OpenDNS says they are being blocked by Verizon - <AUTHOR> http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/OpenDNS-Were-Being-Blocked-By-Verizon-Wireless-111530?nocomment=1

<comment><USER3> I'm the founder of OpenDNS. This article is not accurate. We are blocked by Sprint Wireless, not Verizon Wireless. You can't change your DNS easily when using the Verizon Wireless 3G network's provided hardware, but if you are using your device in tethering mode or a USB-connected fashion, you certainly can use whatever DNS service you want.

How did this happen? We have, in the past, been blocked by Verizon Wireless, either deliberately or due to technical issues, but it is not the case today. I've been a VW customer for a few years, and it's a great service. And today, Verizon FIOS service requires the user to have CPE that doesn't allow the user to change their DNS (same with ATT U-Verse). Sprint Wireless blocks us today, and always has.

In my phone interview, done too hastily or speaking too quickly, I misspoke when speaking about Verizon FIOS and Sprint Wireless as examples of how our customers aren't able to use our service and mixed up the companies. That or the reporter misheard. Either way, this is a good reminder of why it's always better to do email-based interviews. The reporter in this case is a very good one whom I've worked with in the past, so I'm confident the error was mine. In fact, most of the post (it's a Q&A) doesn't really capture the entirety of our discussion, which is unfortunate. My actual sentiments are far less anti-ISP and pro-Google than I think they came out. (repeat, I really dislike phone interviews)

It's unfortunate that I wasn't able to correct the story earlier, though we did work to get the original Washington Post blog updated right after it posted (and it was corrected). Other sites didn't quite seem to pick up the update. I've been trying to update other blogs where I can because it's not fair for VW to be painted in this light. It should have been Sprint Wireless. Some folks on my staff have also worked with Verizon Wireless to make sure that they are not blocking us, and I thank them for their efforts.

<comment><USER4> _And today, Verizon FIOS service requires the user to have CPE that doesn't allow the user to change their DNS_

I'm hesitant to publicly disagree with the founder of OpenDNS, but I have a different experience. FiOS doesn't require the use of their provided CPE for Internet access. The ONTs installed have both Ethernet and MoCA ports, and I use a non-Verizon device connected to the ONT's Ethernet. Using a non-MoCA CPE will break Verizon's television boxes, but the fix for this is to simply plug Verizon's supplied CPE into both an Ethernet port on the replacement and the shared coax segment.

<comment><USER3> I think this is right and what we've heard from users is right. It's actually the same complaint from Uverse customers -- swapping out the ISP-provided CPE breaks their TV service.

It seems you've got a work-around. We'd love to update our knowledge base with this. I can't find contact info on your user page, can you email me david at opendns dot com as I have a few more questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DNS redirection (and the monetization thereof) is kind of a moot point in the mid/long term in light of DNSSEC.

Consider the example of comcast, an ISP that uses opt-out DNS redirection advertising, but has been forced to give up the practice for its DNSSEC resolvers:

* We believe that the web error redirection function of Comcast Domain Helper is technically incompatible with DNSSEC.

* Comcast has always known this and plans to turn off such redirection when DNSSEC is fully implemented.

* The production network DNSSEC servers do not have Comcast Domain Helper's DNS redirect functionality enabled.

* We recently updated our IETF Internet Draft on this subject, available at <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-livingood-dns-redirect>, to reflect this.

\-- <http://www.dnssec.comcast.net/faq.htm>

<comment><USER6> Whoa, will DNSSEC prevent all DNS-level hijacking? OpenDNS has a DNS-level blacklist option (totally opt-in) which redirects to their own servers. Will that still be possible with DNSSEC?

<comment><USER5> As this amounts to A record forgery, yes DNSSEC clients will prevent this. There is really no technical difference between this practice and the poisoning that DNSSEC is defined to defeat.

Of course there are plenty of other ways to blacklist or redirect IPs - <USER2> routes, RBL subscriptions in software firewalls or through browsers like the google safe browsing subscriptions. DNSSEC won't be the place to do it, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty dubious that they started blocking this. The availability of alternative DNS systems makes it harder to censor domains.

</comment><comment><USER8> Combine this with COICA and suddenly just changing your DNS provider becomes quite a bit more difficult.

<comment><USER9> If an "important" ISP starts blocking outbound port 53, then people will just do their DNS lookups over HTTPS or whatever. This is irrelevant today because nobody is censoring DNS yet. Combine documented DNS censorship with documented blocking-of-port-53, and the problem will be fixed in hours.

(Funny story; my work laptop has some software installed that only allows ssh connections to be made when connected to the VPN. But when connected to the VPN, there are no routes to the Internet, so I can't check my email while traveling with my work laptop. Change my sshd to bind port 443 in addition to 22, though, and ... the restriction is gone.

Censoring the Internet is hard, even when you control the network or client machine!)

<comment><USER8> True, but each restriction just makes it that much harder to get around. For the majority of people, the first block will stop them, but once you get into cat-and-mouse land, you'll lose a bunch more.

<comment><USER9> Meh, they don't seed torrents anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Most IPSs think that DNS is an afterthought, to be stuffed in an old box and forgotten. Typical scenario: wait for a request, deny that request, then cache and honor the request the second time round.

<comment><USER11> Is that why sometimes I open a webpage and it gets stuck loading with the status bar displaying "Looking up example.com..."? If I reload the page it then loads immediately. I've been thinking that it has something to do with the cache, but why on earth would they deny the first request?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to put in a good word for openDNS. I've used them for several years and have always found David Ulevitch and the company to be friendly, helpful, and reliable.

<comment><USER13> Seconded. It's faster than my own ISP's DNS. (Damn you, Speakeasy! _shakes fist_ ) If you want to test for yourself, ping 184.108.40.206 (one of OpenDNS' anycast DNS IPs). If it's faster than your ISP's, you should try switching.

<comment><USER14> Network latency isn't the only factor. Use <https://code.google.com/p/namebench/> to see which server will really be the fastest for you.

Or roll out your own. It probably won't be the fastest option but close enough and, more importantly, fully under your control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> while it's still bad, the article say it's only for the wireless part

</comment><comment><USER16> I would not like to see ISPs block alternative DNS services. I use OpenDNS to block distracting sites, and alias <http://block.opendns.com> to localhost, which is then redirected to my to-do list. A web server on my machine redirects the default page at localhost to my to-do list on <http://rememberthemilk.com>.

In addition, my /etc/hosts file includes the hosts file from <http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/>, which aliases ad and tracker site domains to localhost.

Ad blockers suppress ads, but do not provide positive reinforcement. Site blocking software systems filter unwanted content, but do not substitute desired content in its place. It's not enough to slap the user's hand.

The domain name filtering service OpenDNS displays a block page at <http://block.opendns.com> if a site meets the criteria for filtering. This is negative reinforcement. OpenDNS might provide positive reinforcement if users could to substitute something else, for example, an online to-do list such as <http://rememberthemilk.com>, for the block page.

Maybe OpenDNS could provide such a service.</comment>


The Future of DoorDash Is Turning Delivery Into a Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3066126/tech-forecast/with-its-new-drive-service-doordash-is-turning-food-delivery-into-a-platform <comment><USER2> _DoorDash loses money on almost every meal it serves._

Uh oh.

We're headed for a big crash in "just in time services that lose money". Remember Webvan and Kosmo. The business model of all these guys, including Uber, is "achieve monopoly, crank up prices". Probably not going to happen.

The experience of Austin, where Uber and Lyft pulled out over the driver fingerprinting issue, is instructive. Within a month, six competitors were up and running. The barriers to entry in this area are low. Even if someone does get market dominance, they can't raise prices much.

Uber is particularly vulnerable because their latest capital infusion of $1.5Bn is high-interest debt, not equity. That's an axe hanging over the head of a money-losing company.

<comment><USER3> Someone on HN explained this very well recently: that food delivery is the perfect business for duping gullible investors, because you can book the entire cost of a meal as top-line revenue, even though it passes straight through you to the restaurant. So if someone orders $80 worth of food, that's $80 that you can show off on your Series B pitch deck even though your profit after delivery might be -$5. It's not even like the Uber theory of "we're spending to grow", it's "we're spending to make more money that isn't ours look like ours", with the losses expanding in lockstep. I agree that a major bust is incoming.

Edit: "gullible" may not be the right word. It's more like this is a clever hack to exploit how tech investors are complacent about huge losses, as long as revenues are growing too. That's not inherently a bad thing, sometimes this approach is a good way to build out a healthy business. But the food delivery outfits are carefully exploiting this and hoping they get pattern-matched to other business models where it's OK, even though their situation is not the same at all.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if those gullible investors are so easy to find, Groupon introduced everyone to the concept of "gross revenue" and "net revenue" back in the days.

<comment><USER5> And they were a tremendous success for their pre-IPO investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> DoorDash can't seem to get my simple order correct when picking up from a restaurant. They have < 10% order accuracy after ~100 orders. Either special instructions weren't followed or entire parts of the meal were missing. At one point, we had ordered 5 entrees from the same restaurant and the delivered 2. They don't train their delivery drivers to do any accuracy checks on the order. Are they really qualified to move into being a delivery platform? I wouldn't trust them with anything important.

<comment><USER7> > They have < 10% order accuracy after ~100 orders.

Why do you continue to order through them if they're that inaccurate?

<comment><USER6> At first, I ended up switching to other delivery platforms. I also reached out to the restaurants that DoorDash was constantly messing up with and spoke with them directly about how to improve the system. I also spoke to DoorDash, but you can only ever get a hold of their support team, not anyone who manages the delivery business. After that, accuracy got better, and then slowly started declining again. Now, I use Amazon for my food delivery, and they do a fantastic job.

<comment><USER8> Does Amazon deliver from restaurants?

<comment><USER9> Yes Prime Now does restaurants in SF

<comment><USER6> And in Seattle

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure you only need to read this headline to know that the next notable landmark in the future of DoorDash is ceasing to exist.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Everyone, shockingly, wants convenience. And as a result, it's our job to find the ways to fulfill that." \- said every consumer internet company ever.

Demand does not beget a sensical business model.

</comment><comment><USER12> Long story short: DoorDash moving to 3PL B2B services to catch larger ASPO, therefore higher margins to pay the $7 fixed driver fees.

1\. Dominos does 2.5MM deliveries sure, but Dominos is a marketing company first, a delivery company second, and a food company third. Their products are purposely made to be sold enough to cover labor and ads with barely enough left over, but combined works with a franchise network.

Which means...

2\. Most providers on the platform are really bad, if your restaurant is working with DoorDash it's because your food is bad and delivery is the only value add, see regards to In 'N Out vs Jack In the Box.

So that means they have to ditch their current form since...

3\. Churn of drivers is insanely high since they're viewed as disposable. The pay is low after considerations, limited job security, limited upper movement, limited support for drivers. All because the margins are just not there at the level they're at.

Obvi, since people's habit of spending $20 on a $8 burrito isn't sustainable.

So Postmates and DoorDash all running faster towards being USPS before more down rounds to tackle last mile problem--with UPS/FedEx just chuckling on the side playing with their plane and ships and Uber playing with their trucks.

PS. Analog to this is [https://gorickshaw.com](https://gorickshaw.com), a YC company.

<comment><USER13> I followed everything you said, but what does ASPO stand for? Cannot find it with my googles

<comment><USER14> Average sales per order, I am guessing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Honestly: not surprised. The margins on DoorDash were way too slim to ever make the unit economics work. "Customers are used to paying $30 to Uber across the city — but very few will pay $30 to Uber their sandwich." [0]

[0] [https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death- star-85f9...](https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death- star-85f9a121313)

</comment><comment><USER2> Here's the new competition for DoorDash - autonomous delivery robots from Starship Technologies.[1] These robots are being deployed in Redwood City, CA, this month. The City Council just voted to allow them to use Redwood City sidewalks for a 9-month test period.

The video shows them delivering from La Tartine. I eat there often, and was there tonight, but haven't seen one of the robots yet.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW16O6UWtSc)</comment>


Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/26/climate-change-obama-administration

<comment><USER2> The pictures certainly seem convincing, but they don't necessarily show a trend.

Here's a picture of Barrows Alaska from 2008 showing that there's as much ice there as in the July 2007 picture. <http://blog.politiken.dk/lomborg/files/2009/07/picture-1.png>

I wish these environmentalists would do some proper datacollection and analysis instead of feeding us half-baked truths. It would further their cause tremendously.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The images: <http://gfl.usgs.gov/Publications.shtml></comment>


How I nipped burnout in the bud with diet, exercise, sleep - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@farez/how-i-nipped-burnout-anxiety-and-depression-in-the-bud-with-diet-exercise-and-sleep-b05530af7555 <comment><USER2> You overcame burnout by working less.

Thats what came to me when I saw the title.

When i read the article, it seems you overcame depression with exercise and diet.

So the real problem was depression?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, by swapping work for exercise, I did work less (and exercised more). But before I started eating and sleeping better, or exercising, I did try and remedy the negative feelings by just taking time off work (e.g. whole days off, going for walks, etc), but I did that without changing my bad diet or eating habits, and without doing any exercise. It didn't work for me. The depression and anxiety was still there.

The change came only after I improved my diet, exercise and sleep.

Of course, this isn't a scientific article about mental health :). Just what I experienced.</comment></comment>


The most underrated Objective-C Class - <AUTHOR> http://www.stephenbalaban.com/caching-with-nscache-the-most-underrated-objective-c-class/

<comment><USER2> I recently changed an image cache in one of my projects to use NSCache instead of NSMutableDictionary. I found that when my application was sent to the background (even for a few seconds), the cache was cleared and the images had to be reloaded on resume. This was not suitable for my application since the initial image request was costly, so I went back to the initial NSMutableDictionary implementation.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious if anybody has insight into NSCache's caching algorithm? It would be nice to know the details.</comment>


Precision Oncology: Nanoparticles Target Bone Cancers in Dogs - <AUTHOR> https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2016/08/02/precision-oncology-nanoparticles-target-bone-cancers-in-dogs/ <comment><USER2> Great news for dogs and humans with cancer!</comment>


What Makes Steve Jobs Great - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/opinion/nocera-what-makes-steve-jobs-great.html <comment><USER2> The long Esquire interview referenced in the article is worth checking out:

[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/Nocera_Ch2...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/Nocera_Ch2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> i'm fucking tired of all that steevie bullshit. stop, please, stop.</comment>


Ask HN: When should we ask for credit card details? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
We (me and markbao) are Supportbreeze. We're working on our marketing pages now and we're not sure if it's better to ask for credit card details at signup or sometime after the trial expires. We know a lot of companies, like 37signals, ask at signup, but we don't have a free plan (for more on that, see here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1615416) and only offer the trial. So if we ask for credit card details, there is no way to trial our product without providing it. Will asking at signup deter people from trialing? Is it better to ask at signup or after trial expires?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Listening on techzing #56 <http://techzinglive.com/?p=257> they talk about your possibilities (CC info at signup of after the trial period). Asking for CC info lower your signup numbers but makes for higher conversion rate at the end.

So, it really depends on how much does it cost to you an user (bandwidth and support-time).

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps you could introduce a few steps. Doesn't know if this makes sense, but just thinking out loud for your inspiration:

Step 1: signup for trial period (no cc asked)

After trial period: complete your profile and get 2 more weeks of signup (including your cc)

After extra trial period: confirm membership

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't ask for credit card details on sign up. Be earnest and provide customers a great user experience first. If you've done your job well, they'll be more than willing to hand over their credit card numbers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes it will deter people from signing up. On the other hand it allows you to run a 'you must cancel' trial rather than one where they have to take an action to continue using.</comment>


Djitsu just released v1.0.25 with full support for standalone pages - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/djitsu/comments/gyp2pq/v1025_and_its_huge_render_any_cell_or_any_export/ <comment><AUTHOR> Awesome for prototyping and learning to code</comment>


User's Are Not Happy with New Facebook Changes - <AUTHOR> http://articles.cnn.com/2011-09-21/tech/tech_social-media_facebook-changes-react_1_facebook-top-stories-users?_s=PM:TECH

<comment><USER2> Every change Facebook has ever made has been met with wailing and gnashing of teeth, which blows over so quickly that it's usually a source of amusement for those who like the change.</comment>


Suicide Linux - <AUTHOR> https://qntm.org/suicide <comment><USER2> I've added a counter (of successful commands in a row) to my bashrc. I've seen it as high as 120.

      function promptCommand()
      {
        LAST_STATUS=$?
        # Set title of window to dir, then add new line to prompt.
        PS1='\[\e]0;\w\a\]\n'
        if [ $LAST_STATUS -eq 0 ]; then
          ((successes++))
          PS1+='\[\033[1;32m\][$successes]'
        else
          successes=0
          PS1+='\[\033[1;31m\][0 $LAST_STATUS]'
        fi
        PS1+='\[\033[0;32m\] '
        PS1+='\w $(date +%H:%M) \$ \[\033[0m\]'
      }

      lastStatus=0
      successes=-1
      PROMPT_COMMAND="promptCommand"

My prompt:

      [0] /home/bar/g3 14:19 $ echo "boo"
      boo

      [1] /home/bar/g3 14:19 $

<comment><USER3> Man, I hope you don't use grep very often (by default it uses exit code 1 when it doesn't find anything).

<comment><USER4> >grep

Not to mention tar which is just impossible to get right on the first try.

<comment><USER5> Especially when disarming a nuke

<comment><USER6> Nuke-practice is why I only use tar these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of Vigil, "the eternal morally vigilant programming language" [https://github.com/munificent/vigil](https://github.com/munificent/vigil)

<comment><USER8> Shouldn't the _programmer_ also be punished? I find flagellation by static type errors unsatisfying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The reaction from the OS is actually rather underwhelming.

Somehow related, a coworker at a previous place unmounted some disks on an old AIX production box. It took him a solid minute to realise he had mistakenly unmounted / due to a typo (yes it was possible) as old processes with already opened files were happily serving stuff and only new attempts at opening files were beginning to produce errors.

Also, a similar interactive mishap in the heat of the action:

        somebox:~$ rm * .o
        rm: .o: No such file or directory
        somebox:~$ # ...
        somebox:~$ # *stares a prompt*
        somebox:~$ # Wait, what? _Please_ tell me those C files were versioned! (The answer was, obviously, "no")

<comment><USER10> A few months back I was wiping some old drives using a USB->SATA adapter plugged into an old Linux machine I keep around for experimenting on random things. Mostly because I could just leave it to run for however long it took. There were two drives in the machine, sda and sdb. So the drive came up as sdc.

So then I typed:

$ shred -n1 -v /dev/sda

Took me about 4 seconds to realize what I did before hitting Ctrl-C.

Then, I sighed. Considered whether I could save anything. Realized there wasn't anything on there worth saving, and reinstalled. :)

I'm usually much more cautious than that and I'm thankful it happened on a dumb test machine at home and not something important, but it was still a bummer and my first real sysadmin-type screw up. Mistakes happen, though. Even Linus once dialed his hard drive [0].

[0] [https://liw.fi/linux-anecdotes/](https://liw.fi/linux-anecdotes/)

<comment><USER11> Stuff like this is why I usually double check and only access disk by anything but the /dev/sdx or /dev/hdx labels; too easy to blow up in your face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On Illumos rm -rf / does nothing. POSIX says that removing / has undefined behavior, so the obviously smart (useful, user-friendly, GOOD) thing to do is to do nothing, as that fits "undefined behavior".

<comment><USER13> That's quite funny... but ultimately futile. It doesn't say what happens if you say "DROP TABLE xyz<ENTER>WHERE...ohshit". (The <ENTER> bit is because you're used to doing that in your preferred SQL-DB editor.)

One should _NEVER_ do anything non-scripted on a production system. ALWAYS enter it into a file and then do the "run-sql-from-a-file" command.

EDIT: Yes, I also realize that "rm -rf /" can theoretically happen if you have a bad variable substitution, but you _MUST_ turn on the flags that cause your shell to error out instead of just substituting the empty string.

<comment><USER12> Protecting against every damned footgun is not possible. But some footguns blow users' feet off so often (this one because shell scripting is _so_ tricky and dangerous) that it's est to do something about it.

<comment><USER13> Indeed not, but just having the extra step of "write this into a file" (and perhaps have someone look it over) catches most of those _really_ bad mistakes.

It's really about NOT getting into the habit of "just fix it in production". That way lies madness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of bash roulette. [http://www.bash.org/?96164](http://www.bash.org/?96164)

<comment><USER15> Also in comic strip form: [http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/05/16/russian- roulette/](http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/05/16/russian-roulette/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > You know how sometimes if you mistype a filename in Bash, it corrects your > spelling and runs the command anyway?

What? No, what's that about?

<comment><USER17> There's the cdspell shopt: "If set, minor errors in the spelling of a directory component in a cd command will be corrected. The errors checked for are transposed characters, a missing character, and a character too many. If a correction is found, the corrected path is printed, and the command proceeds." ([https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The- Shopt...](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Shopt- Builtin.html))

<comment><USER18> It's an interesting idea, but is made mostly irrelevant by tab completion.

<comment><USER19> I knew a guy who aliased all permutations of 'make' (maek, mkae, amke...) to 'make', so he just hammer the keys at once and be sure the thing would run.

<comment><USER20> I've had to do this with grep, gerp gpre gper. I've determined that I'm just constitutionally incapable of typing that word more than 2 in 3 times, and I've learned to cope with my disability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Just have to mention, since I recognize the domain, that Sam Hughes has some excellent science fiction freely available in a serialized form here as well. Well worth investigating.

<comment><USER22> Don't miss his work at SCP wiki, either. [http://www.scp-wiki.net/qntm-s- author-page](http://www.scp-wiki.net/qntm-s-author-page)

<comment><USER23> Visiting that page on mobile asked for permission to record audio and take photos...

<comment><USER21> I didn't get any such request in chrome on android. Then again, that's the kind of site with the kind of subject matter to randomly request access every nth page just for the reaction it evokes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is funny. I think I'll stick with "thefuck" [1] though.

It would make a good prank to set up on someone that left their machine unlocked. Not sure if it's more funny than changing their background to goatse.

[1] [https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck](https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck)

</comment><comment><USER25> In all seriousness, what if it's a machine that no one should ever really be running commands on? This could be an effective, albeit naive, way to discourage undesirables in the system.

<comment><USER26> That is the most absurd approach to access control I have ever heard... but I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Computers already demand a level of precision that is hard for biological lifeforms to conform to. Now this. Not sure if I should laugh or cry.

</comment><comment><USER28> Perhaps a better name would be Roguelike Linux.

</comment><comment><USER29> a less destructive version of this is to install `sl` on your linux or mac.

<comment><USER30> I never type sl, but often type "gerp". I have an alias though.

<comment> moses-palmer A friend of mine aliased `git status` `git statsu`; I, being lazier, chose `git st`. Any time saved I lost by not copying his other alias, `c = commit -amSTUFF`...

<comment><USER31> I must be lazier. I use `gitst` for `git status`. That is 1/6 shorter and IMO not harder to remember.

<comment><USER32>
        ~ $ abbr | grep git | sort
        abbr af 'git kit autofixup'
        abbr amend 'git commit --amend'
        abbr fixup 'git commit --fixup'
        abbr gb 'git branch'
        abbr gcan 'git commit --amend --no-edit'
        abbr gcm 'git commit -m'
        abbr gco 'git checkout'
        abbr gcop 'git checkout -p'
        abbr gfa 'git fetch --all -p'
        abbr gkdm 'git kit del_merged'
        abbr gl 'git log --oneline --color --decorate -n20 --graph'
        abbr gp 'git pull --ff-only --all -p'
        abbr gph 'git push -u origin HEAD'
        abbr gre 'git rebase'
        abbr grec 'git rebase --continue'
        abbr grem 'git rebase -i master'
        abbr greom 'git rebase -i origin/master'
        abbr greum 'git rebase -i upstream/master'
        abbr gs 'git status'
        abbr gxa 'gitx --all'
        abbr namend 'git commit --amend --no-edit'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It would be nice for someone to develop a suicide-g++. Whenever you compile a program that results in Undefined Behavior, the execution of it will wipe your disk.

<comment><USER34> So it just always writes a program that does `system(rm -rf /)`?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> A good read about recovering a system that had rm -rf * run on it:

[http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/recovery.html](http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/recovery.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> My team is considering running this in Production. Do you offer support contracts?

</comment><comment><USER37> bash corrects your spelling?? Is this a cute way of saying "I made a typo that turned out to be a legit command" or is there some DWIM I don't know about (and thankfully don't have enabled)?

</comment><comment><USER38> In the video, the banner the shell displays says:

      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>===
      WARNING: Suicide Linx installed
               (http://sourceforge.net/projects/suicide-linux/)
      </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>===

I'm wondering if the typo is a subtle joke.

</comment><comment><USER39> We should call it Russian Linux: just like how you would like to play a Russian Roulette.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ah, that video! The good old days of Ubuntu! I just installed 17.10. :-(

Edit: The video in question: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_pgnMWgd34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_pgnMWgd34)

</comment><comment><USER40> One idea I like is randomly flipping a bit on the root partition every day or so. You'll have to take an incredibly long time to find the problem, of which there will be one eventually.

</comment><comment><USER41> Some like to learn by the stick, while others by carrot. And some like to learn with a grenade.

</comment><comment><USER42> Haha, how can it do that out of interest, if you're not root? (As aren't the top level directories in / owned by root?, or does it work anyway, if rm can recurse down? deleting files from the current user)

<comment><USER7> In the video he says that you need to be root when you make the typo. But since you have to be root when you install the package, you could plant a suid binary or even leave a service running as root that deletes all your files later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> A bit too unforgiving for my taste :) To err is .. destruction!

</comment><comment><USER44> Shouldn't this be more accurately called Seppuku Linux?

</comment><comment><USER45> He seems to have forgotten the --no-preserve-root flag.

<comment><USER46> This was made before they added that flag :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> not enough, I want a 5 seconds timer on every new attempted input line. You either type something or you don't.

</comment><comment><USER48> THis is not nearly as hard corre as it would have been in the days before Xen.

</comment><comment><USER49> Good to have snapshots (zfs) that you can go back to after a screw-up.

<comment><USER50> Just pray that the snapshot restoring program wasn't gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Is this the digital equivalent of corporal punishment?

</comment><comment><USER52> Is this a package or a true operating system distro?

</comment><comment><USER53> I just wasted 2 minutes of my life reading this.

</comment><comment><USER54> Docker image? It completely defeats the thrill.

</comment><comment><USER55> 1) death by accident (or rm -rf'ing) is not suicide 2) has the bar been lowered that much now? a simple bash configuration makes a new O/S or distribution?

:-)

</comment><comment><USER56> What a fun OS!</comment>


Is that a Pita in your Pocket? (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20000302032020/http://www.zdnet.com:80/sr/stories/issue/0,4537,2412263,00.html <comment><AUTHOR> OP note: I saw this via this tweet: [https://twitter.com/estherschindler/status/97900524945223270...](https://twitter.com/estherschindler/status/979005249452232704) , but as the original article link (on web archive) was in the twitter thread, I used it for the HN submission -- feel free to change it to the Tweet if that's felt to be more appropriate.</comment>


Host your Docker containers in the cloud - <AUTHOR> https://orchardup.com

<comment><USER2> Isn't one of the points of containers is that you can have many small containers that run 1 application? If that's the case pricing per-container seems... very expensive.

</comment><comment><USER3> You know, initially I was wondering what the added value (except for abstracting away the raw OS management => automated management) was compared to DO until I saw that you're running with them ;)

Good luck though! Sounds like a good approach although I'm not sure whether charging twice what DO is charging you is going to work out.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article was already posted. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6478322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6478322)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is there some kind of bandwidth or processing limit?

<comment><USER6> Nope – not at the moment.</comment></comment>


AWS Key Management Service - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/kms/ <comment><USER2> I put on my robe and tinfoil hat...

Managing all my keys on such a service would mean trusting Amazon will not hand them over to NSA and friends (with our without NSL or sealed indictment). Which I'm rather sceptical about, tbh, considering Amazon makes quite a lot of business with governments of all sorts.

EDIT: to clarify, my comment was about keys that would otherwise not sit on, or be used by, AWS images. If you make the effort to use such a tool, it makes sense to store all your keys, not just stuff that would have ended up on AWS anyway; and that's where the risk lies.

<comment><USER3> The keys are stored on SafeNet HSMs, you'd have to trust that they don't do anything with them but they can't exactly export them.

<comment><USER4> _How does AWS KMS compare to AWS CloudHSM?_

AWS CloudHSM provides you with a dedicated hardware device installed in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that provides a FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validated single-tenant HSM to store and use your keys. You have total control over your keys and the application software that uses them with CloudHSM.

AWS KMS allows you to control the encryption keys used by your applications and supported AWS services in multiple regions around the world from a single console. Centralized management of all your keys in AWS KMS lets you enforce who can use your keys, when they get rotated, and who can manage them. AWS KMS integration with AWS CloudTrail gives you the ability to audit the use of your keys to support your regulatory and compliance activities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is actually a really cool feature - the CloudHSM offering is both (very) expensive and not user friendly. This should help with big clients requiring HSMs or the like.

So many cool services could be built with this if there's an open API.

Edit: Sadly, it seems there's no out of the box ELB support... Would be great for TLS termination.

<comment><USER5> For ELB TLS termination, AWS already stores your TLS key securely in IAM, probably using some of the same underlying technologies. What sort of integration do you want between KMS and ELB?

<comment><USER3> Securely doesn't equate to what a HSM provides. I'd be doubtful if they are (using them) right now...

If IAM gets compromised, an attacker can take the key and run, opposed to them only being able to use it while they have access to the HSM. Not saying it's likely to happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Usually when I read "security" and "centralized" in the same sentence, I think of an unsustainable model that will be disrupted in a few years.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lots of new Amazon services today?

<comment><USER8> There is currently an AWS conference going on: [https://reinvent.awsevents.com/](https://reinvent.awsevents.com/)

<comment><USER9> A re:Invent banner was all over AWS sites for half a year now, I can't believe that this is it.

I was expecting Jeff standing up in a suit and talking to a live audience. Instead, there is what appears to be a pre-recorded video stream of advertisements on how AWS is great:

> _Think you 're a good architect? These 12 tips will help you get around our > global, fast and secure AWS infrastructure._

<comment><USER10> Andy Jassy delivered the keynote earlier this morning to a capacity crowd. We made 5 big announcements today and have more in store for tomorrow.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, just figured out how huge this event actually is.

Any chance that VPC will support broadcast? The FAQ page is quite dry on details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could any one point me what's wrong with nominal users and keys managed by system automation (AKA Puppet/Chef/SaltStack)?

<comment><USER12> PCI compliance.</comment></comment>


Differential Equations with Transformers: Deep Learning for Symbolic Math - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/solving-differential-equations-with-transformers-21648d3a1695 <comment><USER2> Post by the researchers (Facebook AI): [https://ai.facebook.com/blog/using- neural-networks-to-solve-...](https://ai.facebook.com/blog/using-neural- networks-to-solve-advanced-mathematics-equations/)

Arxiv paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.01412.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.01412.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember there being a lot of skepticism about the performance metrics used in that paper last time this topic came up. Vaguely, I think they were comparing the runtime of Wolfram's perfect answer search to their own model which was not required to get the answer exactly right. I think there were also some other shenanigans.

<comment><USER4> I was a critic when this was first posted (and was promptly downvoted). I don't understand why this is getting traction (or even a research direction they decided to pursue). does anyone really believe this thing is doing some kind of symbolic reasoning? it's doing nothing but memorizing training examples! that it has nonzero performance in test is owing to the wonky metric.

<comment><USER3> On one hand you have 1980s symbolic AI that can produce true, coherent statements, and on the other you have GPT-2 which can produce really nifty gibberish. If you could put the two together maybe that would be some progress. I can see that getting transformers to emulate symbolic math might be a step in that direction.

<comment><USER4> that's not reasoning though. it's not even an expert system or prolog (because adversarial examples exist). it's very close to a million monkeys typing.

<comment><USER5> Where does a 100B neurons firing fit on to that spectrum?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Raises a tough question about mathematics generally. Is math anything other than memorizing a set of rules (and being able to regurgitate them when shown a problem)? Obviously for anything like arithmetic, multiplication, etc. the answer is "yes this is just memorized".

Then for more complex math, can't it be argued that this is just recombination of memorized theories and algos, but using some kind of random search?

I'm not sure math involves as much symbolic reasoning as we like to think, but I could be wrong. The same goes for programming - mostly just regurgitating known algos (which break into smaller memorized sub-algos). When presented with something novel, generally just use random approaches until one fits. A few people in history who had to come up with "the first" such programs had some novelty, but even those were mostly just applications of known / memorized solutions in a random way (e.g. quicksort).

<comment><USER3> For at least a hundred years (as long as symbolic logic has existed, however long that really is) it has been widely known that you can iterate through every single theorem without any special creativity or thinking. The problem with that strategy is that you will spend most of your time on theorems like (not not X => X), (not not not not X => X), (not not not not not not X => X) and so on. What mathematicians actually do is use their human intuition and aesthetic sense to pilot the mechanical formalism towards goals that are worth achieving.

<comment><USER7> That's not a really fair way of putting it. Unless you're suggesting that there's something deeply magical about our human "aesthetic" intuition why can't that itself be coded into a set of syntactic indicators (e.g., favor short equations, don't repeat yourself, connecting theorems otherwise far from each other in some distance metric is valuable) to be used as a search heuristic?

<comment><USER3> The human aesthetic can't practically be programmed as a classical algorithm. The human ability to identify cats can't even be programmed as a classical algorithm, that's why neural networks were invented. Maybe a neural network could predict how interesting mathematicians would find a theorem but by that point there's no point for anybody to do anything, even artists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related: Poor man integrator (1), a 99 lines of maple symbolic integrator that uses an heuristic (parallel integrator).

[http://www-sop.inria.fr/cafe/Manuel.Bronstein/pmint/index.ht...](http://www- sop.inria.fr/cafe/Manuel.Bronstein/pmint/index.html)

Clearly, if your generator for equations is limited the system can learn the dictionary lhs (integral) => rhs (derivative) to go rhs => lhs. (integrate)</comment>


GNOME Do. The Google Instant of opening programs\files better than OSXSpotlight - <AUTHOR> http://do.davebsd.com/preview.shtml

<comment><USER2> Is Gnome Do still alive? 0.8.3.1 was released in Dec 09 and I haven't seen any updates come across since then. I hope someone's still working on it. I love the project. (If I were less lazy and wanted to learn Mono, I'd take a stab at it.)

Edit: wrong release date

</comment><comment><USER3> The comparison to OSX's Spotlight isn't entirely fair - it's more akin to Google's QSB, Launchbar, or of course the venerable Quicksilver.

</comment><comment><USER4> Besides Launchy, is there anything similar for Windows?</comment>


The Failed War on Drugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/opinion/failed-war-on-drugs.html <comment><USER3> Oregon resident here... My parents are Baby Boomers. About 2 years ago, I sat down with them and had the "talk" with them about opiates. My talking points were:

* I'm a Gen Xer, I did drugs for fun back in the day so I fundamentally don't care if you are taking opioids for whatever reason.

* If you get an initial opioid script from a doctor for more than 10 days, you have a 20% chance of being on opioids a year after. Again not a moral failing. [0]

* If you do find yourself taking opioids and finding yourself uncomfortable about your use, you can talk to me about it because I don't consider drug use a character failure. Been there, done that.

* When my parents visited from a red state, I took them to a cannabis shop and we tried non-pyschoactive CBDs together. They found the shop like visiting a dentist's office with an herby smell. Dad went back to his home state of Montana (fortunately legalized years ago) and got himself hooked up with various relieving CBD and THC compounds. He does not like MJ very much but it's better than tramadol for him as it has fewer side effects for him.

This is my contribution to the failed drug war. Screw big pharma...

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day- supply...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day-supply-of- opioids-1-in-5-become-long-term-users/)

<comment><USER4> >* If you get an initial opioid script from a doctor for more than 10 days, you have a 20% chance of being on opioids a year after. Again not a moral failing. [0]

It should be noted that people who are bad enough off to need opiods, may continue to be bad off for a long time. Not because of the opiods, but because of having a condition so bad that doctors are willing to give you opiods.

A script for more than a few days of opiods is very rare. I had a complete back fusion with 21 vertebrae drilled into and only had ~7 days prescribed.

<comment><USER5> Yes, with all this drama about the opioid crisis (sequel to the meth crisis, sequel to the crack epidemic, sequel to LSD crisis (Charles Manson), sequel to the reefer madness, sequel to the original Prohibition), people miss the point that they have very valuable uses.

What youngsters and middle aged folks like me don't really grasp (I'm starting to) is that getting old fucking hurts, sometimes a lot. Having a managed opioid addiction is a hell of a lot better than being bedridden, both physically and mentally.

<comment><USER6> The most frustrating part of the failed War on Drugs is that pain management doesn't have to be Sophie's choice between being in pain or being addicted to opiates, but thanks to a chilling effect on research due to the DEA's classification of cannabis as Schedule I, the mainstream medical establishment sees long-term opiate use to manage chronic pain as acceptable practice.

29 states plus Puerto Rico, Guam, and DC all recognize the medical benefits of cannabis including pain management. Presumably there's something when smoking the plant (whether THC or CBD, or some other as-of-yet undiscovered chemical) that's proven to be beneficial. In the face of the opioid epidemic, isn't it time for the DEA and the Federal government to think that there might be something to this stuff?

Instead, the current classification is that cannabis has a higher abuse potential than cocaine, Vicodin and methamphetamines!

<comment><USER5> I suspect it's like laughing gas. It has more to do with making the patient not care as much about the pain (distraction) rather than direct pain management though numbing / blocking receptors.

<comment><USER7> You'd suspect wrong. It has anti-inflammatory elements along with interacting with receptors in nearly every facet of the body. It has a psychoactive element that makes it popular for recreational use, but there truly are medicinal uses for it.

<comment><USER5> Does it actually block pain receptors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Over the last few years, due to personal events in my life, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between drug addiction and emotional pain. Self- medication is a huge factor in drug use, and I hope everyone understands that.

From the perspective of self-medication, drug addiction itself isn't the disease: drugs are just a coping mechanism to protect the user from a deeper agony. So when we talk about "reducing demand", we're not going to get anywhere unless we're able to provide people with better ways of dealing with their pain. A stint in detox isn't going to do shit for someone with depression or PTSD besides making them feel guilty and pathetic when they inevitably relapse. And if you actually succeed in making it impossible for this person to get their hands on illegal drugs -- while doing nothing to address their underlying pain -- then you might just end up with a suicide. As strange as it sounds, "drugs of abuse" may actually be the only thing keeping some people alive.

In a way, our current drug epidemic is partially a failure of psychiatry. We need to do better in terms of addressing these root causes of psychic anguish. Drug addicts aren't lazy hedonists; they're just people who want relief from their demons. They deserve better options.

<comment><USER9> Why do people think pain is evil though?

Perhaps the pain doesn't need to go away. Perhaps it's there for a reason. Perhaps attitudes need to change. Perhaps embracing and examining pain (within reason) should be a more common reaction.

Just throwing out ideas. Slap 'em if you want to.

But I will note not every society has needed to use so many pain relievers.

<comment><USER8> I'm actually glad you posted this response, because it's a topic that needs to be addressed.

I recently watched a video of a Columbine survivor giving a TED talk about emotional pain and addiction, and he said something along the lines of: "If you want to heal it, you have to feel it." Basically this commonsense idea that the best way to heal from trauma is to face it.

It sounds right... but is it? The guy giving the talk had been addicted to opioids for 10 years before getting sober and confronting his emotional pain. The implication is that he could've saved himself 10 years of drug addiction if he had just confronted his pain after the shooting instead of medicating it. However, he doesn't seem to consider the possibility that he might've been _unable_ to process his pain immediately after the shooting, and that he was only able to overcome his trauma after a certain amount of distance (time- wise) from the incident.

So this is the question: is it _always_ the right move to confront one's emotional pain in full? Is there ever a circumstance where numbing pain via medication (at least temporarily) could lead to better outcomes?

I don't know the answers. I'd love to know if there have been scientific studies done on this issue... I actually asked this question on /r/AskScience a month or two ago but it didn't get much attention. Curious to see what the research says.

<comment><USER10> This is only partially relevant, but I know from personal experience that sometimes facing the pain is the wrong choice, at least in regards to anxiety attacks and CBT. It's simply not necessary at all and can be very counter- productive.

<comment><USER11> Yeah. Generalizing, naturally, but "exposure therapy" is an approach of getting people past phobias and trauma that involves lots of small steps in controlled environments, and it's not recommended in all cases or for all conditions.

I think it's also a bit simplistic when we frame avoidance solely as a product of being unwilling to face pain. In some cases (certain forms of PTSD), substance abuse is used to numb because you've exceeded your local tolerance for the pain you've been facing, or because the only thing you've been experiencing/facing _is_ pain and its exhausted your coping mechanisms. Learning at mid-life that you're no longer the person you knew, while also dealing with the traumatic source, compounds the process of processing the events.

Particularly when getting into how life altering traumas work, coping and accepting are processes that require different treatments/approaches at different times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm disappointed by the half measure in this proposal. Shulz and Aspe suggest possession for personal use should be decriminalized while drugs should remain illegal in large quantities. This leaves prohibition intact and supply remaining in the black market.

This proposal would give street users a break (a step in the right direction) but would leave the supply chain intact. Cartels would continue to destabilize regions of Mexico.

<comment><USER13> > possession for personal use should be decriminalized while drugs should > remain illegal in large quantities

Your objection is correct, a fundamental issue with "decriminalisation of personal use" is that it's still quite trivial for officers to charge "possession with intent to distribute" for people who don't make a business out of dealing drugs. Talking about giving drugs to a friend / having a scale (to measure your own doses) / whatever else -- the police still have plenty of ways to threaten people with hard time to get you to plea guilty to a lesser offence. Hell, people who share drugs have been prosecuted for _homicide_ after someone OD'd. It's still prohibition, just with better PR.

Such a state of affairs still cranks the iron law of prohibition ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition), the reason so many people die of fent overdoses), this still leads to police having legal authority to stop and search your car if they claim to smell weed, it still leads to people involved in the drug trade having no options for dispute-settlement outside of violence ([https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-war-on- drugs...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-war-on-drugs- creates-violence/2015/10/16/6de57a76-72b7-11e5-9cbb-790369643cf9_story.html)), it still leads to police focusing on the impossible task of ending the drug trade to the point of trashing the homicide clearance rate ([https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/02/why-are- americ...](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/02/why-are-american- cops-so-bad-at-catching-killers)).

<comment><USER14> Thanks for this comment. I wasn't aware of the iron law of prohibition but it makes a ton of sense. The higher the risk, the more you optimize your supply chain to minimize physical contraband in travel, which means optimizing for product value per weight.

<comment><USER13> The other effect is that drug prohibition can (and currently does) function as a _subsidy_ for violent transnational criminal organisations: the difficulty in transporting contraband inflates its price at the destination, and if Alice's drug-trafficking operation can obtain a competitive advantage over Bob's by killing Bob's personnel; she just might. Without the doorkickers of the DEA and friends, there'd be no hyperviolent drug lords.

Without prohibition, drug trafficking operations have to compete with fully licit container ships and will get annihilated; because the illicit drug trade's transport methods are optimised to evade detection and without that selection pressure, there's no point for all the violence and the concealment tactics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> its a rather poignant article considering California began legal recreational marijuana sales today. 7 other states have legalized marijuana for medical and recreational use as well.

throughout most of the 80s the policy was 'do as i say, not as i do' as far as I can tell. with the government simultaneously financing the contras and fueling a drug epidemic. in the 90s we saw 3 strikes and a nearly terminal myopic perspective that branded drug abuse victims the same as Hillary Clintons "superpredators" and other violent felons. Today the US has become the nation with the greatest number of citizens incarcerated, thanks in part to this endless drug war. Conversely, the opioid crisis in the US has been recognized but almost no convictions of drug executives have taken place for their role in fueling it. It feels similar to the housing crisis.

Its also difficult to see the drug war as anything but a proxy for placating voter bases after the 1964 Civil Rights amendment. Michelle Alexanders 'the new jim crow' goes into detail regarding this.

I hope 2018 continues the sobering trend of abolishing mandatory minimums and decriminalizing marijuana, a recreational narcotic less dangerous than Alcohol yet one which has managed to become more regulated than methamphetamine.

<comment><USER16> _"You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."_

John Erlichman, via Dam Baum

<comment><USER17> This was a part of the Nixon southern strategy, Lee Atwater discussed it with some detail. [https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters- inf...](https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters- infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/)

And in my view the current Attorney General is carrying out the same old ideas and policy effects, which is why he's so neurotically anti-weed, conflating it at every turn with opioid addiction.

<comment><USER18> > And in my view the current Attorney General is carrying out the same old > ideas and policy effects, which is why he's so neurotically anti-weed, > conflating it at every turn with opioid addiction

Sessions has made statements in line with that description, but as yet they don't seem to have manifested in substantive DoJ action.

Of course, part of it may be that while posturing is supported by the administration, a major new FBI law enforcement initiative would be incompatible with the Administration's propaganda war on the FBI, making it hard for it to get the green light.

<comment><USER17> They can't manifest into substantive action, Rohrabacher-Farr prohibits it. That's why Sessions keeps harassing Congress to withdraw the prohibition, so he can use DoJ funds to prosecute both recreational and medical marijuana possession, distribution, production.

<comment><USER18> > They can't manifest into substantive action, Rohrabacher-Farr prohibits it.

Rohrabacher-Farr only applies on its face to state _medical_ cannabis laws, and in any case Trump's signing statement on the spending bill containing the first renewal during his administration implied that the administration views the provision as unconstitutional. So, there's certainly action that the DoJ could take consistent with the administration rhetoric, from a couple different angles. It would hardly be the only example of this administration aggressively probing the limits of its power until and unless explicitly constrained by the courts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The thing about the "War on Drugs" is it has never been a real war, more a minor skirmish fought with the equivalent of paintball guns.

Not that I am suggesting any of these are good ideas (sometimes the cure is worse than the disease), but if you really wanted to go to war on drugs and win you could do any of the following:

1\. Spike the drug supply with a slow acting poison. Lots of poisons to choose from to make this work.

2\. Conduct continuous drug testing of the entire population (say once a week) with harsh penalties for failing.

3\. Apply a mandatory death penalty for any drug use (especially if combined with 2).

4\. Immunise the population to induce anaphylaxis if drugs are consumed (this one is technically possible, but it would need further research).

I am not advocating for any of these (far from it), just pointing out that it is meaningless to say you have failed at something that has never been tried.

Edit. Rather than clicking the inverted arrow, how about engaging in a discussion.

<comment><USER20> This is a very interesting comment. I had not considered this perspective before and I haven't really heard anyone else use this line of thinking before either - so I appreciate what you wrote.

But if you look at a bit of the historical context of the war on drugs, you see that a significant part of it was originally racially motivated. Having a pseudo-war instead of a real war gave the people in control more leverage to selectively target the consequences of banning certain substances like Marijuana or Cocaine.

<comment><USER19> Yes the "war on drugs" has been a sideshow of the forever war on the underclass.

<comment><USER20> Ugh, I wish that weren't the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At this point articles like this are stale. They don't convince anyone not already convinced, and are really just echo chambers. The thing is, making posts and articles isn't going to change a damn thing, there's such a disconnect between the people in power and your average person that it's hard to see how any real change will come about from writing, airing your criticisms and petitioning. Especially since 21st century activism seems to be more focused on retweets than praxis, which ultimately means that unless people take to the streets and force change, all that's ever going to happen is more articles and more silence from the top.

Do something if you believe in change.

<comment><USER22> These articles really do change the conversation in Washington, when the byline is someone like George Schultz. We don't expect to hear this sort of thing from a member of the Nixon and Reagan administrations. In fact, it's not common to hear it from the Clinton and Obama administrations. But if it were from a Green or a Libertarian, it wouldn't reach the NYT op-ed page because it'd be uninteresting, and nobody in Washington would talk about it.

<comment><USER23> So you're saying the NYT, in all it's democracy-loving care and self- importance, can't (or editorially won't) push this issue on it's own, for instance by hammering the point home with continued, determined, journalistic reporting of actual events that the War on Drugs foments, because it's not "fit to print", or not "fit to sway Washington D.C."?

But when some washed up D.C. insider millenials never heard of finally wants to admit what we all know, they run the article, as an opinion piece.

But the nation can't focus on fixing the problem b/c of all the celebrity "news" and other garbage they did print in place of dogged coverage of decades-spanning, life-taking, community ruining, racist practices led by the federal government...

That's exactly why we don't read the NYT. It's part of the oligarchy.

<comment><USER24> The parent poster already explained why this position would be seen as run-of- the-mill and ineffectual if comes from the NYT's editorial voice.

The NYT choosing to run this is exactly what you want them to do, using their position to push this issue by choosing to run this Op-Ed. Yes, It's a bland position only catching up to the status quo of many statehouses, but what's significant is the byline.

In this case, The Times is showing Shutlz and Aspe approve of the steps taken in states to an audience that's not ready to make any baby steps at a federal level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Something what is almost never told in this discussion about drugs in the US is the root cause of drug use and it's epdemics is simply this: Live for a lot of people in the US is shitty, that is why they use drugs. The circomstances that cause these shitty lives is of course debatable but never addressed by the rulers of the US.

<comment><USER26> What about all the people in other countries that use drugs?

What about all the people throughout history that have used drugs over at least tens of thousands of years before the US was around?

<comment><USER27> Of course it doesn't stop all drug use and abuse. I simply enjoy some like folks would enjoy alcohol. But surely you can understand that having a shitty life makes drugs look more appealing.

For example, if you can't get proper time off work to heal an injury - <USER2> really is an indicator of a shitty life - you go to pain meds to get through. Or maybe your doctor said you couldn't keep working your current job, but you don't qualify for disability or any assistance to find or train for a different one. So you take pain meds in between. Keep doing this and you might find an addiction. Sure, it is better to go to a therapist to get over trauma, but that's more expensive than weed or vodka in the short term - plus either drug is more immediate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The war on drugs was a highly successful campaign to entrench racism so deep in the American psyche that you will never be rid of it.

The "War on Drugs" was never about drugs.

<comment> aaron-lebo Race plays a huge part, but absolute statements like this are not true. You're underestimating just how strong views against drug abuse of any kind are in this country due to religion or whatever.

The prohibitionist movement had a strong female component and the argument was based around various forms of domestic abuse that were related to workmen being drunk all day. This had overlap with the abolitionist movement. It was not racist in its origin and it was the strongest legal "war on drugs" we ever had.

[https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/abolition- wome...](https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/abolition-womens- rights-and-temperance-movements.htm)

<comment><USER29> The War on Drugs and the Prohibition are two very separate things. While what you say is true about the Prohibition bringing disparate groups together (Church groups, women's' groups, big tobacco), the War on Drugs was an inherently racist tool invented by the Nixon administration to target hippies and blacks.

[http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman- richa...](http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard- nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html)

<comment><USER30> Yeah, except that Nixon just gave it that name. Drug prohibition in the US started when Nixon was learning to walk.

This "drug prohibition is about racism" is all _post hoc ergo propter hoc_ stuff.

<comment><USER28> The War on Drugs is a specific program of racist vilification. I did not make any claim about prohibition.

<comment><USER30> No it wasn't. The War on Drugs was an attempt to take disparate anti-drug efforts and combine them into a more coherent whole. It was no different from the War on Poverty.

Were there people attempting to use drug policy to attack other people they didn't like? I've no doubt. But that wasn't the purpose of the War on Drugs and it would never have come into existence if it were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It would be good if we reflect on why people take drugs. Maybe US need more holidays so people will feel happier. If people are happy they will probably consume less drugs.

In my view drugs are a way to escape pain.

Maybe smart phones are making people isolated from each other? We used to watch movies with friends now we watch personal streams. People not feeling a belonging are seeking escape in substances?

<comment><USER32> You're focusing on the mental/psychological reasons someone pursues drugs over more mundane things like literal, physical pain relief.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It seems like future may locate the point where America began it's decline with Nixon's war on drugs (though that definitely first of America's wars on substances).

<comment><USER34> It definitely triggered very negative developments like mass incarceration.

<comment><USER29> What's worse, mass incarceration has become the status quo with the American public. Writing new laws and jail seems to be the standard response for every problem in America. This is evident in the current opioid epidemic, where politicians just write up new laws and hope to just legislate the problem away, instead of examining the root cause and legalizing alternative medicines or funding treatment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> In my opinion it's best to legalize drugs to the point where people are educated about it's use. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvRQKXtIGcK1yEnQ4Te8hWQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvRQKXtIGcK1yEnQ4Te8hWQ)

And when they feel they need help getting off the drugs they can go to any clinic or government point to help them get clean and back on their feet. This has proven quite successful in any country that has done this so far.

</comment><comment><USER36> I would ask myself what the cash liberated from the war on drugs could be more usefully applied to, except I suspect it wouldn't get spent on health, mental or otherwise, or on short-circuiting or avoiding paths to jail in the justice system. A shame, because both relate strongly to side effects or direct outcomes of .. the war on drugs.

</comment><comment><USER5> >The high black-market price for illegal drugs has generated huge profits for the groups that produce and sell them, income that is invested in buying state-of-the-art weapons, hiring gangs to defend their trade, paying off public officials and making drugs easily available to children, to get them addicted.

Drugs are cheaper now than they every have been. I'd argue it's the lack of regulated competition, leading to a handful of cartels that take the lion's share of the market (and money) that gives them such power.

[https://www.alternet.org/drugs/price-illegal-drugs- dropping-...](https://www.alternet.org/drugs/price-illegal-drugs-dropping- purity-increasing-and-global-war-drugs-failing)

<comment><USER37> It's not that the competition is unregulated really. It's more that to enter the market as a supplier you need the resources to fight the government's involved and the other cartels which will happily just murder you instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Drugs" is not a belligerent.

So who is this war "on"?

Distributors? Users? Creators?

Even these are vague groupings.

How can you fight a war if you can't even specify who the enemy is?

The short answer: You can't.

We have the same issue with "Terror".

</comment><comment><USER39> From a memetic/selection perspective, the war has been phenomenally successful in perpetuating its own existence.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Not prone to ill, nor strange to foreign guest, They eat, they drink, and nature gives the feast The trees around them all their food produce: Lotus the name: divine, nectareous juice! (Thence call'd Lo'ophagi); which whose tastes, Insatiate riots in the sweet repasts, Nor other home, nor other care intends, But quits his house, his country, and his friends. The three we sent, from off the enchanting ground We dragg'd reluctant, and by force we bound. The rest in haste forsook the pleasing shore, Or, the charm tasted, had return'd no more. Now placed in order on their banks, they sweep The sea's smooth face, and cleave the hoary deep: With heavy hearts we labour through the tide, To coasts unknown, and oceans yet untried."

Life's a journey. More should face it sober.

</comment><comment><USER41> > What, then, can we do? .... Only then can we engage in rigorous and > countrywide education campaigns to persuade people not to use drugs.... We > still have time to persuade our young people not to ruin their lives.

Yeah you should've persuaded Steve Jobs not to use drugs and especially LSD. Then you could also invent iPhone yourself</comment>


Secret Backdoor in Some U.S. Phones Sent Data to China, Analysts Say - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/us/politics/china-phones-software-security.html <comment><USER2> You cannot have privacy and security without free/libre software. While such doesn't doesn't guarantee privacy or security, operating systems that make an effort to build the system entirely from source without any proprietary components are much less likely to have a problem like this slip through the cracks of a large, active development community.

Unfortunately, currently the only Android operating system to do this is Replicant, which has terrible hardware support and---due to the sorry state of affairs for mobile---lacks many features requiring proprietary drivers. Cyanogenmod stops short, but would still make situations like this much more difficult.

Even if you don't subscribe to the principles of software freedom, please consider helping out the Replicant project if you know enough about the operating system. I use a Replicant device (S3) and I'd love to see others working to get version 6 out:

[http://blog.replicant.us/2016/08/replicant-6-early-work- upst...](http://blog.replicant.us/2016/08/replicant-6-early-work-upstream- work-and-f-droid-issue/)

We also need reproducible builds of the operating system and its software--- again, something that cannot be done without a fully free/libre OS.

Despite increased surveillance on such a vulnerable and enticing target, this doesn't get enough emphasis.

<comment><USER3> That's the old open source argument.

And while many things could most certainly be discovered by extensive, costly audits, that someone has to pay for...

OS code bases are huge.

How difficult would it be to hide functionality like this in some obscure code that's camouflaged as something else?

How hard would it be to automatically install an app that does this after first boot, disguised as some self updating or analytics feature?

Not very, I think.

If someone puts an Android fork online, who has the time to go through the changes to discover something like this?

Also, such features could even easily be placed on a tiny, dedicated chip inside the phone, completely apart from the OS.

If you don't build the hardware yourself, component by component (assuming that the components themselves are trustworthy), and audit every single LOC in the OS, something can always slip by.

<comment><USER4> The source code is not the only condition for security. However it drastically decreases the threshold for the audits. People can even make a crowdfunding campaign and pay to professionals like it was done with TrueCrypt.

But even without such a campaign, evil developers would be in a constant danger that someone may discover a backdoor. It is a very unstable situation: just one person is enough to make a lot of noise, and everyone could be this person. And yes, people do read the sources:

[https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/who-actually-reads- the-c...](https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/who-actually-reads-the-code)

It's all about defense in depth:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%29)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a chinese Android phone. Instead of connecting it to the Internet I connected it to my computer over bluetooth and started monitoring the traffic it tried to send. There were attempts to connect to Google servers and chinese manufacturer's servers. The data sent to China was supposed to contain sensitive information like phone number or SIM card identifier.

It also has an auto-update (read: backdoor) feature that cannot be disabled.

I ended up making a linux-based whitelist firewall to access the Internet but it is pretty inconvinient because I have to manually enable every new host. And I can use it only at home.

As a consumer I am very disappointed and feel being deceived by Google. I know about "you are the product" saying but the smartphone is not free. I bought an expensive (two hundred dollars!) device and I had to spend a lot of my time to be able to control its activity. And of course the advertisement never mentioned that a smartphone is going to spy on me.

We need a law against this.

<comment><USER6> Where did you buy that phone from and what brand was it?

I was under the impression that US does not allow selling of Android phones from most Chinese brands due to the reasons you mentioned, and for those that all allowed, they have strict vetting procedures to prevent phones with such capabilities from reaching the US market?

<comment><USER5> The manufacturer's name is Shenzhen Huafurui Technology if it tells you anything. The brand name is Cubot. I do not live in US but one can buy such kind of phone on Amazon (if you search manufacturer's name there you can find it is even cheaper now).

It is good to hear that in some countries importing such phones is not allowed.

<comment><USER6> Sorry to hear your experience. Next time you'd be better off buying from a more established brand if you going to buy a phone of Chinese brand. Chances are, if they are officially selling outside China, they would have met some the requirements from the respective countries. I know Europe and US has strict privacy laws and that's why you can't buy such phones through official channels.

<comment><USER7> Unless you've purchased phones from all the "more established" brands and verified whether they're sending data, this is hardly sound advice.

"More established" brands have a history of leaving secret backdoors and phoning home just the same as the Chinese devices.

One was discovered in a range of Samsung devices just a couple years ago. Lenovo, same story, spyware and garbage hidden deep within their gadgets.

The only solution is to take a chance, buy a device, test it. If it's backdoored, return it if you can, and call them out on HN/Amazon reviews, etc.

<comment><USER6> That seems rather pessimistic. If you really don't trust any brands, what's wrong with directly buying from the tech companies instead of the manufacturers? Like Google Nexus (Pixel), Microsoft Windows Phone and iPhone. They are supposed to the industrial standards for how to do privacy correctly.

<comment><USER8> When a simple Google search reveals the exact pattern mentioned occurring again and again, not just with phones but with networking gear, laptops, TV's, IoT devices, CDs (Sony rootkit anyone?), and websites loaded to the max with trackers and secret downloads onto people's machines, it moves from pessimism to "this is just how it works."

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. You want crap free gadgets, make them sell crap free gadgets by ratting them out when they sell gadgets loaded with crap.

<comment><USER6> I am okay with the skepticism you have here but is there really a reason to create two throwaway accounts just to reply to me?

Do you happen to know me in real life? I can't think of another reason for this.

<comment><USER9> No one should have to justify wanting to remain private/anonymous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Elephant in the room is of course the amount of data that is sent to the u.s. from phones in the rest of the world. Hardly a surprise that China is getting in on the action too.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. When an address book is sent to every company that makes an app it's business!

When the same is sent to China, it's outrage?

Ditto with auto-updates.

I'd be glad if I could control much more of my data exposure. But business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone regularly audit devices and apps with something similar to a web proxy, to see where they talk to during the course of normal usage? This seems like a decent low-hanging fruit (well, relatively speaking).

I also remember there used to be application firewalls in windows that kept track of the connections that each application made and if any of them contacted a new server, they'd ask you for permission. I don't think most folks used them because in the end they kept asking a lot of questions that the users didn't necessarily know how to answer, but I wonder if it wasn't such a bad idea after all, and whether the "default" choice could be mined from other users' settings.

<comment> nommm-nommm Yes, they do. You can use Fiddler or similar as a web proxy for mobile apps. Stuff has been found like this - [https://www.troyhunt.com/controlling- vehicle-features-of-nis...](https://www.troyhunt.com/controlling-vehicle- features-of-nissan/) and I recall there's been several more but I can't recall the details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We can do better. Auditable open source and reproducible builds are security and privacy differentiators. They make shenanigans like these more difficult to pull off and easier to investigate.

<comment><USER14> Hardware and firmware are still usually closed though.

<comment><USER15> You need to start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> H guys, I'm one of the researchers with kryptowire if you have any questions

<comment><USER17> Hey duked. I just returned from Hong Kong (on vacation) and used two BLU Advance 5.0 phones as burners for use while in-country. I take precautions whenever I travel overseas.

I've got two phones here that were used during my trip there. I was wondering if you had any tips for figuring out of they were compromised or otherwise owned while I was out there.

<comment><USER16> Hi, our findings are specific to the BLU R1HD. What you can do is have man in the middle proxy for your device and look at the traffic. Funny enough we actually bought the R1HD for the same reason as you... We had a conference in Taiwan and wanted a burner and BLU looked awesome for the price ;)

<comment><USER17> That was my thinking as well.

I do INFOSEC for a living and needed to make sure I wasn't bringing back any compromised devices when I returned. So far, the two phones have remained powered down while I come up with a plan to examine them.

It would be interesting to see if they are loaded with malware out of the box or if there is something going on when they are used in country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slightly off topic: but doesn't backdoor mean that there's a particular party that has control over the backdoored software? Here it sounds like the device is calling home... or is that sufficient to be called backdoor?

<comment><USER19> Yeah, backdoor usually means that the device accepts credentials from a third party, and not sending them reports.

I suppose you could interpret this "backdoor" as third-party access to the data, rather than to the device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I used to analyze mobile malware and the line of what was OK and what wasn't really came down to how big the company was. If it was an unknown firm set up as analytics / advertising, it was fine to block. If it was a mega analytics / advertising it was not malware because it was a massive company.

</comment><comment><USER21> Funny how this follows right after this: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/14/china- threaten...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/14/china-threatens-to- cut-sales-of-iphones-and-us-cars-if-naive-trump-pursues-trade-war)

</comment><comment><USER22> >Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages. The American authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence.

We can tell the same about Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Uber, Microsoft, Visa, AmericanExpress...

<comment><USER23> Consent. The big difference is consent.

<comment><USER24> Do not use the Internet. Do not use phones. Do not use bank accounts. Do not travel by plane. Do not enter public spaces. Do not show your face.

Otherwise you accept our Terms of Service.

Thank you for trusting us.

(Is it just me or is it actually very hard to figure out whom I've given consent to do something with something that is mine?)

<comment> wu-ikkyu >(Is it just me or is it actually very hard to figure out whom I've given consent to do something with something that is mine?)

Reading and understanding EULAs for every tool you use is a full time job that requires a law degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If we don't really object to sharing our data with a wide range of u.s. companies, why would we care if it is shared with China or anyone else also?

<comment><USER25> Chinese companies are harder to monitor and learn about. More importantly, they are not bound by and/or are unlikely to follow any data privacy laws.

<comment><USER26> On the other hand, American companies don't seem to be bound by the laws that we think they are either.

As example, I'll submit PRISM (while admitting that we're still not 100% clear on that) and the retroactive immunity provided to telecom companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Question for HN: I'm in the market for a new Android phone. If I want to avoid this sort of thing, are there manufacturers I should steer clear of?

<comment><USER28> > I'm in the market for a new Android phone.

Find a phone which has a large community around it, and lots of custom ROMs available. An official Cyanogenmod release is a good sign. It's also a sign that your phone will have a longer usable life than whatever the manufacturer promises you now.

Custom ROMs have a long history of extending the life of phones. For example the HTC G1 was abandoned by Google at Donut (1.6) but unofficially received up to Gingerbread (2.3). It's a bit of a perverse example, but hopefully enough to make the point. Phones with good community support receive current versions of Android long after both Google and the manufacturer have stopped giving a shit.

To the people who say "you can't trust a random stranger on the internet making a custom ROM to be any more secure than the manufacturer ROM" you're right. If someone wanted to make a custom ROM with malware in it, there's a pretty good chance it may not be noticed.

If your threat model includes a three letter agency, then don't use Android. Full stop. The iPhone is the ecosystem you want.

I recommend to all my friends and family to buy phones with good community support just to receive updates to ROMs like Cyanogen. The first thing I do when they say they're considering "Phone XYZ" is to look on XDA Developers[0] to gauge the level of community around the model. If it looks dead (e.g. look up any tablet based on the NVidia Tegra for what not to buy [1]) then I recommend they keep looking.

I've had really good luck with Chinese phones which are also sold in markets like South East Asia and India. There are millions of users of these phones, so the custom ROM community is quite strong. The hardware is also quite cheap, I have a Xiaomi Redmi 2 I bought last year for $125 USD including shipping, and it runs Android 7 thanks to community developers [2].

[0] [http://forum.xda-developers.com](http://forum.xda-developers.com)

[1] [http://forum.xda-developers.com/mi-pad](http://forum.xda- developers.com/mi-pad)

[2] [http://forum.xda-developers.com/redmi-2](http://forum.xda- developers.com/redmi-2)

<comment><USER29> I spent a day battling with getting a custom ROM on my Redmi 3 and gave up. In case anyone reads this: Xioami make amazing phones for the price. This $120 USD phone outperforms my S3. But getting a custom ROM on a Xioami is getting increasingly difficult - you have to ask for permission, jump through hoops to unlock the phone and sometimes it just does not work. Xioami is the Apple of China - great UI but increasingly closed ecosystem. Their OS is called MIUI, which is basically Android with more customization options (necessary for the markets they serve). It is a great phone and OS, but it is more complex than just flashing CyanogenMod (unfortunately).

<comment><USER30> This does not blanket apply to all Xiaomi devices. There are official builds of CM available for the Mi3, Mi4, Redmi Note 3, and a fully open source unofficial build for the Mi4C and Mi4S.

Unlocking their bootloader can be done officially through a request, or unofficially. Changing the recovery by replacing a single file in the EDL and retaining bootloader lock is also possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is why some users are going real paranoid. So somebody decided that their first and only Android device will not have access to the Internet. Instead, it's sole role is to function as a camera.

linuxbsdos.com/2016/11/05/the-samsung-android-tablet-that-will-never-access- the-internet/

</comment><comment><USER32> From the article: _" A Google official said the company had told Adups to remove the surveillance ability from phones that run services like the Google Play store."_

Google hates it when a program phones home to someplace other than Google.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Ms. Lim said the software was intended to help the Chinese client identify > junk text messages and calls. She did not identify the company that > requested it and said she did not know how many phones were affected. She > said phone companies, not Adups, were responsible for disclosing privacy > policies to users. "Adups was just there to provide functionality that the > phone distributor asked for," she said.

This whole article is a lot less racist if this paragraph is put on top. You know because every app made by some of the 1.3B people must be a government effort to collect intelligence.

The app is bad because it does the function without consent, not because it's made by Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER34> If it's only sms then that's not that bad. Are the SoC setup in a way to make crypto practically impossible on these ?

</comment><comment><USER35> Didnt we all knew this would happen eventually?

</comment><comment><USER36> Easy to avoid: just buy a phone that was built in your country.. oh, wait...

</comment><comment><USER37> Por isso uso pombo correio

</comment><comment><USER38> This can also be read outside the states as follows:

For about $50, you can get a smartphone with a high-definition display, fast data service and, according to security contractors, a secret feature: a backdoor that sends all your text messages to _the USA_ every _few seconds_.

Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages. The authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a government effort to collect intelligence.

[EDIT: Fixed formatting]

<comment><USER39> Well, actually, the US has backdoored the entire Internet :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Huawei routers used in Indian govt offices were found to be sending data to China. They were banned after the discovery. Wont be surprised if cellular components that are made in China send back data quietly.

<comment><USER4> People at HN would appreciate the corresponding links...

<comment><USER41> [https://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/...](https://intelligence.house.gov/sites/intelligence.house.gov/files/documents/Huawei- ZTE%20Investigative%20Report%20\(FINAL\).pdf)

<comment><USER40> Yo thanks fam!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What's the big deal? Google does this on a much bigger scale and of course shares its data with the US government when asked. Why is it suddenly scary when a Chinese company does the same?

<comment><USER43> That's cute. You make it sound as if Apple doesn't share your data with the US government when asked. Oh, look what do we have here:

>In one of the leaked emails sent by Apple Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Vice President Lisa Jackson to Podesta, the Apple team clearly stated that the current methods of encryption in place allows the firm to essentially send an unlimited amount of personal and sensitive user data to law enforcement.

>Jackson further emphasized that Apple already has a 24-hour live team established for the sole purpose of handling law enforcement and government requests. "Thousands of times every month, we give governments information about Apple customers and devices, in response to warrants and other forms of legal process," Jackson stated. "We have a team that responds to those requests 24 hours a day. Strong encryption does not eliminate Apple's ability to give law enforcement meta-data or any of a number of other very useful categories of data."

You have to love that 24 hour live team whose sole purpose is to provide customer data to law enforcement and government people.

<comment><USER42> That's not at all what I meant, but whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Pah, nothing to hide, nothing to fear, what's the big deal eh?

I do hope Eric Schmidt and Trent Lott have been using one of these phones/devices.

<comment><USER45> And Zuckerberg

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wish we could have disposable phones in Germany...

</comment><comment><USER47> This is just a Chinese hoax to scare us like that global warming bullshit.... right... am I right...??? .... /cry</comment>


Search Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/124162066737/search-architecture

<comment><USER2> That reads a lot like the architecture that FB came up with for Graph Search as well, essentially creating queries which are s-expressions for edges and then solving the graph for a given start node (things like 'user:me' but can also be 'user:foo' or 'image:bar')

That is a really great system when your documents are reasonably simple and nominally identical (pictures, comments) and the ranking signals are all organic (liked, followed, tagged, etc).

It gets a bit more interesting when you try to infer content of the images. If you do the image interpretation like Google does or Alchemy Vision[1] then you get a document that itself has semantics in addition to the metadata. So 'find all the cats' is now a corpus wide search of several billion images which do not have a graph relationship but may have been tagged 'cat'. Clearly its a bit easier if you constrain it with 'cats in pictures from people I follow' but that doesn't help a whole lot if you're liberal with your follow button :-). You can build something like the Mustang architecture paper that Google wrote or something like the combinator based inverted graph stuff that we did at Blekko, or I'm sure there are other ways to skin that particular cat.

I'm always interested in reading about this stuff for that reason. So many interesting problems in computer science live in a forest of acyclic graphs.

[1] disclaimer, IBM acquired both Blekko and AlchemyAPI. See [http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/alchemyvision](http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/alchemyvision)</comment>


Ban 'killer robots,' rights group urges  - <AUTHOR> http://www.france24.com/en/20121119-ban-killer-robots-rights-group-urges

<comment><USER2> I like this idea a lot. Not just because robots could go berserk, especially more intelligent robots in the future, but perhaps most importantly because no one could be responsible of what the robot is doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> The "plausible deniability" would seem significant, so that is an interesting angle</comment></comment>


(1) I don't like this button on face book - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/Idontlikethat?skip_nax_wizard=true&__adt=2 <comment><USER2> It's not going to happen...</comment>


Flavorize.com Looking For $1 Million To Build "Pandora For Food" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/25/flavorize-seeks-funding/

<comment><USER2> So it offers unlimited free food, but only in the US. You can't choose specifically what you want to eat, but it does a great job of guessing foodstuffs that you might like. And you can't eat the same thing twice due to licensing restrictions.</comment>