Justice Department Calls Apple's Refusal to Unlock iPhone a 'Marketing Strategy' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/20/business/justice-department-calls-apples-refusal-to-unlock-iphone-a-marketing-strategy.html <comment><USER3> Regardless of the merit of the FBI's request and Apple's refusal, this is rather hypocritical response from the FBI, since their insistence to make the request public is what triggered Apple's public response in the first place:

<<Apple had asked the F.B.I. to issue its application for the tool under seal. But the government made it public, prompting Mr. Cook to go into bunker mode to draft a response, according to people privy to the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity.>>

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/technology/how-tim-cook- be...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/technology/how-tim-cook-became-a- bulwark-for-digital-privacy.html?_r=0)

In this case, the Justice department is clearly the one with the bigger 'marketing strategy' agenda here by trying to market the merit of their request to the American public and congress.

(As a side note, most of the non-tech folks I talk to seem to be siding with the FBI's request, so at least at some level, the government seems to be winning the marketing battle.)

<comment><USER4> Consider the possibility that the government is using this all as a means to convince the public phones can be secure, and that apple's cooperation actually matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems the Justice Department admits that Apple's reputation for privacy and security is of great value to the company. I wonder how it intends to argue, then, that forcing Apple to create a corrupted build of iOS which harms that security and that hard-won reputation does not place an "undue burden" on the company.

<comment><USER6> Clearly Apple's security has market value but that needs to be balanced against the benefits to society as a whole. Just restricting this to US law it seems Apple is not defending an existing right to privacy of the "man's home is his castle" sort. Those have been limited from the beginning by warrants and other acknowledged mechanisms of government to poke its nose into people's private affairs in the interest of the general welfare. The "right" that Apple is defending seems new and much more absolute--that you may possess devices may not be opened under any circumstances whatsoever.

The question of whether such rights exist is separate from the question of whether breaking into one device threatens security of all others. If true that seems to call into question the assumptions on which data protection algorithms are based. In other words, assuming you can create truly unbreakable encryption and it only works if there are no backdoors, is that really a data protection strategy that meets the needs of society as a whole? You could argue it's flawed even if the mathematics work perfectly.

<comment><USER7> What of Yahoo when they allowed Chinese authorities to access an email account? While we might believe in the integrity of the US government, my faith in a backdoor being made available to the Chinese government used responsibly is low.

<comment><USER8> > While we might believe in the integrity of the US government

It seems here that nobody here is concerned about non USA citizens.

<comment><USER9> Even USA citizens should not believe in the integrity of the US government, considering the surveillance antics it has taken on its own citizens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really don't see how Apple taking a stand on this publicly is of any benefit to them from a marketing perspective. I'm sure there are many of Apple's customers who think they should comply with the FBI on this issue and see their refusal as "supporting terrorists". Apple could have decided to just do what was being asked without making it public and the rest of us would go on knowing nothing about it, but for them to publicly make a statement that they were asked to do this and believe it's wrong, I think, shows a genuine belief on their part that it is an overreach and sets a dangerous precedent for the future. I'm no Apple apologist, but I don't think this has anything to do with marketing for them.

<comment><USER11> It is positive marketing for them. The fears that oversea customers have about US corporations are real, and drive real spending decisions. There will be economic ramifications to Apple and the entire security industry if the FBI wins this fight. For that matter, if the government gets intrusive enough, the fears of _not_ overseas customers are going to start driving buying decisions too.

And let's be honest... this is marketing by the FBI too, picking a convenient fight on ground of their choosing to obtain this new power. The Justice Department is right, but the Federal Goverment is not in a position to throw stones from their glass house here.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. This entire tragedy was exactly what they needed to make sure that Americans had the proper amount of fear to begin giving up more rights. They made sure that the request was public so they could use this event as an anchor against Apple when they refuse to create backdoors.

"Apple wouldn't even use their technology to get the information off of the phone that the terrorists used" will make a powerful headline when the FBI and NSA are asking for the rest of the backdoors they want.

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/technology/how-tim- cook...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/technology/how-tim-cook-became- a-bulwark-for-digital-privacy.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really wish any journalist would call out the DoJ marketing this strategy with ISIS. They tried this exact same strategy about 3 months ago with a meth dealer, but people don't respond the same to the DoJ trying to get evidence with a drug case: [https://ia801501.us.archive.org/27/items/gov.uscourts.nyed.3...](https://ia801501.us.archive.org/27/items/gov.uscourts.nyed.376325/gov.uscourts.nyed.376325.15.0.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Here was EFF's take back then, same as it is today:

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/apples-eula-gives- it-l...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/apples-eula-gives-it-license- invade-your-privacy-government-claims)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Apple can lose this and still win. The check on courts' power to compel third parties to cooperate in discovering evidence is "unreasonable burden." Here, you have a device that seems like it can be broken without too much fuss. But by fighting this battle, Apple puts itself in a much stronger position to argue that the burden upon them is unreasonable when the government comes around looking to unlock a phone featuring a security enclave. Even if they lose this, they're drawing a line and saying "this is the border between reasonable and unreasonable."

The government's approach is a double-edged sword. On one hand, they can pick an "easy case"\--as they have here--and hope to establish a toe-hold. On the other hand, the precedent created by an "easy case" can have an anchoring effect that limits its reach. When a principle is applied to overwhelmingly favorable facts it can leave courts looking for the mirror-image scenario: if the burden is reasonable here, when is it _unreasonable?_

</comment><comment><USER16> Now, if one were really cynical, and by cynical I mean "possess the power of accurate observation", one might conclude that attempts by justice departments around the world to use tragedies to push political policies and legal decisions, as well as the publicity surrounding such, is also a marketing strategy...

<comment><USER17> Never let a good tragedy go to waste. As they say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I expect these are red herrings:

1) As Bruce Schneier poits out, if Apple can write the code to break the security, so can others (especially if they steal Apple's signing key). (He also says the vulnerability is not just in the 5c but in current iPhones too.) [1]

2) Considering #1, and that every system ever designed has many vulnerabilities, I find it hard to believe that the US government hasn't developed exploits. Perhaps they just don't want to reveal that in such a high profile case.

\----

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/02/18/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/02/18/why- you-should-side-with-apple-not-the-fbi-in-the-san-bernardino-iphone-case/)

<comment><USER19> The FBI may not have access to those exploits even if the NSA does

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The key issue here is that this is a 5c, which doesn't have the secure enclave. If Apple complies, then this means that there is now a precedent of any IOS device without the enclave to be potentially "cracked" by the authorities with Apple's help.

What I don't quite understand is - how does this affect newer devices, will Apple be legally obligated to build a backdoor to circumvent the enclave from here on (if Apple complies, that is)?

(But even the idea of older generation devices being "fair game" for the government ( _any_ government - if it was done for US, it's now possible in any country Apple operates in) is creepy).

Also - what can possibly be on that phone that isn't available elsewhere? Phone records exist at phone companies, social network stuff can be obtained from the facebooks and googles, if they were using watsap - well that's not something Apple could decrypt anyhow...

I'm leaning towards the opinion that Tim Cook was right to make such a big deal out of it, even if it's a 5c.

<comment><USER21> Apple has told reporters off the record that the FBI could make the same demands for Secure Enclave equipped iPhones, probably because the Secure Enclave can be updated.

That's why they're making their stand in this case.

In the future Apple may make it so that the iPhone must be unlocked before an update could be applied, but that isn't the case now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If it's an effective marketing strategy then what might that indicate about people's opinions regarding the intentions of the US Justice Department?

</comment><comment><USER23> And it most definitely is! From the privacy perspective, Apple was foolish to contest the order since this phone _is vulnerable_ to Apple - a storage unit owner unlocks the unit for the police, what legal basis does Apple actually have to resist? _Our_ values are driven by visions of ideal systems that can only be unlocked by their owner, but that is not what Apple has created!

Unfortunately, Apple is peeing in the pool for all of us that actually care about digital freedom. This case will set a terrible precedent, and prime government to preemptively address hypothetical devices that _are_ secure.

<comment><USER24> Storage unit owner has keys with which s/he can unlock the unit. Police does not ask storage unit owner to demolish his building at his own expense to get access to the unit if owner does not have keys.

Apple already "unlocked storage unit" to police where they had keys by providing police iCloud backups. Now police is asking Apple to "demolish the building".

<comment><USER23> Yes, police don't _ask_ the storage unit owner to break open the door - <USER2> just do it. In this case they're even asking first and willing to reimburse Apple, which is nice for a change.

If you think anything more than one phone's security is being "demolished", then you've been mislead by Apple into thinking their devices have security properties that they don't actually have. If their reputation takes it a hit, it will be due to their negligent design and marketing, not from the inevitably resulting correction. Security does not suffer politics.

<comment><USER25> If the FBI could break into the phone without asking, they would have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If Apple doesn't really care about privacy for its own sake, and this public support for customer privacy is just a cynical ploy to get my dollars... Fine.

Let's hope more "greedy corporations" seek out my business by supporting human rights. I'll buy that.

</comment><comment><USER27> This whole ploy is a blatant marketing ploy. As if there's anything of national security on that phone? Bullshit. They have the metadata already. They're trying to solidify court precedence. It's especially scary that this surrounds scalia's death—I don't think it was planned, but man, the court is a hoppin' place in the news right now.

</comment><comment><USER28> Did it ever occur to them that Apple's executives actually think this is _the right thing to do_?

It's not just about this case, where any data on the phone will be of at best little value. It's about future cases, and the possibility of widespread abuse of the back door not just for "terrorism", but far less important things like minor drug cases - or worse, wholesale data mining, like the NSA has already done with phone data.

</comment><comment><USER29> In capitalism, market share is determined by company decisions that create different amounts of value for consumers.

Thus, any decision that a company makes is in effect "marketing" if the goal is to grow/preserve market share.

It's unfortunate if the underlying mental model of employees of the Justice Department is that we should all sacrifice our privacy (and that of our customers) for some notion of the greater good.

It's scary when anyone thinks that his/her own job interests represent the greater good for everyone else... even worse when that job is a position of governmental authority.

Sorry, blind allegiance to the government is not a religion I want any part of. It's also odd to use the anti-capitalist smear technique of labeling something "marketing" to undermine it.

<comment><USER30> Well the DOJ doesn't get to unilaterally decide what is the greater good, let alone how to get there. There's multiple civil processes to go through to hopefully interweave the legal, political, judicial, ethical, and technical issues. It should be a battle. A vigorous debate exposes the weak arguments and we ought to end up with the best ones, assuming the predominate state of society is stable. My complaint about DOJ is trying to inject emotional catchphrases, and classic propaganda techniques, to distort a rational process. It makes their position look weak out of the gate.

<comment><USER29> Very true

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Glass houses, Justice. I'm calling this unprecedented request as part of a high-visibility case exactly the same thing. This is DoJ's opportunity to market their desire to spy on _everyone_ as "national security" and "keeping us all safe!".

<comment><USER30> Clipper chip redux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> i'm inclined to agree with the justice department here. we need a compromise before govt just takes over and we have a technologically ill-advised government body legally mandating a bad solution (ie crypto of a certain strength becomes illegal for U.S. companies). I think similar to what mike rogers proposed, a two key system, is an acceptable compromise. However, instead of the govt having the other key (and reasonably every other government that might want it, which is the primary problem with this system), the manufacturer instead is required to maintain the key. Then only under legal coercion of servicing a warrant would they decrypt a message. The manufacture has a fiscal responsibility of maintaining their key, as customers would otherwise not buy their products. While the manufacturer is not given the undo burden of recording every message (it is presumed law enforcement has this, but needs to decrypt it). This system gives people access to simple security, while allowing legal action to proceed as it otherwise has prior to widely available encryption. In addition other countries can seek similar legal action, keeping with the laws of their respective countries. It's going to happen, so lets not fumble like we usually do with progressive shit, and leave it up to the idiots in congress to stumble through an unworkable solution to. Which means, instead of companies playing hardball and just denying requests (basically for PR purposes), they instead proactively design some kind of a compromise system.

</comment><comment><USER33> Well, ya, of course it is. It will work if that is what consumers want.

</comment><comment><USER34> In a years time we'll forget about it and the result of what will happen. And Apple may do it anyway in the quiet so they win customers by publicity and win the government.

If the government want something done, surely it will have to be eventually? What do apple have to win by going up against them? Gov could make their life pretty difficult?

<comment><USER35> Transplant yourself to any other police state. Anywhere with a very strong government hell bent on controlling its citizens. Eastern Germany, Or the USSR, or Germany under the Nazis.

How did the government get such power? Immediately via overthrow, or incrementally?

At what point do you draw the line? Has there ever been a government that got some power and then stopped trying to get more? Look at the history of the USA for the past 200 years.

Apple is trying to draw a line in the sand. We can debate about where the line should be, but there has to be a line.

<comment><USER34> This doesnt explain why they're not after marketing, or prove they are trying to draw a line without any other ulterior motive :)

No-ones going to ever know really, bar apple and the gov

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Will the FBI insure my Apple stock when it goes down? Cause if they cooperate their stock / sales could go down by a large percentage. And that's not market forces moving it, it's the government. (I know I sound like a conservative, but I'm actually a socialist liberal)

<comment><USER37> You make a good point but how do you figure that sounds conservative? Also, liberalism and socialism are opposing ideologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> That's like calling a car manufacturer's decision to not allow remote disabling of airbags by FBI a "marketing strategy"

</comment><comment><USER39> I wouldn't say it's their main priority with the refusal, just a potential added benefit.

</comment><comment><USER40> Sounds like a classic ad hominem attack as per Graham's hierarchy.

</comment><comment><USER41> Hell yeah it is! Country of origin USA, rights include: freedom.

<comment><USER41> This is not about marketing. Think about it... Really think about it. They could have always capitulated in silence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wow, just wow.

Either they are tone-deaf or being deliberately ingenious about things. Neither is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER43> I agree that it's a marketing strategy, just 2 or so weeks ago Apple was getting huge amounts of bad press for their poor software development practices. So much so that it had been consuming large publications. I don't take it as a coincidence that Apple released the statement to re-gain some of that lost face. However, I don't think it's a zero-sum game, and I think Apple is definitely doing the right thing by challenging this in the courts. Apple even stated in their press release that they had previously complied with close to 80 FBI requests to unlock devices in varying degrees, but they never disclosed the breadth of what they had done in those past requests. So why choose now? Timing is everything.

I think both sides of the case are engaging in a lot of PR. The original FBI request for unlock looks pretty tame, unlock ONLY that device, disable ONLY a software protection that would delete files on failed attempts. I think the best way to compare it to is physical objects so we can get the software pieces out of the way and reason with it a bit better. Would it be within the FBI's power to ask a Safe-maker to disable a mechanical security measure on a safe that destroyed the contents of the safe when the combination was entered incorrectly after a specific number of attempts, and the FBI had no other way to obtain entry to it?

I'm not sure how far that analogy gets you or what the laws actually are, but the only way to actually get them changed is to challenge them.</comment>


Ask HN: Is A New UI Innovation? - <AUTHOR> http://skylarrudolph.blogspot.com/2014/06/feelings-about-apples-keynote.html?m=1

<comment><AUTHOR> With Apple's new release of OSX Yosemite and iOS 8. Specifically for this release, do you view these UI changes as innovation.</comment>


Hackers.txt - <AUTHOR> http://mrkiffie.com/blog/code/hackers-txt/

<comment><AUTHOR> I know posting this here may be "preaching to the choir", but it was still interesting read.

Do you have hackers.txt on your website(s)?</comment>


Leaked details for Intel's Rocket Lake-S point to a new microarchitecture - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcquest.com/leaked-details-intels-rocket-lake-s/ <comment><USER2> The big news: Intel is dropping SGX (Software Guard Extensions)

That's the stuff to implement a secure enclave for software that doesn't respect the user's authority over the computer, such as digital restrictions management.</comment>


Launch HN: Airship (YC W18) – Controlled rollouts of new features - platypus-d Hi HN! We're Alvin and George, the founders of Airship (https://www.airshiphq.com). We built Airship to help companies roll out new features carefully, instead of blindly deploying.
You may have seen that a million users are revolting over Snapchat's redesign, dropping their App Store rating below 2 stars. You might also remember when Digg launched a redesign in 2010 that caused a 30+% dip in usage in a matter of days. To avoid unpleasant surprises, companies like Facebook and Airbnb have developed their own sophisticated tools to carefully roll out their new features, test and measure their impact incrementally, and roll them back when signs of trouble appear. This way they can be informed about how users receive the features, and can fix mistakes without jeopardizing their entire user base. Then they can publicly release the new feature with reasonable confidence about its likely reception and effects.
Alvin and I discovered the importance of controlling feature launches and monitoring them carefully when we worked at Zenefits together. Many companies would like to be able to mitigate risk through controlled feature rollout and rigorous testing, but don't have the resources to do it. This approach is proven to work, but remains expensive, since only companies that can afford in-house tooling, and often a dedicated team to maintain it, can do it. It struck us that there was a need here for a product, so we started Airship to build it and make feature rollout accessible to everyone.
To use Airship, you install one of our SDKs. Then you can flag or gate code with if/else blocks calling a single function provided by our SDK. This automatically gets wired up to controls in the Airship dashboard which allows you to control targeting rules, rollout percentages, and whitelists/blacklists.
Key features of Airship: - Gradually roll out and A/B testing of entire features, not just copy and superficial changes - No performance hit (checking whether a customer has a feature takes < 0.1 ms) - 0% downtime (no dependency on Airship's services, so effective downtime is 0%) - Complex experiments using attributes of Users, Groups (e.g. location, purchase amounts, device types, etc.) as well as other object types (Product Listings, Pages/Posts, etc.)
We'd love to hear your feedback and hear about your experiences, ideas, and needs in this area! <comment><AUTHOR> While I'd love to test out Airship, not being able to do that without signing up is pretty much a non-starter for me. When I say pretty much, I can often be persuaded with having at least the documentation available without signing up. For example Logrocket ([https://logrocket.com/](https://logrocket.com/)) needs signing up, but the documentation is all there and I can immediately see the effects it will have on my app if applied.

<comment><USER2> +1. With this kind of product, I want to see docs and code snippets immediately. What kind of code do I have to write to use your product?

<comment><USER3> Thank you, really good suggestion. We'll see if we can put snippets on the main page to help with this.

<comment><USER4> Why hide it? Me signing up gains you nothing, I can just use some throwaway account, or make some email@example.com which you gain zero from. But to the op's point, I'm not going to go through those hurdles, I'm just going to move on.

One of the biggest draws for this sort of thing from the dev side is "how far am I going to have to bend over to use this".

Freely available documentation sounds like a no-brainer.

<comment> platypus-d We thought that the onboarding flow should take you through the product first, where the docs is readily available. In hindsight, making the docs more publicly available makes sense.

Here is the docs: [https://airship.readme.io/v1.0/docs](https://airship.readme.io/v1.0/docs). We'll also link them in our home page in the next iteration.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's awesome, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wanted to drop in a quick review of Airship (disclaimer: I got to know the founders through the experience of being early users).

We, at Repl.it, started using it for a very risky rewrite of a core part of our product -- the IDE ([https://repl.it/site/blog/ide](https://repl.it/site/blog/ide)) -- and it helped us roll it out safely, turning it off when we needed to, when we get a user bug report Airship could quickly tell us if that user has the feature on, etc.

Since then we've been using it for virtually every feature release and experiment. We couldn't be happier with how smooth the service is:

\- The service is reliable and fast.

\- The UI is simple and instant.

\- The SDK is simple and easy-to-use.

<comment><USER6> Cool service. Heads up, your Go version is really out of date with some potentially serious security holes. You should probably upgrade to 1.10

<comment><USER5> Updating a lot of our languages as we speak ;) Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really like the product (and may use it!), but the landing page is very confusing. You get to the meat of the issue in your HN comment, but I see very little of that on the landing page.

<comment><USER3> Thank you - that's helpful feedback. We'll improve the marketing page with some more details in the next iteration.

<comment><USER8> A good example is this image in your homepage: [https://www.airshiphq.com/dist/static/media/control- targetin...](https://www.airshiphq.com/dist/static/media/control- targeting.bcf9a31c.svg)

This image serves absolutely no useful purpose (What is it?). It would've been much useful to see a screenshot of the product where you could set feature flags to at least give us an idea on what your product does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats on the launch!

You're probably already aware, but if not here's a heads-up that there's a company called Urban Airship that is in a related space (and based on what they do, your space could be in their sights). Just something to think about.

Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the heads up! We've taken a look and so far seems like we add value in different ways since they focus on mobile engagement, but definitely will consider this going forward

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a reason your pricing jumps straight from $0 to "Contact Us"? Surely there's a $50/month plan or thereabouts that would be relevant to a lot of smaller companies?

Congrats on the launch!

<comment> platypus-d Right now, we're working with each each company, even small ones, to find out the right price point for them. If you have any questions on pricing, email us at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER11> The lack of published pricing immediately makes me think it is too expensive for me. I pay for plenty of services, but "contact us" pricing either means "Enterprise" expense, or pushy sales people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How is this different from LaunchDarkly?

<comment><USER13> There's room for more than one player in the market here, it's a super important sort of tool where the open source versions are all pretty mediocre. OSS solutions tend to be statically configured, which non-engineers don't tend to have access or ability to configure. That's not to say you couldn't OSS something here, but it'd be a real effort to host.

<comment><USER14> what are the open-source alternatives, if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER15> This site has a pretty good survey of the open-source options in various languages: [http://featureflags.io/feature- flags/](http://featureflags.io/feature-flags/) (you have to pick a language from the menu to get to the page specific to that language, as the page I linked to is more of an overview of the concept, and there doesn't seem to be one page that lists them all).

<comment><USER16> FeatureFlags.io is owned and operated by the CTO of LaunchDarkly. It's not a survey, it's an infomercial / microsite for LaunchDarkly. It states "contributed by LaunchDarkly" at the bottom, but considering it's owned by them that doesn't seem to adequately sum up the situation. Not sure why they wouldn't just call it as it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As the CTO of a growing website ([https://www.kapwing.com](https://www.kapwing.com)) we have been looking for a tool to make it easier to test certain features / changes on a smaller scale. I signed up reluctantly because I am curious about how your SDK works. But I was disappointed that I wasn't able to find any examples or info on the amount of work it would take to integrate.

My initial questions are: \- Will this work with frontend React code? \- Do I need to create separate database hooks? \- Can I create UI experiments without writing code? \- Does it integrate with Stripe if we want to test conversions?

<comment> platypus-d We will be reaching out to you shortly to get your questions answered. Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER18> Would you be willing to answering them here (or link to your site with these answered)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This looks cool. How long have you guys been working on this?

For everyone else if you want to see their api's not very hard to take a look from their SDK.

[https://github.com/airshiphq/airship- ruby/blob/master/lib/ai...](https://github.com/airshiphq/airship- ruby/blob/master/lib/airship-ruby.rb)

</comment><comment><USER20> Congrats on launching!

Regarding your pricing page: I feel the "10,000 API calls" and "75,000 API calls" limits on the Hobby and Growth plans would deserve some context. Is it 10k API calls per day or month? How fast do I exhaust it?

You comment mentioning that you emphasize local computation was helpful and the pricing page might benefit from including it.

<comment><USER18> Agreed. It's hard for me to buy a service that limits the number of API calls when I possibly can't control this directly. What about changing this to the number of MAU (monthly active users), or features, or some other unit I can grok when I think about my product and how I'd use your product?

<comment><USER3> If you're interested, let's talk. Outside of the published tiers we already do something different. Can reach us at email@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> SDK-only deployment or do you have an API that we can plug into a webapp? Wasn't mentioned too clearly on the site.

<comment><USER21> Also, colour me dense but I'm a marketer/PM and I can barely understand what's on the landing page. And there's no way that sales needs feature flagging.

I know it's early days but maybe slightly simpler copy where you tell me what feature flagging actually is?

On the flip side, I learned something pretty cool today! :-)

<comment><USER22> Sales can use feature flags to enable secret features for a customer they're talking to. For example to demo a not-yet-shipped feature. They can use a feature flag to mark a customer as "enterprise" so they get a different version of the product. Overall, I've found it useful for customizing my product for the person I'm in person or on the phone with, without touching code or affecting all users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been watching this team for over a year and have been consistently impressed by how fast they're iterating, how thoughtful they are about this problem, and the care they put into doing it right. Rooting for this company!

</comment><comment><USER17> For anyone looking for the documentation it seems you can find it here: [https://airship.readme.io/v1.0/docs](https://airship.readme.io/v1.0/docs)

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there anything Airship can do that you can't do with Optimizely?

</comment><comment><USER11> How does this compare to something like Flipper? [https://github.com/jnunemaker/flipper](https://github.com/jnunemaker/flipper)

</comment><comment><USER25> There's lots of talk about controlling the user experience and doing UI experiments on the landing page and no instance of direct marketing to UX professionals. How come? Just curious.

</comment><comment><USER26> Congrats on the launch.

Couple questions

1\. Is this another A/B testing framework? Or is it for feature enablement?

2\. What level of granularity(user, cohort etc.) does the platform support?

<comment><USER3> 1\. Feature enablement leads very naturally to A/B testing so we're tackling both.

2\. Actually fairly granular, especially if you have properties or attributes you want to filter populations on.</comment></comment>


This Super Angry Birds Custom USB controller offers tangible game play - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcgerms.com/this-super-angry-birds-custom-usb-controller-offers-tangible-game-play/

<comment><USER2> I ever dreamed of having such a controller. Good news for folks who are tired of touchscreen controls.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hope similar tangible controllers make it for other top games as well.</comment>


Vladivostok WW2: Fake Google snippet saying Japan attacked Soviets in 1939 - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=Vladivostok+WW2 <comment><AUTHOR> "The Siege of Vladivostok was the longest siege of the 20th century, and the biggest military battle undertaken by elements of the Japanese Army and Navy, during their war with the Soviets. The siege lasted an entire year, from the spring of 1939, until the spring of 1940, when the Soviet commander finally surrendered."</comment>


All You Need to Know About Elastic Search but Were Afraid to Ask - <AUTHOR> https://www.kablamo.com.au/blog/2019/2/20/elastic-search-explained <comment><USER2> This page is devoid of anything interesting. The potentially interesting thing is linked at the bottom:

[https://www.kablamo.com.au/s/Elastic-Search- FINAL.pdf](https://www.kablamo.com.au/s/Elastic-Search-FINAL.pdf)</comment>


Notes on a Suffix for 'Scandal' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/watergate-gamergate-and-the-evolution-of-language/382276/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> _The suffix -gate isn't entirely a function word—it still retains the meaning of "scandal." But it could one day undergo what linguists call "grammaticalization," when content words because function words._

It's already happening. A few days ago I encountered the sentence "We need to gate this issue", meaning "We need to draw attention to this issue and turn it into a political scandal".

<comment><USER3> It will be interesting to see what the staying power of the -ghazi suffix ends up being.

It may fade, may replace -gate, and it may even live alongside -gate to signify nothingburgers people try and turn into scandals like you mention. In the latter case we can look forward to a lot of cases where both sides try to rebrand -ghazis into -gates and vice versa.

<comment><USER4> I've definitely seen -ghazi in the "artificially constructed attempt at a scandal" being used several places—some of the Apple press called "Bendgate" "Bendghazi", and the anti-Gamergate subreddit is called "Gamerghazi". So I think it's picking up steam, although we'll see if it has staying power.

<comment><USER5> Just recently the Galaxy Note 5 reverse pen issue was also being called "Penghazi". But in both the Bendghazi & Penghazi names it works because it sounds so similar to "Benghazi".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the amusing "Watergategate"[1] sketch from the British comedy show "The Mitchell and Webb Look". I mean, the joke is sort of in the title, but it's still funny to watch.

There's a point to it to, similar to what the article said: language evolves in interesting, sometimes convoluted ways.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB9JgxhXW5w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB9JgxhXW5w)</comment>


Photos: what Puerto Rico's unfolding humanitarian disaster looks like - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/9/19/16333116/photos-hurricane-maria-puerto-rico <comment><USER2> 'The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.'

[https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/91408723486904729...](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/914087234869047296)

The Americans really lack a leader with any empathy.

<comment><USER3> She used the TV cameras to grandstand Trump in preparation for her run for governor. Who you think is lacking empathy really depends on which side you're already on. The US is doing its best to help a place that's had 85 years to prepare for a hurricane and she has the audacity to blame the US for not helping enough, while millions of pounds of food sit rotting on docks and FEMA works 24/7! Shame on her.

EDIT: Honest question, now that the argument seems to be over whether the USA is putting forth its maximal effort (which I believe it is). Puerto Rico doesn't pay federal income tax, which largely funds the response that States receive. Puerto Rico is not even a territory, it is a commonwealth, and supposed to be much more independent and self-reliant than States. They even have their own President. Are they _entitled_ to equal aid that States receive? If not, it appears what we are doing for Puerto Rico is more charity as opposed to obligation. So that makes the mayor's statements more inflammatory and inappropriate than they would otherwise be.

<comment><USER4> She plead for help. And there's definitely more the feds / military could do. Puerto Rico is part of the US.

<comment><USER5> The Navy could evacuate the entire island with one aircraft carrier and a few trips to Miami. Our leaders just do not have the will to do so.

<comment><USER4> What? There's three million+ people living there. And where are they supposed to live? And how should they be picked up, with a seriously decimated transport network?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's embarassing that this is so underreported in the US. This is a disaster at an epic scale and it's just not received anywhere close to the coverage it deserves. I understand that America may not want to hear about thousands of people dying in Asia when Houston is submerged. That's not moral but it's not surprising considering human nature. But this is a bunch of Americans on American land.

It doesn't help that the President has made it all about how he is the real victim while golfing in NJ.

<comment><USER7> >in Asia

I think you're misunderstanding.

This is Puerto Rico, a US territory. The people in those images are United States citizens.

<comment><USER8> I think the original commenter was saying he could understand why american media focused on the flooding in houston rather than the flooding in southeast asia, but there's no excuse for not covering puerto rico.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the biggest issues is the holdup of supplies at the port where there was damage to the facilities. Getting logistics in place when there is a limited supply of gas/electricity/communication makes everything more difficult, along with the government bureaucracy.

For anyone who is interested in helping increase the ability of first responders and folks on the ground to better respond to events like this, consider building tech and startups that aid in volunteer management and distribution, communication systems when power and cell towers are down, logistics networks to get supplies to places in need. Much of this stuff is not innovative tech, someone just has to care to retrofit solutions that exist already to the needs of these scenarios. Heck, the Red Cross volunteer signup page is just a wufoo form. So much can be automated and modernized.

Made a simple site with some resources on where to donate money/goods: prmaria.com

Disclaimer: Living in San Juan and hearing reports from the ground

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Has anybody seen a good technical overview about the current situation in Puerto Rico? I'm not sure what that would look like exactly, but I imagine it would involve some maps and tables and some actual data. I realize that data is hard to come by in the early stages of a situation like this, but on top of that the news media really only seems to report anecdotal stuff with a random smattering of actual facts thrown in without any context. Is there some media outlet that's doing a better than average job out there that I don't know about?

<comment><USER10> > the news media really only seems to report anecdotal stuff with a random > smattering of actual facts thrown in without any context

There just isn't much money in journalism to do in depth work, which results in poor quality articles, which reduces people's willingness to pay for it.

It's a downward cycle of despair.

<comment><AUTHOR> I subscribed to the print version of Newsweek for something like 20 years, and at least in the 80s and 90s it was a pretty decent source of information even if it was somewhat format limited (think of it as the 168 hour news cycle rather than the 24 hours news cycle).

But I can't justify that kind of subscription anymore, because I don't read a single source when reading online, I read from a huge variety of sources.

I've reached the point where I would be willing to pay for good online stuff, but I am not going to do it by paying for a bunch of subscriptions on a whole bunch of different sites. But there really isn't any other alternative it seems like. It seems to me like there ought to be some sort of business opportunity here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What can the rest of America do here? Can you get down there to volunteer? Is the Red Cross the best place to donate?

And what if this happened in Guam? Hawaii? Alaska? Chicago? What do we think the response from the US govt would be in any of these cases?

<comment><USER12> [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/can-help-hurricane- victi...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/can-help-hurricane-victims- puerto-rico/)

PBS: How you can help hurricane victims in Puerto Rico

<comment><USER11> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of course this will be politicized but there is not much we can do except let time run its course. Supplies have been sent to PR, many weeks ago. But distribution is not easy. There is not any gasoline to run vehicles. And the little bit of diesel that is around is used to run chillers to keep perishable supplies. But that fuel is about to run out too. Which means they'll have another problem, they'll have tons of stuff that will need to be disposed of and no where to put it. Its a mess, but this is what happens.

You can't air drop supplies on mountain terrain. It won't land where you want it, and people will likely die trying to get to it. Many state the help should have been sent before the hurricane...yea that will work good as your supplies and volunteers are washed out into the ocean. About the best you can do right now is pack a sail boat full of hotdogs and start sailing.

<comment><USER4> > Of course this will be politicized but there is not much we can do except > let time run its course.

Huh? The three star general now commanding the military effort says he doesn't have the necessary resources (neither hardware, nor staff). There's just forty or so helicopters ferrying stuff around.

Seriously? That's the best the US is supposed to be able to do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I see this kind of damages, and what happened to St-Martin and St- Barthelemy, I thank God that my island has not been under the eye of Maria.

I have seen storms before, but that was a different beast!

I am hopeful that more people now understand the importance of housing and building standards.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if there is some paranoid prepper somewhere on San Juan who is now at his cabin in the mountains eating his storeable food, etc. Their doomsday scenario finally arrived and all. Probably not. Even if there was, their carefully prepared stuff probably got trashed during the storm.

<comment><USER14> Since Maria and Irma, I have been thinking about how I can make my house self- suficient. Water storage is becoming cheap, and I hope solar will also become affordable when Tesla solar roof will be sold outside the US.

<comment><USER16> Water storage is important, especially in case of a radioactive event, but for most cases you probably want a water filter, such as a Life Straw. You can probably filter more water than you can store (unless you have a very large water tank).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are a lot of charities that have been working to help areas affected by these recent storms and earthquakes. Is there an easy way to donate and have it be spread across several trusted charities at once? What is the best way to help here?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm no expert, but I suspect that because Puerto Rico has ties to the US, it probably receives more funding than the other islands in the area.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm always taken aback by the people who decide to stay when they've been ordered to evacuate. That must require either a Herculean level of courage or an incorrect estimation of the real danger posed by certain classes of tropical storms.

<comment><USER20> this is one of the most out of touch responses I've ever seen anywhere. it's an island 1000 miles from the mainland populated by predominantly poor people. what do you except them to do? swim?

<comment><USER19> I didn't specifically reference Puerto Rico. Obviously if you are on an island surrounded by water you cannot leave. I was referencing people that have the means and capability to leave, but don't because of sheer stubbornness.

<comment><USER17> > I didn't specifically reference Puerto Rico.

You commented on a post that was specifically about Puerto Rico.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Australian government deports Disrupt's co-founder for not picking fruit - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-australian-border-force-has-deported-the-co-founder-of-tech-startup-disrupt-2016-3 <comment><AUTHOR> For those that want to read more, a detailed run down of events is available on disrupts blog at [https://www.disruptsurfing.com/save-our-start-ups-the- govern...](https://www.disruptsurfing.com/save-our-start-ups-the-government- deported-my-business-partner/)

</comment><comment><USER2> "Lying to border control" is a pretty good way to get kicked out of all sorts of countries.</comment>


In China, Hacking Has Widespread Acceptance - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/world/asia/in-china-hacking-has-widespread-acceptance.html?hp&_r=0 <comment><USER2> If it doesn't draw blood, its accepted business practice in China. If it does draw blood, it _might_ be accepted business practice.

Seriously, I've never seen a place where cheating was so accepted: just about every other taxi ride attempted to take me the "scenic route", almost every business deal ended up with them trying to screw or defraud us.

What a nightmare of a place to do business in - never again.

<comment><USER3> I'm probably slightly biased here, having quite a few good friends that themselves are very involved with the manufacturing scene in China. From what I know and have seen, the apparently widespread cheating you mentioned is much rarer than you say. In many areas there is serious friction between (corrupt) government and business, and it is mostly under such situations where I've known about "non-standard business practices".

That said, if you're white, then I would be more inclined to believe the incidences of fraud you've experienced. I still don't believe it's a majority, but the incidences of foreigner-exploitation in China is significant enough to turn away a lot of potential business. I don't think it's really racism per se, as I think amongst many Chinese, especially the less well-educated, they believe that for reasons of history, foreigners, especially Caucasians, owe them something -- "after all, didn't you guys plunder our country's treasures 100, 200 years ago?" (8 nation alliance, Opium Wars, World War II, etc). It's irrational and this is no excuse or justification of their disgusting behaviour, but I think this is what's happening in many cases.

Still, there seems to be a slightly Sinophobic slant to these articles. Stuxnet (I think most people believe it's American/Israeli?) is just evidence of how far the Pentagon has gone with hacking. Its sophistication is actually amazing, and I while most may claim that "hacking Iran is beneficial for the rest of the world", I don't think the consequent fear of American hacking prowess is irrational at all. Is China's decision to ramp up their own cyber- espionage the right thing to do? I don't know. But I believe that any look at the history of international politics will show that nobody really gives a shit about international law whenever it becomes inconvenient. China is hardly a "victim", as they claim, but the narrative of "Chinese hackers rising" that's so popular these days distracts us from the much-more formidable power that our Pentagon already has.

<comment><USER4> > I don't think it's really racism per se, as I think amongst many Chinese, > especially the less well-educated, they believe that for reasons of history, > foreigners, [...] owe them something

Technically, that is racism. Blaming similar looking people.

Less insidious than other forms maybe...

<comment><USER3> Don't think so. Technically speaking racism is strictly prejudice based on racial, biological theories. This is prejudice based on history. Imperial Japan was part of the 8 Nation alliance, defeated China in the Sino-Japanese Wars, in WWII, etc. It's just easier to figure out if you're a white businessman than a Japanese businessman. Looks are a _part_ of it, but their reasoning is all historical. Unlike say, segregation in the 60s USA -- black < white simply because they're black. So, maybe it's sort of like racism, but if you want to be technical, it's some other kind of prejudice. I'd say xenophobia is a better term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Crackers exist and it is a shame that the western world punishes security research and shifts the blame towards the "hackers" instead of trying to get these vulnerabilities fixed, where they originated.

In the coming (or ongoing) cyber-war - who wins? The countries that welcomed crackers or those who jail them?

Note: I am not advocating breaking into people's computers. Just a community that welcomes security input.

<comment><USER6> The reason that the blame is shifted toward "hackers" is that being proactive with security, while the right thing to do, costs money and time. In a market where software from different vendors is usually only determined by price and update frequency spending additional money and time is a competitive disadvantage. However, if you can push your security failings off onto "hackers" not only do you minimize costs but your customers, if they're not sufficiently savvy to this game, think that you're the better vendor because you're able to "beat hackers at their own game".

Nowhere is this mindset more prevalent than in the anti-virus software field, which of course is another can of worms itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh, too bad. :-(

Given the headline, I was hoping for an article on how technically inclined people are not ridiculed as "geeks" or "nerds" in China, but are rather accepted as contributors to key aspects of life in the 21st century. Instead, they're _still_ using "hacking" and "cracking" interchangeably in the New York Times. Apparently we're not as "21 century" as I thought.

<comment><USER8> I think this community really needs to get over this. Individuals, groups of individuals, or even entire communities do not get to determine the definitions of words or how words are used. Words usage is determined by society at large. If this is how hacking is used by society, then that's what it is. That's how the English language works. That's why the word xerox is an acceptable verb. That's why the meaning of the word gay has changed.

English evolves according to how its speakers and writers use it. Let it go.

<comment><USER9> The word gay changed precisely because a small community refused to "let it go".

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure what you're saying? When I look up the history and etymology of the word gay, I don't see anything of the sort. It was quite a gradual change not the fault of any single small community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Meta: it seems the New York Times really didn't appreciate getting blocked from China a few months ago. All the articles I read on HN that depict China negatively seem to come from the NYT. Or maybe other publications that aren't blocked in China actively avoid those topics?

<comment><USER11> Or, now that they are blocked, they have nothing to lose by criticising China, unlike other media corporations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems to me that China is building itself a problem that it might not be able to handle in the future. Sort of like the Romans (or Germans or British or Americans) had / have with all of the soldiers they produce(d).</comment>


I was a college newspaper advisor - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffpearlman.com/i-was-a-college-newspaper-advisor/

<comment><USER2> Just in case you aren't familiar with Jeff Pearlman:

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

Former SI writer. His expose of baseball player John Rocker shook up the MLB world at the turn of the century. He's since written a bunch of sports biographies that have sold very well.

He also wrote this, of interest to Hacker News readers:

[http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/21/pearlman.online.civili...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/21/pearlman.online.civility/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> In different context, the school could have brought this PR-focused individual on staff the right way.

Having a master's in journalism myself, I have much faith in the value of pure journalism, but also little faith in the idea of pure journalism being inherently sustainable (financially).

To kick an experienced, passionate journalist off the paper staff is ludicrous, and so is the idea of censoring the paper to show the school only in a positive light. However, a PR/consulting professional could provide much value to a group of young students who are pursuing an industry that will likely be quite harsh to them.

Understanding how ads work, learning how to build a personal brand and learning about other industries that seek similar skills to those of a journalist are three things that come to mind.

Many working journalists and journalism professors I've encountered have a highly negative view of PR – calling it the "dark side." Many of them entered a job market years ago where it was far more feasible to get a job at a newspaper and climb to larger and larger papers until you have a solid career – today the more likely path is one of repeated layoffs, shutdowns and underpaid contract work.

In my mind, these two professors could run this paper as a team very effectively. The business-minded PR professional could help the paper work toward financial independence and help students better understand the current career landscape, while the OP could teach pure journalism and stand up every time the former individual tries to cut out an article that reflects poorly on the university.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't access the website (WP DB error), but reading some of these comments seems to give the gist that he's complaining about being a prior-review publication that the school administration decided was a PR vehicle of the school.

It was the same thing for me as a student, I was pursuing a journalism degree at my school, and gave 5 years of blood, sweat and tears to my paper as Photo Editor, News Editor, and Editor in Chief. We had a very high degree of oversight where we could not do stories that could reflect poorly on the school in any possible way.

Legally this is actually questionable as the money we received from the school was actually from student funds, similar to our ASB, so we technically worked for the students, not the school. Further, being a prior-review and PR paper, means the school approves of everything we write, which opens them up to libel issues if anything slips through.

This made it very, very hard for me to get a decent journalism education. A lot of journalism is about the (attempted) presentation of two sides--often in college it's students vs administration, city vs school. And when they decide we're not covering an issue because it's too hot, or we only present a rewritten PR release, I'm only learning how to write content-farm content. And don't even think about starting an underground paper, you'd get thrown out of school. My school really handicapt my possible journalism career which I really learned out on my internship. Luckily I built my own tech career and fell back on that and now run tech for a news company.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think he hits on what's really the issue, but then gets distracted. The college wanted a PR publication, not a truly independent newspaper.

Given that they paid the printing costs (I'm not sure if this was always the case, but it was at the start of the venture), I guess it's up to them if they want to control it like that.

What doesn't seem right is them telling him that his later independant paper can't 'compete' with their PR mag. So long as they're not funding it, it's not their concern.

<comment><USER6> _Given that they paid the printing costs, I guess it's up to them if they want to control it like that._

Students paid the printing costs (or, on students' behalf: their parents, taxpayers, or private donors).

<comment><USER7> This is essentially the same argument as "You can't arrest me — I'm the one who pays you." It's facile and will not get you far in the real world.

<comment><USER6> "You can't arrest me, I pay you" is facile in the legal context of individual rights vs. the common good. This is, in fact, the opposite - suppressing the common good (loosely, freedom of the press) for individual gain. I don't see how it's "essentially the same argument" at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "What if prospective students, taking a campus tour, pick up the Touchstone and see a column about crappy food or bad policies?"

The prospective students would know that they were visiting an institution that values the free expression of ideas and criticism, over the college's marketing image.

<comment><USER9> Students don't choose colleges by their food or policies anyway.

<comment><USER10> you'd be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm working in a student newspaper, where we are 50+ people working 12-20 hours a week. It's very fulfilling, social and fun to see that we can actually achieve something. I recommend everyone who has the chance to join their local one.

And as a CS student it's nice to meet people outside engineering, like humanities, psychology, medicine etc. Fun with a heterogeneous clique.

<comment><USER12> As another CS major working at a college newspaper, I agree! Are you the web developer? Shoot me a message.

<comment><USER11> (Can't message you, feel free to send me a mail on the address in my profile):

No, I'm not really the web developer. Atm I'm working on a web-app that allows the journalists to log in and collaborate on articles, see the status on this issue's articles, export them to inDesign and some other book-keeping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good grief. I know nothing about Manhattanville, and at this point not much about student journalism--my own days were long ago, and the offspring has graduated and no longer does it.

However, a) I don't think we had a faculty advisor back when; there was a board with faculty on it that picked out the editor from among self-nominated candidates, but that was about the level of involvement the faculty had. Writing, editing, layout, all that institutional knowledge was handed down student to student.

And b), the notion that the student paper can serve a college's PR purposes strikes me as silly. Before I went to college, I saw one copy of of the newspaper where I later worked, and I was already signed up. I guess we saw a couple of the publications from my son's school, but it had no effect on his desire to attend it. And, though family loyalty is a good thing, and I'm proud of his work, I really didn't see many of the issues he worked on--half a dozen from four years.

</comment><comment><USER14> Stories like this make me feel so LUCKY to have gone to both a high school and a university with excellent, nationally recognized publications. I learned more about writing, design, inter-office politics, management issues and how to balance a busy life than I had in class up to those points in my life. I am who I am today because of student journalism, more than perhaps anything except my parents.

My school (The University of Virginia - Wahoowa) is going through a change right now moving to digital distribution and less frequent daily issues. I think they team is doing a great job from the little I have heard as an alum, but I would miss the feeling and pressures that we went through when I was there.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hi Jeff. I hope you read this.

Why don't you just look at this experience as something that had to happen to set you on the path where you're really needed...

You took on an unpaid overworked responsibility to help 15 people and it didn't work out.

Why not use that same energy and love of journalism to help a lot more people on-line. For example, can you engineer a way to help us hackers write better? Believe me, we need it.

Perhaps you can come to Hacker News and help us in some fashion. You can reach hundreds of thousands of us, we'll double your pay, and you won't have to drive and hour and a half to pick up the paper. I imagine someone here can figure out how to push those bits anywhere you want while you sleep.

Don't let this speedbump become a roadblock. 86 that anger and find a better outlet for that love.

<comment><USER16> *write <i>more</i> better

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd say this captures it: "Our Mission" <http://mvilletouchstone.com/?page_id=171>

<comment><USER18> It looks like this page has been taken down?

<comment><USER19> I think that's the joke. "Our Mission", then a whole lot of nothing. So, they have no mission.

<comment><USER18> Ah. *whoosh

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If the University itself is what pulls the strings of the student media, then it is not free to be the student media. You need independence, the freedom to criticise the administration.

</comment><comment><USER21> I worked in school publications since I was a freshman in highschool all the way through college...I was very lucky to be at schools where the papers were well-respected and independent...in high school, even, it was considered one of the "cool" things to be involved in, and non-newspaper kids would come hang out all the time (it helped that I installed a N64 with Goldeneye in our staff lounge when I was a senior).

That said, scholastic journalism has always been a tricky issue...while they do have advertising, they still take in some part of student fees and school resources, and so the administration will always feel they have a right to intervene.

And the fact that the exciting part of journalism is about exposing misuse of power and coverups...well, you can see the conflict of interest that an administration has when sponsoring any kind of journalism on campus grounds. With journalism dying as a professional career, these campus newspapers (which are bleeding ad revenue) become only more dependent on the administration, which will inevitably lead to more control of the student press.

Even if journalism is no longer a viable career, I hope that campus newspapers continue as a real option for students to participate it, if only as a place to learn. My high school advisor was absolutely ruthless in his critiques of our work, such that some students would break down in tears during his hilarious (if you weren't the target) read-throughs of the just printed issue. Looking back, the high school journalism program was the only time in high school where our scholastic writing had real consequences, and I count myself lucky to have gone to a school that valued civic education over worrying about being embarrassed by student journalists.

<comment><USER22> Even though I'm a programmer, I did take journalism in high school, and worked as a humor columnist for my college newspaper.

In high school, the paper was fully funded by advertising. As such, each student who worked on the paper was responsible for selling a certain amount of advertising each quarter, with your grade depending upon it (no, really! I could have been writing on the level of Normal Mailer, yet if I sold no ads, _at best_ I could expect a D- (in the US, that's the lowest passing grade)). I was there to write, not to sell (and hell, I never complained about the stories I had to write, having gotten stuck with stuff no one else wanted to write about). It took an intervention by my mom to get me out of that class.

Now, I can understand the the need for advertising, but to force grades based upon money raised, especially seeing how it's not the primary purpose of the class? Drama class (yes, I was also a drama geek in high school) also relied upon advertising (in the program bills, plus the occasional fund raiser) but grades there weren't dependent upon the amount of money raised, nor was everybody expected to sell (or at least the drama teacher realized that for some people (ahem) their skills lied elsewhere (in my case, accounting)).

College was a bit different. I'm not sure if there was a journalism major, and working on the newspaper was open to anyone willing to work. I only got involved because I had time to kill on Wednesdays, and all I did was write a humor column (<http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/murphy/>) and it ended because the paper ended in a major scandal, involving student funding and an inappropriate relationship with the student government (which itself was mired in a huge scandal, where the President resigned somewhat suspiciously, along with the Senate Speaker; then the Judicial branch declared the recently held elections invalid, and the Senate responded by starting impeachment proceedings against the Justices---nice to see college was preparing them for life in the US government).

The newspaper tried to go it alone, off campus (and by taking all the equipment from the former on-campus office to the new off-campus office) but it folded in less than a year. I think it took over a decade before a new newspaper (new name even) started.

So yes, I did learn quite a bit working for a high school and college newspaper. I just don't think I learned anything related to journalism though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The paper's website: <http://mvilletouchstone.com/>

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone have a mirror?

<comment><AUTHOR> Google has it cached:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0BKpgOg...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0BKpgOgDrYoJ:www.jeffpearlman.com/i-was- a-college-newspaper-advisor/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

<comment><USER24> Thanks! Not sure why my original comment was downvoted, but whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "It was about mediocrity."

Welcome to college :D</comment>


Closures for Dummies (or why IIFE == closure) - <AUTHOR> http://unscriptable.com/index.php/2011/10/02/closures-for-dummies-or-why-iife-closure/

<comment><USER2> The title on HN seems to have converted the 'not equal to' in the original into 'equals'

</comment><comment><USER3> "Immediately-Invoked Function Expression"!? Seems like a pretty wordy way to say "let".

Insert snarky comment about Lisp macros here.</comment>


Microsoft Offers $100k If You Can Hack This Linux Operating System - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/05/06/microsoft-offers-100000-if-you-can-hack-this-linux-operating-system/ <comment><USER2> Quite curious on the outcome, given that Microsoft has decided to only support C for application development on Azure Sphere.

<comment><USER3> You mean as opposed to safer languages like Rust or "friendlier" languages like Python or Javascript?

<comment><USER2> As opposed to C++, Ada, Rust or whatever else that is safer than plain old C.

Although I am aware that outside STL like data structures, C++'s security story is just as good as C.

NVidia is doing something similar for their automation projects, they have chosen to go with Ada/SPARK.

Now that is a security story I can buy.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the clarification :)

As far as I know all current Sphere hardware is based on an ad-hoc Mediatek chip[0], which is really underpowered[1], I think this might be a factor. Or maybe I suppose they're bringing up C first and then build the toolchain for other languages on top of that?

[0]: [https://www.mediatek.com/products/AIoT/mt3620](https://www.mediatek.com/products/AIoT/mt3620)

[1]: [https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/azure-sphere/app- developmen...](https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/azure-sphere/app- development/mt3620-memory-available)

<comment><USER2> So far the only times that the discussion has come up, they state that their target market won't buy something else and there are sanitizers anyway.

Quite strange for a device whose sales pitch is security above anything else.

Yet notice how the "The Seven Properties of Highly Secure Devices" story doesn't mention anywhere the safety of the programming languages.

Meanwhile on another side of the computer campus we have Microsoft Security Response Center writing such blog posts [https://msrc- blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s...](https://msrc- blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-systems-programming-language/)

If you dig into developer requests, there are several posts regarding this, for example

[https://feedback.azure.com/forums/915433-azure- sphere/sugges...](https://feedback.azure.com/forums/915433-azure- sphere/suggestions/38747848-support-c)

Note that I am not advocating that C# would be viable option on Sphere's case, just the absence to acknowledge C as being the platform Achilles' heel in the security story that the team selling.

At very least also do hardware memory tagging like Solaris SPARC, iOS and Android (as of 11) are doing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Crunching the numbers on a Techcrunching - <AUTHOR> http://fr.anc.is/2012/08/20/crunching-the-numbers-on-a-techcrunching/

<comment><USER2> Simon Tabor says it the way it is: <https://twitter.com/simon_tabor/status/237180987350609920></comment>


Stop Publishing web Pages - <AUTHOR> http://dashes.com/anil/2012/08/stop-publishing-web-pages.html

<comment><USER2> I'm actually kind of tired of sites that just give a stream of data.

That's why on all my projects going forward, I'm going to try to take the next step and design the page itself to be attractive as to the placement of the content---more like a magazine, than like a Reddit.

<comment><USER3> How about image based streams? May be too Pinterest-esque for you but moves more towards a different paradigm. Check us out at <http://skim.me> when we release first version in a few weeks.

<comment><USER4> i think streams for image based sites, so long as the taxonomy is correct could be a killer UI. Thats one of the reasons Pinterest is moving along nicely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This post seems a little naive. yes, people spend a lot of time on things like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. However, that's only half the story. People also use search engines to find information. Information that is organised in pages, e.g. Wikipedia or Amazon. Streams are fluid. Information is there and gone the next. Pages and streams serve two different purposes and one does not exclude the other.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting that in a "blog about making culture" that he doesn't address the issue of archival. While a CMS can produce a nice snapshot for archive.org or another mirror to capture, streams are trickier, especially if they rely on the app that produced the stream(s) to work.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't streams actually make it easier? The site that wanted to do the archiving could subscribe to the stream and slurp up the content as it became available. As far as crawling older content presumably having a stream doesn't preclude you from also having permalinks to each entry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Streams are not always the best solution. How do you get an item at the end of the stream? By scrolling for minutes and hoping your browser doesn't crash...

It's a model very well-suited to social publishing, immediate content, not so for articles/timeless information.

<comment><USER9> the browser crashing problem just shows it's still such a new paradigm that programmers still are not tackling the problem correctly. many libraries are already being written to better handle this problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is no doubt in my mind that streams will be a much bigger part of the future than they are now. (They won't completely replace page-based content where that is more appropriate.) Currently streams seem to be the domain of the big 'platform' players (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, maybe a feedreader for those so inclined) so I am only really have to 'keep tabs' on a couple of streams. I think our current tools for creating and consuming streams are still relatively basic and for 'streams' to break free from these strongholds requires a lot more innovation in how we can create them, interact with them, manipulate them and transition in and of of them seamlessly.

</comment><comment><USER11> Streams are more an attitude shift to match how people consume content than a substantial functional shift. They still allow for permalinks; it's possible to link to any tweet directly. Stream-oriented content is about acknowledging that pages and destination sites are the wrong units of content. Content needs to respond to platforms — more than just screen sizes. Content Management Systems need to be treated as true _content_ management systems, not _page_ management systems. Content == data. See: John Borthwick's comments on content as information; Substance.io and Prose; Medium; NPR's API; &c. Pages are a legacy format.

</comment><comment><USER4> Streams allow people to find/stumble across information they may not have known existed. A visitor could enter (site) with a permalink to the content and then find a zillion spinoff conversations/articles - rather than forcing them to search or use poor navigation by the site owners, they could now spin themselves around the web based on streams of content... Love the idea!

</comment><comment><USER12> Related reading: "Streams vs. documents" -- [http://web.archive.org/web/20100108034547/http://software- li...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100108034547/http://software- libre.rudd-o.com/Streams_vs._documents)

</comment><comment><USER13> The OP took a reasonable idea: stop shoehorning content systems into producing static HTML _pages_ (and instead, produce an API)...and jumps somewhat illogically to "make it all a stream!"

Why isn't it possible to create an API which you dogfood to produce static pages (because permalinks are nice) AND content for streams?</comment>


An interactive Python profiler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/what-studio/profiling <comment><USER2> Looks awesome, I've been wanting something like this.

Trying to install it from Git, however (as the README suggests) fails, because Pip can't find click>=4.1 and urwid>=1.2.1.

EDIT: To resolve this, before installing do this:

      $ pip install git+https://github.com/mitsuhiko/click.git
      $ pip install git+https://github.com/wardi/urwid.git

EDIT2: Never mind, was using outdated mirror. Works just fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange, are you using any local mirrors or something? Because it should be available as you can see here: [https://pypi.python.org/simple/click/](https://pypi.python.org/simple/click/)

<comment><USER2> Oh, you're right. Crappy corporate set-up.. Works just fine in the wild.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Excellent! If they want to add flamechart-like visualization that would be excellent. Here's one I made myself back when I was needing to profile some python: [http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/35134924139/a-nov...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/35134924139/a-novel- profiler-for-python)

</comment><comment><USER4> Does this work with the multiprocessing library?

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks great! Is there any impact of both the profiler and the target (or profilee?) being run under the same interpreter? I'm thinking impacts of the GIL, specifically...

</comment><comment><USER6> Would be awesome if it could be used with nosetests. I've just given it a spin but nosetests seems `overpowering` the profiler.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great contribution!</comment>


Macaroons 101: Contextual Confinement – Elegant Authorization - <AUTHOR> https://evancordell.com/2015/09/27/macaroons-101-contextual-confinement.html <comment><USER2> These seem a lot like JWT (JSON web token)?

JWT is mentioned in passing near the end of the article, but it would be great to see a description of what makes macaroons different or better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Macaroons can be attenuated and delegated in ways that JWTs can not. Restricting the access granted by a JWT requires having the initial keys used to sign the token. Macaroons also have a built-in mechanism for verifying assertions made by third parties (in the form of "third party caveats")

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems like this might support a distributed capability model system.

<comment><AUTHOR> They don't out of the box form an ocap system but there's nothing preventing you from making one with them. That's something I've been meaning to explore more in-depth.

Here's a good discussion on the differences between macaroons and capabilities: [http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/cap- talk/2014-December/0163...](http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/cap- talk/2014-December/016333.html) (see the "Macaroons: Capabilities vs Credentials).

<comment><USER3> Awesome! Thanks. I've read the Macaroons research paper now and of course it mentions "prior work going back to the Amoeba OS" and they thank Mark Miller (among others) at the end, so yeah.. I feel a little sheepish. :-)

This is very exciting stuff. Thank you for writing such a great article about it, I'm looking forward to reading more. And I have a copy of your pymacaroons source printed out to peruse. Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aren't those macarons and not macaroons?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used that imagery mostly because other preceding resources about Macaroons use macarons (there's even an unofficial logo[0] for macaroons that are actually macarons). But according to wikipedia[1], macarons are simply the French variety of macaroons.

If you ask me, French macarons are way better than the coconut kind.

[0]: [http://macaroons.io/](http://macaroons.io/)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroon#France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroon#France)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So you have a list of constraints: c1, c2, c3. You have a secret key on your server, 'k'. You calculate the signature as 'HMAC( HMAC( HMAC(k, c1), c2) c3)'.

So anyone can add constraints and then create a new valid signature by HMAC'ing the additional constraint into the existing signature, right? You can add constraints, but of course, you can't remove them later if you only have the latest iteration of the signature.

I'm trying to see the use-case here... is it a 3rd party taking one of these signed strings in order to append their own "constraints" onto it, cycle the signature, pass it to an end-user, who will then hand it back to your server? And even if this happened, how would you know at the end of the day who actually added the constraint? All but the first HMAC can be done by _anyone_ , so aren't you just creating work for yourself?

Specifically how is this ever better than just doing a single HMAC(key, data) on everything that you control, specifying some delimiter character to know where your own signed data ends, and then everything else is just unsigned? I guess if you trust your link to the 3rd party, and if you trust they will add the proper constraints, then the only benefit is you know once constraints are added they cannot be removed without access to the original signature.

Going directly to the paper, they show an example on Page 4 ([http://imgur.com/ARJNdu6](http://imgur.com/ARJNdu6)) of a 3rd party service adding additional constraints onto an existing set;

      For example, Figure 4 shows a macaroon authorizing a user at client C to
      access chunk 235 at a key-value storage service TS. This macaroon has
      been derived as a strict attenuation of another, more permissive macaroon
      —held by the social-networking "forum service" FS—by both eliding that
      macaroon's signature (called, say KFS), and by adding caveats whose
      predicates require a specific chunk and client IP address to be present
      in the request context. Even so, this macaroon's signature, KUSER, both
      allows the target storage service to verify its integrity, and also
      allows its bearer to derive new, further attenuated macaroons. In this
      manner, macaroon signatures both protect integrity and act as keys.

"Integrity" usually means you know something was not altered, so I think it's a bit dangerous to call it that. The coloring of the figure is also misleading. With the proposed nested HMAC construction, we do not actually know which caveats were added by TS versus which were added by FS, or perhaps Mallory. All that 'TS' knows is that these constraints exist, it loses a key piece of information, namely, the ability to prove which of the constraints are guaranteed to be first-party constraints, versus which were added later by third parties. For example, this could expose 'TS' to potential DoS attacks because anyone can add potentially expensive-to-verify "first-party" constraints which the server could be tricked into thinking that it had actually added itself.

Instead, the server should HMAC the full set of its own constraints with its own key, and then a single delimiter should be added. If third-parties want to add additional sets of constraints, then the nested HMAC can start being used, but again I would propose, first, sets of constraints be added atomically with some delimiter to reduce the number of wasted HMAC cycles, and second, there should be a way to include an additional shared secret between TS and FS in the HMAC process so that TS can actually validate who added the constraints without significantly increasing the size of the payload.

Edit: So, what I get out of this after ~30 minutes of review is it's a very high level protocol for how an already trusted set of servers might go about letting each other specify constraints. Frankly, I'm not sure why that's 16 pages of research. I think the HMAC chain implies more security than you actually get, and actually involves a subtle trade-off that I don't see addressed anywhere in the paper (but I didn't read it _thoroughly_ )

<comment><AUTHOR> Edit: responding to you is a bit of a moving target. I'll attempt to address your latest revision a bit later.

Most of what this article is about concerns first-party caveats only, because (for better or worse) I was trying to keep the discussion fairly basic. I'm glad it piqued your interest enough to read the macaroon paper!

> Instead, the server should HMAC the full set of its own constraints with its > own key, and then a single delimiter should be added.

This basically describes a JWT, and there's nothing wrong with doing things that way; it clearly works well for a lot of cases. Macaroons provide flexibility by allowing attenuation and delegation. Hyperdex[0] and this video[1] both discuss cases where those properties may be more desirable, which may serve as clarifying examples.

> I would propose sets of constraints be added atomically with some delimiter > to reduce the number of wasted HMAC cycles.

That's perfectly valid, it's also a suggestion from the macaroon paper:

> Macaroons permit many optimizations, in both their primitives and > applications. For example, a reduced number of operations can be used for > chained-MACs, if caveats are combined as in Figure 9.

Where figure 9 just shows including multiple "caveat assertions" in a single "caveat".

> This exposes 'TS' to potential DoS attacks where anyone can add potentially > expensive-to-verify first-party constraints which there server could be > tricked into thinking that it had actually added itself.

It's good to point out that this is a vector, but practically it's very easy to mitigate this sort of attack. The entire verification process is controlled by TS, so in the first place any caveats it doesn't understand will be ignored (and verification will fail because not all constraints were met). I strongly prefer failing macaroon verification as soon as possible (even if it opens up the possibility of certain timing attacks; which could at best only reveal supported caveat types and never any secrets). This alone limits the attack surface only to specific caveat formats that TS understands. From there it's easy to add other safeguards if necessary. Verification could limit the number of caveats allowed (the macaroon paper even suggests these limits could be encoded in the macaroon as "structural caveats", although currently no implementations support them), or simply fail if it takes too long to verify. As with all DoS attack prevention the goal is to mitigate as much as possible; simply rate limiting could be effective.

> I guess if you trust your link to the 3rd party, and you trust they will add > the proper constraints, the only benefit is you know once they are added > they cannot be removed.

When you use "third-party" you seem to be referring to attenuating the macaroon with additional "first-party" caveats. Actual "third-party" caveats can be used to verify context in a third-party system. First-party caveats confirm the context of the target service, but consider that first-party caveats could be added by other components of TS (e.g. in a service-oriented architecture) or by local client software (e.g. a browser extension), not just "third parties."

> We do now actually know which caveats were added by TS versus which were > added by FS.

This is not quite true - without storing information about the originally constructed macaroon, TS has no way of knowing which caveats it issued originally and which caveats were appended later by someone else.

[0]: [http://hyperdex.org/doc/latest/Authorization/#x11-630002](http://hyperdex.org/doc/latest/Authorization/#x11-630002) [1]: [https://air.mozilla.org/macaroons-cookies-with-contextual- ca...](https://air.mozilla.org/macaroons-cookies-with-contextual-caveats-for- decentralized-authorization-in-the-cloud/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the detailed response, and sorry for all the ninja-edits, I kept coming back and adding more as I read more!

Please note, "We do _not_ actually know..." \-- I agree with you emphatically. I think it's my biggest gripe about the construct.

I do like the idea of a standard way of packaging a set of constraints, and also that they can be flexibly added by different systems. I think there's some weakness in how they are signed and to describe the signature as providing 'integrity' is over-reaching.

I might call it an "append-only cookie" or an "extendable cookie" but never a " _macaroon_ ". ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


The Psychology of Skyscrapers - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046722/evidence/the-psychology-of-living-in-skyscrapers

<comment><USER2> Great article, I wasn't aware of this one of Ballard's works, though it's definitely on the list now. I think in defense of high-rise living, having a comfortable view does give one a deep and unconscious sense of psychological security. Whether severe drops, floor to ceiling glass and high winds assist or hinder with that is quite another question.

<comment><USER3> It's my favorite of his books. And it's a movie coming out soon from director Ben Wheatley, who I think is a perfect match.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Prove me wrong: email ain't dying - <AUTHOR>

There seem to be lots of people who think email is dead or dying, being replaced by all sorts of others ways of being in touch.
However, I've seen nothing that indicates that email is really dying at all when it comes to business communications.
The universal standard for being in touch is still an email address.
So if you're a believer that email is dead of dying, what's the evidence?  As far as I can tell email is going to remain the primary method of business communication for the foreseeable future. <comment><USER2> As a greybeard who was using Internet email in the 1980s, I could wave my cane around and claim this newfangled web thing is just a passing fad.

Instead, I will point out that, besides email's asynchronous nature (which others have mentioned here), email's biggest strength is that it is federated and open. (The latter two are also true of the web.)

Sure, many people either get their email from or host it on Google / Microsoft / BigInternetCo, but there's nothing stopping anyone from registering a domain, setting up an email server, and actually communicating with the Internet.

Try that with Skype / iMessage / Hangouts / Messenger / etc.

<comment><USER3> Interesting you mention skype.

I've been providing my own email since 1998. In the back of my mind the past few years, it's occurred to me that I ought to be providing my own dialtone.

It's just a week or so of futzing around with asterisk and bringing a landline into my cabinet, right ?

<comment><USER2> Years ago I tried configuring Asterisk and was defeated. Well, not completely defeated as I got it "working," but I couldn't claim to truly understand the configuration.

Asterisk's configuration system isn't the worst thing I've seen, but it reminds me of Sendmail, which (if you don't know) is not a polite thing to say.

Of course now there are probably glossy Asterisk distros you can run in a VM and configure via WUI. But I'm obstinate enough that I want to understand the text config.

There is also FreePBX, but I know nothing about it.

Even further off topic, I'd recommend the Obihai boxes as a cheap way to get started. No affiliation, I just have an OBi110. It's about as easy to configure as Asterisk itself. (Why is all this VoIP kit horrible to set up?) However, Obi has a through-the-web quick configuration that will hook it up to Google Voice with no other hardware/software. That alone is worth the price of the box (which occasionally goes on sale). ~US$40 flat and Google Voice gets you free phone calls in the USA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The messaging protocols that are still here from the older days of the Internet are not going anywhere. Email is here to stay. IRC is still going strong. Hell, even Usenet is still kicking. Ignore the FUD.

</comment><comment><USER5> Email will never (in any reasonable time-frame) die, but the use cases are narrowing. A large percentage of people in their teens and early twenties use email for personal reasons rarely, if at all, preferring other tools like SMS, Facebook messenger, and other social networks. Of course they will still have an email address, and most will check it occasionally for emails from their parents or tuition reminders or whatever. To contact friends though, they'll use other means. This seems odd to many people in their 30s and 40s, given email's ubiquitous, straightforward, and open nature; but, if all your friends are in your facebook contacts and everything is happening on facebook, that will be the most convenient place to send messages. Or for close friends, you'll just text them. What's the point of sending an email that won't get read for hours or days? And what's the point of checking your email regularly if all you get there is spam and bill notices and stuff?

I'm 34 and email is my preferred method of communication. I certainly lament that some people eschew it for closed, proprietary alternatives, but I can understand their reasons for doing so.

</comment><comment><USER6> "email is dying"

\- people that are building social networks for cats

<comment><USER7> So you're saying that fewer cats are using e-mail?

<comment><USER8> more cats are using social media.

<comment><AUTHOR> My cats email spelling is crap. I think his paws slip on the keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd much rather prove you right.

I do think email will change (not just new MUAs but improvements to current protocols for more modern use cases) but it will always remain in some form since it is so basic and universal. Your email address is currently your core online identity and it would take a major shift to change that. That alone fortifies email's position psychologically.

I see four main uses for email: 1) communication within a business, 2) communication between businesses, 3) social communication between individuals, and 4) communication between businesses and individuals. Groupware solutions/messaging/etc have tried to replace email for #1 for some time but email is still needed alongside it for communication with the outside world (#2, #4) and because a lot of enterprise software relies on email for their workflows. Social networks have made huge inroads in replacing email for individual to individual communications but their adoption is still not yet universal. I've also personally seen many people default to email after using a social network as an address book-- maybe email is just a more personal method since there is a stronger sense of owning the messages? Or maybe it's easier to check email than keep up to date on several social networks. Finally, as an individual interacting with a business (legit marketing, but also order confirmations, other notifications, etc.) email still is preferred since it is so universal and won't require leaning on another business for them to conduct their own business.

I'd be interested to know if others have a similar taxonomy or if they are aware of better, non-email solutions that can simultaneously cover more of those use cases.

</comment><comment><USER10> Email is different from other communication tools such as Skype where email is fully asynchronous. I think no other tools now are able to replace email regarding this property.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't SMS have that property ?

I hate it, and I hate that people use SMS instead of email, but isn't it fully asynchronous ?

</comment></comment><comment> cs- It just can't, email is like a part of one self. It may go in the more secure direction with some privacy under the hood, like HTTPS is for HTTP.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's definitely "dead of dying" \- most businesses I know are primarily communicating through pinterest or snapchat.

<comment><USER12> Serious question: are you joking or is this a serious comment? I can't imagine a company deciding that moving to pinterest or snapchat would be a more efficient method of communication.

<comment><USER13> I've seen Facebook used for code management. Thankfully not at a business, but still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a difference between being "The universal standard for being in touch" and being the primary tool for business communications. Yes, email is not dying for inter-business communications (intra-business is a different story, slack et al).

But as "The universal standard for being in touch" it's definitely dead. I don't even know emails of most of my friends nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER15> It will die when the crucial percentage of people using it does.</comment>


The Mathematician Turning Basketball into a Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpLHMKTolVw <comment><USER2> Very interesting video. The pioneer of this was Daryl Morey, GM of the Rockets.</comment>