The Blockstack Browser: A Gateway to a New, Decentralized Internet - <AUTHOR> https://blockstack.org/blog/introducing-the-blockstack-browser-a-gateway-to-a-new-decentralized-internet <comment><USER2> Unless I can unplug the WAN connection on my router and connect to your product instead, keep in mind that you haven't invented the next internet. You might be able to decentralize the worldwide web of HTML pages and hyperlinks, or invent another protocol that can be encapsulated in TCP/IP packets and ethernet frames, but the internet (the graph of inter-connected networks that speak common protocols) is still a fundamental requirement for your product, and the metadata associated with those stacks is still very real and trackable.

To that point as well, the internet already "works how real life works." Sick of Company X and the way their business treats employees? Shop elsewhere, remembering that it won't be as convenient with fewer choices. Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you, remembering that they probably can't pay as much for great engineers.

It's Conway's Law. We are largely constrained to create systems (including the internet) that mirror the organizational structure we're a part of. Yes, we can evolve and revolutionize occasionally, but it will always mirror "real life" because they will always influence each other.

<comment><USER3> _> Sick of Company X and the way their business treats employees? Shop elsewhere, remembering that it won't be as convenient with fewer choices. Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you, remembering that they probably can't pay as much for great engineers. _

Hard sell. There's a reason why the government has laws against monopolies. Especially when it comes to the internet, consumers tend to choose the best/fastest product over the most ethical one.

<comment><USER4> I don't know, the alternatives are getting better. Maybe not consumer grade, but usable, especially for a developer. For the past few years I've made a reasonable effort to use ethical software as long as it doesn't make my job too hard, and here are the results:

\- Ubuntu is my daily driver OS, with Windows getting booted once in a blue moon to play some games

\- Firefox for 80% of my browsing (the other 20% is Chromium on a Chromebook, which seems to run faster than FF even in an Ubuntu chroot with crouton)

\- Thunderbird and a plain ol' IMAP mail server for email

\- Maybe half of my messaging has moved to Signal

\- Searx.me for web searches, sure I'm using the Google results more often than not, but at least my queries are anonymized, and switching to other providers is easy

I started a business on a very boring, conventional tech stack that gets a lot of hate on HN--PHP and WordPress--but it's a free and ethical stack, and I sleep better at night because of that. I gave our latest hire most of the same desktop software I use, and so far no major problems.

I'll grant you that the UI of some of this software is a little creaky, but I get by, and overall I'd say most of the nasty bugs we have to deal with in our toolkit are in closed source SaaS stuff.

Some notable unethical holdouts include occasional Skype/Hangouts calls, Slack, Google Docs, and Dropbox. Also a bunch of small-time SaaS products. But give me time.

<comment><USER5> So are you hosting your own IMAP server? If so, have you any problems with your emails being filtered out as spam?

EDIT: Bit of a brain-fart. IMAP is just a client of a mail server. So to rephrase my question - what mail server do you use?

<comment><USER6> This reminds me of that "hackproof" box BBC reviewed that was a Raspberry Pi that couldn't update itself.

Also, having run an email startup in London, patching and anti-spam at almost any scale is nontrivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Javascript Required." "Oh snap! Your browser doesn't support Javascript."

I have seen so many of these Javascript-only "websites" posted on HN I am wondering is this coming from some web development template? How difficult is it to have a page with text for those not using Javascript? Something like

This website was designed for browsers that run Javascript.  Are you using one?  Here are some examples of browsers that work well with our website: browser1, browser2, etc.  Alternatively, a no-JS version of the website is available here.

There are of course other ways to do this. The point is that it can be done and is not difficult.

For those not using or with Javascript disabled:

[https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack- core](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-core)

And a blog

       curl -o 1.htm https://blockstack-site-api.herokuapp.com/v1/blog-rss
       tr -cd '\12\40-\176' < 1.htm > 2.htm
       xyz 2.htm

where xyz is some program that displays html or rss.

<comment><USER8> There are a bunch of very popular web development frameworks where pretty much all the functionality comes from the javascript. Angular and React are some of the better known ones.

<comment><USER9> one of react's differentiating qualities is that it can render the entire page on the back-end, so there's no reason for the page to fail if the user does not run javascript.

<comment><USER10> Whilst this is often true, not all React code will render server side. You need to take care to make sure your React code stays isomorphic, which usually lasts right up to the point you discover some third party React component you reused would require significant rewriting to support server side rendering. That's how my personal projects usually end up anyway!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope this dies in its current form because:

0\. It's self-promoting a panacea "fix" as a product at the wrong level of abstraction.

1\. Protocols and standards exist for interoperability.

2\. Tries to rebuild everything (supply- and demand-sides) while fixing very little.

Fix what's here and now for the benefit of everyone with a migration path, not for the benefit of a few in a temporary, constrained, arbitrary way divides people similarly to the way Facebook tried to foist another internet onto the third-world.

<comment><USER11> It's an open-source project with 4 years of research and development behind it. The architecture implemented here is actually inspired by David Clark (Chief Protocol Architect of the internet) and his new design principle, called trust-to-trust design, that aims to fix critical security issues with the current design of the internet.

I agree that rebuilding everything is hard and that's why we reuse not only TCP/IP and everything below TCP/IP in the stack, but we also reuse existing infrastructure in a decentralized way.

We've already built this stack and have been running it in production for 3+ years. Please see our peer-reviewed research papers and our whitepaper at [http://blockstack.org/papers](http://blockstack.org/papers) for more details. Happy to answer any questions!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh, bummer, I thought this was some sort of like, "turn your wifi router into a mesh network connector" thing.

I don't really know much about blockchain, but I know to access whatever this is, I still have to pay Comcast 50 bucks a month for the right to use their "tubes."

<comment><USER13> My hope is for low orbit satelite internet to really become a thing. Putting pressure on monopolies to lower prices to compete and giving you at least another option for an ISP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bob Kahn, not TBL, is the other "father of the internet".

> Today we are proud to announce the Blockstack browser, which allows > developers everywhere to access a whole new internet.

reminded me of then-Senator Ted Stevens' take on net neutrality

> Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your > own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by > my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday > [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the > Internet commercially.

In other words, what a load of hot air! Looking forward to their $50M seed round.

<comment><USER15> I remembered the "series of tubes" comment but never heard this part:

 _I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o 'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday_

I had to go back to listen to the original. Man what a trip.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE)

<comment><USER16> Reminds me of an old classic, the then-Minister for Communications in Australia back in 2010.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gl7X6peh-w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gl7X6peh-w)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _> Developers can build apps on this new internet by downloading the Blockstack Mac or Linux app (Windows coming soon) and by using nothing more than your existing Chrome or Safari browsers._

Why Chrome and not Firefox? In their context, the later makes way more sense.

<comment><USER18> Support the decentralized internet by using the products of a company currently trying to centralize the internet!

<comment><USER17> And being open source friendly, proposing using closed browsers...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wait, so does this mean anybody who wants to run this project needs a copy of the whole internet on their machine? Or connect to someone who has a whole copy of the internet?

Regular bitcoin only deals with tiny transactions and already it takes days to download its blockchain on an older DSL link.

Also, how is this better than just, you know, running your own website? Is that too Web 1.0 for today's hip youth? How much aggregate computer power is necessary to deliver one page in this system? How about 10 years from now when it has petabytes of data to deliver?

<comment><USER20> No, you don't need the whole internet.

You can't run application code with just pure HTML. The processing code has to run somewhere. Blockstack runs it using Javascript in your browser, and with bring your own storage.

Only naming (identity) is pegged to Bitcoin, blockstack has a virtual blockchain on top of this which has functionality akin to DNS (and CA). That DNS can point to your storage, so you can have things on Dropbox or Amazon S3 or wherever.

So it scales pretty well, you don't download what you're not interested it. It will work with a lot of infrastructre/services that exist, but you can cut out a lot of middle men.

You could host your application code on your Amazon S3. But when a user runs it, the app can store private data in THEIR chosen storage. And if you have public data, that could be either stored with their chosen storage without encryption (only signature) so it is public, or indeed you could store it in your application storage.

<comment><USER19> How does this free you from corporate masters then? Is this to prevent governments from seizing your DNS when they can't get access to the hosting?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are great many explorations on a decentralized protocols (this, Zeronet, IPFS, urbit) but I don't see many infrastructure related projects that we can play with today. Anyone can knows of hardware stack that enables fault- tolerant meshnets?

<comment><USER22> I'd love to see an implementation that uses "parasitic storage". There seem to be enough free places to post content now that it would be workable, especially if you thought broader than just things like Google drive. Throw in free blogging platforms, pastebins, free email + attachments, etc, and a bit of PKI (obfuscate) + redundant copies.

That would allow for real world use without having to rely on things like "pinning".

<comment><USER23> Couple years ago, a couple friends and I threw together something like that.

GPG encrypted messages with a huge list of fallbacks where messages got stored. (Pastes, private subreddit, Facebook via RSS).

The code was truly awful, but the premise was we just needed each others public keys, and all was good. (Killed the project when one of us lost their private key, and we realized hardcoding the public keys had been a terrible idea).

I don't think I have the code anymore, but shouldn't be much more than a weekend project if you stick with text only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Once again, a manifesto on the landing page that explains nothing about what is actually being proposed.

Please link to summaries of what has been done, why, and where it's going.

(On the face of it, a "blockchain" seems like a god-awful fundament for a distributed net, compared to e.g. IPFS.)

</comment><comment><USER25> I stopped skimming this at "If you are not an engineer at Google or Facebook, it's hard for you to innovate."

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't get it. I browsed the web site and didn't find an About Us page. Is this a browser? Is this a platform to build applications on top of? I initially thought IPFS and BitCoin but not sure what to make of the product. What is being presented is not summarized in a clear manner to me.

</comment><comment><USER27> This works using the bitcoin blockchain and is a great example regarding the usefulness of blockchains.

I mention this because in the previous threads regarding crypto currencies, people were asking for some value-creation technologies based on blockchains (other than speculation and money laundering)

<comment><USER28> > This works using the bitcoin blockchain and is a great example regarding the > usefulness of blockchains.

Is it? I thought you didn't do anything on the bitcoin chain without value changing hands.

Is there some kind of high-level overview available for those of us who are totally unfamiliar with the inner workings of blockchains, and would nonetheless like to gain a firm enough grasp to understand what Blockstack actually offers? I'd love to read such a thing, but haven't yet found it on the Blockstack site.

<comment><USER27> Indeed, in order to have something stored in the blockchain, you have to make a transaction, which incurs costs. However, reading the blockchain is free (once you exclude network traffic costs and electricity).

This is an overview of how blockstack works: [https://blockstack.org/docs/how- blockstack-works](https://blockstack.org/docs/how-blockstack-works)

This is a description regarding the transaction fees on the bitcoin blockchain: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees)

Here are some real time stats regarding the costs/byte of info to be stored in the blockchain (in satoshis - 1 USD is approx 45k satoshis at today's BTC price)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Still struggling to wrap my head around this, mostly trying to make sense of:

[https://blockstack.org/docs/how-blockstack- works](https://blockstack.org/docs/how-blockstack-works)

This is DNS on top of the blockchain right?

Though where it deviates some is:

"Even though only data record hashes are stored in blockchain transactions, we can use them to verify the authenticity and integrity of the data itself once we get it. For example, you can host your data in S3, and other peers can verify your data by first obtaining the hash from Blockstack DNS and then checking it against your data's hash."

So functionally what this is solving is (I'm asking here):

\- Nobody can take your domain away b/c they don't have the keys, so stuff like domain sniping, ISP interference, Government seizure, etc. are less likely (notwithstanding [https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/))

\- Every piece of data is checksummed so you can (and maybe this is what the Blockstack browsers are doing) verify that it hasn't been tampered with ala MITM.

But even with that, I'm still unclear on just what's the right way to think about this. Like if I setup a new web site on a domain, would I also enter in every file on the page as a separate 'data record hash'?

<comment><USER30> in my view, this is where all the blockchain ideas break down. once you require a central party holding the data for the service, its no longer decentralized. theres a reason the bitcoin blockchain is slow, expensive and hard to use. All of its weaknesses are sacrifices the users make in order to obtain decentralized uncensored internet money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How is this different than using Mist? ([https://github.com/ethereum/mist](https://github.com/ethereum/mist))

</comment><comment><USER32> Is it another Silicon Valley promo just like that machine learning compression a couple of days ago?

</comment><comment><USER33> Is this like ZeroNet? Does anyone knows the difference?

<comment><USER34> ZeroNet executes arbitrary javascript from anonymous/unknown sources. I hope this one does not.

<comment><USER35> Isn't it your browser that executes the javascript? Just like the normal web?

From what I remember, ZeroNet ran in whatever browser you used to access it.

<comment><USER34> In the normal web if you browse a well known site there's a _degree of trust_ that the site is not serving malware to you.

That's why is good to use a dedicated device/OS user or at least browser profile to access your bank and doing random browsing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can you provide some more precise examples of the things this tech would prevent, and how it would prevent them? From an outsider's perspective, it seems like google or whomever could always add an extra layer of junk to any underlying technology to bring it back exactly to where we are now, but just less efficiently.

</comment><comment><USER37> > Imagine a world where people don't have property rights. In this world, you > cannot own a house, and all your belongings are kept in a storage facility > owned by a few corporations. And in this world, walking into any store or > theater implies that you disclose all your personal information, places > you've been, other things you've bought to the business owners. You are > tracked 24/7, your belongings are stolen from storage facilities, and you > can't do anything about it.

Since it's done to curb terrorism and protect children from predators, isn't this what most people want? I mean, I personally would rather shoot myself than live like that, but I'm not most people. I seem to recall that the UK's internet censorship bill (or whatever exactly it was, someone correct me please) has majority voter support.

</comment><comment><USER38> Skimmed that whole page, and now feel that I understand even less what it is than when I started.

So, it's like a Smoodie?

</comment><comment><USER39> This is really good proof of concept project. Blockchain is super exciting and I share your enthusiasm. Problems it solves are real.

I kind of feel it will not take off, no windows support etc, but you never know, if anything is hot these days, it is blockchain solutions.

</comment><comment><USER40> it costs an average of 0.025 btc (~$60 US) to register a name which seems suspiciously expensive for something this new. Has anyone gone through the process of registering an Id and building an app yet? I would love to hear some unbiased feed back

<comment><USER20> You're burning that money. Noone gets it. If it costs 0.025 btc you're trying to register a very short name. Try a longer one, it's a lot cheaper.

I've registered an ID. I did it through onename.com which pays the registration fee for you (as a way to get more people into it, it won't stay that way).

Read the blockstack papers, they're the best info around and makes everything clearer. It is a bit hard to wrap heads around. I've been trying to unsuccessfully explain it many times, there's so many good ideas and so much potential there!

(I'm unaffiliated btw, but have been following the project for a long time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I am an app developer. Why do I choose to do my app on BlockStack? I get that as a user i want to control my data, but who are these people who want to make apps on it?

<comment><USER42> If I knew how, I would, because as a developer I want my users to control their data.

<comment><USER43> Larry from Blockstack here.

Yes! Users _should_ be in control of their data and Blockstack enables this. There are also practical advantages for developers.

User control of data means you don't have to have the responsibility and cost that comes along with storing other people's information. With lots of user data, you're a valuable target for hackers and governments. It also frees you from maintaining expensive backend infrastructure and devops. This lets your app scale without a huge bill from your favorite cloud infrastructure provider.

<comment><USER41> How about Walmart's automated supply chain. Who are the users, why do they benefit from controlling their data? Why does Walmart want to build on some future incarnation of this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> has anybody here actually tried to get it to work by following the installation instructions? I've been unsuccessful so far. I tried to install it using the given shell script but it fails. I tried to install it using the manual installation steps but this also fails. It cant find the necessary installation files.

</comment><comment><USER45> What's getting stored in a blockchain?

<comment><USER46> See [https://blockstack.org/blog/blockstack-whitepaper- part-1](https://blockstack.org/blog/blockstack-whitepaper-part-1):

"Blockstack binds (human-readable) domains to public keys to establish ownership of domains. These domains have associated data records as well. These small bindings are stored on the blockchain and are tamper resistant. The actual payload from the data records is stored outside of the blockchain because blockchains have limited storage space and are not meant to be used as general-purpose databases."

<comment><USER45> How is this different than:

[https://namecoin.org/](https://namecoin.org/)

<comment><USER20> Blockstack project originally ran on namecoin. But it is not a secure blockchain.

Also, it stores much data in the blockchain, so it has scaling problems. Blockstack stores the zone file data in its own Atlas (DHT-inspired) network, and the zone files point to where the actual application-level data is stored.

Blockstack can work on top of any blockchain, so if Bitcoin is not the most secure anymore, it could be moved. Separating into different layers allows scaling and resiliency. And you don't have to run a blockchain, which is good, because that already exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> ....and then $NATION_STATE puts enough nodes on the network to execute a 51% attack, and we're back where we started.

Basing anything on proof-of-work puts you in a perpetual race to control more compute than your adversaries.

</comment><comment><USER48> I am wondering how this compares with TBL's Solid. Also IPFS, like is this a rival, or something that could run on IPFS, or what. Also, could you access this with tor?

<comment><USER20> I do not know of Solid. But IPFS is a storage layer, so you can use IPFS as part of Blockstack. It is even normally mentioned in the architecture diagrams. Have a look at the picture down on the page here: [https://blockstack.org/intro](https://blockstack.org/intro)

Where it says "storage layer" it has things like Dropbox and S3, in some versions of the picture it also has IPFS. This is up to the user. As long as you can fetch it, it can be used. Usually that would mean you'd have to use HTTP, but it depends on the browser you're running.

You can also read about 'Gaia' (where it uses storage as Dropbox/S3 as 'dumb harddrives' where it can dump encrypted blobs on) in the whitepaper: [https://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf](https://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's not a particularly good sign that the gateway to this "gateway", as it were, doesn't like you not having JS enabled.

</comment><comment><USER50> I like the idea of storing data and apps locally!

<comment><USER51> So do I...

Lets take a fun game. How about all of Atari 2600?

[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmacAqRVhJX9eS7YJX1vY3ifFKF9CduDqPEgaCU...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmacAqRVhJX9eS7YJX1vY3ifFKF9CduDqPEgaCUSa4x5xb/)

Ok.. This is remote, across all the machines that have that IPFS hash. In other words, its not local.

(in console) ipfs pin add QmacAqRVhJX9eS7YJX1vY3ifFKF9CduDqPEgaCUSa4x5xb

Now its local!

Or lets do something more than a game... How about Node-Red in browser(PageNodes)?

[http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSCrZUPkqH4gsncsD7tGXPiFpymsbwmywsHXLDh...](http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSCrZUPkqH4gsncsD7tGXPiFpymsbwmywsHXLDhBtSQ6T/)

EDIT: I had the point in my head, but didn't put it down here. In other words, we _already_ have this technology, and not using buzzword-bingo like "Its the interwebz but with blockchains!". These links are direct proof that it not only exists, but is working right now.

And in reality, making a type of blockchain in IPFS would not be hard. It's an immutable data structure, with append-only characteristics.

And, I also am partial to IPFS, primarily because it feels like a proper IETF- internet scale project. ZeroNET looks prettier, but.. throw away. Again, some subjective feel there, but IPFS feels elegant.

<comment><USER52> I've been partial to IPFS since I first learn of it but I know there's a few competitors in this space. Is there anywhere with some comparisons of the technology and maybe popularity (since the more people, the more robust the network) of these projects?.

<comment><USER51> Well.. I know of a few. ZeroNET, Maidsafe (kind of), this project. There's also some DRM encrusted version kind of like this. I forget their name. But they wanted a pay-gateway. EDIT: found it. Called "LBRY" (I'm absolutely not impressed.. [https://lbry.io/](https://lbry.io/) )

Primarily, I see ZeroNET as its competitor. And ZeroNET has the bling and the wow factor, but much of the underlying system is.. unfinished. It also requires some heafty frontend with backing DB as well. It seems cobbled on and over-engineered.

IPFS, on the other hand, is clean and clear of its focus. It's simple enough to do as it purports. It works now. It seamlessly works with gateways to allow non-IPFS users to access the network. It's network agnostic: ip4, 6, and whatever else is a protocol addon. And it seems to be on its way to an IETF standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Ok, can I just run the server to support the project? I have some Azure credits and would like to put them to good use.

</comment><comment><USER54> I don't know too much about Blockchains, but wouldn't Ethereum be a better choice for something like this?

<comment><USER55> No. Better to have a dumb network. Keep things as simple as possible. Transactions on the bitcoin network suffice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Perpetual motion is finally here!

</comment><comment><USER57> Any ideas about whether this is ready for someone to start a company on?

</comment><comment><USER58> I believe the current internet is a living creature and the sarcasm and snark it produces are natural defenses against any new internet someone tries to create.

</comment><comment><USER59> Ethereum is going to dominate this.

<comment><USER60> All of these blockchain-based protocols are impractical. Blockchain is wasteful and slow. It may work adequately for a transaction ledger, but it doesn't work for the web's primary purpose of distributing arbitrary information ad-hoc and on-demand.

<comment><USER61> Totally agree. A lot of hype without real understanding of the limitations.

[https://blog.tokenize.io/the-case-against-blockchain- identit...](https://blog.tokenize.io/the-case-against-blockchain- identity-d3e0aa3faa3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _> Imagine a world where people don't have property rights. In this world, you cannot own a house, and all your belongings are kept in a storage facility owned by a few corporations. And in this world, walking into any store or theater implies that you disclose all your personal information, places you've been, other things you've bought to the business owners. You are tracked 24/7, your belongings are stolen from storage facilities, and you can't do anything about it.

Most of us would not stand for this in our real, everyday lives. But on the internet, we tolerate and even expect it. We become dependent on nameless, faceless, remote parties just by connecting. On the internet, we are powerless. Our existence on the internet is defined by others, whether that other be a mega-corporation or a government.

Now, we can change that. _

Beautiful mission statement.

<comment><USER62> I like that it's an anti-corporate sentiment, but with an appeal to property rights. I almost suspect it's a deliberate clever way to appeal across the spectrum.

<comment><USER63> Well, you can still support individual/grassroots property rights while rejecting corporativism

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Is it from Silicon Valley (tv show) ?

<comment><USER65> While that one is mostly fictional, it is creating an actual completely decentralized version of the internet by creating an ad-hoc network using people's phones.

This still requires you to have your normal internet to connect to it and use it.</comment></comment>


The Hidden Cost of GoFundMe Health Care - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/01/the-perverse-logic-of-gofundme-health-care <comment><USER2> I wrote about this on here once before, but for a while I was working on a short story about a fictional dystopia in which crowdfunded healthcare devolves into a televised game show where people pitch their sob story to viewers. Whomever ends up with the most votes (a la The Voice), moves onto the next round, until finally one person is crowned the winner and has all of their needs taken care of. What was supposed to be a silly story turned super cynical and depressing, so I stopped working on it.

When I last talked about it, someone pointed out that this was already a thing, back in the 1950s, called "Queen for a Day" \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_for_a_Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_for_a_Day)

 _Each contestant was asked to talk about the recent financial and emotional hard times she had been through. The interview would climax with Bailey asking the contestant what she needed most and why she wanted to win the title of Queen for a Day. Often the request was for medical care or therapeutic equipment to help a chronically ill child, or might be for a hearing aid, a new washing machine, or a refrigerator. Many women broke down sobbing as they described their plights._

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a perfect pitch for a Black Mirror episode. Although "Fifteen Million Merits" gets kinda close.

<comment><USER4> I think "Nosedive" goes into similar territory and might even be the better fit, since success in this kind of show and GoFundMe campaigns could be considered a proxy for popularity and/or "good" presentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have an acquaintance who is working in a top Bay Area tech company with a total compensation of close to $200k.

Her parents visited her and sadly her Dad had a cardiac episode and had to be taken to ER.

They stabilized him and thankfully he managed to go back to his home country and get proper treatment.

The ER bill was about $50k and she decided that the best way to pay it was by creating a GoFundMe campaign before she even tried to negotiate with the hospital or fight it with the insurance.

She managed to raise $15k.

After seeing that I am reluctant to donate any money to GoFundMe campaigns.

<comment><USER6> Maybe I'm just being dumb, but I don't really understand why that makes you reluctant to donate.

It's not like your friend is trying to scam you or anything. That money is actually going to a bill that they are required to pay. Most people I talk to don't even know they can negotiate hospital bills.

Seems weird to act like your friend or GoFundMe is the villain here, when the issue is really a healthcare system that has a "secret menu".

<comment><USER5> I am not so sure. When she has the money to pay for it, but instead chooses to portrait like she doesn't and asks others to pay for it, I think it's at least immoral.

It goes without saying that the healthcare system is completely broken, but that doesn't justify above behavior.

<comment><USER7> 200K in the bay area is not exactly wealthy. It's a solid middle to upper- middle class wage. Taking a 50K hit for something you did nothing to deserve, just because you love your parent is stupid. I would hate it if my daughter tried to do that for me.

<comment><USER8> " I would hate it if my daughter tried to do that for me."

But you are OK if other well-meaning people pay? If you make 200k you can take the hit and you should have known better.

<comment><USER9> You do realise that if you buy insurance and don't claim anything that's literally you paying for other people's healthcare, right? That's how insurance works. The only difference between that and the socialised national health systems around the world is that you also pay for the insurance company's profit.

<comment><USER10> I feel like I have to say this to everyone all the time when they try to defend the US as having the greatest healthcare system ever. It's literally impossible to offer the same service as a socialized, government program for cheaper when the non-socialized option has to make a profit. If a non- socialized system can drive costs down, so can a socialized provider. There's literally no situation where the socialized system loses on this.

<comment><USER11> Huh? So really, all services should be socialized is what you are saying?

There is literally no way a private company could offer something cheaper and better than the government?

<comment><USER10> I never said all services should be socialized. For example, I don't think auto repair services should be socialized. Do you see how silly your statement is?

And no... there is no way that a private company could offer something cheaper because both entities function the same way except that a private company also has to make a profit. Governments are not profit-making entities. Take whatever method a private company has to make something cheaper and remove profit and you have something the government can handle.

<comment><USER11> I didn't realize we were talking fantasy hypotheticals. Reality is, private companies can and will always do better than the government in almost everything. For the exact reason that you claim to be the problem. They want profit.

Industries like healthcare are plagued with government interference. Some regulations are important. Many just serve as a moat around the oligopoly that is the current private health Care system.

<comment><USER10> No one's talking fantasy hypotheticals except for you. The "reality" that you're claiming is not at all actually reality considering that every other industrialized nation on the planet pays less for healthcare and prescription drugs than we do in the United States. If private industry can drive prices down, then so can government. The USPS was the poster child for efficient and effective government service until Republicans decided to absolutely decimate it because of lobbying from private industry. Government services don't need to make a profit, they don't need to lobby, and they don't have any of the greed-driven motivation that private companies do.

You're either being intentionally obtuse or you're intentionally being misleading for some reason. This isn't rocket science. If two things are equal and one has the requirement to also generate profit, there's no way the other can possibly cost more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am upset that any individual needs a GoFundMe page to get money for a treatment. However, I also know many people who simply make terrible life decisions such as lack of insurance, buy luxury cars/homes and generally live beyond their means. Then, when shit hits the fan they own nothing and have to rely on assistance. I would much rather have the government take the money from everyone then use it to fund healthcare. Most average people are not smart about money.

Also, I recently donated to a family member, even though the treatment she is receiving is in my opinion snake oil. There is 0 peer reviewed studies. I still have mixed feelings about it. I researched what other people experienced with the treatment and results were mostly negative. They sell hope.

I too have a chronic condition, and there are doctors who offer magic solutions for large sums of money. There is a doctor who claims he had the condition and treated himself. Then weeks later his website went up and he now offers the treatment for a tiny sum of like $13k. Desperate people will pay that money for having hope. It is sad imo.

In general regular doctors will be blunt and honest. Doctor needs to tell you that if there is no hope there is no hope and how much time you have or what you can expect. In the practices that operate in grey areas and provide treatments which are not backed up by science people are getting scammed. I have been to one of those places with a family member...everywhere you look they have quotes about hope and not giving up but then when it comes time to leave you are responsible for $3000 for a visit, of course no insurance will cover it. Makes me disgusted, as that money would be better spent trying to adapt to your new condition if possible.

I too had a hard time coping with my condition and honestly the US social safety net is pure garbage. Disability takes two fucking years to get a decision, and you will most likely need a lawyer. You could not even get healthcare before obamacare or pre-existing condition would not be covered. I lost a job and had to pay $600 for cobra insurance. Honestly, just thinking what I had to go through makes me want to go back to Europe.

Edit: Apologies that this turned into a rant.

<comment><USER13> One of the bars I go to, every other month or so seems to have a fundraiser for a regular at the bar.

I almost never donate unless I'm there the day of the fundraiser, or there's food involved. $10 spagetti dinner for instance.

I understand this person needs help. But in almost every case, I know this person. I know how much $$$ they spend on acohol a week. I know how they got fired from their job for not showing up. I know they blew their tax return in a week. I'm not a cold hearted person but I don't understand why others have to bail them out.

<comment><USER14> >I know how much $$$ they spend on acohol a week.

Are poor people not allowed to have fun?

>I know how they got fired from their job for not showing up.

Are depressed people not worthy of keeping alive? Do they not bring enough value to the table, so it's okay to just let them die?

>I know they blew their tax return in a week.

Is poor financial sense justification for not helping someone out that needs help?

I dunno, these all seem like kinda tenuous justifications for not giving. By all means, it's your money. I'm not telling you how to spend it. Just that I don't agree with the core idea that poor people should live like hermits, that you know everything about people's lives, that not being taught finance by anyone is a solid justification for not giving.

It seems rather post-hoc. Personally I don't think any of thse things should justify someone losing basic human rights like food, shelter, or health. This isn't to say the problem should be solved by private charity, it shouldn't. Can't, I would even say.

<comment><USER15> Personal responsibility is a pretty simple concept: if you cannot afford _necessities_ like food, shelter, and medical care (which are not "human rights" in the sense that you do not have the right to compel other people to perform the labor required to supply you with these things) then you should not be buying alcohol, especially not at marked-up prices for having someone serve it to you, and neither should you be blowing your tax returns on other discretionary items. Everything else is just excuses. Nobody should be prioritizing "having fun" over food and shelter, and those that do are not entitled to have their impulsive behavior subsidized by others.

<comment><USER16> >(which are not "human rights" in the sense that you do not have the right to compel other people to perform the labor required to supply you with these things)

Food, shelter, and medical care are absolutely human rights: [https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human- rights/](https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/)

>(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care

<comment><USER15> The UN can say whatever they feel like but the notion of positive rights for able adults is arbitrary and unfounded. You aren't entitled to the care of society unless you uphold your part of the social contract and contribute in return.

Or in other words if you have a right to others' labor, then by not working you are violating their human right to yours, and therefore their obligations cease.

<comment><USER16> The end result of your line of thinking is that the disabled (who are unable to contribute) should be left to die or be executed.

<comment><USER15> >able adults

I already covered this. Children and the infirm lack the capacity to produce so they owe nothing.

Also do note that nowhere have I argued that the genuinely destitute should starve, even capable adults. But if you have the spare cash to throw away on being a regular at a bar, as in the scenerio at hand, then I have no sympathy.

<comment><USER16> >I already covered this. Children and the infirm lack the capacity to produce so they owe nothing.

How do you define "able enough to work"? What if someone has severe mental deficiencies but can still lift and move things? Can you determine with near certainty who is able enough to work and who is malingering?

These are not new problems, but your proposal is worse than the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whenever I see these I tend to think that the people who have the best story will get the most money and not the ones who need it. It's pretty much a market for self-promoters and scammers, not necessarily people who need help. I also believe that in a civilized, developed, wealthy country this should not be necessary.

<comment><USER17> > I also believe that in a civilized, developed, wealthy country this should > not be necessary.

This I generally agree with, though we will probably disagree on the extent and how much it should cover, what limitations it should put on your behavior etc.

> It's pretty much a market for self-promoters and scammers, not necessarily > people who need help.

This, I feel, just describes reality. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, those that ask for help the most, cry the loudest, demand support the most aggressive etc get most of it, not necessarily (and imho rarely) those that need it the most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder what would happen if you could preemptively donate onto a pool that would guarantee you first place in line should you ever need to pay for an emergency medical expense? Yes this is almost the same as insurance, just without the middle man:

$100 upfront buys you 2 years of protection up to $50k for _emergency issues_. I would go for it. The major issue I see are the grey area in what constitutes an emergency, as well as the "hidden menu" as someone here calls it. That if you don't try to negotiate, you are throwing away massive amounts by paying sticker price.

Perhaps another approach is to buy "attorney insurance" that buys you an expert negotiator (and legal representation) should you ever need to fight the hospital over one of these ordeals.

<comment><USER19> The biggest issue is death spirals. Healthier people will drop out of the market increasing costs, causing the almost healthy people to drop out, increasing costs, until no one is left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing this article didn't mention is how crowdfunding also exacerbates existing inequalities: for example, racial biases [1].

[1] [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2837042](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2837042)

</comment><comment><USER21> Having worked for a competitor that was later acquired by GoFundMe, the reality we faced was that we could determine pretty quickly whether a fundraiser was going to be successful within 48hrs or so. While we spent a lot of time developing tools to help people setup a good fundraiser which would increase their chances, for the most part, it just came down to their extended social network.

Most people came to our service directly to give to a specific fundraiser (as opposed to coming to our site to find a fundraiser to give) and while we did things like "now that you gave here, check out this" type features, the results were somewhat lackluster. If I were to start a compassionate crowdfunding site today, I'd try to build it in such a way that it could be embedded into niche communities that are both to gather content, support, and fundraising.

The whole experience is that it was fantastic to work with people really dedicated to the mission and feeling like you are making a difference. On the other hand, it's hard also not to change your mind on how healthcare is viewed in the US, that the majority of Americans are one car transmission away from a downward spiral into poverty, and while I appreciate GoFundMe and other compassionate crowdfunding sites, a high tech only, private enterprise solution is not always the best way to solve humanities problems. Coming from a die hard capitalist, that's saying something.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm a visible transgender woman and meaning I don't pass as a woman aesthetically. I've spent several years fighting the healthcare system & insurance provider but no prevail. I can see a transgender woman in Toronto managed to get funding in a few days using GoFundMe. She looks gorgeous in her picture and I'm surprised she doesn't pass. I'm not sure how I feel about it, somewhat happy for her and frustrated personally. Seems like everything is painfully pointless when it comes to decency in society. Everything is a battle to keep the poor close to suicide it feels like.

<comment><USER23> I suspect you won't get a good response posting this on HN.

<comment><USER22> IDK, a lot of people on HN seem to understand from comments I've read, that the healthcare & insurance system are needed to be overhauled.

The GoFundMe did help a woman in great pain of life being too challenging to finance her surgeries and when every other system designed to help is denying the treatments that should be medically necessary.

I could even say the healthcare & insurance system are currently designed for having a person live a hellish life. They don't care even if a person has a letter from a doctor saying the surgeries are medically necessary from my experience.

It would be nice if people that downvote actually express why. HN used to be that way several years ago. I enjoyed learning who I'm dealing with when it comes to people against my insight in life; as I think anybody does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Always felt homeless photo diaries could be funded

<comment><USER25> Why?

There is overwhelming evidence that homeless is primarily a mental health problem, not a financial one.

<comment><USER26> > There is overwhelming evidence that homeless is primarily a mental health > problem, not a financial one.

[https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced- chroni...](https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic- homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how)

> As of 2015, the state can just about declare victory: The population of > chronically homeless people has dropped by 91 percent.

This by approaching housing access/payment _before_ anything like mental health services.

Unfortunately, after over a decade, funding was withdrawn... and the homeless population spiked again.

<comment><USER25> But that's giving housing, often with counseling attached, not money.

<comment><USER26> They're subsidizing their housing. With _money_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As an Icelander, I'm glad I'm not American. Your values and health care are extremely fucked up.

<comment><USER28> This comment might be generalised to "I live in a functional country, I'm gland im not American"... I agree f-that

<comment><USER29> No country with a population more than half the size of the US has its shit together.

<comment><USER9> So... large countries should be broken up?

<comment><USER30> He's right, I have to admit: every country with a population more than ~175M is pretty f-ed up somehow if you think about it.

It really makes me wonder if there's an actual scaling problem here. Just look at how much trouble large corporations have with inefficiency. Maybe humans just aren't capable yet of making extremely large organizations work well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is peak #LateStakeCapitalism, no fault to GoFundMe but these campaigns are such like something out of a YA dystopian novel. Slowly but surely I do believe American's are becoming more comfortable with the idea of free healthcare, in whatever form that comes in.

<comment><USER32> There isn't really such thing as free healthcare as long as staff need education and training, doctors have to be paid, hospitals need to be administrated, and treatments have material costs, etc. If it's being paid for by the taxpayer, it's not coming at no cost to them, they're paying for it in a pretty direct way.

<comment><USER33> I wonder if it would cost as much as the F35 program. I'd rather pay for a junkie's health care than a token national alliance tech project jet that no one needs.

<comment><USER34> Estimates for the cost of the F35 program vary widely, but a decent guess is 1-1.5 trillion over 50 years or 20 to 30 billion a year.

The US currently spends ~3.5 trillion per year on health care.

So yes, taxpayer funded health care would cost as much as the F35 program. In fact, quite a bit more. Perhaps 150x more per year.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but we're already paying that _and_ we're spending more than everyone else. [1] Universal healthcare isn't just morally justified, it's also financially justified. The only justifications for our insane system are regulatory capture or sadism.

1\. [https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart- collection/health-...](https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart- collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/#item-relative-size-wealth-u- s-spends-disproportionate-amount-health)

<comment><USER35> You seem to be assuming that introducing universal healthcare in the US would bring down costs. I've never seen any evidence whatsoever to support that claim.

<comment><USER36> You could look at every other country that did it for the evidence you seek, provided you aren't limiting to the pool of evidence "in the US".

<comment><USER35> Changing the country changes too many variables at once. The US also spends a whole lot more on infrastructure than virtually everyone else in the world, and there's no obvious reason why. Just assuming that universal healthcare would solve all of our cost problems is comically optimistic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak - <AUTHOR> https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/nintendo-has-reportedly-suffered-a-significant-legacy-console-leak/ <comment><USER2> Modern Vintage Gamer just released a video [0] discussing this leak in greater detail along with its expected implications.

Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan.

One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see what an old game's codebase even looks like. The first thing that stood out to me was the project's flat folder structure, full of hundreds of files; I guess I was expecting things to be a bit more structured. The source is more readable and approachable than I expected, although I've only poked around in some of the more obvious places and definitions. I'd recommend watching The Ultimate Game Boy Talk [1] before trying to dive into any code.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8G7eq0GlQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8G7eq0GlQs)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyzD8pNlpwI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyzD8pNlpwI)

<comment><USER3> I have zero experience in the video game industry, but I'd think that since video games get ~zero attention after they're shipped, writing maintainable code is less of a priority.

I'd be really curious to see how the Pokemon Red/Blue split was done. Is it a C precompiler flag? Build config? Actual config? Cloned repo?

<comment><USER2> In the Pokemon Blue codebase they use 2 flag variables to distinguish between the different games, these are `pokemon_type` and `pokemon_type_blue`. The name of the second flag definitely hints that it was added later in development.

These are the values for each game:

        Green:  pokemon_type=0 pokemon_type_blue=0
        Red:    pokemon_type=1 pokemon_type_blue=0
        Blue:   pokemon_type=1 pokemon_type_blue=1

The general pattern for branching between game variations looks like this across the codebase:

        ifn pokemon_type
          ifn pokemon_type_blue
            ; blue
          else
            ; red
          endif
        else
          ; green
        endif

Conditional assembly directives like `ifn` are resolved statically during assembly, so only the code between matching conditions is included as part of the output. To anyone interested in exploring this a bit more, I'd recommend reading Chapter 8 Section 13 of the DOS version of The Art of Assembly Language Programming [0], which starts on page 43 of the linked PDF.

Bonus fun-fact: In the Pokemon Yellow codebase it says `pokemon_type=1` is yellow, while `pokemon_type=0` is pink! This suggests to me that the idea of Pokemon Pink with Jigglypuff as your starter was probably being floated around but it was eventually scrapped. (The only remaining options for a pink starter pokemon with a pink evolution in the original 151 would be Clefairy and Slowpoke, neither of which are very cute.) The idea of Jigglypuff as a starter is further supported by her appearance alongside Pikachu on the roster of the original Super Smash Bros. which seems rather unexpected unless they had bigger plans for her.

[0] [http://www.plantation- productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.c...](http://www.plantation- productions.com/Webster/www.artofasm.com/DOS/pdf/ch08.pdf)

<comment><USER4> I found some supporting evidence from bulbapedia "Clefairy was originally going to be the official mascot of Pokémon, but Pikachu was used instead due to the popularity of the anime and Pikachu's familiarity with fans".

Source: [https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Clefairy_(Pok%C3%A...](https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Clefairy_\(Pok%C3%A9mon\))

Very cool find about the pink version!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To be clear, this doesn't just contain the source code of the software. It also contains the Verilog for the N64 GPU and other important hardware component, which is hugely important. From what I gather, it also contains full version history from their VCS.

While it is very interesting, it's worth noting that anybody hoping to use this for anything "serious" risks getting the Nintendo lawyers on their ass. Emulators won't touch this, neither will console clones. This leak is both a blessing and a curse.

<comment><USER6> It's a bit of shame, too, because from what I gather, the N64 has a bit of an atypical architecture[1] that's made it hard to get the same quality of emulation that the game cube and wii have. It doesn't have a straight up and down GPU, it has what it calls a reality processing unit, that does graphics and sound. And it can be reconfigured with cartridge specific microcode? It's getting into the weeds on hardware design and I'm not experienced enough to have a strong opinion on the matter.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specific...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specifications#Reality_Coprocessor)

<comment><USER7> The N64 emulation scene has always been heavily drama filled, going back at least 20 years to the original Oman archives. While the system architecture is bizarre, that's fine, we can cope with that. It's always just been a very toxic social space that has pushed a lot of the more talented emulator developers away.

As someone who is in "emulation-adjacent" communities, just yesterday I ran into a giant new pocket of N64 drama I was previously unaware of.

<comment><USER8> The whole emulation scene (well at least a very good part of it) is full of drama. That's fascinating; they somehow have the time for that after writing state of the art whole system highly optimized emulators, sometimes inventing new techniques on the fly...

<comment><USER9> The person that spends the time required to learn about game consoles on a deep technical level to write emulators. Will not have much time left to refine their social skills.

It is allot of personal free time they put in to these projects so I guess it is understandable that they want to protect their work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like drawing metaphors from Tamiya. Tamiya is a Japanese scale modelling and remote-controlled vehicle company with a loooong history of making quality products that the industry just eats up. Like Nintendo, Tamiya has always been in the back row when it comes to technological innovation, but lead the pack when it came to functionality, reliability, and quality. Just like Nintendo, there are Tamiya fan clubs where people are enthusiastic about products from this one company. The rest of the industry doesn't exist to them. I'm trying to illustrate how Tamiya is to the R/C world what Nintendo is to console games.

That said, vintage Tamiya products new in original packaging from the 70s and 80s can sell for thousands and thousands of dollars. Simple plastic and aluminum parts that were consumable in the 80s were selling for hundreds of dollars in the late 2000s. The market was a rough place. I have about a dozen antique Tamiya models, so I was one of those people engaged in bidding wars for 1/4" long tie-rod ends. A brand new Tamiya in the 80s was probably about $100 for a rolling kit. Now people are paying that for individual parts. Nobody was having fun with their models anymore. Everyone was just dusting them off and spending money keeping them pretty.

Tamiya had to get the kids playing with their models again. They had to take this exclusive, elitist market they created by accident 30 years ago and start making money off of it again.

So Tamiya re-released nearly _ALL_ of their vintage kits. Brand new, with original design, documentation, decals, and packaging. This was in addition to their new models and high-tech racing vehicles which were still being released on a regular schedule at the same time. Initially all the collectors (myself included) were livid, because for a while it meant my $1,100 Bruiser 3-speed was only worth $500. That didn't happen either. For a time the prices dipped significantly, but collectors still demanded vintage parts to repair their vintage models. The prices soon stabilized. Now that market is healthy and stable, vintage vehicles can be repaired cheaply if desired, and collectors can still spend thousands on NIB models.

If Nintendo embraced their market they could possibly reap the same benefits. The enthusiasm for their products is there. Tamiya has shown it is possible to separate collector demand from commodity demand and still have those ecosystems thrive side-by-side. I think Nintendo could pull that off as well.

<comment><USER11> One of my dreams was always if Nintendo released "development diary" editions of old titles(in particular Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time) where you'd get to try out a playable showcase of the game's builds at particular states in development from very early initial tests, to Alpha, Beta, various trade conference demos etc. Each with developer commentary, perhaps design sketches, deleted content and maybe maybe also some source code.

Essentially like what's pretty much standard for special edition BluRays. Pack that in a nice hardcover booklet and people would eat it up.

<comment><USER12> You might enjoy the content on [https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor](https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor) and [https://www.unseen64.net/](https://www.unseen64.net/), among others.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I'm aware of these. The point is these sites exist because the interest is there but game developers aren't interested in serving it. That's why people try to find leaked beta copies and even resort to hacking like here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this bad? Am I misunderstanding?

What financial damage does this do when Nintendo no longer manufacturers this console or actively developers for it and hasn't for years, or a decade in the N64/GameCube's case?

<comment><USER14> You might be missing the concept of "face" [0]. This is _only_ bad in that it causes Nintendo to lose face, and Nintendo _hates_ losing face. For example, examine Wikipedia; Nintendo's page about legal disputes [1] is whitewashed to reword all of Nintendo's abuses towards Free Software and the public domain as "protection" of Nintendo's "property".

Face allows Nintendo to take their holier-than-thou attitude. It is why they feel that they are allowed to both destroy the community's own work [2][3][4] and steal it for themselves [5][6]. We profess love for Mario, Zelda, Pikachu, and Metroid, and in return, they are socially empowered to abuse us.

Imagine a world where copyright were only 14 years, as in the original, or 2 years, as in my back-of-napkin estimation of how long it takes to publish something and have it fully saturate the world market. In such a world, Nintendo's back catalog would no longer have the force of law behind its monopoly; they would still publish excellent games, but they would not be able to prevent others from enjoying them. Indeed, there is not any reasonable claim to financial damages, just facial damages.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_\(sociological_concept\))

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Intellectual_property...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo#Intellectual_property_protection)

[2] [https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4dbf90f837296db72ca959e1...](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/4dbf90f837296db72ca959e1d9aac8e11ad3c208/2015-07-06-nintendo.md)

[3] [https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2016/2016-12-27-N...](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2016/2016-12-27-Nintendo.md)

[4] [https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-06-22-N...](https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-06-22-Nintendo.md)

[5] [https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did- nintendo-d...](https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo- download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us)

[6] [https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/9as2ii/did_ninte...](https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/9as2ii/did_nintendo_actually_download_roms_for_their/)

<comment><USER15> 5/6 sounds interesting to me. On the one hand Nintendo is the IP holder of the original ROM, so they would be the only ones allowed to legally download it if I understand it correctly. On the other hand the ROM was modified and contains a header which was made by someone else. So, to that part they don't hold the rights to download it? Or is it okay, because it's a derivative of their work?

<comment><USER3> You might be able to argue the header was implicitly licensed because the author knowingly distributed it.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Not at all. For instance, if I publish code on github without a license, it remains proprietary / all rights reserved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From an archiving perspective, this is incredible. I don't trust corporations, even those as wonderful as Nintendo, to do proper archiving of their systems and release it even 100 years on.

</comment><comment><USER17> One of the most interesting parts of this is the story behind Nintendo's use of friend codes rather than Gamertags.

There was a presentation [0] leaked that outlined that usernames "weren't simple enough". It's a great look into Nintendo's Wi-Fi Strategy

[0] [https://www.docdroid.net/Qr3JNsl/wi-fi-concept- pdf#page=11](https://www.docdroid.net/Qr3JNsl/wi-fi-concept-pdf#page=11)

<comment><USER18> All of their points looks like an attempt to justify bad decisions.

SW-7899-1252-5983 is simpler than username systems children could figure out on Neopets and Club Penguin? People can guess your username because they know your name is Billy?

Discord and Blizzard have the ultimate ez solution: What username do you want? Billy. Alright, if you want someone to find you, give them this string: Billy#1201.

Nintendo still hasn't made an online system as good as Xbox Live in 2002. How they justify SW-7899-1252-5983 as the ideal trade-off sheds some light that they might have an institional-level lack of intuition about what a compelling online experience looks like. Which is interesting because I think most people by now assumed catastrophic indifference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So... if someone who isn't me wanted to download this, where would they look?

<comment><USER20> Actually I am gonna remove this google "download nintendo leak routefree" and you'll find what you need somewhere in the results.

<comment><USER21> > However I MUST say this is from 4chan so BE CAREFUL about what you download > and how you play with stuff.

The only danger in downloading something leaked on 4chan is that you run the risk of learning a little more about dolphins than you might have liked.

<comment><USER22> Nah, Dolphin is 100% open source and above board, they're going to avoid this stuff like the plague.

<comment><USER23> True I don't think they would take the risk, it's just not worth it.

Through I'm wondering if Nintendo will try to use that as a excuse just claiming they used that material.

<comment> blaser-waffle Nintendo is a conservative company with strong, well known brands (Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, etc.). I'd be surprised if they rolled over and let this slide.

I'd be doubly surprised if they ever open sourced anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> God I would love to see Mario 64 re-released with a full ray-tracing engine for an Nvidia RTX. The PC port is already there, perhaps with the help of information stolen in this leak.

</comment><comment><USER25> The irony is that N64 got leaked and not Saturn, Jaguar or some console where the owner isn't continually exploiting the IP in some fashion...

<comment><USER26> Its not irony, its certainly going to be based on interest. People (hackers and non-hackers) are going to be more interested in the more popular IP. More people owned Nintendo products than the other brands. More interest leads to bigger target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The PC emulation community could also theoretically use the data to improve > their software so that it imitates the original systems perfectly. However, > since the leaked documentation has been illegally obtained this would put > them in murky territory.

I'd love to hear opinions about this whole thing from folks who work on emulators.

<comment><USER28> I don't work on emulators, but I do work on Wine. We explicitly forbid any contributions from anyone who has seen any Microsoft source code. The risk of introducing work derived from code owned by Microsoft is too high. I don't know how strict emulator authors are about this--they're non-commercial and so have less at stake than we do--but if I were an emulator author, I would cut ties with anyone known to have looked at this material. The whole reason emulators are legal and ROMs aren't is because emulators are original work not owned by the console developer. Once you start introducing derived work, that all flies out the window, and Nintendo can crack down on the emulators themselves.

<comment><USER29> That policy obviously just results in Wine contributors not disclosing seeing Microsoft source code, which is a good thing for Wine, but does not imply that having Microsoft source code (or Nintendo's in this case) is useless.

Also looking at source code and documentation does not mean that the code you write is derived work (although it makes it very slightly more risky that it is).

<comment><USER28> > That policy obviously just results in Wine contributors not disclosing > seeing Microsoft source code

Absolutely not, we take it very seriously. If there's a hint of looking at Microsoft source code or REing Microsoft binaries, then contributions are banned. It's not a wink-wink kind of situation.

<comment><USER29> I mean that almost surely there are people that do so and carefully make sure to not mention that and make sure that their contributions are not derived work and don't have such "hints".

The main technique to do so is "parallel construction": e.g. you reverse engineer a binary or look at source code, find out a special case not implemented in Wine, then construct a test case that tests the special case and behaves differently in Windows and Wine and claim that you found the test case experimentally, from a personal project that didn't work in Wine or from open source code you find that triggers it (rather than from RE or source code reading); you then implement a patch in the way you find most optimal without influence from how the code you reversed or read did it.

This is in fact good for Wine since it results in both having high quality contributions and having no additional liability.

So Wine's policy effect is not to stop such activity, but to make the Wine project not liable for it; thus, any leaks of Microsoft's source code are in fact good for the project since they enable this activity and the Nintendo situation here is similar.

<comment><USER30> What evidence do you have for this?

<comment><USER31> If there was evidence it wouldn't be effective.

That's like asking a spy for evidence of their current mission.

Does the spy's denial of knowledge or a lack of evidence of that spy's mission mean that individual was not a spy? Quite the opposite. It means they were an effective spy.

<comment><USER30> This isn't enlightening. It sounds like there is no evidence and the user to which I originally replied just wanted to besmirch the reputation of the Wine project without a good reason why they are lying about rejecting legally troublesome contributions. It is possible to go about an open source alternative honestly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this mean I'll be able to pick up a good clone in Shenzhen next year? Serious question.

<comment><USER32> I doubt it. Refurbishing and selling original hardware is still likely to be much cheaper than the engineering effort required to build one from scratch.

The Wii is old enough that modern commodity hardware can emulate it well enough that it almost indistinguishable from running games on the actual device. Wii clones already exist as emulator boxes and that will continue to be the most financially sound way of producing clones.

If this leak were to include design specifications of more modern hardware (such as in the Switch) I think you _would_ see some good clones in Shenzhen in less than a year.

<comment><USER33> Not if someone turns N64 on a chip design for $30 200-in-1 handhelds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It would be amazing to see the Gameboy/N64 emulator hacker community expand, and NEW games begin to be developed based on these docs. Maybe Nintendo could double-down on this and turn it into good publicity

<comment><USER22> The article mentions that this would be unwise due to these documents being released illegally. Reverse engineering some existing system for the purpose of interoperability (as is common among homebrew enthusiasts) is legal; hacking into a Nintendo subcontractor's IT and leaking internal documentation obviously isn't.

<comment><USER35> A developer can use the leak as a reference without being the one responsible for the leak. It sounds like it would be hugely beneficial.

<comment><USER36> If Nintendo can prove they used it as a reference, that's evidence for a nasty lawsuit.

There's a reason why people go to these lengths:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Did have to remember the linux law case of a few lines of code nearly got the case. Very hard checking about anyone copy a few lines. Not a good development short term. Good for historical analysis.

</comment><comment><USER38> Would this make the N64 any easier to emulate?

</comment><comment><USER39> Nintendo "suffering" a leak is one (very pro-corporation) take on this. Probably not the one most people would have on hearing about this though.

<comment><USER40> This isn't pro-corporation at all IMO. It's acting like this is something that happened rather than an action someone took.

Headline should be closer to "Hacker leaks Nintendo source code ..."</comment></comment>


People who cross deserts and seas to reach Europe not likely to be slackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21662547-bigger-welcome-mat-would-be-europes-own-interest-let-them-and-let-them-earn?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/lettheminandletthemearn

<comment><USER2> I wonder if people who work online and already face fairly direct competition from a global workforce are more open to this line of thinking?</comment>


Ask HN: Compile Rust to WebAssembly for EOS Smart Contract? - <AUTHOR> So I'm familiar with the fact that the supported language for EOS smart contracts is C++. However, the EOS docs mention that even the C++ needs to compile down to WebAssembly.
So my question is, could I write my EOS smart contract in Rust, and use a crate to compile my Rust into Web Assembly? (A very loose example of compiling Rust to WebAssembly can be found here[1]).
Or is a C++ compiled .wasm file significantly different from a Rust compiled .wasm file? (I really want to write EOS smart contracts, but I'm hoping I can just use my existing Rust knowledge, as opposed to having to learn C++)
[1] https://hackernoon.com/compiling-rust-to-webassembly-guide-411066a69fde <comment><USER2> So, a .wasm file can call into functions defined by its host environment; this is often a browser but in your case, it's the EOS VM. The trick is letting Rust know what those functions are so you can call them. wasm-bindgen should have you covered there.

Beyond that, it's all the same; the VM can't care what the original language is.</comment>


Entrepreneurs: should Techcrunch's Michael Arrington be your cheerleader?  - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2010/11/01/entrepreneurs-should-techcrunchs-michael-arrington-be-your-cheerleader/ <comment><USER2> AirBnB's Brian Chesky is a damn good story. I'd make every aspiring entrepreneur watch his Startup School talk if I could.

<comment><USER3> Oops, I wanted to submit this, but realized that you did already.

Yeah, wonder why this post did not get on the front page. I find it more useful and interesting than all the posts that contain merely opinions.</comment></comment>


Apple Launches Portal for U.S. Users to Download Their Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/apple-launches-portal-for-u-s-users-to-download-their-data <comment><USER2> I've been an Apple customer for the past decade or so, starting with the white 13" macbook, and the first iPhone. I've heard the argument many times that Apple is just as bad as Google/Facebook when it comes to collecting data.

I checked my data when the GDPR came into effect, and was pleasantly surprised to find only information i "expected". It has my complete purchase history over every Apple product I've ever _registered_ as well as iTunes/AppStore, it has every service/repair call/appointment I've ever made. It then goes on to list everything I've uploaded to iCloud.

There were no unpleasant surprises. No records of phone calls, no text messages (I don't use iMessage in iCloud), and absolutely no data i wasn't expecting them to have.

Google/Facebook have become greedy, and i expect a backlash will happen eventually (if not already) where people are fed up with them siphoning every little detail of their lives.

<comment><USER3> Did you ever grab your Facebook data? When I did, I was astonished to find out just how much they had collected and stored. Numbers I hadn't seen in _years_ even, and a lot from back in the days I had a Blackberry and there was seemingly no option for "don't eat up my contact list." at all. It was frightening and eye opening at the same time.

<comment><USER2> I grabbed my Facebook data when the GDPR came into effect. Besides what I've "willingly" shared they don't have much data on me. No phone calls, no text messages, no locations, no contacts.

I attribute this to always having used iOS, and me always having been rather conservative with what permissions I give out to apps. I never give out address book permissions, location updates is allowed if _I_ have use for it within the app, etc. I've never used Google apps on my iPhone.

Mostly though, it's probably due to iOS. It has always had better/finer privacy settings, and where Android used to require permissions up front, iOS asked for them when you actually used the feature within the app.

The option to disable background updates also helps a great deal. Can't very well siphon my entire location history if you only receive location updates for 6 minutes per day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since I dont see a link in the article, the page is [https://privacy.apple.com/](https://privacy.apple.com/)

Although im in the U.S. and i dont see the option to download my data. Perhaps it hasn't rolled out to everyone? or am i looking in the wrong place?

<comment><USER5> In this article ([https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/how-to-download-your- apple...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/17/how-to-download-your-apple-data/)) they say:

>If the "obtain your data" option isn't immediately available, it may still take time to roll out to all customers.

Time to sit and wait!

<comment><USER6> I just asked to download my notes and the ETA is one week according to the web page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised that nobody mentioned how big of a target this is for the criminal enterprise. Gaining unauthorized access to someone's account through this portal would be a gold mine, even better than iCloud alone.

<comment><USER8> I just tried it. Someone would need my apple id, my password, access to one of my apple devices (I had to enter a code that appeared on one of my devices), and access to my email. If someone already has all of that, I'm hosed no matter what.

<comment><USER9> There's still a hole in Apple's user ID mapping that doesn't recognize firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com are the same person and the e-mails go to the same place.

If you accidentally approve creating an Apple ID that's some variation on your e-mail it opens up your account to human phishing attacks. Just call apple support and raise hell until someone makes a mistake.

The RFC mentions dot-atoms in address elements are _locally interpreted_. There's no rule specifying if x.y.z or xyz are equivalent or not. The issue for me is that an Apple ID looks just like an e-mail address. firstname.lastname@example.com and email@example.com are equivalent to Gmail but not to Apple. From that I believe it creates an opportunity for confusion.

<comment><USER10> That's not a hole. Those are different email addresses according to the email standard.

How exactly would this attack even work that you have in mind? And wouldn't it even be easier to conduct this so-called attach on an email host that actually treats firstname.lastname@example.com as a different email from email@example.com since it wouldn't even require the 'victim' to click anything in their email?

The right answer is for Apple to keep treating them as separate emails and refuse to give people access to accounts with different email addresses. It's that simple.

<comment><USER9> >Those are different email addresses according to the email standard.

Not really. It's left open to interpretation from my reading of the relevant RFC. The spec says the dot-atom form should be used but does not say in what way it should be used. Google collapses x.y.z@gmail and firstname.lastname@example.com to the same thing which is fine they're welcome to do so. However the Apple IDs email@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com are entirely different entities. So we have a namespace collision in one space but not the other because although an Apple ID _looks like_ an e-mail address it's not. I'm just saying that can create a problem.

       An addr-spec is a specific Internet identifier that contains a
       locally interpreted string followed by the at-sign character ("@",
       ASCII value 64) followed by an Internet domain.  The locally
       interpreted string is either a quoted-string or a dot-atom.  If the
       string can be represented as a dot-atom (that is, it contains no
       characters other than atext characters or "." surrounded by atext
       characters), then the dot-atom form SHOULD be used and the quoted-
       string form SHOULD NOT be used.  Comments and folding white space
       SHOULD NOT be used around the "@" in the addr-spec.

<comment><USER11> > It's left open to interpretation from my reading of the relevant RFC

No. The part of the spec you quoted says that _if_ the local part of the email address is in the format "atext+ (\\. atext+)*" where atext is "Any character except controls, [spaces], and specials", then the quoted-string form shouldn't be used. In other words, don't use quotes when you don't need them. This has nothing to do with how to "interpret" dots; they are interpreted like any other char except they can't occur everywhere in the local part (e.g. "foo.@bar.com" isn't valid).

<comment><USER9> >The _locally interpreted string_ is either a quoted-string or a dot-atom

That's pretty clearly stating (to me) that the dot-atom is locally interpreted. It doesn't say anything about _how_ to interpret a dot-atom. Just to use it in preference to the quoted string if the rules you mention apply.

<comment><USER12> You're mixing up two different concepts. E-mail address and mailbox. Multiple e-mail addresses can be used to deliver to the same mailbox. That's what "local intepretation" means. a.a@b is still a different address than aa@b.

<comment><USER13> And in the end is what happens with gmail. You have one mailbox and all versions of your mailbox with dots in between the characters as alias automatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google had this for a long time, also Facebook and also Microsoft I believe- especially after it became a GDPR requirement most companies just rolled it out worldwide. Bloomberg's quality of research is going down a bit recently.

<comment><USER15> I am curious (seriously, not sarcastic), which of these 4 companies has rolled this out worldwide? Surely Apple will never be able to roll this out in China?

<comment><USER16> Google has had "Google Takeout" for a fairly long time I think (I heard it started as someone's 20% project a long time ago but is a legitimate team there now but that's just hearsay)

<comment><USER17> It would be cool if someone could figure out how to crawl LinkedIn to parse org charts... I bet you could do that to solve problems like this. Only question is whether the participation rate in LinkedIn for that workplace is high enough

<comment><USER18> I don't think LinkedIn has information as to whom someone reports to. It could somewhat be inferred by looking at the connection graph, but would be ridiculously noisy (for example I have connections to managers and directors I have never reported to).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone else think this is really cool? This makes me think even more that Apple is really a supporter of privacy and a good actor. What do you think?

<comment><USER20> > This makes me think even more that Apple is really a supporter of privacy > and a good actor.

That's the point... this is a publicity stunt. Corporations don't have feelings, and the board that drives the company is primarily concerned with company health and growth above all other things. Leadership may, however, set a strategy that capitalizes on recent public scrutiny of user privacy concerns to push the narrative that will sell more iDevices. Humanizing corporations is a dangerous game, because it plays right into their hand. Don't let them fool you into it.

<comment><USER21> I believe that this is a very simplistic view. Of course corporations can't have any feelings, but corporations are still led by human beings who can have truthful views and steer a company such that they do some good. I believe Tim Cook and most of his top managers have good intentions. At least they have been very consistent on some topics like privacy, minority rights and the environment. Is Apple perfect? Of course not. But I have not the feeling they need to do these things just for publicity reasons

<comment><USER20> Corporations will do "good" things when it aligns with their product goals. You can be sure that if Tim Cook or anyone at a publicly traded company started steering a company away from profitability they would be replaced. The company will always be susceptible to market forces, and the needs of its shareholders and employees before users or the world, unless regulation steps in or public opinion would hurt their profitability.

<comment><USER22> While you make a fair point, the commenter is suggesting that Tim Cook is well-intentioned, and the comment that a company like Apple is suspectible to market forces is not an indication that Cook is not well-intentioned.

(Not that intentions matter particularly either way.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sorry to be off topic, but if Apple really wanted to provide a complete "home" for customers inside their walled garden, I would suggest to them to allow tying a custom domain name to Apple email service. I trust Apple more than most other companies as I am sure many others do also. Email, calendar, iCloud storage, and Apple devices would provide a reasonably good one stop shop for privacy seeking customers.

<comment><USER24> Apple is one of the only major email providers that does not encrypt user email data at rest.

<comment><USER25> Reference for this?

<comment><USER24> The Apple support page at [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT202303](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303) shows "No" for on server encryption for iCloud Mail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Note that once you request your data, and indicate the maximum file size you can handle, the following message is displayed:

Thank you. We are preparing your data.

When your data is ready we will notify you

As a reminder, this process can take up to seven days. To ensure the security of your data, we use this time to verify that the request was made by you.

You can view and check the status of your request on this site at any time by visiting privacy.apple.com/account.

</comment><comment><USER27> To me the interesting point was how little data Apple keeps, compared to Facebook or Google.

<comment><USER28> I'm curious where you are getting that data from? The article says nothing about the data contained, and most other people in this thread either don't have access at all, or are stuck behind a 7 day wait time. Have you managed to get yours?

Also, what is your metric here? A lot of "journalists" comparing the takeouts from Facebook or Google use horrible metrics such as byte size, which make zero sense because these takeouts contain videos from Photos and files you've uploaded to Drive. It's in no way an indicator of how much "data" these companies collect.

<comment><USER29> What he says is true - this has been available by via support requests or for EU residents for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When I went to [https://privacy.apple.com/](https://privacy.apple.com/), I could only correct the info tied to my Apple ID, or access my purchase history. No option to download anything. Maybe that's not the right link?

<comment><USER31>
      If the "obtain your data" option isn't immediately available, it may still take time to roll out to all customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm from the UK with an Apple account registered here and it let me request a copy of all my data, so not just limited to U.S. users it seems.

<comment><USER33> > not just limited to U.S. users it seems.

'course not, it's GDPR stuff, it was rolled out in the EU back in May ([https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/23/download-all-apple-id- icloud-...](https://9to5mac.com/2018/05/23/download-all-apple-id-icloud- data/))

They're doing what they originally pledged: rolling it out globally instead of limiting it to where they're legally required to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just tried it, it takes a bit of time:

Thank you. We are preparing your data. When your data is ready we will notify you at email@example.com

As a reminder, this process can take up to seven days. To ensure the security of your data, we use this time to verify that the request was made by you.

<comment><USER35> It seems to be as a measure of safety, not because it takes 7 days. They're giving time for the user to notice an unauthorized export attempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is nice. Ok, thanks for letting me have my own data.

What i really, really want is a DELETE button that wipes out all of my personal data on Apple's servers FOREVER with 0 chance of recovery.

I want to press DELETE and i disappear forever from Facebook, Google, Apple, Comcast etc. Pewfff like i never existed... THAT would be cool my friends!

Wake me up when that happens.....(not a chance that will ever happen).

<comment><USER37> Time to wake up then. When you log in on this page, both temporary deactivation as well as true deletion are both also offered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Headline is confusing. To clarify, this applies internationally. The 'U.S. users' is misleading.

I just did it from NZ.

</comment><comment><USER39> Privacy to me isn't letting me download my data, it's _not_ letting others download it. I'm not sure how opening a door keeps others shut more tightly...

<comment><USER40> Privacy also includes data transparency and knowing what data they store about you. The best way to do this is to provide you with all data they do store about you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> As a digital forensics practitioner this is amazing. Court orders can be served on users instead of having to rely on Apple. Usually just having information preserved is enough for both sides to come to a fair settlement.

<comment><USER42> You want to use a court order on a user to not provide information it has, but actively perform actions to obtain new data in order to hand it to law enforcement?

Is this legal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is available for Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

</comment><comment><USER44> Works in Canada too.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think this is an indicator that large centralized companies are starting to see that users' are valuing privacy and this is them signaling that they are part of the solution, when in reality this is more of a publicity stunt or a check box (so they an say, "see, we care about your privacy") than anything.

<comment><USER46> Or perhaps, more accurately, due to following legal requirements (GDPR) and then not keeping the feature regional.

Maybe this is what will force companies to understand that stored user data is both an asset and a liability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Does anyone know if it would support exporting iOS backups saved in iCloud?

<comment><USER48> It does not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> So how to request Apple not collect this data?

<comment><USER50> You have to tell your iphone to stop sending it.

Depending on your iphone's settings, and what data you don't want Apple collecting, that could mean anything from turning off iCloud to not using iTunes and the App Store.

Basically, any app is likely giving Apple data on you. (Well I take that back. Apps will give _some_ company data on you. But they won't necessarily give it to Apple. Obviously for full and complete privacy you would need to turn off any google, facebook and amazon stuff as well. Also any ancillary apps, like mileage meters, or health and wellness type stuff. A lot of games too now I think about it.)

<comment><USER51> > health and wellness type stuff

This is very crucial and I really don't see any alternative services to the ones like Strava and RunKeeper for iOS.

Even an app that does the job w/o any social features would do (in fact I never use the social feature aspect of these apps)

<comment><USER52> Have you looked at apps by David Smith? Pedometer++, Workouts++, etc. They integrate with Apple's Health app, but don't sync anything on their own. And Apple's health app is encrypted to your device.

<comment><USER51> Thanks. I installed Workouts++. I will try to use it to record my runs and how activity data is presented. Though I am not yet sure I can use it w/o an Apple watch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Can I request they destroy it?

<comment><USER27> You can request to delete your account. Not all of your data can be destroyed, due to legal reasons. For example, anything related to financial transactions (e.g. app purchases, subscriptions, etc) can't be deleted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Game.changing. apple is elitist, no doubt, but in a good way.

<comment><USER55> Apple's late, others already had this for years. Sure they're elitist in that they convince everyone this is revolutionary game changing one of a kind when it's normal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The only link in the article takes me to Bloomberg's page about Apple, which is useless to me as someone who is interested in visiting this privacy portal.

If you are going to take a few minutes and write about a launch or release like this, please take the extra few seconds to include a link for your readers. Make your content _useful_.

Relevant: [https://privacy.apple.com/](https://privacy.apple.com/)

<comment><USER57> I still don't get why reporters or publications seem to refuse to link to the most obvious and central key piece of material to an article.

Article on a new law being passed... no link to the raw text of the law. Article about a new scientific study that has come out... ofcourse, no link to the study. Famous person issues a statement or makes a speech... sure, we'll give you a few quotes but no link to the full text.

It's like, come on!

<comment><USER58> This relates to my other peeve: trying to find the original video when something goes viral. Let's say I hear that Alice was seen telling Carol secrets about Bob. I go to Google/DDG/Youtube and search "Carol Alice secrets Bob" and get several dozen video results. ALL of them are other people trying to repackage the original video with their own commentary. News sites, bloggers, etc.

How do I locate the OG footage?

<comment><USER59> I remember putting a feature request that Google append to the video description the original source. But then you devolve into the whole authenticity realm like with Twitter verified badges.

<comment><USER58> Oh for sure. I know it can be tricky to make that decision. Having some advanced search tools would help me do it on my own. What if I could see the results, and tell Google to show me the earliest video that has a runtime between x:xx and y:yy and is visually similar to a chosen result? With at least 50,000 views?

Maybe filter out all results posted by media orgs. Or show only those results that don't have cuts in them (almost all original footage is a continuous shot of a situation, with no titles, cuts to reporters or anchors, or introductions)

I think I'm headed down a rabbit trail of leveraging ContentID smarts for better searching and filtering.

<comment><USER60> That's exactly what we built internally. Not only a capability to identify the original video, but which portions of it are being shared the most, what's the most popular video, etc.

Technical challenge is one thing, but getting people to choose some random search engine over Google is incredibly hard, as Google spends billions of dollars to divert all the traffic to themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> what about the other regions user

</comment><comment><USER62> What's to stop law enforcement circumventing the phone and just going this route to get user data for court cases? Or, is there stuff on the phone that won't be included here?

<comment><USER63> This doesn't download data from the phone at all. This only downloads data that was already stored with Apple.

This doesn't make any additional information available to law enforcement.

<comment><USER64> Potentially gives law enforcement an easier way to get the information? Instead of compelling Apple to give it out (they can afford lawyers), they can try compelling individuals instead.

<comment><USER65> If the police can compel individuals to give up their passwords then none of this matters.</comment></comment></comment></comment>