Site Leaks Microsoft Online Surveillance Guide, MS Demands Takedown Under DMCA - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekosystem.com/cryptome-leaks-microsofts-online-surveillance-guide-ms-demands-takedown/

<comment><USER2> And now look at <http://cryptome.org/>

<comment><USER3> multitouch@reddit posted this link: <http://file.wikileaks.org/files/microsoft-spy.pdf>

<comment><USER2> It might just be me or Preview.app, but that pdf seems to have the wrong text color in many places. It's not consistent with what's in scribd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I don't get is how merely _alleging_ a copyright infringement under the DMCA can lead to the immediate take down of an entire website. If I was to claim Microsoft infringed my copyright, would they take microsoft.com offline for 10 days?

<comment><USER5> The entire point of that section of the DMCA was to make it easy for rights- holders to get something pulled from a site. While the DMCA definitely puts _too much_ power in the hands of rights-holders, the previous method was to sue the infringer and then wait for a court to issue an injunction (which could tend to take a while; the courts aren't really known for their speedy service).

Rights-holders obviously don't like the idea that the infringing material just sits there being distributed to anyone that wants it while all the legal ducks are lined up for filing suit and petitioning a judge to issue the injunction.

> _If I was to claim Microsoft infringed my copyright, would they take > microsoft.com offline for 10 days?_

The big players obviously have the rules bent for them, especially since they have large legal teams. I assume that if you have a large, highly-paid legal team, your hosting provider might also let you leave your content up with the understanding that your legal team will help them out if the DMCA-notice- issuer comes a-knockin'. Either that, or they make enough money off of your account to warrant paying legal fees to defend themselves in order to keep you as a happy customer.

In your example, Microsoft would probably just remove the offending material, then rush the court documents to get a suit underway so that a judge could issue a ruling allowing them to distribute it while the matter was decided.

<comment><USER4> The issue, it seems to me, is that a rights-holder by that definition is anyone who _claims_ to be a rights holder. I would expect there to be some form of plausibility check by an independent person, otherwise there could be completely frivolous denial of service attacks based on this law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why would they host it on Network Solutions? The unfortunate reality is that we do not always have freedom of speech in fact. Most network hosts are not going to protect you if they're afraid of being sued.

They should be using <http://prq.se>, the same company that hosts TPB & wikileaks.

Edit: This post is perhaps ill-informed. Network Solutions is 4chan's registrar so they can't be that bad.

<comment><USER7> It's a sliding scale of fear

4chan is scarier than The Man is scarier than [everyone else]

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The more I read news like this, the more I respect organizations like Sunshine Press (Wikileaks) and the work of individuals like John Young.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mirror of cryptome.org (minus the zip in question) at: <http://cryptomeorg.siteprotect.net/>

Most interesting bit: <http://cryptomeorg.siteprotect.net/0001/ms-spy- takedown.htm>

Network Solutions placed a legal lock on the domain (also mentioned in article above.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why exactly do people refer to the DNS as 'distributed' ?

The internet needs a better naming system, one under which removal of an established name _cannot_ happen.

<comment><USER10> Most people who ventured into Zooko's Triangle (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle>) have never been seen again.

<comment><USER9> sigh, it's true. Adoption is the hardest part, as DNS/URLs work great right up until they don't.

<comment><USER10> Adoption is definitely hard, although that wasn't my point. The kind of DNS replacement that many people want appears to be technically impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If microsoft did not publish the document, or they did not register and establish it as copyrighted material, then I say Cryptome should claim copyright of the document.

Furthermore, the CALEA requires ISPs to coperate with "LAW Enforcement" of which Microsoft is NOT. What Law enforcement agency told network solutions to block the domain?

</comment><comment><USER12> How is it not valid to say that a guide written by Microsoft is protected by copyright and can't be republished?

If he believes himself that copyright is not intended to protect this type of material, why doesn't he file a DMCA counter notice so that Network Solutions is prevented from taking down his site?

No host is going to put themselves on the hook for some customer's infringement by ignoring the safe harbor rules, regardless of noble intent of the infringer.

<comment><USER3> <http://cryptomeorg.siteprotect.net/0001/ms-spy-takedown.htm>

> My Counter Notification is attached. > [...] > [Scanned] February 24, 2010 > By email and fax to 703-668-5959

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/9587992205>

</comment><comment><USER13> site crashed...</comment>


40% of Android phones are returned? 'Absolutely ridiculous' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2011/07/28/40-of-android-phones-are-returned-absolutely-ridiculous/

<comment><USER2> Finally, that ridiculous BS from Techcrunch is being debunked.</comment>


My Interviews with Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://thesocietea.org/2016/07/my-interviews-with-amazon/ <comment><USER3> Interesting, I get pestered by them constantly, and never actually considered going for it. For one thing, the common sentiment on HN seems to be 'friends don't let friends work for Amazon'.

Amazon seems like a meat grinder, where getting hired isn't as hard as it seems, and they just burn through young people who don't know better. This is as someone completely on the outside who's only heard stories, though. When I brought this up to one recruiter a few years ago, they basically acknowledged the reputation and their intent to improve.

Perhaps unlike HN, I've never seriously considered joining a mega-corporation like Google, Facebook, or Amazon. I just don't see the appeal, nor do I want to work in a city (SV, Seattle, NYC, or otherwise).

<comment><USER4> Interestingly, I opened the Amazon door as a new dev and found something very different than what this post describes.

The first step - before speaking to anyone about my background or interest - was going to be an intensive, one-hour coding session. It looked like it would be more "independent proof of competence" than "friendly programming task to evaluate you". I was expected to be on webcam the entire time to verify identity and prevent cheating. No joke about the _entire time_ part - <USER2> was a reminder to get any water or office supplies I would need before sitting down, because the interview would be terminated if I left the frame of the cam.

Between the blind hostility of that opener and the meat-grinder rep, I passed without interviewing (and passed with the next Amazon recruiter shortly after, who had no idea they'd pinged me before). I'm sure this routine is reserved for new grads, and the weird "don't lean out of frame" stuff seemed to be from some interview-management third party, but it was still the most stilted process I've seen from an actual software company.

<comment><USER5> Bezos set a mandate to HR a few years ago that he wanted them to be able to hire a new grad without ever needing to speak to a human engineer. That is, he wants the entire interview process automated (specifically for new grads, at least for now).

What you experienced is part of their experiment in figuring out how to make this work. They've got a number of variations of interviews going on right now. I believe this is so that they can scale up as rapidly as they need to.

Apologies for the lack of citation but I don't believe this is something Amazon has spoken publicly about.

<comment><USER6> Oh that is great, robots hiring staff.

<comment><USER7> Not defending it, but when you and your fellow engineers are spending a majority of the time interviewing instead of programming, such a system is certainly tempting.

<comment><USER8> Maybe that problem only impacts productivity significantly when attrition is high (suggesting that the problem might be with talent retention and not engineering effort spent on interviewing)?

<comment><USER7> Perhaps Amazon has an attrition problem - at the company I'm talking about, it's just extremely rapid growth.

<comment><USER9> The attrition problem is well known.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a little confused. The recruiter said that $170-$200k was an acceptable range. Then they offered him the position for significantly less than that. I don't understand why he even considered the offer. I would have been really upset that they wasted my time with a bait and switch. Am wrong for feeling that way? Are there other factors to consider?

<comment><USER11> When I've seen this with people interviewing in Amazon, it's generally because they're tagged to a higher level position, and during the interview, they decide they're not a fit at that level, but possibly at the one below it. i.e., he might have originally been interviewing for an SDEII position, but they felt his skill-set was closer to what they look for in an SDEI, but still wanted to make him an offer to join the team.

<comment><USER12> The comments in the original blog post suggests a gap of 60k with the offer. Your comment makes sense only if he was interviewing for a Principal Engineer position or something, but instead was offered an SDE-I position. Plus I'm pretty sure very few (if any) non-Principal SDEs at Amazon actually get 200K in the first year.

<comment><USER13> Yes. If you can be promoted directly from SDE-I to SDE-II, there should not be a ~60K gap between. I've had the described thing happen (start interview by assuming level 3, but hire at level 2), and the gap is more like 20K. In other words: they should have known better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good on the author for making the decision based on his and his family's needs and not "but it's a top-tier company, man, you gotta work for the best be the best do the BEST."

People often don't consider cost-of-living when making job decisions. I think the way to do it is to equalize the salaries based on cost-of-living across each company you're considering. So if you make $60,000 in a small midwestern town, that's the same as making $120k in Seattle or the Bay Area. If you make $80,000 in a small midwestern town, you're coming out ahead of the guy/gal pulling six figures in SF.

It's an important consideration and one I think many employers try to get you to ignore.

<comment><USER15> > So if you make $60,000 in a small midwestern town, that's the same as making > $120k in Seattle or the Bay Area.

Not true at all. I made almost that exact jump when moving from the Midwest to Seattle.

You're forgetting things like raises, bonuses, and 401(k) matching that are a % of your salary. Sign-on bonuses and stock benefits are common out here but rare in the Midwest.

Plus, even if your housing cost doubles, other expenses don't. Food costs, gas, vacations, and everything on Amazon is the same. I actually spend a lot less on transportation because I can take public transit instead of a car. We were able to sell one of our cars too.

Not to mention you can probably keep most of your salary if you decide to move back to the Midwest.

<comment><USER14> > Plus, even if your housing cost doubles, other expenses don't. Food costs, > gas, vacations, and everything on Amazon is the same. I actually spend a lot > less on transportation because I can take public transit instead of a car. > We were able to sell one of our cars too.

That's actually not true. I'm referring to cost-of-living, which includes housing, gas, food, etc. All the things you list. Here's a calculator you can use to try it for yourself [1]. Using that, if I live in Columbia, MO (which I chose at random) and make $60k, I must make $111k in the Bay Area to maintain the same standard of living.

[1] [http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost- of-l...](http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living- calculator.aspx)

> You're forgetting things like raises, bonuses, and 401(k) matching that are > a % of your salary. Not to mention sign-on bonuses and stock benefits, which > are rare in the Midwest.

That is definitely correct. But you can certainly find companies offering good (signing and regular) bonuses and 401k matching; I did. Stock is much rarer, as you say.

<comment><USER16> Cost-of-living is only one cost to consider.

I also used to work in Nowhere, USA and now work in the Bay Area. While my "cost of living as a percent of salary" is much higher, so is my "salary minus cost of living" which is a more important measurement. To put it into concrete hypothetical terms:

Person A lives in rural Iowa, makes $50K a year after taxes, and their cost of living items (housing, gas, food, etc.) add up to $20K. Person B lives in the city, makes $100K a year after taxes, and their cost of living items add up to $60K. All other things being equal (I know, that's a stretch), who's doing better?

One school of thought is that A is better off because while they're making half the salary, their cost of living is 1/3rd. My school of though says that B is better off because he has $10K more to do things that cost the same as they do for person A: Investment, travel, Netflix, anything you buy on Amazon, whatever.

<comment><USER17> If you can take a job somewhere with more than double your after-tax salary(what you would have to do to go from $50k after tax to $100k after tax) and only double your living expenses, of course you will come out ahead. I don't think that is a common situation for a family unless you either downgrade your standard of housing(smaller, add roommates, less desirable area, increase commute, etc) or are seriously underpaid. For single people it might be more commonly possible. Probably explains why a lot of people seem to come to my relatively high CoL area straight out of school and move away as soon as they start a family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wouldn't work for Amazon if my life depended on it. I interviewed once with A2Z. Phone coding interview, working on their music service. I was just coming from a major company in the space where I did the exact thing they needed and they recruited me based upon the strength of the product I developed. I answered and passed all questions without a sign of issue. I was expecting the new step was an in-person interview, and in fact was told that. Although I was local, I got called again to do another phone screen, more coding. I told the recruiter that I already had other offers and would be more than happy to do coding on site, so I could streamline the process.

She didn't like this and put up a hard-lined attitude about it, insisted I needed more basic questions. Totally treated me like less than a person and didn't care that I had other offers that would expire. Acted like it was a gift that Amazon was interested in me at all.

Who seriously puts up with this crap? One can only imagine how working for a company must be if this is how their hiring process works. I hung up the phone and last I checked I wouldn't want to be working at the music thing anyway.

<comment><USER19> It's a really tough job market for a lot of people. I would guess as a total ballpark that 80% of people who apply to Amazon would absolutely jump through hoops all day just to get an interview. They're almost always not going to be a good fit, but if you deal applicants all day and they're overwhelmingly kissing your ass for the time of day, it's easy to see why someone with narcissistic traits would get huffy when someone doesn't follow their every whim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's wasteful for companies to focus so much on implementing data structures for front-end coding jobs when they're packaged commodities nowadays.

If you're going to be building search engines or whatever, OK. And, time complexity questions should be asked. But chances are, the broad majority will end up doing line of business apps that require three data structures of which you will never write a better version than your stdlib: list, hash, set.

There's only one time in my 20 year career I've ever had to implement my own data structure (Directed Graph), and I basically copied it line by line out of a book and ended up replacing it with Neo4j.

<comment><USER21> but programmer has to know what ds/algorithm to choose, of course you can look up complexities and stuff but it doesn't help in cases where performance tuning of caches ect is necessary. you have to understand what that particular algorithm/ds is actually doing to tune it properly.

<comment><USER20> Your example of performance tuning caches is a perfect.

It's enough to generally know about caches. Databases have query caches. Memcache and Redis are memory caches. Retrieval is O(1) because they're based on hashes. You can influence object expiration and turn on LRU.

I can't implement a cache with LRU by the seat of my pants though, but I'm experienced enough to know you shouldn't do that anyways. And, I know enough to read the docs and ask intelligent questions.

None of that changes the fact that when my cache blows up in production, I'm going to be in the exact same position as my all-algo-knowing colleague -- scared, grasping at straws, and applying grit to fix the problem.

<comment><USER22> Wow, I could not agree more. What you are calling grit is massively under- measured in the current bullshit whiteboarding interviews for software developers today.

<comment><USER20> Thanks. Another name for it is StackOverflow :-P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is the proper way to handle recruiters:

 _I responded saying that working for Amazon would be awesome, but for me and Layla to move up to Seattle would require a 170-200k salary. I assumed this recruiter would take a look at that number, scoff, and politely end our conversation – but she affirmed that they could work with that, and asked if I wanted to set up a phone interview._

If you still get too many, then it's time to increase your salary requirement.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hearing that the recruiter more or less committed to a 170K+ range, only to waste significant amounts of interviewee time before rendering a below market offer is really concerning.

Amazon is in direct competition for talent with Google, Facebook and Microsoft and from what information I can gather they all pay significantly more while also lacking the bad reputation Amazon has accrued over the years for being a complete meat-grinder. (whether or not the others are actually meat-grinders is still up for debate: but they don't have a public reputation for being such)

Why does talent in our industry continue to accept this kind of treatment? If name brand law firms tried to pull this shit with associate lawyers I suspect they would get sent invoices for the billable hours.

<comment> amzn-336495 Amazon is not in direct competition with those companies. Amazon bottom feeds on new grad hires, people with restrictive visas, and interns. Their 90th percentile pay for developers is going to be about $120k per year with maybe a $150k total comp target. They may hire a few dozen top people per year, but for the most part no one ever quits those companies to go to Amazon.

<comment><USER24> Of course few people quit google or facebook to go work for amazon unless it's a Marissa Mayer-esque jump in the org chart.

The real question to ask is how many individual technical contributors does Amazon lose to the others?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What is the general take on the initial ballpark of 170k - 200k vs. the actual offer of low 6 figures? Is that just how the game is played and to be expected (e.g., never believe anything they say to get you into interviews), or is it something to be affronted by: why did we both waste all of our time on this process?

Or is it likely to be somewhere in the middle...maybe if he blew everyone away in the interviews he would have received an offer for 180k, but he didn't so it was more of a 115k assessment?

<comment><USER26> They interviewed him assuming he was a senior candidate, the interviewers gave feedback that said "Good enough to hire, but not good enough to hire as a senior."

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My experience was the complete opposite. I interviewed for them when they came to Sydney.

The recruiter on LinkedIn said that it was for a senior Java developer role. We even spoke over the phone to go through some of what the role involved.

The actual interviewing process was half a day of being interviewed by various people from different departments, some asking sysops questions, some asking general BA questions, some asking network/IP related questions, and 2 (if I remember correctly) actually asking programming/developer questions.

One was shocked that I didn't have a laptop with me, which was not at all part of the instructions.

The process was nowhere near as organised as what's mentioned in this blog, and this was somewhat recent (late 2015 I think?)

Perhaps their overseas recruitment arm seriously needs better coordination?

</comment><comment><USER28> And this is why remote work for tech people is the future.

Timezones are still an issue, but if you're willing to adapt your work hours to meet the majority, being remote allows you to work for fantastic companies without sacrificing your way of life.

<comment><USER29> They tried this with India, it failed. It's why we need such a robust H1b "solution".

<comment><USER30> One of the few interesting presentations I've seen by a top consulting firm, was given by a regional manager in Norway for Accenture - he talked about their experience with outsourcing to India (this was in the early 00s). Basically it came down to a cultural (business culture) divide, communication, and differences in education.

Throwing half-baked specs over the fence to people from a different culture, who's main qualification wasn't that you could get them _at all_ , but that you could get them _cheaply_ unsurprisingly lead to catastrophic project failures. Sending consultants both ways to work locally together for a while, creating real mixed teams -- worked better.

Tell Stackoverflow, Trello and Gitlab that remote teams doesn't work. Of course it _can_ work, but you need to plan for it. Oh, and team members that are any good, will command a high salary. Don't pay them, and they'll jump ship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hey - I wrote this! =D

</comment><comment><USER32> Great write-up! I'd love to see the linked in profile that generates such great leads. I've tried to improve and polish my linked in profile but still not hearing from recruiters. I must be doing something horribly wrong

<comment><USER31> Hi - Here it is [https://www.linkedin.com/in/alkrauss48](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alkrauss48)

While I got recruited about 10 months ago, all the information should be the same (besides a new job).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I had a similar situation (but with Microsoft), and although in my case it would have been a net improvement in income (probably), there was impact on family and stability to consider, so I declined the offer.

I think being aware of priorities for each person and each phase of life is important. There's times when big name or (relatively speaking) big salary is the prime factor, and that's great, and go for it! There's also times when being close to family, staying rooted, and being stable is the prime factor, and that's ok too.

</comment><comment><USER34> Sounds like my experience last month, except I was interviewing for a low- level software position and didn't get an offer. :/

Actually, I only asked for $130k base and felt guilty about _that_.

<comment><USER35> No joke, I've heard of companies equating ask-salary to self-worth and that a modest request can cost you.

<comment><USER34> That thought has crossed my mind. Sometimes I feel like that question is some sort of bullshit test to see if you over- or under-value yourself. Based on the StackOverflow transparency discussion yesterday I think I am underpaid by about $10k to begin with, which I have still not fully internalized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> My experience being interview by Amazon is mixed...I had a screening call + three phone interviews with Amazon, for an elite devops system/network team. They were amazing and very nice people, from the initial RH contact to the technicians evaluating me. Actually to be fair, EXTRA nice people. On the other hand, some other recruiter messed up, and put me with an interview that I only found out at the last minute it was for a system help desk position in some other occasion. That experience was horrible, and the technician who was supposed to conduct the interview missed it and passed on the interview to an indian employee which accent I barely could keep up with...I just did not abort the interview out of respect. What I would say is that they handle differently people that applies for the more important positions, and in that respect, they are not much more different from other big players in the industry. To give credit to Amazon, their hiring process seems to be saner than Google, where you get contacted by a lot of clueless 3rd party headhunters that try to coax senior people like me into lowly positions that do not match our experience.

</comment><comment><USER37> I had a couple phone screens with them for an AWS role in Palo Alto. They not only forgot to call me for both of them (we rescheduled both times), but my interviewers could not have come across as less interested had they tried. I went through some basic algorithms with them and asked questions about how they wanted to handle errors and edge cases only to be brushed off "do whatever" or "that's fine"\--and not in the friendly "don't worry about that" sense, more with a "why are you wasting my time?" tone. I asked about what they worked on and was told either very basic details that I knew as a user or "I can't talk about that."

/shrug A week after the second screen, I got sent a form letter "no" from my recruiter, which was just fine by me. I've accepted an offer from a rival of theirs and I can't wait to kick their asses.

</comment><comment><USER38> His package (base salary + bonus + average vested stock each year) seems to be standard with regard to the position he's applying. Still, with that package, if Seattle's cost of living is the show stopper (not cheap by any means), then I guess never bother trying at Google/Facebook/equivalents in the Bay Area...

</comment><comment><USER39> I read a lot of comments on bad behaviour of Amazon, which might be. Also a comment series on the lowball offer and wasting his time if there wouldn't be an offer in the 170k range. Also true.

But I think it is in order to tell the author of the story as well not to waste their time. This time it's Amazon who most of us don't like, but in generic it could be any company. If your main reason for not going has nothing to do with the offer or job itself but only with something you could, and should have considered beforehand you effectively wasted the companies time, not the other way around. They gave you a free test.

</comment><comment><USER40> Kudos on the author for sticking to what he said was his bottom line. This episode benefits all developers/engineers because we need to incentivize software companies to branch out beyond SF, Seattle, Boulder, and NYC.

</comment><comment><USER41> Pretty nice of Amazon to say high hundreds, waste time, and then offer low hundreds. Even after explaining from the very start, that this was a requirement.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why is everything opposed to algo/ds questions? If you understand them conceptually and know how to program, you should be able to implement them.

</comment><comment><USER43> A point I hope employers note:

The first reason he lists for declining the offer; salary was too low relative to housing prices.

</comment><comment><USER44> A whole day dedicated to onsite interviews, plus traveling time. How do employed people manage that?

I understand that, from the company's point of view, 1 day is still to short to assess someone. But it is still a lot of time dedicated to an offer that may or may not materialize.

<comment><USER45> We either call in sick, or make something up. I have used various excuses. Once I said I had to "get some tests on my thyroid" and would be unavailable for most of the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm gonna ignore the fact that this is for Amazon, which has its own criticism. Anybody who is baffled by the author's insistence on $170-200k but the offer of low 6 figures needs to read up on negotiation. I recommend the various videos/books/posts by Ramit Sethi that are specific to salary negotiation.

If you give the number first, you lose. They will only negotiate downward from there. You can deflect in a million different ways (which are covered by Ramit extensively), and each time you deflect your advantage increases. They can persist in a million different ways ("I'm sorry, this is just procedure" is probably the most common), but if you cave and give them a number, it will only go down from there. If you give them a range, the best offer you will ever get is the low part of the range. Don't give them a number...wait for them to offer, then negotiate upwards.

<comment><USER40> I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with this as a steadfast maxim. I think overall your statement fits maybe even 75% of negotiations but many do not fit this mold.

Overall, your BATNA (and your counterparty's) is the most important factor in the negotiation. Numbers can certainly go up, especially with changes in your BATNA. Case in point: "I've just received a higher offer; I would accept yours if you could match it + $10k." People post articles on HN all the time talking about how they get companies to outbid each other.

More important than "never giving the number first" is being steadfast in what you want (within realistic bounds). I have followed both styles but haven't been penalized by starting with the number first. If you're the best candidate, the company will pay what you insist on. Otherwise, the "never giving the number first" was never going to work to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I thought one is not supposed to share actual technical interview questions?

<comment><USER48> Only if one has accepted the offer, which, _spoiler alert_ , this guy did not.

<comment><USER49> I'm pretty sure I had to sign NDAs regarding coding questions before any interviews happened (not Amazon, a different company).

<comment><USER50> What are they going to do? Take you to court for vaguely describing a coding question?

<comment><USER51> The status quo is that the company whose questions you leaked will never hire you again in the future, and other tech companies who find out about this while researching you as a possible hire might also decide to never hire you.

It's the difference between a polite "this offer doesn't work for me at the moment", and burning your bridges.

(However, this particular article doesn't seem to discuss any specifics of technical questions, so I don't see an issue here)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't think it is a good idea to post the actual questions one is asked. As an interviewer, I like to use the same question so I can calibrate across candidates.

<comment><USER53> They made him lose his time, I think it's fair game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> this is by far the most thoughtful mic-drop i've read today

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm so nervous in interviews that I get nervous just reading these stories.

</comment><comment><USER56> I know people who have worked there and have read so many horror stories. And beyond that not even horror stories, just plain old stories about it being a shitty place to work.

I'm sure it's possible to get a good job there, not everyone's life can be miserable there. But I wouldn't roll those dice, would you?

</comment><comment><USER57> > I was honestly pretty shocked that I had gotten an offer, and told the HR > person that I would get back to them within a week after I discussed this > with my family.

Upvote if your startup pretended that your offer would expire in 48 hours

#WordGamesFromSandHill

</comment><comment><USER58> I'd rather be homeless and broke in Seattle than living in a mansion in OKC.

<comment><USER59> I'd rather be homeless and broke in a sunny third world country than ever visit Seattle again. So what?

<comment><USER60> I'm curious why is Seattle so bad you'd give up the relative safety to live in a third world country?

<comment><USER61> I live in Seattle. I get really depressed from December-February due to the lack of sunshine, and I've found it to be a more difficult place socially compared to other cities I've lived and worked in. To the point where I have frequently thought about leaving.

That said, I played beach volleyball all day yesterday with some friends as the sun set over the Olympic mountains in the background, and it was greatness. But it took me a couple of years to find my place.

Happy as can be at the moment, but it's odd how the gray can send me into a spiral of inward reflection that drives me nuts. Everyone posts the beautiful pictures of Mount Rainier and sunsets, which are gorgeous, but half the year you can feel lethargic and go into a hibernation mode which messes with your head if you don't have a strong social circle already.

<comment><USER62> I live in Seattle. I love the look on new coworkers' faces when they see Mt Rainier for the first time in April: "HOLY COW IS THAT A VOLCANO??"

<comment><USER63> I live in Munich and work in just south of it. I took my lunchtime walks down the same country path 100 times before I noticed the Alps were looming huge right in front of me.

And I think the weather here is good. (And the wheather in Seattle was wonderful on 100% of the days that I visited it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Nice post. Confirmed that I was right to systematically ignore Amazon recruiters.</comment>


Why abandoned domain names are so dangerous - <AUTHOR> https://www.csoonline.com/article/3300164/dont-abandon-that-domain-name.html <comment><USER2> I recently found a car parts shop and noticed they link to a abandoned domain that hosted a Piwik (now Matamo) script.

I bought the domain and now every customer was running scripts from my server. Being a good sports I notified them but they didn't react. I even visited them in the shop and they accused me of hacking so I let it be.

After a year I saw them promoting their site (that was still running code from my server) on facebook and I wrote them and they accused me again and threatened me with a lawyer.

Issue only got resolved because I found out a facebook friend of mine knows the owner and he dropped everything after they intervened.

I worte it in detail on my blog (which they also tried to make me take down): [https://blog.haschek.at/2019/threat-vector-legacy-static- web...](https://blog.haschek.at/2019/threat-vector-legacy-static- websites.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was concerned for a moment, but this seems more like an issue for big companies, not individuals.

<comment><USER4> Years ago a friend of mine demoed an exploit of another mutual friend who'd let a domain lapse that was used as the reset email for a yahoo account. We let him know obviously.</comment></comment>


'DroneGun' takes down rogue aircraft from over a mile away - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2016/11/28/dronegun-takes-down-rogue-aircraft-from-over-a-mile-away/ <comment><USER2> Jamming is the only serious contender in anti-drone technology. Somewhat infuriating watching the latest new fad in the news every week.

Using eagles to take out drones is tantamount to animal abuse, expensive guns that shoot nets are easily overwhelmed by simply buying another drone, none of the these fad solutions can scale.

Meanwhile companies like Department 13 and few others in the sphere have some fairly advanced tech and could take on swarms. They can safely hijack the signal to bring it down in public areas rather than bricking it 200m in the air like most jammers seem to do. Not necessarily the best thing in crowded areas.</comment>


France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/france-to-invest-20bn-in-high-speed-broadband-for-the-entire-country-7000011671/ <comment><USER2> Not many people remember, but the Clinton admin offered $200 billion in credits and tax cuts for US telcos to roll out fiber nationwide in 1996:

[http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html)

[http://www.cringely.com/2009/10/29/what-goes-around- teledesi...](http://www.cringely.com/2009/10/29/what-goes-around- teledesic-2-0/)

TDLR: through mergers and good lawyers, the telcos were able to get the $200 billion of Clinton tax credits in return for nothing. Obama is trying again with a $100 billion plan

<comment><USER3> The Clinton administration bears a lot of blame for that--the government had a unique way of not, you know, actually making the credits conditional on rolling out nationwide fiber. Business is as business does, government is as government does, and apparently no one had the idea of modulating ISP rewards _after_ broadband service levels changed. I'm not sure you can blame the telcos for maximizing shareholder value as much as you can blame regulators for not understanding that the sky is blue.

<comment><USER2> > I'm not sure you can blame the telcos for maximizing shareholder value as > much as you can blame regulators for not understanding that the sky is blue.

Actually you can. Regardless of legality, it is still stealing.

I'm just really sick of people condoning this crap just because the motivation is to maximize shareholder value. There's a thing called ethics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's about time to massively rollout FTTH in France. Paradoxically I think its deployment has been hampered by a good early ADSL coverage and the associated low prices on ADSL (with uncapped data). These low prices have decided the operators to only make minimum investments on their networks and to further seek to make profit in mobile where data plans are capped and where profits are better. Moreover the entry of a new actor in the mobile space last year has further exacerbated the situation, this actor has significantly reduced the subscriptions prices so the others actors seek to differentiate themselves and one way they found is to invest in LTE networks. So for all these reasons until now FTTH had low priority in France and is marginal. I hope it will change soon.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget FTTLA, which is vastly available in the most densely populated urban areas - it is not as fast as FTTH when there are a lot of households connected to the last amplifier, but i'd say roughly 20% of households could have access to it. On the other hand, FFTH is available for maybe 0.5% of the country (I mean, even in Paris itself, not one building in twenty is connected to it...)

I think you are right with your argument on cheap and good quality ADSL services : i think for most people an uncapped 10-20Mbps, that includes TV, phone, and our famous boxes for 30€ a month is more than enough...

<comment><USER6> I only pay 32€ every other month, and I have more bandwidth than I need.

<comment><USER7> Could you imagine using your own hardware, on your own connection to run your bootstrapped side-project for $100/mo? I'd rather not have to pay Amazon, OVH, or whoever just to be able to service side-projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Only 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload? I guess it would be okay for rural areas, but it's awfully obsolete for cities, even today, let alone for 2023 - at least for an European country, especially one like France. And why such low upload speeds?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mmmm, describing 50 Mbps down as "okay for rural areas" doesn't really mesh with reality.

Most rural areas throughout Europe and elsewhere are struggling with <10 Mbps, if they can get broadband at all.

If you know any region in the world which isn't densely populated, but where every home (not just 1 or 2) has 50 Mbps download, I'd love to read about it. I know of a handful of self-starter village communities which are doing this (e.g. B4RN in the UK), and that's about it.

<comment><USER9> >Most rural areas throughout Europe and elsewhere are struggling with <10 Mbps, if they can get broadband at all.

That sounds like Tucson, where I used to live. Now I'm in New York and getting 50 Mbs down and 5 up for $20 – $30 less than I used to get 12 down and 2 up.

<comment><USER10> That sounds really good. It's not like that in Toronto. We have a communications oligopoly in Canada though.

<comment><USER11> It's coming to Toronto <http://www.beanfieldcondoconnect.com/index.html>

It's more then an oligopoly, there's a government mandates to provide equal service to the north that also drives up prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hopefully the French public respond more maturely than the Australian public did to their similar plan - after years of bitching about how shit internet speeds were here, the gummint finally said "okay, we're going to build a great network with capacity for future use; it will be a great nation-building project", to which the public promptly turned on its heel and started whining about what a white elephant it was and how we have enough capacity and don't need the benefits...

<comment><USER13> Are you sure it's the same public? You're making it sound like the same people who were once for it swung against it.

<comment><USER12> I'm talking more about the general public tone, but yes, I do know some people that made that exact switch. There's really not much cognitive dissonance involved.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who grew up around poor people and was aware of how they struggle with money. Her family wasn't in poverty, but they weren't flush with money either. At around age 30, she made her way into the finance industry and started pulling down six figures. She mentioned that she got a raise recently, but had been infected by the finance mindset that any raise is tainted by the marginal tax rate, and was bitching that 'half of it went to the government' (for values where .37 = half, it seems).

Anyway, her version of the story went 'the government taxes so much money out that I can't give as much to my single-mother sister who is scraping by on welfare - they should lower taxes [for this reason]'. I asked what about all the other single mothers our there that don't have sisters in high finance - reducing the tax yield would mean they get less. My friend changed her tune pretty fast and realised that hey, she was actually in a good position and should be positive about it instead of negative.

The thing is, my friend wasn't someone who grew up amongst wealth, she knew what it was like to be poor, and she herself had worked the same shitty jobs as poor people everywhere. She was smart, and knew deeply about social opportunity (she dated a fiery, forthright anarchist for many years). People just tend to have short memories and short forethought and tend to think that what concerns them in the present is the most important thing always.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there anyone else out there that thinks the investment may not be smart long term?

I enjoy the luxury of highspeed wired internet in Boston and LTE internet on my phone. In the short term, I am considering switching to an LTE hub for my home to get rid of Comcast completely. I could be wrong, but I feel like we will see rapid development of wireless technology which could make the entire 20bn investment somewhat foolish.

<comment><USER15> Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than wireless. For the foreseeable future, you're going to want to be able to maximize your total capacity by taking advantage of terrestrial links when you have them.

As for switching to LTE--don't. I tried that here in New York, and it's not what it's cracked up to be. The only service with solid LTE performance is Verizon, and while the speeds are consistently good (5-8 megabits), they are "good" only as far as wireless goes, and it costs you $10/GB. I blow through 10-12 GB a month just barely using the internet, and not even downloading movies, etc. You'll spend several hundred dollars a month getting a decent amount of bandwidth, and for that price you can just get a decent cable connection for home and save the LTE for when you're on the go.

<comment><USER14> _Unless there is some major advancement in physics, it is going to remain the fact that fiber in the ground is going to offer massively more capacity than wireless._

I'm not an expert in physics but if cell phones use radio waves and radio waves travel at the speed of light it seems like at some point technology will allow for very fast over the air data transfers without breaking any laws of physics.

I have LTE on my AT&T phone and it seems pretty good, but I am definitely apprehensive about switching all my data to it in my house. I'll probably wait a few years, but if Comcast does anything to really infuriate me, I am likely to switch.

[Added] I got a few downvotes on this one, while I don't care about the karma, I do want to say that I didn't mean to say "I'm not an expert" in a sarcastic way. My intention was to point out that I don't know what I am talking about.

<comment><AUTHOR> All those radio waves need to be shared between every phone connected to that cell, and between all the other radio based services out there (e.g. Television).

For a direct fibre link, all the available bandwidth is dedicated to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hopefully it'll boost this branch of the French economy. Let's hope that on the way to reach that goal, the cost of internet stay the same (30€/month, 40$, for unlimited internet, unlimited landline phone calls and TV). Because it's maybe the best to learn of the French internet those days, its cost : [http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_cost_of_connec...](http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/the_cost_of_connectivity)

</comment><comment><USER17> Ultimately I think Internet access will reach utility status (like water, electricity, telephony), meaning it will be a given (in the developed world at least and hopefully more and more of the developing world as time goes on).

It's still priced as a premium product and there's no reason for this other than regional monopolies over the last mile.

The one thing that confuses me about the France proposal is how they plan on building this for 20B euros when the NBN in Australia is estimated to cost A$36B [1] for a country with one third the population of France.

The biggest cost in any communications network is the last mile so is proportional to population but inversely proportional to population density. Population density is low in Australia but there is 1/3 of the people.

Additionally, there are significant regional infrastructure costs. It is more expensive per mile to build fibre in, say, New York City versus Tennessee.

Inter-city links are really a small part of the total cost, even in a country as spread out as Australia (given the size, the population is 95% on the coast).

Hopefully the NBN in Australia (which I'm a big supporter of) will survive the next election. The Opposition is sadly against it and the present government is hanging on by a thread and in leadership turmoil.

For those not from Australia, the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, became PM after ousting Kevin Rudd in a partyroom coup d'etat in Rudd's first term, something with little precedent in Australian politics and certainly not in a PM's first term. For example, then-Treasurer Paul Keating ousted fourth- term PM Bob Hawke in much the same way.

This sort of thing isn't generally favoured the electorate because (IMHO) it's perceived as the Number 2 saying "it's my turn to be Number 1" yet it plagues politics (Hawke-Keating, Howard-Costello, Blair-Brown in the UK, etc). Keating went on to narrowly win the "unwinnable" 1993 election and then get destroyed in 1996.

Gillard narrowly won the last election with a minority in the House of Representatives [2]. Who became PM came down to horse-trading with minor parties and independents such that the change of a single seat changes the government. Obviously this is not a stable situation.

Anyway, things look grim for the Gillard government as Kevin Rudd won't go away. He has already failed (twice?) to take back the top job in a partyroom ballot and the issue is rearing its ugly head again.

Tony Abbott (the Opposition leader) has campaigned on a half-assed cheaper version of the NBN that is basically the same ADSL system for most people. Technically the proposal is FTTN (fibre to the node) where nodes are within 1.5km of premises and copper the rest of the way, which should improve bandwidth (ADSL2+ can do about 12Mbps at 1.5km and VDSL/VDSL2 could potentially raise that).

The worst thing for Australian broadband (IMHO) would be for the NBN to be gutted in this nascent stage but it could happen if the Opposition wins big in the next election.

Luckily for the NBN, the National Party, which notionally represents "rural" interests, the traditional party of the Liberal Party, is in favour of the NBN because current (and proposed) broadband solutions for rural areas suck hard.

Now all we need is non-backwards reasonably priced broadband in the United States. We can but hope.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network>

[2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillard_Government#Minority_gov...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillard_Government#Minority_government)

<comment><USER18> Telecommunications has been headed in the other direction. State monopolies get privatised and lose their monopoly status.

I don't think your other examples are standardised in the way you suggest either. Control of electricity becomes less and less centralised.

I wouldn't want internet to be treated as one-size-fits-all. With competition, if one company tries to block certain features, you can change to another. Also, having a government carrier makes it easier to regulate. This makes it easier for the state to mould the network to its convenience, something the Australian government have tried to do repeatedly. The most effective opponents to this are a handful of small private internet service providers.

<comment><USER19> The extenuating circumstance here is that the opposition, which is now trying to get elected, privatised the national telco starting in 1997.

What that meant is we had a for profit company, Telstra, owning both the entire phone network and the biggest cable network, with big stakes in PayTV and joined at the hip through that to the biggest media organisation in the country, Murdoch's. The only competition worth speaking of is another HFC rollout by a competitor that Telstra overbuilt at every turn and made much less viable and DSLAMs by other providers in a minority of local exchanges that still require payments to Telstra including ULL fees. Telstra was also privatised without any vertical separation worth speaking of.

The NBN, evil as government run business may be, represents the most viable and sensible solution to the problem of Telstra. The people putting it together and the ACCC have made sure that it wouldn't be like Telstra at all. What it represents is, like water or electricity infrastructure, a single path to the premise at the lowest possible cost, a mandate of falling prices in real and nominal terms and restrictions by the ACCC being planned out until 2040 already.

How do we know it will be good for competition? Because every telco in the country, Telstra included, is unhappy wih particular details, but they are on board, and Telstra included, happy enough to be there.

Also, the NBN is fairly dumb as a network. A lot of things are handled by the provider, the FTTH deployment of the NBN goes up to layer 2 only. We've tried your proposal of letting private enterprise do the lot, and all it has led to is an increasingly decaying copper network and no HFC rollout of any major note since about 1997.

If broadband becomes a right, not a privilege, especially in a country of suburban sprawl, then you need to treat it like water or electricity. Dumb wholesale network at the bottom, vibrant conpetitive market at the top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm working in bringing high speed broadband to rural areas in the U.S. We are putting all energy in securing funding right now. You can't imagine how hard is for a start-up to secure funding for it. It has been exhausting. I applaud any initiative by the governments to invest in high speed internet.

<comment><USER21> We have ways of funding fiber to the home and farm in the US and Europe. We have ample backbone capacity. Send me an email to discuss funding you. info at eigenglasvezel dot net

<comment><USER20> Thank you for your offer. Right now I can't get into more detail. As soon as I can (Without getting into trouble), I'll post more news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you'd like to know more about why the U.S. lags insanely far behind in the broadband race, and why we pay ~ 4 times as much for our inferior service, check out David Cay Johnston's The Fine Print. I don't recommend it for anyone with blood pressure issues.

</comment><comment><USER23> Germany and UK were not even able to get in the ranking of the FTTH Council Europe… They do both not have 1% of all and at least 200.000 households connected to fiber… what a shame

<comment><USER24> The internet in UK (London, Virginmedia) is terrible; whenever I need to download and especially upload something (some video, hires pictures, system backups) there is serious swearing involved. In comparison, _eight_ years ago in Bucharest I had 100/100 Mbps, just like anyone else.

At least Virgin realised they suck at it and sold the Broadband division to UPC/Chello, but that's not much reason to be optimistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> As we are moving more and more towards cloud/web based services and streaming content, the quality of our internet connections is getting more and more important while the performance of our local hardware is losing importance as time moves on. Sometime it will probably end with big mainframes in datacenters and thin clients in forms of phones/tablets/pcs, much like it was before the PC revolution :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Like every ideas there is some good and some bad. It's stupid to think about FTTH and FTTLA in the french countryside because nobody cares about it. We just have to wait and see how much will be actually spent in a useful way. I'm confident because in the past, France showed that it can make a success in telco.

<comment><USER27> France is larger than Paris. The countryside isn't populated by cows only and I'm very much concerned about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Meanwhile in the US where technology is a huge part of our GDP

[http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Our-National-Broadband- Pl...](http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Our-National-Broadband-Plan-is-a- TwoYearOld-Dunce-118909)

</comment><comment><USER29> Britain would be better-off doing this rather than building ahigh-speed line. High speed internet for the whole country would be a massive stimulus to all sorts of new business ideas and working practices.

<comment><USER30> Could be argued that if done properly and thoroughly, the rail line might not be necessary at all.

<comment><USER15> Eh, people doing internet things overestimate how game-changing fast internet is. I don't care how fast the internet is, people are still going to want to meet each other for dinner, see grand-babies in person, etc. Faster internet doesn't obviate the need for travel.

<comment><USER31> Cut even 1 trip in 50 and you can avoid building a lot of infrastructure. Netflix vs video rentals is one clear example of less trips, but there are plenty of others.

<comment><USER15> 1) Cutting 1 trip in 50 is actually a lot; 2) A 2% reduction in travel doesn't do much when e.g. U.S. air traffic alone is growing 2-3% every year and car traffic is increasing at 2-4% each year.

<comment><USER31> Air travel is substituting for other forms of travel because it has become far cheaper with a 50% average cost savings between 1997 and 2006.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Thats a much better idea than a railway no one cares about to birmingham

</comment><comment><USER33> It's about $3 Billion a year. Not bad at all.

US could have done this and fixed the power grid when we had that $800 Billion stimulus plan, at least we would have gotten something worthy out of it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Desperate move...

It's a desperate move and it may not be that smart in face of ever faster wireless.

The problem with France is that for years they were bragging that they were the "4e plus grand puissance du monde" (world's 4th most powerful nation). Now they're fifth. By the end of Hollande's first mandate they'll be sixth (Brazil passing in front of them).

If Hollande is re-elected, France could very well be out of the G8 by 2022 (ouch: three more places lost).

Germany today said that french people only working 35 hours a week and only until 60 years simply isn't going to cut it.

Oh, sure, it may somehow work. But not if you plan to stay relevant compared to the other countries.

These are more words by Hollande: some more little faerie dust to dodge and delay discussing the real issue. Most notably: public spending representing 56% of the GDP and the private sector being taxed like crazy and which, hence, keeps shrinking and shrinking.

</comment><comment><USER35> Last time I heard, they were so poor they got more money from the EU than they paid. Category Greece and Spain. Meanwhile we're only paying...

<comment><USER36> That's always been wrong [http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/europe/09/eu_budget_...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/europe/09/eu_budget_spending/img/graph_net_contrib_466x485.gif)

<comment><USER26> I don't know where this gif comes from but I have this source: <http://ec.europa.eu/budget/figures/2011/2011_en.cfm> So in terms of "Total 'national contributions'": DE: 21 189.9 FR: 19 075.6 IT: 14 517.6 UK: 12 918.3

It was published the 20/09/2012.

<comment><USER37> the two things are not necessarily at odds: states put some money in (total national contributions), then take some more money out (resulting in net contributions).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bargain Travel Sites May No Longer Be Bargains - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/why-bargain-travel-sites-may-no-longer-be-bargains-979e8bbf47a8 <comment><USER2> One thing the aggregators do well is offer a consistent and more flexible search than the airlines' own sites which are often pretty terrible. For example, I live within 2 hours of about 5 airports, and when flying within Europe there are often two airports near the destination. Being able to search with multiple departure and arrival locations, with flexibility across several days, in order to find the cheapest combination of airports and dates is _still_ a useful service.

I'm interested to know where Google Flights fits in to this picture. It is not well publicised but suddenly seems to have become quite good. A key feature for me is inclusion of the two big UK low-cost carriers, Ryanair and Easyjet. I'd assume Google are not working on commission but are just trying capture another area of search with their algorithms and data. Does anyone know more about it?

<comment><USER3> Usually I search with an aggregator find the cheapest carrier, then book directly with that carrier. I've found booking sites to be a bit hit and miss - often they add extra booking fees that make the chosen flight more expensive or you miss out on certain options. In Europe I usually use a combination of Momondo, Skyscanner and Kiwi (formerly Skypicker).

<comment><USER4> The aggregators are also always showing the cheapest fares, regardless of the restrictions on those fares. More and more airlines have fares like Delta's "Basic Economy" which does not even let you pick a seat. Everyone is familiar with the long standing "non refundable" restriction on most of these fares but the newer restrictions vary from airline to airline and the aggregators don't do a good job of detailing those.

Contrast that to booking on most airline sites where they very clearly and very obviously show you the restrictions because they publish the fare alongside of the less restrictive fares as a way to up sell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hard to get through this article. It repeatedly insists that "everyone" uses aggregators, when airlines and hotels sell much of their product directly. In particular, Southwest does not sell through aggregators at all and they are the highest volume US airline. Personally I refuse to book through aggregators because I don't want finger-pointing between aggregator and airline if something goes wrong.

I stopped reading when the article said travel agents are irrelevant for anyone but boutique wealthy travelers. A large amount of corporate and government travel is routinely booked through agents, who receive a routine fee.

Hard to believe there is anything good in this article when so much of it in the opening paragraphs is facially inaccurate.

<comment><USER6> I work in the industry, and I disagree. If we want to be more exact, most of the airline volume is through Global Distribution Systems (GDSs). I'd say that truly "direct" sales are in a minority.

But sales through aggregators have soared (mostly using the Amadeus GDS)

As mentioned in other comments, corporate travel does not buy direct and, along with luxury travel, are the two last holdouts of travel agents - I agree with the article in that agents are becoming more irrelevant for non-corporate bookings, although they're fighting back :) .

See for example:

[https://seekingalpha.com/article/3110756-global- distribution...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/3110756-global-distribution- systems-a-bright-spot-in-a-disappointing-airline-industry)

 _" market share loss due to disintermediation, which was starting to become a problem for GDS companies, has slowed considerably, according to Amadeus.

Airlines have realized that the reach GDS companies provide -- especially to business travelers -- cannot be matched by the airlines themselves.

Low-cost carriers (LCCs) like RyanAir (NASDAQ:RYAAY) and Southwest Airlines (NYSE:LUV) didn't use GDS to sell their tickets. After their initial growth period, during which they tapped deal-seeking customers, their growth slowed down. They couldn't access the higher-margin business travelers. Hence, most of the LCCs, including Southwest, RyanAir, and jetBlue (NASDAQ:JBLU), had to come back to GDSs to increase their growth rates."_

<comment><USER7> That last quote is somewhat misleading; Southwest adopted the Amadeus GDS for their internal reservations in 2007, replacing a homegrown system. In their 2015 exposed their bookings through Amadeus but only through i:FAO for corporate customers, not the public who still have to buy direct.

Also, the definition of 'most of the LCCs' conveniently excludes, well, most of the World's LCCs...

<comment><USER8> That's true at a high level, but off on some dates.

Southwest cut a deal with Amadeus in 2007, but is still using the internal homegrown copy of Sabre for all domestic bookings. If you book something that lands outside the US, it goes via Amadeus. They will move all reservations to Amadeus, but over the next year or so.

They exposed bookings to corporate booking tools starting in 2009, but not via a GDS, but rather by a private connection.[1]

Then, in 2015, they exposed bookings via Amadeus, including domestic, to corporate travel tools. But, the booking itself does land in the aforementioned homegrown reservation system.

[1][https://www.concur.com/newsroom/article/concur-and- southwest...](https://www.concur.com/newsroom/article/concur-and-southwest- airlines-sign-new-access-agreement)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's very true that in terms of hotel booking many consumers still see the big OTAs as the "bargain" sites and are often surprised to find that you can usually get an equal or better rate by booking directly with a hotel chain itself.

The company I work for, roomkey.com, was founded by six of the largest hotel chains to address this problem and bring more direct bookings back to the chains. The OTA duopoly of Expedia and Priceline have many of the hotel chains over a barrel with very aggressive contract terms that do not allow the hotel chain to advertise a lower direct rate than those they supply to the OTAs. And added to this, the OTAs take a pretty eye-watering commission.

However, most of the big chains are able to provide a lower rate to their own loyalty members. Room Key is unique in that we can access and aggregate these lower rates into a one-search solution. But, we are a tiny voice and competing with annual online marketing budgets of over a billion dollars each for the big two OTAs. Our job is a very hard one.

I'm glad articles like this are starting to paint a truer picture for the consumer. It really does make sense to book direct almost every time. It's easier to cancel/modify. You are the customer of the hotel, not a third party. You get loyalty benefits. And more of your money goes to those who take on the overhead of your stay and ensure the quality of your experience.

The OTAs used to be both cheap and convenient. Now they can only really lay claim to convenience through aggregation, and we at roomkey.com are trying to change that too.

<comment><USER10> Agoda often offers discounts to hotels you've viewed if you're browsing around and I always get the hotel cheaper than what's on offer at the hotel directly. For example the hotel I'm currently staying at in Taiwan cost 2500 NT, booking directly with the hotel is actually 4100 NT...

I don't understand how this is possible but this is how it seems to me.

I don't use things like flight scanner because booking directly with the airline is always cheaper from experience.

<comment><USER10> Actually. Google flights usually has prices that match the airline. I sometimes use that to compare. Then go to the airline site directly to do the booking.

<comment><USER11> I haven't seen Google offer booking.

<comment><USER10> Flights.Google.com doesn't offer bookings but it's good for comparing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm ehhhh on this.

I've worked with these systems. Airlines are pretty much never worth it through these sites. Margins are so damn razor thing that everyone pretty much scrambles for the last dollar. (Literally like 3-5 dollar margin"

Hotels are MORE worth it, in that they do offer deals through aggregators. Partially due to name and partially through exposure.

Booking.com is pretty good for this as they index alot of smaller hotels that generally are hard to find.

</comment><comment><USER13> While I thought this was a pretty good article, the author is confusing what is an OTA vs a meta-search engine, even though he spends a paragraph explaining the difference. From one of the comments on the article:

* Expedia is not an aggregator/meta-search, it is an OTA itself. Meta-search engines are sites like skyscanner, hipmunk, trivago and kayak to mention some.

Another further confusion is when the author compares TripAdvisor with Hilton's own site. The screenshot even shows that TripAdvisor just redirects to Booking.com (Booking.com is owned by Priceline), who is the OTA.

The other thing the author doesn't discuss, but is an important part of the story, is that large OTAs spend billions advertising through Google, and are experts at it. Booking.com is _the_ largest spender of _any_ company on Google Adwords: [https://venturebeat.com/2015/11/05/booking-com-largest- googl...](https://venturebeat.com/2015/11/05/booking-com-largest-google- advertiser-facebook-hasnt-cracked-the-code-on-direct-response/)

<comment><USER14> Yes, exactly, the author confuses the term OTA versus a metasearch engine. Expedia and Priceline are the largest OTA's after consolidation in recent years, creating what is now a duopoly. Furthermore, Expedia and Priceline have created an illusion of choice by acquiring the majority of the high traffic metasearch sites and then deciding to maintain their separate brands.

Disclaimer: I built a flight search tool, [https://concorde.io](https://concorde.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The lifecycle of aggregators may have some parallels with the fall of high- frequency trading. Eventually, the technology barrier to entry falls, incumbents fight back and the ecosystem rebalances.

Two topics missing from this article are AirBnB and low-cost airlines that fly to smaller airports. AirBnB does not compete with aggregators and cannot be shut out on the supply side by hotels. Do low-cost airlines (like Norwegian) benefit from customer discovery via aggregators?

Do aggregators change prices based on geographic location of the buyer? The article mentioned an experiment with higher prices for OSX buyers.

<comment><USER16> "Do aggregators change prices based on geographic location of the buyer"

Anecdotally, I booked a flight a few weeks ago through expedia.hk for an itinerary that was not even available through expedia.com. I'm not sure if they geotarget, but for Expedia at least, the TLD you go through matters.

I've also found a South American carrier (I forget which) to have significantly different prices depending on whether the website is in Spanish or English (alas, they wouldn't accept my US card through the Spanish site).

<comment><USER17> LAN is 100% cheaper on the Spanish website. I had no difficulty booking using an AU credit card. Also sells return tickets with a total cost less than the cost one way ticket to the same destination. Weird business model but my wallet was happy that I figured it out. :D

<comment><USER18> If it's _100%_ cheaper, why does it need a card in the first palce?

<comment><USER19> Just to verify if you are adult enough //joking

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Who thinks that $2000 for a transatlantic trip is a good deal?

I just looked at Google flights and most offerings are under £400 return (GOA- JFK). Even in mid-august I struggled to find flights above £600. Either that guy is flying business (management consultant, maybe then) or he seriously got shafted on price.

Just had a look - premium economy is £900, business is almost £2000.

EDIT: Interesting, it gets a lot more expensive the other way around. Though Google does suggest Milan as an alternative route, which drops the price to £400 again. It seems like the hop from Genoa to the international hub makes the difference.

Or you could get a train from Milan, which is only 85 miles.

<comment><USER21> to some, convenience and time worth more than money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had a somewhat similar experience as Mr. Giacobbe in the article.

Recently I had to make a last minute change in a hotel reservation via Agoda, but they require you to pay the full amount in order to cancel the reservation, and then re-do the booking.

So instead I called the hotel directly and got my reservation changed without any extra cost.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's been this way for a long time. It's often cheaper to book directly from the airline than through an aggregator so it always pay to check (and use a tool like [http://matrix.itasoftware.com](http://matrix.itasoftware.com) to also look for fare prices)

It makes sense, it's not in the airlines or hotels best interest to give lower prices to external OTAs and by providing better fares on their website they cut the middleman. It's also the reason why hotel chain tend to not reward user with status and points if they book through an aggregator.

</comment><comment><USER24> I can tell you that the aggregators were totally useless when booking a hotel in New York.

"$99 for a room!" Great!. Erm, for tonight. Only. It's "$299 for every other night". Not so great.

Eventually it became clear that staying in Connecticut and taking the train in was a huge improvement.

<comment><USER25> This has been my experience, until recently. I started not booking ahead and just using the Hotel Tonight app to get something (literally minutes before i get on my flight). I feel like one day i'm going to get screwed, but so far I've never slept on the street (around 20 months of doing this) and the rates are often no more than $160 CAD for great hotels in midtown [area sucks, but its where the office is]. I also like that it shows currency in my local currency, not the destination currency.

<comment><USER26> The reason this works for you is not anything to do with Hotel Tonight, it's because NYC hotels price high early and then drop prices heavily because they're market is hurting (lots of new supply, and fewer customers).

At any chain hotel (Marriot/Hilton/IHG/Choice/Wyndham/Starwood), you'll get the cheapest price by being a rewards member (free, just like airline mile programs) and reserving directly on their website, or www.roomkey.com which is also owned by the hotel chains itself.

Next time, reserve the room from far out, then pay attention to the cancelation policy. Just before the cancelation policy ends, check the prices, they've probably dropped. You can then cancel and get the new price, and it will be cheaper than Hotel Tonight, because the hotel doesn't need to pay commission to Hotel Tonight, and you get the benefits of being a rewards member.

<comment><USER25> Yeah I'd 100% believe this. And to throw another data point in here, i just did it now at got a room at the central park hotel for $180 CAD / night for 2 nights.

The only other good thing about this approach is that I find meetings often get canceled or delayed due to flights not getting in. Canceling hotels is expensive, when you do not book till the last minute canceling becomes very rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I travelled to Spain in low season recently. For accommodation it doesn't hurt just to turn up, old school, without a booking.

Trivago have been blitzing our TV stations with ads, so I thought I'd give them a try. But their searches seemed just to redirect to booking.com so I couldn't see much value-adding.

Forget the 'only 2 left at this price' deception. I door knocked at a couple of places and they were half empty for the night - owners offered cheaper in cash than off a website! Now maybe this doesn't work in high season when everything is full but I found it liberating to stumble out randomly from a bus station to the tourist information centre who would plot for me on a map the best places to stay!

</comment><comment><USER28> The author missed a major driver of this - which is that the hotels etc are not allowed to undercut the OTAs, or the OTA will boot them off.

This is why you can call and get a better deal, and why many hotels are aggressively trying to build loyalty programs

<comment><USER29> As far as I know too the OTA can legitimately under-price the supplier's products down to their wholesale price right? Which I'm guessing would mean that the largest volume OTAs should have better deals due to lower wholesale prices, but could cause consolidation to continue, meaning higher prices eventually....which happened in car rental and seems to be happening now in travel

<comment><USER21> i dont think they can, unless they package it with something else eg: flight and hide the actual price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Recently left a startup in that business. The article is spot on.

And there may be technological opportunities here, like open APIs to hotel property management systems or even property management systems as a service....

</comment><comment><USER31> One thing not mentioned yet is that "resort fees" are basically just a way to avoid paying commission to the aggregators. The combination of the ~20% commission and the most favored nation status that aggregators require from hotels without the negotiating power of Hilton limits the options hotels have to raise rates. And as the article mentions, this leads to hotels trying harder these days to establish a relationship with customers as an end run around the MFN clauses.

Also, I've probably booked 100+ hotels in the past few years, and I still do the majority of them through booking.com. I am aware that I can sometimes get cheaper rates by booking direct, and I do sometimes, if the delta is high enough. (On the other hand, I actually just booked a Hilton that was cheaper on the aggregator than on their own website.) I'm also aware that every hotel employee will tell you that 3rd party customers get the worst rooms in the place and are the first ones to get walked when overbooked. I can't say I've ever noticed any problems there. I'm even aware that booking's rating system is skewed - their 10 point scale actually only runs from 2.5 to 10, and the median rating is something like 8.1, so keep that in mind when you book your "Very Good, 8.1" hotel.

Despite all that, it has one killer feature that making direct reservations doesn't have - a uniform interface for making/changing/canceling bookings. It's a tremendous benefit in countries where I don't speak the language. I can do it fairly reliably on either the app or the website even when my network connection is dodgy, at any time, and without having to speak the language. I do admit that my requirements are fairly specific and most people traveling within their own country with reliable phone/internet service are generally better off doing the search first on an aggregator, and then booking direct (after signing up for loyalty programs) if the price is close.

(I work in the industry, but not for any of the companies mentioned.)

<comment><USER32> It's interesting that you say third party customers get worse treatment. I always assumed the opposite would be the case, because people booking through a portal can leave a rating, while many direct customers will be one-time business, with little to no recourse of things are sub-par. Do you know what the reason might be that this is not the case?

<comment><USER31> Worse treatment doesn't really mean much unless the hotel is close to 100% capacity. I may have phrased that part badly - what I meant is that 3rd party customers are lower priority than 1st party, so if it comes down to a question of who gets the nicer room, 3rd party will lose.

With respect to ratings, very few people actually leave them. So you're looking at the uncommon case of a traveler being negatively impacted, multiplied by the chance they even notice or care (e.g. someone who sleeps like a log getting the noisy room), multiplied by the chance that they actually bother reviewing. Couple that with the fact that pickier customers (frequent business travelers, points bloggers, or just brand loyalists) are vastly more likely to book direct, since you generally can't use/gain loyalty program points when booking through an aggregator, and it's understandable why direct customers might get preferential treatment. Not to mention that they're making more money from the direct customers to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Use Lola.

[https://www.lolatravel.com/about](https://www.lolatravel.com/about)

 _" We're a new kind of travel company that provides on-demand, personal travel service through a smartphone app. The Lola app instantly connects people to our team of travel agents who find and book flights, hotels, and cars for our customers. We also provide support while they're on their trips."_

Aggregators are all fun and games till your plans change. And Lola gives you human curated travel (they really do consider your tastes) at aggregator costs.

<comment><USER21> looks like bot to me.

[https://www.lolatravel.com/](https://www.lolatravel.com/)

<comment><USER33> Not a bot. Not remotely a bot.

Multi-tasking humans who are pretty damn good and making your travel feel important to them to get right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been running citybreakflights.com since Jan this year and one thing I've noticed is that buying tickets directly from the airline tends to be much cheaper than using an OTA. I track prices of flights from the UK to Europe for people wanting to go away for a few days. I don't track hotels but when I go away on a city break I use booking.com. Might start going directly and comparing the difference in price.

</comment><comment><USER35> Skyscanner is great, but I get the sense that the airlines have cut them off. They used to show almost every carrier, and sent you straight to the airline website to book (I assume they got paid for referrals). Now they seem to search other aggregators, who have spotty data themselves. The great whole month price overview never works any more.

<comment><USER36> Skyscanner got acquired recently, maybe this is what triggered the change.

<comment><USER37> There hasn't been any change, Skyscanner has been adding airlines over the years.

Of the GP, is there any example you can think of where airline coverage is now missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I find the aggregators still offer better deals if you're willing to forego stuff like being able to cancel or selecting the exact hotel you want to stay in.

</comment><comment><USER39> It makes sense. Companies will use price discrimination to offer higher prices when they are able to segment the market. This would happen regardless of whether the lazy people were on aggregators or going direct. If they're able to separate the groups and one is more price sensitive than the other, that group would tend to be charged higher prices.

</comment><comment><USER40> So how does Google flights compare</comment>


Animals "lie" to their own kind to get what they want (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=1421 <comment><USER2> Does this account for the possibility that the shrimp aren't necessarily "bluffing", but might just be hopped up on a testosterone-analog and have no idea of their true abilities?

I've seen a small yippy dog go into a frenzy trying to attack a much larger dog, and when it slipped its leash, it DID attack the larger dog, and was promptly tossed in the air.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure ascribing motivation changes the point

<comment><USER4> We would want to see what a bluffing shrimp did _when called on its bluff_. If it ran away then what's happened is different to the small dog which appears to actually _believe_ it's bad enough for the fight. And in this case I would say that the shrimp had managed to "tell a lie", while the small dog had managed nothing other than total honesty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gilfoyle: Why would Dinesh lie about having friends? Why would Tara lie to me about fucking other guys when we have a totally open and hedonistic relationship that allows for behavior like that? Because people like to lie, Richard. It's a war of all against all. The history of humanity is a book written in blood. We're all just animals in a pit.

Jared: I feel very sad.

Dinesh: Fucking Gilfoyle.

</comment><comment><USER6> Strange title. It has long been known for example that squirrels pretend to hide nuts in certain places when they see other squirrels watching. I think they mean exclusively the aggressive stance here.

</comment><comment><USER7> A relevant clip from Louis Ck : [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=msy__Gujljo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=msy__Gujljo)</comment>