GitHub buries 21 TB open-source code in Arctic vault for 1k years - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2020-07-16-github-archive-program-the-journey-of-the-worlds-open-source-code-to-the-arctic/ <comment><USER2> Github's site for this has much more detail on the technical aspects of this: [https://archiveprogram.github.com/](https://archiveprogram.github.com/). Their data archival goals are even more ambitious than burying it in the Arctic. _The GitHub Archive Program is partnering with Microsoft's Project Silica to ultimately archive all active public repositories for over 10,000 years, by writing them into quartz glass platters using a femtosecond laser._

Worth considering swapping the submitted link out for the original source, per the HN guidelines. I would suggest the original blog post: [https://github.blog/2020-07-16-github-archive-program-the- jo...](https://github.blog/2020-07-16-github-archive-program-the-journey-of- the-worlds-open-source-code-to-the-arctic/).

<comment><AUTHOR> how does one swap the link in HN? one can only edit the title text.

<comment> jagged-chisel Admins (dang, for example) will occasionally notice a request like this and make the change.

<comment><AUTHOR> great. thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> orbital-decay This is a bit more than a simple PR move as I initially thought after reading the article submitted in OP. They take steps to ensure redundancy, recoverability, durability, and much more. They work with the experts who know the problem by heart.

Still, the main question remains. Computer programs are extremely volatile by nature, they are written for the constantly changing media, and need huge amounts of context to be useful for future generations. Will a snapshot of the Linux kernel be useful in 100 years? 1000 years? After some global disaster? Even if you don't intend to run it (which requires archiving the current state of the supported platforms and much more), how much additional work will be needed to simply read it for studying?

 _> After the Challenger disaster, a hunt for the blueprints of the abandoned Saturn V rocket ensued. They were largely recovered, thanks to the work of archivists._

Yet nobody can build another Saturn V today with these blueprints. Any complex product is much more than just a set of blueprints. It's an organized process that depends on a certain team of people, supply chain, existing infrastructure, and much much more. Useful products only exist when they are supported.

<comment><USER3> idk about you but if I were a hyper-advanced singularity hive mind entity from the year 12,020, I'd get a huge kick out of scrolling through some archive of those adorable entry-level not-even-sapient programs our ancestors wrote in antiquity.

<comment><USER4> I bet in 12,020, we'll still be waiting for Ruby 3.

<comment><USER5> Don't know what features you're looking for, but the roadmap in their issue tracker says it is due in about 5 months. [https://bugs.ruby- lang.org/projects/ruby-master/roadmap#3.0](https://bugs.ruby- lang.org/projects/ruby-master/roadmap#3.0)

<comment><USER4> Mostly joking. It's just been in the works for a while now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What happens if someone file a DMCA takedown of one of the repositories in the vault?

<comment><USER7> The polar bears will keep the lawyers away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Somewhat unrelated but I've always had this concept of documenting everyday life down to the most mundane of details (by today's standards).

Archived for a few hundred years that could be pretty interesting for future historians.

Even with how digitized everything is, there is definitely a lot of things that are undocumented (at least consistently in one place) or left out as too obvious.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. Far too often in history books/podcasts/shows you see guesses as to what normal life was like, but they're just guesses. Because no one bothered writing down exactly what the average Roman went to war wearing or how they lined up or what their tactics were, because the contemporary audience already knew. It would be considered boring and too much information. But 2000 years later, we're still guessing what the Gallic Wars looked like, sounded like, smelled like. Because it wasn't important enough to write down.

We still have some of these same issues today, but given the rate of change in technology, we're talking years instead of centuries or millennia. What was the average life like for a startup employee during the Dotcom era (1995-2001)? I have no idea because I was too young to experience it and I've never been able to find any books or accounts of the average daily work life even 20 years ago.

<comment><USER10> _Far too often in history books /podcasts/shows you see guesses as to what normal life was like_

The problem is that history books/podcasts/shows are not intended to reveal that level of granularity about life. They exist to provide a summary within a specific set of boundaries (printed pages, run time, etc...).

If you want to know the nitty-gritty, you need to start with the source material. There's more source material on daily life available in the world's museums and university archives than you could ever digest in a lifetime. That's why it's summarized in the above-mentioned forms.

<comment><USER9> Not true at all. Listen to History of Rome and you'll hear historian Mike Duncan constantly saying "we don't know how this happened because no one ever wrote it down". Dan Carlin says the same thing a lot in Hardcore History. If was just a matter of too much details they would have said "this detail doesn't matter" or just bypassed it.

It's not that the medium isn't granular enough, it's legitimately that no one wrote this stuff down so it's just gone forever. There is no source material to start with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This archive contains JHipster and openapi, but I'm failing to understand one thing. Does it also contains OS, dependencies, compilers, linkers etc? What's a point of just storing the jhipster without its node and maven dependencies? Why store the code you won't be able to compile and execute?

<comment><USER12> > _Why store the code you won 't be able to compile and execute?_

The code itself is a manifestation of human creative expression and part of our cultural heritage even without executing it.

> _Does it also contains OS, dependencies, compilers, linkers etc?_

If they are free/open-source software (in this specific case on GitHub), then yes. See also their partner [https://www.softwareheritage.org/mission/](https://www.softwareheritage.org/mission/) which archives more than just GitHub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did they include all dependencies?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a "snapshot". In python one has to import a module during run time but for example, in matlab code, the modules and their classes/functions should already exists within the snapshot directories as submodules. I am not sure about other languages how this works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is the guide to read the data: [https://github.com/github/archive- program/blob/master/GUIDE....](https://github.com/github/archive- program/blob/master/GUIDE.md)

You need to know how tar, lzma, utf-8 and git work. Judging by how hard it is to decipher ancient texts, I'd be surprised if anybody was able to read code without additional information on these subjects. Especially storing the binary git repo as-is will make it very hard.

</comment><comment><USER15> Here's the original article: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-13/microsoft...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-13/microsoft- apocalypse-proofs-open-source-code-in-an-arctic-cave)

One of the fascinating parts of this, to me, was this whole thing was about permanence... and at the same time, Nat's home burnt down.

</comment><comment><USER16> Whole of GitHub is only 21tb? Wild.

I now have permanent, inaccessible backup of my code. Also wild.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, that's kind of a rub. What if I don't want to be remembered in the future?

This sort of seems cynical on Google's part. The right to be forgotten has just been irreversibly denied to some of us.

I know for a fact that a recently deceased friend wanted his repo's nuked. I wonder if this is going to be taken into account somehow. One can assume that laser can be used to burn nulls where needed, too ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would love to know what kind of plastic film medium they tested and used to make sure it wouldn't delaminate/deplasticize/etc over 1000 years...

<comment><USER19> The testing done for the ISO standard seems to be based on irradiation(1). Seems fairly straight forward although I'm not sure it's tested for all kinds of radiation etc., but with a specific temperature and light it looks like very few other things would matter.

(1) [https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jpol/2016/8547524/](https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jpol/2016/8547524/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting to think about this alongside Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay's paper "The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015" (2015)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11510649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11510649)

[http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER21> Sounds like a great project.

I hope in the year 3020 they have invented the advanced technology that allows a company like Github to sort their repositories by name.

</comment><comment><USER22> You can actually see if the code you contributed made it there. I have an "Arctic Code Vault Contributor" badge in my profile now.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hope there'll be plentiful decent microfilm readers in the future post- civilizational collapse

<comment><USER24> The technlogy to read microfilm is relatively primitive (I mean you still require lenses and a bright light source but you don't require a computer or advanced electronics).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Ha! Microsoft will embrace open-source when hell freezes over"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would future generations be able to run this code on future hardware or future development softwares or programming languages? That would be a challenging test of backward compatibility.

<comment><USER26> We emulate a lot of old hardware today, so the future can hopefully do so too. The future might however be astonished over just how many web-frameworks were "needed"

<comment><USER27> By then they'll wonder how we did anything useful online in under 8 petabytes, given their state of affairs now involves all sites registered within the multiverse-DNS to include mandated state surveillance payloads.

And because ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Taking cold storage to another level.

Short video about the project:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzI9FNjXQ0o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzI9FNjXQ0o)

</comment><comment><USER29> Vikings bury axes in Arctic ice for 1k years

<comment><USER30> Apes bury coconuts in arctic ice for 1k years

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> For good order they should have archived npmjs, NuGet, and popular SDKs as well.

My source code is worthless without it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Please don't store my garbage code from my teens for 1000 years.

</comment><comment><USER33> _node_modules should keep ice together

_ what about water chips?

</comment><comment><USER34> Why not 2,000 years?

</comment><comment><USER35> How do I create a mirror of Github?

<comment><USER36> You can't, unless your question is "how do I mirror a github repo?"

I'm currently indexing thousands of GitHub repos for analytics reasons, and if you don't play nice (fetch infrequently), GitHub will throttle/terminate your connection.

<comment><USER21> GitHub isn't the first company to do this.

You just need to use one of the many scraping proxy services which will give you a HTTP proxy that cycles through millions of IP addresses. It's impossible to block since they are largely residential IPs controlled by malware.

It definitely works but you are encouraging them which isn't a nice feeling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> waste of time

</comment><comment><USER38> So something on the order of 1000 js front end frameworks from now.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know if they archived gitlab code as well? Edit: It wasn't because Github and Gitlab have different management.

<comment><USER39> The archive doesn't include code from Gitlab as GitHub and Gitlab both are different entity managed by different group of people!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you publish the same project in a different language on GitHub - <AUTHOR> Often I like to recreate a program or project using a different language. I mostly use GitHub as a portfolio rather than truly sharing open source software.
Currently my strategy is like this:
1. publish the project to GitHub
2. after a while recreate the project and publish it again with a suffix. For example -java or -cpp like this:
https://github.com/stevenbraham/stocks-data
https://github.com/stevenbraham/stocks-data-go
Curious to hear what other strategies people use? Such as folders or branches? <comment><USER2> I've been seeing a lot of new tools use the -go at the end to specify its a go specific package/tool. So I think what you did is perfect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I also think it's a good approach, but it feels a bit spammy to have the same project listed 5 times</comment></comment>


Pure Javascript HTML Templating for jQuery and Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://json2html.com

<comment><USER2> There are major wins for client-side templating in general, but I don't quite see the market for pure-js templates.

HTML templates buy you:

\- Access to HTML/XML parsers (syntax highlighters, validators, transformers, linters, etc.)

\- Readability by non-technical designers.

\- Readability by Google, bing, et al.

\- Separation of concern.

Pure Javascript is pretty much a terrible language to write templates in, for the simple reason that writing long strings is a pain in the ass. AngularJS does client-side templating The Right Way as far as I'm concerned.

Disclaimer: I'm a Google engineer who uses Angular.

<comment><USER3> I keep seeing "pure html templates" in many comments about AngularJS, but they don't seem to be completely "pure" from my perspective. Couple of questions for you...

1\. AngularJS directives do not seem to conform to valid HTML. Does this matter to Google from a search perspective? I realize that single-page applications quite often have other SEO problems, but valid non DSL HTML templates seem like they would be of value for all the reasons you outline above.

2\. I quite often see the following type of examples in an AngularJS tutorials. How is this different from Handlebars or Mustache? This still ties my template directly to AngularJS, no? Also, this is usually not understood by designers tools.

        <pane title="Localization">
            Date: {{ '2012-04-01' | date:'fullDate' }}

            Currency: {{ 123456 | currency }}

            Number: {{ 98765.4321 | number }}

        </pane>

Not saying JSON templates are better; they look extremely hard to maintain. The Transparency project (<http://leonidas.github.io/transparency/>) does work with pure HTML templates, but it is just a rendering engine and not part of a larger framework.

<comment><USER2> 1\. Angular directives CAN but are not required to conform to valid HTML. All directives can be declared in HTML via a data-ng-xxx attribute if your app needs to maintain valid HTML.

2\. All templates are tied to a compiler - there's really no getting around that. I'd have to disagree that that format is imcomprehensible to non technical designers, especially when compared to purely JS options.

That said, it's perfectly reasonable to rewrite that template as follows (which should play more nicely with existing tools):

        <pane title="Localization"
            data-pane-date="2012-04-01"
            data-pane-date-format="fullDate"
            data-pane-currency="123456"
            data-pane-number="98765.4321" />

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're still mirroring the structure of HTML/XML in your json documents though, which is a pain for large templates. Still feels like you're writing Artisanal Hand-rolled JSON.

My vote for this sort of thing has always gone to Plates: <https://github.com/flatiron/plates>

There should be ZERO logic in your templates — Mustache doesn't count. Bind JSON to HTML through a mapping of data to IDs/class names/data attributes, and your templates will be more re-usable and render faster.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting project. I feel it is similar to <https://github.com/gcao/T.js> \- my little Javascript template engine. However IMHO, json2html is too verbose for large document, and T.js is concise and provides some nice features(e.g. layout, attributes as hash etc).

Below is a T.js template written in Coffeescript.  tournamentResultTemplate = (data) -> return unless data.result

      [ "div.detail"
        [ "table"
          [ "tr"
            ["td", "Result"]
            ["td", data.result]
          ]
          if data.defeated
            [ "tr"
              ["td", "Defeated"]
              ["td", data.defeated]
            ]
          if data.lost_to
            [ "tr"
              ["td", "Lost to"]
              ["td", data.lost_to]
            ]
        ]
      ]

</comment><comment><USER6> What's the advantage of JSON templates over HTML templates?

<comment><USER7> I don't know. Just looking at the example template though, the disadvantages seem huge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a typo in the description sentence: "json2html is an open source javascript library that uses on JSON templates...". Should be "...that uses JSON...".</comment>


Azure Premium Storage - <AUTHOR> http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/04/16/azure-premium-storage-now-generally-available-2

<comment><USER2> This is cool (and, really, required at this point to be competitive) but why can't they use a self-explanatory name?

Amazon calls their SSD-backed volumes "General Purpose (SSD)" and "Provisioned IOPS (SSD)" which explain themselves. Azure Premium Storage could mean anything (and when it's the norm in a couple of years, what will they call it then?)

<comment><USER3> Super Premium :-) I think the way we think about it here is: Azure "Premium" Storage as opposed to the regular Storage offering we have. Having said that, our naming could have indeed been better.

Disclaimer: msft engineer with Azure Storage</comment></comment>


New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines with little effort - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/new-attack-steals-private-crypto-keys-by-corrupting-data-in-computer-memory/ <comment><USER2> The rowhammer "attack" is successful only because the hardware is just plain _broken_ , and I consider it in the same category as things like a CPU which will calculate 1+1=3 if the computation of 1+1 is done enough times --- nothing software should even try to fix, because the problem is at a lower level. The solution is to demand that the hardware manufacturers make memory which actually works like memory should; and it should be possible, since apparently previous generations of RAM don't have this problem at all. In the early 90s Intel recalled and replaced, free of charge, CPUs which didn't divide correctly. Perhaps the memory manufacturers today should do the same for rowhammer-affected modules and chips.

Memory errors are particularly disturbing because they are often highly dependent on data and access patterns, and can be _extremely_ difficult to pinpoint without special testing tools. I've personally experienced a situation where a system which otherwise appears to work perfectly well would _always_ corrupt one specific bit of a file when extracting one particular archive.

As a testing tool, MemTest86+ has always worked well for me, and the newer versions can detect rowhammer, although there is this interesting discussion about whether it is actually a problem (to which I say a resounding _YES!!!_ ) or if there's some sort of cover-up by the memory industry:

[http://www.passmark.com/forum/memtest86/5903-rowhammer- probl...](http://www.passmark.com/forum/memtest86/5903-rowhammer-problem-not- found-by-memtest86-6-3-0)

[http://www.passmark.com/forum/memtest86/5475-memtest86-v6-2-...](http://www.passmark.com/forum/memtest86/5475-memtest86-v6-2-0-released-8-sept-2015)

Run it on your hardware and if it fails, I think you should definitely complain and get it fixed.

<comment><USER3> > The rowhammer "attack" is successful only because the hardware is just plain > _broken_

I too am of this opinion and am surprised this view isn't widely shared. With DDR4, we should be asking for a refund and/or starting a class-action suit, yet we're putting up with software 'mitigations' instead.

This isn't like the 2008 Phenom TLB bug [1] where the CPU was locking up so AMD released a workaround that kept it from freezing at the expense of a 14% performance penalty. This is like the floating point division bug [2] where the device no longer meets basic operational and accuracy guarantees. RAM cells bleeding into each other ought to be considered a fatal flaw, not some intellectual curiosity.

[1] [http://techreport.com/review/13741/phenom-tlb-patch- benchmar...](http://techreport.com/review/13741/phenom-tlb-patch- benchmarked/4)

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

<comment><USER2> _I too am of this opinion and am surprised this view isn 't widely shared. With DDR4, we should be asking for a refund and/or starting a class-action suit, yet we're putting up with software 'mitigations' instead._

I extensively test all the hardware I buy (CPU: LINPACK, RAM: MemTest86+) and if it fails any of those tests, it gets returned as "not fit for purpose". I've done this successfully a few times. A lot of other enthusiasists/power users do the same too, especially if they're overclocking, and searches on other forums show plenty of users testing and finding (mostly other, not rowhammer) errors in newly-bought RAM even when not overclocking. But as noted in the threads I linked to, manufacturers may be trying to cover this up and downplay its severity. Even in the original paper on rowhammer, the authors didn't disclose which manufacturers and which modules were affected, although I think this should really be treated like the FDIV bug: name and shame. I blame political correctness...

<comment><USER4> How do you do it, regarding LINPACK?

I assume just compiling it and execute some tests that are part of it?

<comment><USER2> The Intel LINPACK distribution contains, besides the library, a sample benchmarking application using it, and that happens to be a very intense and "real" workload (solving systems of equations, i.e. scientific computation.) There's plenty of posts on various PC enthusiasists forums about how to run it correctly. (And plenty arguing that it's irrelevant, mostly because their insane overclock _seems_ fine but instantly fails this test. There's a good reason most doing "real" scientific computing don't overclock; a lot of CPUs just barely pass this absolutely realistic test with stock speeds and voltages.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems the HN title and original title are _both_ pretty wrong, at least according to the article content. The attack vector is really the ability to, if you have a known public key and a server using it, perform a pre-calculated bit flip such that the new public key is much easier to factor, and thus obtain a corresponding private key.

So you're not obtaining original private keys, you're altering original public keys so that you can more quickly factor a private key that will be accepted.

If this is an SSH public key, then you can obtain SSH access. If it's a PGP key trusted by the package manager, then you can craft signatures on packages that _would_ be accepted as valid, assuming you can also get the target machine to download said package.

I think SSH is probably the most interesting attack vector assuming you can get network access to the host once you've jumped through the myriad hoops to perform this attack.

It's a serious issue that should be addressed (probably via forced from-disk reads or at minimum integrity checks), but I think the authors are perhaps a little too eager on the practical implications of corrupting in-memory public keys.

<comment><USER6> It's the sort of thing for which the NSA would spend their resources to develop an exploit tool.

<comment><USER2> Rowhammer is such a subtle effect and very easily blamed on many other things that it's not hard for the more paranoid among us to imagine the NSA deliberately sabotaging memories with it to use as a backdoor. When it was first discovered I wrote my thoughts on it here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8716977)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's the crux of the memory issue from one of the link in the article:

DDR memory is laid out in an array of rows and columns, which are assigned in large blocks to various applications and operating system resources. To protect the integrity and security of the entire system, each large chunk of memory is contained in a "sandbox" that can be accessed only by a given app or OS process. Bit flipping works when a hacker-developed app or process accesses two carefully selected rows of memory hundreds of thousands of times in a tiny fraction of a second. By hammering the two "aggressor" memory regions, the exploit can reverse one or more bits in a third "victim" location. In other words, selected zeros in the victim region will turn into ones or vice versa.

<comment><USER8> So it doesn't allow reading any data? I'm most nervous about leaking private keys.

<comment><USER9> in and of itself, no. but it could alter a permission bit, for example, and then reading would be allowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This attack wouldn't work with [current versions] of ESXi since VMs now share pages only if the salt value and contents of the pages are identical (each VM uses a unique salt by default). [https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?langu...](https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2097593)

<comment><USER11> Sharing pages seems a big price risk to pay for saving a little memory.

Why not turn it off entirely?

<comment><USER12> I would guess if you're a big VM hosting provider and you have thousands of VMs all running the same version of Windows or Linux distro, that it could add up to some real savings to have them share common pages.

<comment><USER11> I guess so.

Seems the savings would be somewhat offset by having your whole business destroyed because its easy to crack.

<comment><USER13> Conceptually, it's safe. UNIX distributions routinely do the equivalent operation within single machines, it's a fundamental part of their operating model.

It's just that in the face of defective hardware, it's not safe. But this is not surprising, because nothing is safe, so it isn't particularly a criticism of page sharing. This specific attack may have used it, but Rowhammer is a powerful tool. This is not the only way it can be used; it is merely an exemplar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People are focusing too much on the exact specific attack shown here: Deduplication, modifying a public key, etc. (And proposing solutions like turning off deduplicaiton, checksum, etc.)

But that's just _this_ attack - the fact that they have that much control over memory means there are FAR FAR FAR more possible attacks.

If you can control memory to that level then you are limited only by your imagination.

The only mitigation I can think of at the moment is ECC memory. And shame on Intel for only supporting that on Xeon.

<comment><USER11> What can you do to attack other VMs if you don't have shared memory with them?

<comment><USER15> depends, do they run node? because there were successful javascript rowhammer implementations demonstrated

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those of you worried about your aws workloads, this may help make ya feel a (slight) bit better.

[https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=739485&t...](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=739485&tstart=0)

<comment><USER17> Why only slightly better? The response to that forum post, as far as I can tell, means EC2 is not vulnerable to this attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is more costly, but this is a good reason to use a dedicated chunk of memory for every Xen PV domU. No oversubscription!

Allowing multiple domU VMs on the same dom0 (or the equivalent in other hypervisor platforms) to re-use memory and balloon/contract memory on the fly is what enables this.

<comment><USER8> Can you point me to some services that provide, specifically, Xen PV VMs with non-oversubscribed memory?

I'm considering deploying a custom unikernel for protecting the private key data for my app[1], until I have enough money for a Hardware Security Module.

[1] [http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/135457/penetrati...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/135457/penetration- resistance-of-a-halvm-unikernel)

<comment><USER18> Sorry, I can't, we use Debian stable + xen on our own bare metal hardware machines with from 256gb to 1tb of RAM. Never tried to buy a rental VM using the same dom0+PV setup. All of my off site VMs are for testing, some cheap $4/mo type openVZ that are basically glorified jails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Will rowhammer attacks work against ECC RAM? Multibit memory errors should be detected, even if they can't be corrected.

<comment><USER20> ECC is one of the mitigations, as well as increased refresh rate.

The 'best' solution is better ram: some vendors are more vulnerable than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Would this be a threat to services running on AWS?

<comment><USER22> No, because AFAIK EC2 does not dedupe RAM.

<comment><USER23> What about Hyper-V / Microsoft Azure? Anyone know if they de-dup memory like this?

<comment><USER24> No. Hyper-V has no memory De-dup function. Azure runs on Hyper-V so it's not vulnerable either.

<comment><USER17> What popular cloud providers _are_ vulnerable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "For the attacks to work, the cloud hosting the VM must have deduplication enabled so that physical pages are shared between customers."

But the vendor's cloud will not disable sharing pages of physical memory because ____.

This is a great counterpoint to the salesman trying to sell you on "cloud" anything.

Why is it less expensive to use the "cloud"?

One reason is because you do not get your own physical server, including your own RAM.

When the "cloud" buzz began to gain momentum years ago I raised the issue of not knowing who your "neighbors" were on these physical servers that customers are sharing with other customers in datacenters.

As usual, these concerns will just fade into the background... again.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ouch. Before reading this article I was seriously considering deploying a signing service as a HaLVM (Haskell) Xen PV unikernel running on EC2. The service would receive its private key after startup, such that the key never touches disk. Now I'm a lot less inclined to pretend that the Xen interface actually protects me...

<comment><USER26> Xen has had page-table and interrupt vector related security vulnerabilities. But I don't think EC2 would use non-ECC RAM, so I don't think it's vulnerable to this "rowhammer" technique. (I also don't think EC2 would do cross-VM page deduplication, another necessary condition.)

<comment><USER27> Perhaps we need more certainty than just "think"?

That AWS don't boast that they are not susceptible to this suggests that perhaps at least some of their setup is?

<comment><USER28> The EC2 FAQ [0] states:

"In our experience, ECC memory is necessary for server infrastructure, and all the hardware underlying Amazon EC2 uses ECC memory."

While ECC does apparently not completely mitigate Rowhammer, it helps.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _For the attacks to work, the cloud hosting the VM must have deduplication enabled so that physical pages are shared between customers._

This "Flip Feng Shui" wouldn't work in SmartOS simply because the hypervisor does not implement memory deduplication.

Good luck with VMware though.

</comment><comment><USER30> It seems like a dedicated server would solve this issue in some sense. If your not on a shared VM, then an attacker could not affect the memory.

For those that cannot be on a dedicated server, what changes could be made to the shared VM memory setup to reduce this attack surface?

</comment><comment><USER31> some thoughts:

      For the attacks to work, the cloud hosting the VMs must have deduplication enabled so that physical pages are shared between customers.

This seemingly is an attack where two VMs on the same host can read each other's memory, if a deduplication flag is set on the VM controller. This seems to offer cloud holsters some easy (paid for) upgrades to be honest

its not (afaik) heartbleed time. It's bad but the effort required is high and afaik the attacker will replace your key with their key - making it clear you are compromised.

<comment><USER32> The abstract says the attack allows "flips over arbitrary physical memory in a fully controlled way." If I'm understanding that correctly, it would be trivial to then restore the old key alongside it, leaving the victim none the wiser.

Also, as others have pointed out, this is a hardware issue and the clear solution is to swap out the vulnerable RAM. Yeah, paying more is an "easy" way to have peace of mind (if that's even an option for you as a "cloud hoster"), but that's just backwards IMHO: a security vulnerability on the host's side should not translate into an upsell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder if it would be worth checksumming public keys and re-checking the checksum each time it's used?

<comment><USER8> That's security by obscurity (which may work to delay the attacker). If an attacker can modify your public keys he can modify your checksums as well.

Seems to me that a public key should be identified by a cryptographic hash of it, rather than the public keys itself. Then the attacker would need to replace the entire hash, rather than just a few bits, because the hash changes completely just by flipping a single bit in the input.

<comment><USER33> The attacker isn't making targeted modifications to your public keys, though: they're randomly glitching it, and using the page sharing implemented by the hypervisor to read out and factor the glitched version.

Even with say a 64 bit checksum then there's only a 1 in 2^64 chance of the randomly modified key/checksum pair matching. But you could use a cryptographic hash as your checksum if you wanted.

I only suggest this not because I think it would be a complete defence against all Rowhammer attacks - it wouldn't - but because the general fragility of the RSA construction means that doing it with any potentially corrupted input gives me the willies. There are other sources of bitflips other than Rowhammer and it just strikes me as a generally good idea not to leak the results of RSA operations performed on potentially bitflipped inputs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is Linode safe?</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality demo [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/vb.4/10103154531425531/?type=2&theater <comment><USER2> I've had a course about social media last year (analyses of communication via social media, not the marketing kind) that talked a lot about the problems with online human-human communication and how VR might be able to solve these problems.

Physical space has social meanings. We use space to structure how we start conversations, to show our engagement with our partner, to show our openness to engage with others. Think of the formations you form at parties, and how you know as outsider if you can join a conversation or not.

You also have the important of gaze. Eye gaze is not only an outward expression of an emotion, it is used as a communicative device – as a tool to interact with others. People turn towards to each other to make eye contact and initiate a conversation.

Both space and gaze have so far been missing in online social media. This is the positive value for better communication you add to social media with VR. It's very exciting to see this development already going so fast.

It saddens me though that it seems Facebook is the company making the first steps into this future. This cynic in me says Facebook only develops this to have more ways to manipulate people in seeing ads and other forms of commercial persuasive communication. Tupperware parties 2.0.

<comment><USER3> You're not a cynic, that's literally their business.

<comment><USER4> Ad revenue and tricking others into thinking that all that data is inherently valuable.

Don't forget that last part.

<comment><USER5> Tell that to an app developer that pays $2-$5 per install of their app through Facebook. You may think your data isn't valuable, but I guarantee you that many many peoples data is very valuable to Advertisers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Placing a video call from the outside world into VR is pretty amazing.

Besides that, you can do many of the things demoed even now on AltspaceVR. I tested it out for a few nights, and turns out hanging around in an interactive VR space with random strangers is ruined by trolls and people constantly quitting and joining. We never got successfully through an entire game of "Cards Against Humanity".

Another interesting one was vTime, which focuses more on chatting. You can move your head around and sit around virtual spaces with others, but you cannot move. That felt much like grabbing coffee in real life with someone and we got into deeper conversations this way. I would rate it as perhaps the most interesting experience I had before selling my Oculus to wait another year or two to see things improve.

<comment><USER7> _Being able to place a video call from the outside world into VR is pretty amazing._

Youtube and twitch are capable of doing the conference call equivalent, streaming live video of content that doesn't actually exist, such as a video game, to a video receiving device. The ability to dynamically create live video is more than a few years old, even in live chat systems, from the capability to alter the background behind you while you video chat, to being able to wear virtual hats.

There's a lot in here that is interesting, but so much of it is a different form factor and UI/UX on technology that already exists.

<comment><USER8> You're saying it's just a user experience shift, but that's exactly what the comment you're responding to is saying. User experience changes can be earth- shattering.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I said there's a lot here that is interesting, and I think the actual interesting stuff was seriously downplayed. I don't find the stuff that was presented as "earth-shattering". The ability to show a moving video in a 2d square in a 3d environment is as old as hardware accelerated first person shooters.

We saw swimming among sharks and walking on Mars, both having potential for highly informative and educational experiences. The rhetoric wasn't about how much richer viewing Mars is interactively vs with flat, composite panoramas. The Mars bit was about ~12 seconds with talk about how it was desolate and they wouldn't want to live there… quick, get us out and here and lets move on to… the Facebook offices (a more uninspired location for Zuckerberg to choose I can not imagine). Oh, let's play a card game and let's draw a sword for sword fights! The ability to draw in midair and interact with the thing drawn is the _real_ interesting stuff, stuff that we haven't been able to do before, and this was a demo that said, to me, "Farmville is coming to virtual reality".

Where was showing us things we can't currently, easily do without virtual reality? The live walk through of a building yet to be built? The facilities engineer working with plumbers and electricians on a live, interactive 3d model of a building? The interior designer doing interactive, full-size test fits of furniture? The student walking on the surface of other planets for study prep? The inclusiveness and team building of a remote team working in the same virtual space (this was mentioned briefly in the face expressions portion)? The ability to create and dynamically reconfigure complex user interfaces that would be otherwise impossible to create in reality? Leveraging the facial expressions to read people while playing poker would have been more interesting and a step above current on-line poker playing, more so than "look, we can throw around these cards".

Most of this bit looked like it was scripted. It could have been scripted better to showcase actual advances VR enables, kept the "ooh ahh", maintained the conversational tone and gotten rid of the mundane stuff. I don't think "placing a video call from the outside world into VR" is "pretty amazing".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The whole demonstration seemed very synthetic and not really that impressive to be honest (The position detection for hands seemed a bit low res, facial expressions seemed like something out of a 2006 webcam to cartoon-avatar app.

<comment><USER10> They are working with what they have. There are no face cameras or anything like that in Oculus Rift, so the expressions are literally "gestures", from what I've read. You raise your hands, your avatar is "happy", you wave your head, your avatar is "sad" etc.

This should change in next generations of VR helmets.

<comment><USER11> Not in Oculus in the demo, but there is this Veeso [1] with additional cam for face tracking.

[1] [http://www.veeso.com/](http://www.veeso.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think two major things social VR and this demo highlight:

1) The amount of things you can do in VR is more expansive than any medium before. Video conferences for the most part is used to catch up or transfer information faster (or at least that's how I use it, to catch up with friends/business who are far away). However, it's tougher to use video chats to build NEW experiences, and I can only really think of Google Hangouts and playing something like WarLight/editing a doc that does that. Humans for the most part build better relationships when both parties have shared experiences, and in VR you can actually do a lot of things that you could in real life. This is why it's so different from just "videoconferencing"

2) It finds a balance in anonymity and not having to commit 100% to a conversation. For example, when you video conference you have to pay more attention/be more aware of how you're acting, which explains why many times we choose to have text convos rather than just calling the other person. In social VR you're just an avatar so you don't have to care as much about your appearance/interaction/subtle facial expressions etc. The outward behavioral bar is lower so you can relax and enjoy the environment even more.

VR is a powerful medium because it addresses the above two points - you don't have to be as concerned about your appearance/interaction when you're an avatar AND you can actually do more tangible things in VR to actually BUILD better relationships.

<comment><USER13> God, how I miss David Foster Wallace...

On the Rise and Fall of the Videophone:

> And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if > you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all > kidding aside who doesn't. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded > without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if > that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there > was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video > telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good > old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes > and attach prostheses and do hair- checks in the foyer mirror before > answering the door.

> ...

> The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's > psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, > of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking; and in fact it was those > entrepreneurs who gravitated toward the production of high-definition > videophonic imaging and then outright masks who got in and out of the short- > lived videophonic era with their shirts plus solid additional nets.

Full Excerpt from Infinite Jest: [http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527](http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing this. It's always great to reread DFW. He had such extraordinary prescience about so many things.

Another bit of gold from that excerpt:

> First there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — > like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has > certain un- foreseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the > market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people's stressfully > vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled > via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these > ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the > original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve- > closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present > case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations' own evolution saw video-callers > rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and > enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras > altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one > another's TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, > callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, > unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity- > dioramas, once again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish- > scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive, > intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end's > Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated > attention they themselves didn't have to exert.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Social VR is what second life has been doing for 15 years. I have anecdotally surveyed a few users and none of them was sold on VR. It's fun for the first day, but between being expressionally and physically limited and getting nauseous, none of them found it pleasant enough for long-term use. Virtual worlds are having a rennaisance nowadays, with many new companies springing up. Personally , i am not sold on the future of VR-goggles at all.

<comment><USER16> Why judge on the limitations of first gen hardware? How many nascent technologies and industries would have been dismissed if we'd done that? Or is it the possibility of creating a fully immersive new medium for creative expression, potentially a new artificial substrate of reality, that doesn't excite you?

<comment><USER17> uh... We're easily on 3rd-4th gen hardware at this point.

1st gen: Those VR stations that used to be in malls 2nd gen: Shitty headsets you could attach to a genesis/snes 3rd gen: Occulus (you may be considering this first gen?) 4th gen: vive/fove/[Sony/Samsung/Google]VR

<comment><USER16> Do you think the average mass consumer that is considering purchasing a GearVR cares that _technically_ it's a 4th gen VR product because of the Nintendo Virtual Boy in 1995? I don't think so ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think VR is as an experience overrated.

Almost daily I do Skype calls most of them are video calls. Most of the times I have several people in the room who still can continue to communicate directly without and technical intermediary. In addition you can write down notifications, doodle, multi-task.

For games, I used to play doom in vr in 1997 and after 5 min the whole looking around thing gets stale and you just want to sit down and relax on the couch/chair. See Wiimote.

<comment><USER19> But imagine if all of your doodle and multi-tasking can be virtual. The promise of VR is you can video conference, multi-task, and doodle with many virtual apps all at once. Or with other people. Of course the problem with that is that paper is often a better medium.

<comment><USER18> If that will be good or not is a question of the user interface. I regularly sit in multi-nation phone conferences. And while there are many collaboration tools we mainly still use a simple Excel sheet via screen share to track things. Why? This abstraction layer works with most business users. In addition, in Asia internet connectivity over several countries is not good so that is the least expensive communication method in terms of bandwidth.

<comment><USER20> I think you are shortsighted and unwilling to extrapolate today's VR potential into the (near-ish) future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why are there so much negativity? I thought the people here are supposed to be more visionary. We are one step ahead in the future than other people. Avatar with your facial expressions. This is huge and innovative. It will not be limited to just game players or geeks. Common people will be drawn to this.

<comment><USER22> Well as a long time deliberately non Facebook account holder for many reasons of my own, I can say I found this compelling. Partly because I bought an Oculus dev kit several years ago and was quite impressed with it at even that stage and I'm very excited to seee resources being devoted to a technology I would like to see in common use as soon as possible, especially for these basic productivity tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I loved the demo, thought it was well thought out and impressive. However I would not want to use it on a regular basis and cannot see many people being that interested in purchasing a VR setup. I think VR outside of gaming is limited appeal and only AR will offer any mass appeal as long as it is portable and discrete.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, this is great. I wonder when we will have farmville in VR. My friends, family can take care of our virtual farm...

<comment><USER25> This comment in combination with your username made me laugh way too hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So it begins. [https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest- Cline/dp/0307...](https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest- Cline/dp/0307887448)

</comment><comment><USER27> So Facebook's take on VR is that it is going to be all about people. I am not seeing their vision but I didn't 'get' Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or even Chat Roulette... I will need some persuasion that this will work for the selfie-obsessed narcissistic world, just wearing a VR headset is not a good look.

I can see how Google's take on VR works, you re-use the phone in a budget way and have apps that make sensible use of the format - games, 3D immersive stuff exhibition tour stuff and other Google goodies that are good toys. Really this brings to life what Google do anyway with StreetView, photosheres and so on, so it makes sense. I can see a large army of casual VR users making occasional use of that stuff. I can also see hi-end gaming going for VR, that makes sense too and seemed the obvious market for the Oculus product. Facebook seem to think they have some special transformative take on that, a bit like how the Wii took the games console out of the teenager's bedroom and put it in the front room for mum to do her fitness training games on. Until we see the product and applications some belief is required and even then I will not be an early adopter. This VR stuff has evolved slightly the 'cardboard' way but the fundamentals have not changed in the last 20 years. The problems have nothing to do with nausea from immersive VR, people probably had the same concerns about the horseless carriage. The problems are more to do with what exactly that use case is that compels people to be wearing VR headsets for hours every day and whether people really do want to block out their sight to wear some immersive headgear. This isn't going to happen on the commute home for a while.

<comment><USER28> "The problems are more to do with what exactly that use case is that compels people to be wearing VR headsets for hours every day and whether people really do want to block out their sight to wear some immersive headgear. "

I wear mine as much as I can (sadly I don't have hours a day to do it, but I would if i could) VR Gaming is literally just the beginning. As I mentioned in another comment, Onward is a good demonstration of the potential here. Game- play aside, the social aspect feels very different. The game, as an FPS would be very lame, but with the way it handles communication it's a really great experience. Interactions feel more "life like". I'm really excited to see how far it goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I didn't get how the headset reads the facial expressions.

I also don't see most users designing avatars that look like them. It shouldn't be too hard to do a conversion from a photo.

Also compare it to the PSVR social app:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8tMwlZLEM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK8tMwlZLEM)

<comment><USER30> "the demo's facial expressions were controlled by button presses, not facial analysis"

<comment><USER31> I'm honestly surprised by that, since it seems like just using a simple webcam to read your expression and pick it that way would be a much more natural choice, and probably the least technologically complex aspect of that entire setup. Though I guess you can't always be in an environment with a webcam pointed at your face... but if you have an Oculus on your head, my guess is a webcam isn't far away.

<comment><USER30> Except the Oculus is occluding your face.

<comment><USER32> Not disagreeing with you (because it's definitely not just a simple webcam), but there's been progress in this area:

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

<comment><USER30> Nice! I hadn't seen this before. Interesting approach to capturing the facial expression. I'd bet the first commercial implementation of something like this will be based on cameras inside the helmet combined with IR illumination, We're going to want those anyway for gaze tracking and it might be that they can do double duty. This is clever, but from a practical standpoint I bet capturing expressions will be easier with cameras.

<comment><USER33> You can definitely see where this is going. My first thought was the same: 'we need eyetracking for foveated rendering anyway, so we can get realistic eyes for free', and if you can do that, you can track the eyebrows and muscles around the eye (doesn't need great fidelity), and I wonder if that gets you all the way to the rest of the face as well? Can you smile/frown without it tugging on the parts closer to the eyes which the future headsets can observe?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That was an interesting demo. I read on another comment in this thread, that the backgrounds were fake. Let's assume for a moment that they were not. Imagine all of this happening from the perspective of the dog. The dog (replace human to further this exercise) is completely unaware of all this happening around him. Could we in the future have people talking about us, around us and not be aware of it? Think of this interaction again from the perspective of the 4 people (include the video call) who were talking in the room. At one point, i was so engrossed in the main scene, that i forgot that a certain part of the environment was not aware of the main players. This spooked me out - what if in the future, i can't tell which part of my environment is real(aware of me) and which part is not. Inertia i guess. We always get over these humps.

<comment><USER35> For the time being I would assume you would notice the 360 degree camera making its way through your house.

That is, until we work out using a stable wormhole as the means of observation.

<comment><USER34> That is true. Or until the camera's get small enough and numerous enough that your environment drowns them. It was still an interesting experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think VR is going to be a bit like 3D TV and not really live up to the hype.

<comment><USER28> Maybe this particular VR application, but you can try a Vive on right now and see for yourself. To me, its extremely compelling.

<comment><USER37> Last week I was at a VR arcade which had a very good setup of Vives, good floor space, good hardware, instructors, etc. It was my first time with VR, and I spent about half an hour with the different VR experiences.

It was a lot of fun, and I went and grabbed the entire family and forced them to try it too. They all enjoyed it. Very different experience from anything else.

But since then, I have had no desire to go back and do it again. Nor have any of the family members mentioned it (including three boys between 5 and 12 who love gaming). Nothing about the experience was compelling enough to capture my attention in the long term.

VR has great novelty factor, but no killer apps (yet?).

<comment><USER38> It sounds like having a computer without having the internet in 1997. When they add the social factor and include things like being able to do desktop work, in high fidelity while wearing a lightweight pair of shades, its going to change a lot of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've had a lot of fun with the social aspects in OnWard. Just about 10 minutes ago before I left the game, my group was standing in a circle joking around (until the enemy snuck up behind, dropped a grenade killing us in one blow.

VR is an amazing medium for remote social interactions. There's potential here. Not everything has to be about selfies, and self obsession. It's possible for random people to have a good time with each other. The internet makes it possible for you to find another person similar to who YOU are, and VR makes that interaction more personable. It's literally the best of both "Worlds".

</comment><comment><USER39> Multi-user VR is really, really cool. It seems that Facebook is betting heavily on headset prices coming down (which they will, obviously) which will allow their metaverse to become the de facto virtual hangout space. That two bundo FB shelled out for the acquisition seems like it was a really good deal.

<comment><USER40> Except that having been addicted to Facebook once and quitting cold turkey about a decade ago, I'll never do Facebook again. To me things like TV (particularly streaming services) is close to a drug in terms of addictiveness. Facebook was too. And this looks even more addictive. I'm sure it will be insanely immersive, and that, my friends, is a serious problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Fake it until you make it. Backgrounds are all pre-recorded. Not live! But it's an interesting concept once they manage to get all the scenes live. I still prefer face to face though.

<comment><USER42> I wondered about that dog on the couch... Still, pretty neat (and, come to think of it, a little less worrying than giving Facebook access to a webcam in my house.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> _takes selfie with virtual selfie stick cam and posts it to facebook_

"we can do anything we want"

Does anyone know if there are any other demos/applications available?

</comment><comment><USER44> Why would I do any of this ?

It seemed a bit forced in my opinion.

<comment><USER28> You're lucky you have all of your friends close to you. Some of my best friends are a 2 hour plane ride away. This would be great (if they could afford it).

<comment><USER45> I thought the demo was neat, but I don't quite get this -- how is looking at the cartoon avatars your friends chose possibly going to be more personal than (or even nearly as personal as) video chat, which has been freely available for years on every major platform and allows you to see your friends' actual faces with their actual facial expressions? Is it just anticipation of the avatars eventually getting replaced with a full realistic real-time 3D rendering of your body?

<comment><USER38> Absolutely. There was a research project last year where they uses sensors built into the visor foam and they could reproduce your emotion based on your face movement. Of course we'll eventually all be scanned into the system and at that stage you can decide to use an avatar or your normal face. The real benefit here is social VR. Being able to co-exist in VR to do your work will be ground breaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "Virtual" being used here quite frequently when there is quite a bit of Hyper- reality influences too.

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

Virtual Reality describes the apparatus, and the merging of reality with simulation, or even simulacra of our physical sensoria.

Hyper-reality describes the meta nature of our culture, media, and society. Imagine this: consuming a video of Zuck talking about VR headsets whilst wearing a VR headset, whilst inside Facebook headquarters, all inside your Facebook timeline.

</comment><comment><USER47> Amazing demo of the interface of the future. One thing I would change is to move the other people's avatars to the background so they don't move around as you look around. It was making me dizzy. They should be fixed to the background but be able to move themselves around in your field of vision by walking around, as they would in reality. Obviously a work in progress, but everything else looked great!

<comment><USER48> The thing I noticed and nobody else seems to be commenting on is that these virtual realities were actually just 360 videos? Why was nothing actually being produced by a real 3D engine? I thought viewing 360 vids in VR could make people sick because you don't have the sideways motion of the head. I'd expected them to spend their time in actual virtual realities, not QuickTime VRs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Man that line about Timberlake was forced. And then he made his wife say it too. Hah.

Ok in all seriousness.

We little humans perceive most of our world through spatial interactions. The possibilities to make a world enhancing device are incredible and scare me.

I'm concerned that people will forget how great the real Redwood forest is. Or how great real sex is. Or how meaningful life can be apart from a virtual Reality. I'm afraid that the fake version could be so appealing that I would reject the real and choose to dive into my own Matrix. Many people already play 7 hours per day...what's to stop them from never leaving a more immersive experience?

Like I said, the positive potential to improve science/meetings/remote work/etc is pretty incredible. I don't want to sound like a Debbie downer. But sheesh we need to consider the potential risks to society of a pseudo-reality addiction that is as alluring as VR will be very soon.

Is anyone else concerned?

<comment><USER50> Virtual reality is perhaps an unfortunate moniker, because it encourages a dichotomisation of reality into the "virtual" and "real", and conceiving of these as opposing, or at least orthogonal forces. Thought of in this way, virtual reality seems to promise a compelling-but-ultimately-empty facsimile of reality, the ultimate fulfilment of the escapist dream.

Disruptive technologies are often initially viewed from an oppositional mindset, which makes sense, because any disruptive technology will steal time away from the Old Activities that existed before the technology. People who aren't early adopters will naturally focus on the decrease in the time spent on Old Activities.

We saw this oppositional reaction when the internet gained popularity:

* People are spending so much time in cyberspace that they won't know how to effectively navigate the real world

* People are having fantasy cyber-lives instead of spending time in the Real World

* He's seeing someone he met online, he must not know how to interact with Real People

* And so on.

But social networks descended on society in an incredibly short period of time, and worked their way into the furthest corners of our lives. The oppositional mindset gave way to an integrative one, where the notion of a "CyberLife", as distinct from a "life", is simply misplaced- the internet is now simply a part of _life_ , sans prefix and with a lowercase "l", no longer boxed up in the conceptual category of "the Cyber".

There was another motifical recurrence when smartphones entered the fray. The oppositional critiques were voluminous and eloquent:

* We're spending so much time texting we're forgetting how to speak to each other

* Every crack in every interaction is plastered over with the ritualized and mutually fraudulent "notification check", signposting the way to the unravelling of the social fabric..., etc.

* You can find the Real World up there, when you hold your head high, with dignity, and not down there, with your head bowed, staring transfixed at a shining rectangle, face ghost-like, bathed in the soft pearlescent glow of vapidity.

But at some point, the integrative mindset arrived. It's hard to maintain the oppositional mindset when you get off your Uber, arrive at a restaurant that you found on Yelp, and are chatting to your friend on WhatsApp, only to have them sit down in front of you. The handoff between "smartphone life" and "real life" is seamless. Smartphones are woven so deeply into our lives that if you ask someone how their "smartphone life" compares to their "real life", they'll just give you a strange look. Smartphones are just a part of life.

I think VR/AR could go in this direction, as just another arrow in our technological quiver. If we start looking at things like social VR, which has the potential to reshape the way we interact remotely, or how architects are today routinely using VR to demo to clients, it's not impossible to believe that the integrative mindset could eventually overcome the oppositional mindset in terms of how we think about VR.

<comment><USER40> Excellent--except all your examples of the "oppositional critiques" have happened, and aren't abating. So the concern is well founded. Every day I see people texting, reading, watching videos, and gaming on their smartphones AS THEY ARE DRIVING--navigating traffic, changing lanes, turning, etc. They are so hooked on their devices they're unable (or unwilling) to unplug even while driving a multi-ton death machine amongst other multi-ton death machines.

The truth is that humans have a tendency to be lazy. It's not a simple case of equal substitution; we will happily choose inferior substitutions which require less effort (or expense or time or complexity).

Will people choose to "travel" via VR? Yes. Will this reduce real-life traveling? Absolutely. The sense of having been somewhere will reduce our need to actually GO there.

I this the rise of VR will see many become thoroughly entranced (addicted?) and less productive and even alive than they were previously. We will see society split into two groups: one large, one small. The small group will be comprised of the productive, who limit their entertainment consumption in any medium (but especially VR). This group will be exponentially more affluent than the much larger group. The larger group will be comprised of the numerous people who already consume what is already available through any medium: Netflix, Xbox, cable, internet, tablets, phones, etc. These are the people who (best case scenario) have a full-time job, but they spend every other possible waking hour watching or playing something. More and more of this group are working less and consuming/playing more. And we're not talking about real life here. Just think about World of Warcraft--but on steroids. It's going to be insane how addictive VR will be once the bugs have been ironed out.

In short: I too worry that this is something the human race is not prepared for. I worry that our proclivities dispose us to losing ourselves in it at the expense of our real life and responsibilities.

The truth of the matter is that, anecdotally, I look back over my 38 years and I can see the impact on my life of the digital revolution. I _want_ to do more with my life, but oftentimes the allure of the easy "hit" via Netflix or the internet is more of a draw than spending my free time learning languages, exercising, meditating, working on some of my app ideas, writing, or reading. Instead I choose the cognitively easy "hit" at the expense of my personal development and health.

Think about smartphones and tablets. They can and sometimes are used for meaningful and productive purposes. They _can_ be very useful tools. But for most people they're a distraction and a time suck. Which is to say most people spend most of their time on their devices not doing anything meaningful: playing the latest hot game, Facebooking, Facetiming, Snapchatting, reading the news (as vapid as it is). I predict VR will be more of the same.

Either way, we will see...

<comment><USER50> I think I was addressing _attitudes_ towards new technologies, rather than their _actual_ impacts, which you quite rightly focus on.

I'm less convinced that the impacts of these new technologies are as pernicious as you claim, though I'm very open to the idea that hyperrewarding stimuli can "hack" reward pathways carefully tuned for a very different environment, be it McDonalds, PornHub, cocaine, or even Netflix.

But ultimately this is an empirical question, and while I see strong evidence that the food industry exploits our evolved impulses with carefully crafted payloads of calorie-dense foods, I don't see correspondingly strong evidence for a drop in productivity with the rise of ubiquitous, frictionless distraction- if anything we see a negative correlation.

Also worryingly absent from this analysis is the smorgasbord of opportunities for self-improvement that technology has created. Through technology, millions of people have picked up hobbies, languages, instruments, careers, partners, and yes, World of Warcraft, but I don't think we could tabulate these effects into a "net-technology-induced-eudaimonia" metric and say with a straight face that the result turned out to be negative after all.

Further red flags go up with your assertion that the population will bifurcate into the productive and unproductive, which seems to posit some mechanism that AFAIK we don't have good evidence for, like a susceptibility to distraction that's bimodally distributed among the population, or the lack of/ existence of various feedback effects that would amplify small variations, etc.

Anyway, my main point is not that these general concerns are unfounded, but that they're not well-supported by empirical evidence, so we're probably in broad agreement on that front.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Video chatting with Skype is preferred rather than a funky VR setup personally. I can not imagine this taking off in business. It would like be using dressup clothes in a business meeting -- what is the purpose?

I can view this possibly useful among the Snapchat crowd, but Snapchat allows for deferred messaging, which has great use.

</comment><comment><USER52> I find the creation of avatars in VR intriguing. What FB showed is far from perfect, and apparently the avatar's gestures and expressions are controlled by hand motions, as another poster pointed out. Still, even without legs, their avatars look a lot better than these [1] by Foo VR, in which they synthesize a full body avatar solely from controller positions. [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT3jZyOXqzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT3jZyOXqzU)

</comment><comment><USER53> I am always amazed about how childish this company behaves, and especially its chef. If i would not know the age of these people and their voices i would guess they are 10 judged by their actions. Looks this was made for childish minds in this increasingly infantile society, and like a little megalomaniac kids dream 'to catch all humans that are dumb enough' in his fantasy VR bubble. I hope humankind does not get too damaged by this company and their primary school games.

<comment><USER54> I'd actually say that the presentation was really good. It's mostly in a very accessible form of humor that most can participate in. This presentation will not only be seen by those in the crowd but millions of people on Facebook. The people Mark needs to convince to use these products are not the old but the young, and by using that language I think he's reached the heart of many in the insanely large demographic this demo is targetting.

EDIT: Typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm ecstatic about this project but this demo was not the first of it's kind. It was demo'd live earlier this year at F8: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzhHCcR6hic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzhHCcR6hic)

<comment><USER56> From the demo filmed today vs that demo, it feels like they've made a lot of progress

<comment><USER57> I wonder if the vr can actually grab their facial expressions, or how much was pre-rendered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I would love to see a very different use case. Lets build a virtual space with the known parts of the universe and let anybody travel in it and visit planets, pull up details. That would be much more appealing use case to me than the ones demoed in this video.

</comment><comment><USER59> I wonder if your spouse would be impressed that she sees your avatar instead of you in a video call. It may be novel in the first 1-2 times, but then it'll get tiresome very soon. Especially since the avatars are so poorly made (and with teeth, really?).

</comment><comment><USER60> How come I can't find any pictures/video from external point of view of the demo, just to see how it looks from outside to see Zuckerberg do his demo? Is that all staged? Where people forbidden to take pic/video at the event?

</comment><comment><USER61> Somewhere in the next 4-7 years, I predict we'll see Facebook give away free (or sell extremely cheap) AR glasses - which have a significantly reduced form factor.

</comment><comment><USER62> Makes me think of a hybrid of Second Life and Minecraft. Trying to appeal to two very distinct demographics. Not too serious, not too cartoony. Somewhere in between.

</comment><comment><USER63> That demo looked suuuuper awkward to me. Had to stop after a minute or two because it was so painful. Like Elon Musk, who also sucks at presentation, Zuckerberg should just get a skilled actor to present for him.

The VR app itself looked super cheesy, too. It's embarrassing to see a company with Facebook's resources come out with an app whose avatars don't look much better than a couple of South Park characters.

Way too much hype, and too little substance. Call me back in 10 years, when a serious VR Skype-killer app arrives.

<comment><USER61> Elon Musk is a great presenter. It's refreshing to have someone not overconfident and who is a little skeptical.

The avatars did seem pretty childish, which makes me think this thing could be aimed at kids and teens. Makes sense, given their adoption of Pokemon Go.

<comment><USER63> Musk stutters. There are also many awkward halts and pauses in his sentences, and a lot of um'ing and ah'ing in his speeches. "um" is probably the most frequent word that he uses. The overall impression is that he's nervous and just not a very capable speaker.

He really could benefit from a couple of years of basic Toastmasters' training, not to mention how much he could improve with the help of a world- class speech coach (or even a team of them) that he could easily afford.

<comment><USER61> I get all that. But what I'm saying is that he has a distinctive voice.

It's refreshing to have someone who isn't so polished. Sure, the dude stutters and stammers, but it's not to the detriment of being able to parse whatever he happens to be saying, ist it? This softer-touch presentational style is where he has derived so much reverence, envy, and cultural capital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> It's like a low-rent version of Second Life.

<comment><USER30> Second Life IS the low rent version of Second Life. I don't think anyone has made the high rent version yet.

<comment><USER65> The same guys who made Second Life have made a second second life that's pretty sweet. Better in many ways than OP's demo.

[https://highfidelity.com/](https://highfidelity.com/)

<comment><USER66> I'd read about that a while back. Seems to be shaping up pretty nicely. Although right now the most interesting feature is their issue tracker [1] and bug bounty system.

[1] [https://worklist.net/worklist](https://worklist.net/worklist)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> God that facebook banner is awful. So glad I dumped this site years ago.

</comment><comment><USER68> What is the sell point of this? Real-time lip sync???

<comment><USER69> disrupting the $200 trillion industry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> This is amazing. I want VR so bad.

On a lower note, I wish there were real games rather than this kind of things, but I still find it amazing.

</comment><comment><USER71> woah... this is really impressive

</comment><comment><USER72> "Travel to Mars"

Ha.

Is that the trend now?

</comment><comment><USER73> two paper clips... arf arf...

</comment><comment><USER74> Wow. I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but that was pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER75> > and (dog name) doesn't know what's going on (hahahaha) "yeah he usually > doesn't"

Can't help but notice how certain kind of intellectuals always view animals with contempt. They may love the animal, but they see it as a "pet". What they're really saying, is that the dog is _stupid_.

Now personally, I'm not really excited about technology that's designed by people who live so much in their head, that they categorize the world in "intelligent humans" and "stupid animals". I kid you not, I'm pretty sure, many of them do actually believe that making a computer that simulates a completely working dog and all its behaviours is just a matter of time.. because hey, "the brain is just a computer" and obviously to them, a dog's brain is a much simpler computer...

Now animals being stupid isn't enough. The world also is stupid, so let's just recreate trees, which are obviously just a collection of parts "branch", "trunk" and so on. Wooooo. And then let's touch ourselves all day thinking about how the world is a simulation because we're obviously just a few millenia away of simulating ourselves.

/rant OFF

I'm sure they really love their dog... but to me these type of comments are not innocent. It reveals the materialistic paradigm that drives people making those technologies, and I'm not sure it is for the better.

We're pretty much designing everything on mobile around addiction already, we need more ethics in the way that technology is designed. Especially when it is designed by people who's primary motivation in life is to amass riches rather than actually making our life better.</comment>


Ask HN: How can a newbie contribute to an open source project in python?  - <AUTHOR>

I've just learned the basics of python, and I suppose that, for becoming a perfectionist, practice and coding is the best way. So what kind of contribution can I make to a project written in python, though I may not understand it fully. <comment><USER2> Most mature Python projects will have unit tests, and most of those will be incomplete / broken. Reading the tests will help you understand the use-cases of the program, learn some Python along the way, and then contribution by your own additions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Python has a great community and Github makes it super easy to contribute.

Step 1: Create a github account Step 2: Look at other projects you find interesting, clone them and try them out. If you have a hard time installing it or using it, improve something about it and submit a pull request. Even if it is just improving the README. Step 3: Repeat.

You can always tear apart my projects and improve them if you are interested. <http://github.com/mcotton></comment>


Ask HN: Good tablet games for children with autism  - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for good games that are simple and do not have those annoying ads popping up all the time. Is there a good indie developer of such games, even ones which are not free but cost a few dollars ? <comment><USER2> Physical or mental disabilities?

<comment><AUTHOR> sensory disorder / autism spectrum. The main challenge is attention deficit, so any pop ups / ads destroy their UX.

<comment><USER2> Toca Boca apps generally get good reviews: [http://tocaboca.com/](http://tocaboca.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> looks nice, this is what I meant</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are top-grossing apps calculated? - <AUTHOR> How does Google and Apple calculate top grossing apps, when a number of those apps have their sales from a subscription model that does not happen through the app store (spotify, netflix, etc)? <comment><USER2> Fun fact: if your app has a reasonable conversion rate, you can basically buy your spot on that list temporarily by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising.

It usually isn't sustainable, but can be helpful during launch of a new game to make sure it gets attention. I think it was easier than cracking the Top Free list, since fewer apps have IAP.

The ad team at my previous game company would do this and not tell the rest of the rank-and-file employees. We'd be psyched to see our app in the top grossing list... meanwhile the ad team would be spending more money than we were earning.

<comment><USER3> years ago, the dollar amounts werent that large even. my game company bought us all gift cards and told us all to each buy a couple hundred dollars in our app to bump a couple spots.

another interesting thing, basically everyone on the top grossing chart knows roughly what the others are making - as you adjust ad spend you adjust your revenue, and when you pass someone you know how much they are making. (or just through word of mouth or multiple games)

even more crazy was buying tens or hundreds of thousands of downloads to get to the top of the free charts from bots, before apple claimed to be cracking down, which then triggered a couple percent of that in legitimate downloads. those 'organic' downloads from the charts ended up costing a fraction of what paid ads would have cost if you average the bot download cost over them. then marketing/coo lying about not using bots......dont know why they thinks they can hide stuff from the engineers

<comment><USER4> > my game company bought us all gift cards and told us all to each buy a > couple hundred dollars in our app to bump a couple spots.

Is this allowed?

<comment><USER5> Sure why not?

It's like opening a restaurant and paying people to eat there for a while to generate fake social proof.

<comment><USER6> Fake it until you make it. It's natural conclusion of Doing Things That Don't Scale: [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

First 100 people through the door get 15% off!

Beta testers get the full game half price!

And of course, authors do this on the NYT Best Seller list all the time... buy enough copies of your own book at enough book stores and you'll shoot right to the top: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller_list#Controversies)

<comment><USER7> The first two examples of discounts you cited are very different from just paying to directly inflate your ratings.

<comment><USER6> I'm trying to show a progression from "discounts" to "more discounts" to "we'll give it to you free just to get more 'sales'" That's why I called it a natural conclusion.

The only difference between giving someone a coupon to entice them to buy something from you and buying it yourself is how much money you're losing in the short term. It's on the same spectrum, just at different ends.

<comment><USER8> No, this is not a spectrum.

Offering a discount or giving copies away is marketing.

Buying copies yourself and pretending someone else did is fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They don't account for revenue from outside the stores. Apple technically doesn't allow purchases to happen outside its stores, in practice that has always been a bit of a grey area, but in any case that revenue is not disclosed to Apple and therefore cannot affect the rankings in any way.

As for the calculations, Apple updates roughly every six hours and I think (the algorithms not being public for a good reason, I have no real proof), they take into account the total sum revenue during the last period, but also use the relative delta revenue as a factor, so even with slightly lower revenue a suddenly popular app can appear higher in the rankings.

They also seem to change the algorithms every once in a while, we've seen pretty drastic changes overnight a few times, eventually though the top apps always normalize around the usual suspects, so it's possible that they just do some sort of reset of historical data that also affect rankings.

<comment><USER6> That's the answer. If Netflix is on the top grossing app charts, it's due entirely to signups that happen within the Netflix app, not on Netflix.com.

The better way to think about the list is "top grossing apps for Apple/Google". Their 30% cut is what they're counting there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I also wonder why Apple allows some apps to accept payments via credit card yet others need to use the built in payment solutions?

EDIT: some research later indicates that it's possible allowing a user to sign up outside the app (and outside a webview initiated by the app) skirts around the policy [1], since the user can return to the app and log in, then use their account for payments.

[1] [https://www.designernews.co/stories/9695-how-do-apps-like- ly...](https://www.designernews.co/stories/9695-how-do-apps-like-lyft-uber- airbnb-skirt-apples-30-cut-on-each-transaction)

<comment><USER11> Apps are allowed to use external payment methods for "real world" goods and services.

All digital content (premium features, game coins, file storage, music or video libraries) accessible within the app must be charged through Apple, and the user must not be able to find an alternative payment method from within the app.

> EDIT: some research later indicates that it's possible allowing a user to > sign up outside the app (and outside a webview initiated by the app) skirts > around the policy, since the user can return to the app and log in, then use > their account for payments.

Depending on the precise details of your signup page, this may or may not get banned by Apple if they notice it. It's allowed to sign up users and accept external payments outside the app - _but then you must not have links to this payment page from within the app_. If the user already has an external paid account, then they can use it, but any first-time users must only see IAP or nothing.

Some time ago Apple threatened to ban Dropbox, because they had a webview for signups, and it was possible to upgrade to a premium account within that webview.

<comment><USER12> That's false. You can offer your own solution presented side-by-side with IAP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> How do you know a large fraction of subscription signups don't happen through the App Store? [https://9to5mac.com/2015/09/24/netflix-in-app- purchase/](https://9to5mac.com/2015/09/24/netflix-in-app-purchase/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think Apple only take in account for direct app purchase, in-app purchase and subscription plus this ranking is calculated weekly.

</comment><comment><USER14> I believe top grossing apps only includes payments made via the App Store for Apple.

It includes both in app purchases and cost to buy.</comment>


Why do prescription drugs costmore in the US? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/future/economics/216591-prescription-drugs-outside-us-infographic <comment><USER2> Because we don't have cost controls!! It's as simple as that. Every other advanced (or whatever you want to call them) country on earth has cost controls on their health care.

EDIT: every one of the countries cited in the article have cost controls except us.

<comment><USER3> If the US had health care cost controls (and if every state expanded Medicaid), its healthcare system would be pretty good. It's already quite similar to the Swiss system, except for this critical lack of cost regulation.

As far as I know, Massachusetts's "Romneycare" (the blueprint for Obamacare) was improved to add these cost controls, but I don't know how it has worked out for them. They seem to have very high per capita health care costs relative to the rest of the country.

<comment><USER4> Not as a criticism of your logic but out of curiosity I woul love to know if the per capita health care cost statistics you read or are thinking of, are including or excluding people not paying for health care. Its a common tactic in the manipulation of population statistics to "chose what's included" and in this case the inclusion of people not paying would lower the per capita cost and excluding the would raise it. If the Massachusetts and nation stats don't make the same choice on this matter it makes them much harder to compare fairly.

<comment><USER3> Actually, thanks for prompting me to check on that stat. It came from here: [http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/health-spending-per- cap...](http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/health-spending-per-capita/)

And in returning to it, I realized that it's from 2009!

That said, it seems like it's simply total health care spending divided by population per state. But I'm not sure. Either way, it's pretty outdated.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Translation of Samsung's Response - <AUTHOR> http://esusatyo.net/post/30215775873/translation-of-samsungs-response

<comment><USER3> Apple isn't successful because they have a crapload of patents, they are successful because they build a great product, a great brand and a great ecosystem. This Apple win helps Apple marginally and hurts the consumer significantly. To be honest, I'm not sure why fanboys even like this - <USER2> products improve when there is competition, and all innovation is iterative.

</comment><comment><USER4> Translation of Apples pathetic attempt to compete, not by innovation, but by litigation - Waaahan, Samsung made a better phone, quick call my lawyers.

Go read this before blindly supporting Apple and it's patents - <http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=9227>

Also, patent for rectangle with rounded edges, or slide to unlock! I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's next patent is on how to wank. That should make it some serious dough

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit wow... I didn't even know Samsung was selling cheap iPhone knock-offs. I thought they were just selling phones that had similar look and feel to iPhones (and others) and used similar UI as iPhones (and others).</comment>


How to Learn Data Structures and Algorithms (An Ultimate Guide for Beginners) - Bella-Xiang https://www.coderscat.com/how-to-learn-data-structures-and-algorithms <comment><AUTHOR> A helpful guide to beginners.</comment>


"Amazon Remembers" is a mechanical turk in extreme cases - <AUTHOR> http://limingzhu.posterous.com/amazon-remembers-is-a-mechanical-turk-in-extr Real persons at Amazon look at submitted pictures and try to find product matches. An very interesting experiment reveals. <comment><USER2> I thought it was well known that Amazon used mechanical turk for these tasks when the computer can't figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> I assume The Turk was being funny rather than actually being from Alcatraz?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> didn't know it was using turk for their own image recognition services... not sure if they are using it internally or actually making these tasks available to public.</comment>


John Kiriakou: Obama's abuse of the Espionage Act is modern-day McCarthyism - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/06/obama-abuse-espionage-act-mccarthyism

<comment><USER2> It bears noting that the author is not just anybody. He's one of the people charged under Espionage Act, so he certainly should know what the process involves and how a whistleblower is treated in the current political climate.

I would also like to point out the second-to-last paragraph. "The press also has a role to play, one that, so far, it has largely ignored. That role is to report on and investigate the whistleblower's revelations of illegality, not on the kind of car he drives, the brand of eyeglasses he wears, where he went to college, or what his nextdoor neighbor has to say about their childhood." That would be cynical, if it wasn't so horrifyingly accurate.

<comment><USER3> It's also worth pointing out that while the Espionage Act charges were dropped as part of his plea bargain, he did plead guilty to a charge under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act[1]. The judge didn't buy that his prosecution was politically motivated:

 _Kiriakou, who wrote a book detailing his CIA career, had tried to argue after the charges were filed that he was a victim of vindictive prosecution by government officials who believed he portrayed the CIA negatively, but the judge rejected those arguments as well._

[1] [http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/22/14626249-...](http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/22/14626249-ex- cia-agent-pleads-guilty-to-leaking-identity-of-covert- operative?lite&ocid=msnhp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm afraid that I know where American Apathy(tm) comes from. What can we do about this?

I've written to my Senators, who, incidentally, are very critical of this NSA debacle and we've seen no change. I've donated money to EFF. I've told everyone I know that this is unacceptable. What next? Protest in the streets? What would that get us?

I'm not sure what we can do collectively to affect change. I feel completely hamstrung by the setup.

<comment><USER5> Where does it come from?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> To borrow a line from Christine Keeler well he woudl say that what he what does the Espionage Act (1917) have to do with the Intelligence Identities Protection Act which is what he was charged with?

And BTW Libby should be doing 20-Life for burning a cia officer for petty party political gain

I would agree that adding computer misuse charges against Bradly manning was pointless and stupid.

<comment><USER3> Libby didn't "burn" Valerie Plame. Colin Powell's deputy Richard Armitage did.

<comment><USER6> Ah I sit corrected - but Libby was the one that got the dodgy presidential pardon no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well, it looks like this story is no longer on the front page, or the second page, or the third.. I guess the oppressive streak of the US government against those acting in gray areas for the common good is not germane to "hackers"</comment>


Humans X Design - <AUTHOR> http://humansindesign.com/ <comment><USER2> Really interesting insights on user experience!</comment>


NetroStation: Make your travel through the Internet a pleasant journey - <AUTHOR> https://www.netrostation.com/#/join <comment><AUTHOR> Some additional technical background may be found here: [http://blog.aurelia.io/2017/04/04/case-study- netrostation/](http://blog.aurelia.io/2017/04/04/case-study-netrostation/)

 _The solution is built using Aurelia ES.Next along with JSPM as the package manager. It 's hosted in Azure as a Geo Distributed Web app, it leverages Traffic Manager, Redis and static files that are served from CDN._</comment>


Al-Qaida was the reason for mass blog shutdown on blogetry - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/blogetery-al-qaeda/

<comment><USER2> FWIW, NPR's Morning Edition had a segment on the al-Qaeda magazine this morning. They said the magazine wasn't performing as well as previous a-Q publications and that it was met with apathy by their target audience. The magazine is published in English and is said to have a very "American" feel, specially in its use of popular colloquialism and casual speech (e.g. an article titled "Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom".)

Intel is still investigating its authorship, but given that small sample above, methinks "Dr. Seuss" comes to mind,</comment>