have drawings of the product? At such a small quantity, probably only vacuum forming or machining will be cost effective. eMachineShop might be worth looking into, or canvass the Web for a hobby machinist with a CNC mill that will do them for cheap.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe one of those online fabrication sites (don't know of any off the top of my head, but you could find some on fabbaloo.com)? Or are they still too expensive?

Too bad you don't need more than 10-20, then you could probably use a factory in China.

</comment><comment><USER8> Depends on the surface finish you want, amount of post-fabrication hand work you want to do, price, strength, size...

You could look at www.shapeways.com

</comment><comment><USER9> For that size order, something like emachineshop.com might be the ticket.

</comment><comment><USER10> consider this <http://harkopen.com/projects/reprap>

</comment><comment><USER11> stereolithography

<comment><USER12> Stereolithography is usually fine for evaluating product form, but the cured polymers aren't (usually) functional. Fused deposition systems (from Stratasys) produce functional parts from ABS, similar in strength and workability (for drilling/tapping holes, finishing surfaces, etc.) to injection molded parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Look up "tool and die" in the yellow pages.</comment>


Language Oriented Programming: The Next Programming Paradigm - <AUTHOR> http://www.onboard.jetbrains.com/is1/articles/04/10/lop/index.html

<comment><USER2> I think the problem with claiming this is the "next big paradigm" is that the average programmer, and frankly, even the merely above-average programmer, is not going to be competent to design a non-trivial special-purpose language of any value.

Once you step out of the domain of totally-trivial languages, language design immediately becomes tricky, subtle, and prone to exotic interactions and quirky tradeoffs that even our absolute best teams of language designers can only mitigate, not eliminate... and it's not all going to be "absolute best" teams, after all.

And... then you want multiple languages to be sitting there interacting, too? That's not even possible without somehow limiting those interactions ("thy languages shalt have lexical binding that works thusly"), and now you're just making another meta-language like Lisp, which, presumably, doesn't fit the bill. _Either_ you cut off the diversity of the language _or_ you get the sort of evil interactions the likes of which have never been seen in a real language. The only middle ground there is to do both at once.

If your paradigm requires a genius to use it, that's not a fair comparison against other paradigms; start a genius out on OO and they can get pretty far there, too.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's an article from 2003 that I think is still very relevant inspiration for what's to come. I think we're "getting there" and I plan to be part of this revolution ;)

I especially liked page 3. It's hitting nail after nail right on the head.

edit: On second thought I'm not sure we're getting there because I'm not aware of any IDE that comes close to approaching what I have in mind (which is pretty close to what the article is describing). I guess I just have those concepts in mind so much that I think everyone else sees what I'm seeing. Anyway.

<comment><USER3> I thought pg was thinking this way with arc. I remember reading something where he was planning to add some kind of syntax definition capability to arc, but haven't been able to find the article since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like all he needs is a VM, such as the JVM.

For example, the JVM gives us:

Java, Clojure, Jython, JRuby, etc.

All of these languages are compatible with each other and can easily extend each other. Especially with Clojure, it would be trivial to implement another DSL on top of these, but the platform has always been there.

<comment><USER5> This only solves part of the problem.

If you have ever used JetBrain's IntelliJ IDEA, you will understand why standard text editors are grossly inefficient. IntelliJ is a Java IDE, but imagine for a moment that it was an "all JVM powered languages" IDE. It's a very interesting vision, and I for one am confident that JetBrains can produce something compelling. Their products are top notch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm trying to think of an easy way this idea can be hacked together with existing tools, instead of writing a bunch of new stuff.

Could this be handled by macro programming on a lisp machine? Lisp is essentially the parse tree, which all languages have, so it provides the syntax agnostic representation. Macros allow you to easily specify DSLs, plus the macros themselves are lists and thus manipulable by macros. The lisp machine is essentially emacs that really is an OS, so the entire programming environment is programmable. But, emacs on top of some shell isn't so bad either.

The only thing missing is the syntax layer. Maybe regexps could suffice? Also something like LaTeX can provide a rich variety of symbols and symbolic structures for syntax.

<comment><USER6> Regexps alone are a really poor fit for dealing with recursive structures, such as finding matching pairs of braces. You can use them for a lexing step, but you're probably better off using something like yacc or LPEG for the parsing.

Forth, Factor, and other stack-based languages also have this same property of "syntax agnostic representation". While on the surface they're kind of a backwards Lisp (due to postfix notation, with intermediate results pushed on a stack), both are dealing with nested lists of symbols, and very adept at dealing with things expressed the same way.

<comment><USER7> Forth is _not_ adept at dealing with nested lists of _anything_. It doesn't have linked lists, garbage collection, or traditionally even heap allocation. It does have recursion, but it doesn't traditionally have local variables, and mutual recursion (really handy when you're doing anything related to ASTs) requires using DEFER or something. Do you have a lot of experience writing Forth?

<comment><USER6> Forth words are nested lists of other words (before compilation). It's not as good at dealing with nested _data structures_ as Lisps, agreed, but the poster above is asking about syntax and DSLs.

<comment><USER7> Before compilation, Forth words don't exist. During compilation, they are _flat_ lists of other words, not _nested_ lists of other words. After compilation, they can be just about anything. Forth is great for embedded DSLs but it's not because of its great ability to deal with nested lists of words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> After several years of development, Jetbrains released a beta of the Meta- programming System for implementing this vision:

<http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> this is "new" only if you don't know ruby or lisp.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wrong. The lack of tool support for DSLs is a real issue. We've barely scratched the surface of what IDEs can do. We often have to deal with lackluster editing support (especially so in the case of DSLs) and I find this deplorable.

As an example, if a DSL's function C references a lisp function F, the IDE should integrate the two languages enough that when you ask who calls F the IDE will list C among the calling functions.

edit: Suddenly I have a feeling people will have to see the power of a "real" IDE for themselves before they see that all the seemingly small improvements are really worthwhile. It's a bit like explaining Lisp macros to a beginner: the simple examples are easy enough to understand but aren't very compelling, while the complex, more worthwhile examples are too difficult to understand. So let's talk again in a few years when I have an implementation ;P</comment></comment>


GPS III - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/global-positioning-system-preparing-the-next-generation-of-gps/ <comment><USER2> Some details on new features:

Laser reflectors for improved ranging and ephemeris calculation (NASA request): [https://www.gpsworld.com/expert-advice-laser-reflectors- to-r...](https://www.gpsworld.com/expert-advice-laser-reflectors-to-ride-on- board-gps-iii/)

Regional Military Protection: Amplified on-demand M-Code signal power in a targeted region—allowing receivers to operate more than 10 times closer to a jammer than with the military signals operational today: [https://insidegnss.com/gps-iii-the-next-big-step-in-gps- mode...](https://insidegnss.com/gps-iii-the-next-big-step-in-gps- modernization/)

Colocated Search and Rescue (SAR) repeater payload: [https://spacenews.com/mda-to-build-search-and-rescue- repeate...](https://spacenews.com/mda-to-build-search-and-rescue-repeaters- for-gps-3f-satellites/) (Galileo GNSS has this as well onboard, and also supports a return link to ack the distress call on the device, GPS does not unfortunately)

</comment><comment><USER3> Additional reading: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_Block_III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_Block_III)</comment>