Censorship 2.0: Shadowy forces controlling online conversations - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/censorship-shadowy-forces-controlling-online-conversations <comment><USER2> Of course, this place isn't immune to it. That includes all the usual suspect discussions (NSA, Palestine, China, Russia etc.) but more visibly with the employees of certain companies.

One of the more curious things you can do on HN to distract from a story is to start a tangential flamewar in the comments on it, but my single favourite way I see to bury things around here is to ask for detailed citations to data for something which really doesn't need it, as that results either in a flamewar or if left the post loses any momentum completely.

<comment><USER3> The fascinating thing is, you can't stop the ads on HN from the big _big_ players, because it's effectively accounted as being real news. Zuckerberg held the second public Q&A session the other day, that promised him some news. Then there was that article about a woman engineer at Facebook, the story appeals very appropriately to current events and the emotional zeitgeist of the tech industry, and there was that whole campaign by Sheryl Sandberg in the last few years (which she has dialed down now). So, astroturfing is an amateur's game, the big boys actually launch massive campaigns that give them a nice PR image, they do big actions that ensure coverage. All of this is done very carefully to ensure that the news is framed in a way they want to consumers. One of my favorite pg essays is about this, about the fact that a lot of journalists are lazy and fishing for a marketable story. Make the work easy for them, give them a marketable narrative (communicate it to them not by giving them money/bribing them -- no, that's an amateur's game, you give them the narrative in a socratic manner, you give them selected bits and pieces and trust they'll fill in the blanks). But money/bribing/soft extortion helps too. E.g., if you slam Apple, you don't get invited to their conferences and such. And everyone wants Apple stories... and if you can't report Apple stories, you lose viewers. So you just keep giving out nice Apple stories and you can remain confident you'll continue to get a nice stream of goodies from Apple. Etc. etc.

<comment><USER4> This was just the start:

[http://vimeo.com/85948693](http://vimeo.com/85948693)

Now companies and big governments are analyzing network graphs in real time thanks to Facebook. They can test people's reaction on real time to anything.

I don't believe that Apple's success is just about Advertisement, I use their products a lot because they are very good products.

When I was a kid I did not have money so I bought all computer gear myself looking for the best deal, then I also used my own OS(gentoo with everything super optimized). I used to joke with my friends about how Apple was all about Advertisements and nothing about quality, and people was so stupid.

Then I grow up, I started working on my own and I suffered so much for my conscienceless. First I had to change to a stable Debian because gentoo was killing me, then I had to change to standardized hardware too as it was doing my life miserable.

One day I bought a mac as a luxury because I had made some money with my company. I started using it a lot, it was so simple and it did not made me spent as much time as Linux. I made some numbers and it made sense to buy more Apple gear. It worked great.

I made tons of money buying "expensive"() stuff.

What makes Apple great is that is is one of the only companies that get how real people work, read this book:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running- Asylum/dp/0672...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running- Asylum/dp/0672326140)

Now, I am not a fanatic of Apple, I would love other companies doing the same(like doing my computers on metal) but it is not easy. In my experience companies without engineers on place do not know how to create things. Those that have engineers on place do not understand humans well enough.

()expensive is losing a customer because you could not fix something on time. Expensive is paying an engineer to pay for something that should not be broken in the fist time.

<comment><USER5> I hate Apple.

I too used to use Gentoo, though it was far from my first Linux OS, and Linux was not my first Unix-like OS. I'll spare you the recounting of my entire computer-use history, except to say that I've used a wide variety of operating system over a period of decades, both as a user, sysadmin, and a developer.

I've hated Windows since it was invented, and hated Microsoft before even then, back in the DOS days, when it was a grabage OS that undeservedly dominated the 8-bit market. In some ways it's gotten better (particularly on the stability front), but in others its gotten worse (its dominance on the desktop market is complete).

Apple is like Microsoft with a smile on its face. Everybody's switching to it because it's cool, sleek, and trendy and even Linux is trying to emulate it. But its walled gardens, dumbed down, crippled and bastardized OS'es and "fuck you", "my way or the highway" attitude towards technical users, developers, and sysadmins make me want to puke.

Most users don't know any better, but I really don't get all the technical people who've switched to it from Linux and still sing its praises. They should know better. The most common attitude I hear from them is that they'd rather their OS "just work", and that they're too busy to spend a lot of time tweaking or making it work.

To that I say that they're really not as technical as they think. Someone who loves technology would pick the technically superior solution, the solution that gave them more choice and power, even if it required more of them as users, rather than picking the dumbed-down, technically crippled solution that may be easier to use by non-technical users (or users who don't care about technoogy, or are too busy to care). They would pick the three-button mouse over the one-button mouse.

Some examples of crippled and dumbed-down aspects of OS X off the top of my head (I should really keep a list, as I run in to something nearly every day):

      - massive and pervasive lack of choice
      - no focuse-follows mouse
      - no tiling window managers
      - X is not integrated with OS X's crappy windowing system,
        so you can't use X and still effectively interact with non-X gui apps
      - the Finder is a horrendous piece of shit
      - mouse-centric interface, forcing clicking through everything to
        configure the machine
      - no standard package manager (no, homebrew/macports, etc are not a
        good substitute until they can install everything and do it
        without conflict with the rest of the OS
      - no standard way to uninstall software
      - no more server-level hardware, forcing the use of Mac minis in
        racks because of:
      - license limits to running OSX only on Apple hardware, so you can't
        run it on standard server-level intel/amd hardware
      - tons of closed, proprietary, non-standard garbage like mDNSResponder, mds, etc
      - a feeble culture of open-source compared to Linux/BSD
      - default installs stuck with ancient versions of *nix utilities like bash
      - etc, etc, etc
      - and don't even get me started on the Apple Store or iDevices

I wish I never even knew any of the above, but I've been forced to find out because I'm forced to use OS X at work. I've long suspected that OS X is garbage, but now I know first-hand. It's like Windows all over again.

I guess I should be grateful that it's a *nix underneath, even if it is crippled and bastardized. But the world would be far better off if Microsoft and Apple never existed.

</rant>

<comment><USER6> As a counter to the notion that "they're really not as technical as they think," I'd argue that the professional user has to pick and choose his battles. Spending half a day futzing with window manager and X server configurations--whether due to new hardware, an incompatible patch, or something else--really, really hurts when it stands in the way of programming.

<comment><USER7> Mainstream Linux distros have not required those things for many years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why I'm not particularly thrilled about programs passing the Turing test. As soon as we have programs that can write credibly human-sounding comments on sites like this, many conversations will be controlled by whoever can afford the largest sockpuppet farm. Also, for every post on the actual threads of interest, there will be dozens of comments on _every_ thread designed to increase karma. Automated karma whoring might even be more injurious than the direct intervention, because it will increase the groupthink tendencies already present.

Some might say we're already half way there. I disagree. Yes, Google or Apple employees might swamp an occasional thread here and there, either openly or covertly, but what I'm talking about would be a whole order of magnitude worse and _constant_.

<comment><USER9> It seems like any kind of mass-comment system would be easy to detect. Simply limiting the post rate and comparing to other posts would work just like current anti-span filters now.

<comment><USER8> Limiting what post rate? If it's coming from a farm it could have the same distribution as real people. If you read the article, you'll see that it's not about spam. It's about astroturf, and not even the kind where you just get a people to repeat your talking points. There are more subtle ways of diverting attention toward a legitimate message you find favorable, or away from a message you'd rather have people forget. That's all _much_ harder for an automated system to detect, and the karma-whoring part harder still.

Look at some of the other comments _on this very thread_. Not the top vote- getters, but the ones that must have gotten two or three upvotes apiece. Several of those could easily have been generated by an AI designed to rephrase an already-popular view, perhaps with a pop culture reference or two thrown in to make it seem more authentic. Voila, instant karma, which can then be used in the ways the original presentation suggested to influence who reads what.

It only seems easy until you spend five minutes thinking about it.

<comment><USER10> It is the same problem as credit card fraud detection on an ecommerce site. Naive stuff is easy, as the fraud gets more sophisticated it is indistinguishable from human traffic. It isn't just that bots will post stories, but the bots are controlled by persona-amplification software, so a single person could control 100+ bots, tweaking and modifying their behavior while keeping a 2k view of the conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The first thing this article reminded me of was ghost in the shell season 2. In the show the Intelligence Agency of the government used this sort of info manipulation to increase animosity towards refugees to the point where the public was in support of basically slaughtering them.

In the show this agency also analyzed public opinion using info obtained from discussion forums to gauge the public's acceptance of government policy and they would use the information manipulation with sock puppets to change public opinion in their favor.

<comment><USER12> One of the best shows ever. The whole Stand Alone Complex concept is kind of unique to GitS, is it?

Edit: Oh and btw, ghost in the lisp: [http://medias.ircam.fr/x03b42f](http://medias.ircam.fr/x03b42f)

RPG talking about his work on the mass media manipulation machine of DARPA.

<comment><USER13> Yes and no[0]. For reference, the definition of a Stand Alone Complex from wikipedia [1]:

 _Stand Alone Complex (スタンド・アローン・コンプレックス Sutando Arōn Konpurekkusu) eventually came to represent a phenomenon where unrelated, yet very similar actions of individuals create a seemingly concerted effort._

The ideology of radical Islam from the viewpoint of neoconservatives in the USA in the 00 decade was of "shadowy underground terrorist cells all linked together and we should all be afraid of it", when in reality it was much more akin to the Stand Alone Complex: disparate radical groups all over the world used a common idea to act on their own but without communicating to one another. When viewed by the intelligence community, _of course_ they weren't independent isolated events influenced by the same root idea; they were a _centralized_ enemy. They projected thwir own _centralized_ nature to the fragmented radical Islamic movement of the early 00's. Eventually, that radical Islamic movement grew into the identity provided them by the intelligence community as a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

[0]So yes in name, no in practice if you buy into the viewpoint above.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_Shel...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell#Stand_Alone_Complex)

<comment><USER14> To take this a bit further, as far as I know, the question of what constitutes a _mind_ is still an open question. Ie: where does the "mind" live in us? Is emergent minds, like that displayed by a ant colony, really a mind, in the same sense that we have minds?

One of the hard things about [ed: (military)] intelligence, [gathering] is that it is very hard to ask the right questions. You can sometimes find the "right" answers to the "wrong" questions -- and convince yourself you know what's going on -- while in reality you're interacting with a shadow-reality of partially your own creation.

For example: oppress and invade, deploy divide and conquer tactics across unconnected populations that share some cultural values -- and you'd probably be able to create a stand a alone complex in the form of the resistance that forms. Then that might latter merge into a true complex, as the various independent parts realize that they have a somewhat common agenda... Maybe we'll see the new Star Wars films inadvertently expand on this theme, judging by how they're setting up the story with then animated "Star Wars: Rebels" series? :-)

Highly recommend the newest prequel installation of Ghost in the Shell, GitS: Arise: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell:_Arise](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell:_Arise)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is more insidious than I think even most HN readers realize. In the intelligence community, the big black sheep people don't really talk about is psychological operations, or psyops, units. They are the same breed that used research from MK ULTRA style programs to learn how to deprogram humans (some claims on how to reprogram them), and part of that is a scientific analysis of mass social community discourse. Previously, domestic propaganda was illegal, though it was often engaged in _anyway_ now that the law against domestic propaganda has been rescinded that means the remnants of older programs like Operation Mockingbird, where the CIA inserted people into news outlets across the board for intel gathering and disinfo pushing, have now evolved to a level where they are actively manipulating public discourse on all kinds of subjects.

A very good example of this is the post JFK assassination issue. It's pretty clear to any intellectually honest person that there are some very large issues that were never addressed regarding the assassination, because the CIA purposeful put into action an operation to discredit any alternative theory's as "conspiracy theory" and anyone who talked in that manner was labeled as a crackpot "conspiracy theorist" and then a large campaign to undermine any logical discussion of "conspiracy theory", essentially by putting it, as Chomsky would say, "outside the accepted range of debate".

Wonder why the fourth estate, aka journalism is in such a sad state of affairs? It's because the state has reached (quietly) so far into it that even the handful of real journalist are having a hard time.

They have keep up technologically to keep sources safe, which proves almost impossible these days. They have to deal with pushback from the editors bosses of a glarily political nature, they have to deal with being cut off from sources if they happen to piss off the wrong people with a too-strong story.

This is another reason the surveillance society is so insidious. I have said it before and I will say it again, surveillance, censorship, subtle covert influence of public discourse, are not about security.

It's about control.

A lot of people argue about 1984 vs Brave New World. What I say is that it's a Brave New World, unless you attempt to resist, then it's 1984. This is the state we live in, the real question is "Are the people going to let this happen?"

I'm no longer so reliant on the "long arc of justice", and am getting pretty pessimistic.

<comment><USER16> > This is the state we live in, the real question is "Are the people going to > let this happen?"

I am terrified of mental manipulation. My only inclination and direction is to train my mind to be an independent blank slate. There's also an odd web that forms, the direction of information flows, word choice, word frequency, like it ping pongs in between groups of people. The form of abstract ideas, the direction of thought. These things can be studied.

<comment><USER15> >The form of abstract ideas, the direction of thought. These things can be studied.

Indeed you are on to something there. I have long called for a return to our Enlightenment roots for just that reason. It encourages an independent and able mindset, which is precisely why education has been deliberately manipulated in to preventing any such thing.

Education of the populace is not in the interest of the international or domestic oligarchs. Remember this.

<comment><USER16> I don't think anyone really does it on purpose. A truly independent mind can be a terrifying thing. It can make you feel disconnected, isolated, insane, or stupid.

I have observed the flow of information through people for a long time. I find myself incredibly tired of studying this. It shows nothing of an individual's depth, their character, their individual personality. It's the shadow on the cave.

<comment><USER17> >A truly independent mind can be a terrifying thing. It can make you feel disconnected, isolated, insane, or stupid.

You get used to it because you remember the science:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F17JGDZDVUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F17JGDZDVUs)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eURiWot_- ng&list=UUW1ELHQMq-...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eURiWot_- ng&list=UUW1ELHQMq-RFZhtOf6dVObg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've made this point before about search engine ranking. Most of the popularity signals used by search engines can be, and are, faked. I have two papers on this:

"Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" (2012), or how Google's use of social signals backfired, badly. [http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf](http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf)

How Google's use of social signals backfired, badly.

"'Places' spam - the new front in the spam wars", or how Google's use of "local" information backfired. "[http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/placesspam10.pdf"](http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/placesspam10.pdf") (2010)

Google's merge of data from Google Maps into the main search engine results created a whole new branch of local SEO spam.

The fundamental problem is that the creation of fake online identities is cheap and easy. This can be partially fixed by taking a tough line on identity, but that's hard for services which are either big or have only a casual connection with their users. Facebook ran into the gay agenda enforcing a real names policy.

The mobile guys can at least make people buy a phone to fake an identity. (A phone number is not enough; you can rent fake phone numbers. See "[http://www.attlines.com](http://www.attlines.com)) An app that phones home with too much user information, though, is hard to fake cheaply. Yelp can tell if your phone has been to the place you're rating.

<comment><USER19> > the gay agenda

I'm not sure if you know about this, but this is typically a term of derision and a strawman by anti-gay and homophobic groups.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_agenda](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_agenda)

<comment><USER20> +1; there are also lots of other marginalized groups of people who stand to lose something if aliases cannot be used.

Edit: for example: [http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/faceboo...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/facebooks- real-names-policy-is-legal-but-its-also-problematic-for-free-speech)

<comment><USER21> Larger and more concise list: _Who is harmed by a "Real Names" policy?_

[http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Rea...](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F)

<comment><USER22> Yes but this comes from Geek Feminism wiki, so you have to read it as such:

Someone I like is forced to not be anonymous: oppression. Someone I dislike is forced to not be anonymous: justice.

<comment><USER19> No you don't. Evaluate the statement independently of who is making it. Just because someone calls themselves "feminist" while making a claim doesn't mean you should invalidate their claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 2013's "Most Reddit Addicted City" was Eglin Air Force Base.

[http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global- reddi...](http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit- meetup-day.html)

<comment><USER24> Air Force Bases are also full of technologically inclined 18 to 25 year old men, i.e the Reddit demographic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not sure how alarmed I am by this. I certainly have seen this in action on Wikipedia at least, if not on the scale described, but I have little doubt it occurs and I can think of a couple events whose online conversations show evidence of this sort of manipulation.

To some degree I admit, when I see the overwhelming online conversation swaying in one direction, it does influence. On the other hand, partially because I know online conversation manipulation is out there, I become less prone to read comments. I used to always read comments to Economist articles for example, now I rarely do.

Ultimately, if there is online conversation manipulation but people barely pay attention to it, it will be overwhelmed by all the other random sources of influence in our lives. Whether, traffic, etc. all play some influence on our opinions, if the impact of the online conversation manipulation is less than that, I am not alarmed.

There are two other aspects of this worth thinking about:

1\. What is the problem we have with online conversation manipulation? Is it the sock-puppets alone? If you replace sock-puppets with volunteers, is that different enough? If you take volunteers who otherwise wouldn't participate in that online conversation, is that different enough? What are the aspects of this that are different from a legitimate campaign to change the opinions of others about a position you think is profoundly wrong.

2\. One sad aspect of this is that it dilutes the impact of anonymous or semi- anonymous voices on the web. This was a short-cut to influence for ordinary web users. On the other hand, this is in a way natural, whenever the impact of a medium becomes popularly recognized, more people will try to utilize that medium, and its impact will be diluted. In the same way, just having a website used to be a short-cut to influence, but now has little effect.

<comment><USER26> US gov. actually admitted that it has a trolling network - it used to be called "viral peace". They claim it operates on "terrorist websites". And of course they give no definition of "terrorist websites" \- But I think it's safe to assume reddit, twitter, facebook are terrorist websites.

<comment><USER27> They also have some openly governmental accounts called "Think Again Turn Away", like

[https://twitter.com/ThinkAgain_DOS](https://twitter.com/ThinkAgain_DOS) [https://www.facebook.com/ThinkAgainTurnAway](https://www.facebook.com/ThinkAgainTurnAway)

They used to directly engage in debate with people more, while now they seem to have switched to a more posting-only style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been talking about this for years; we have to at the least be aware that there is wide scale sockpuppetry and astroturfing for political as well as corporate ends. Better tools for disinformation detection may help. One person running many personas is much easier to detect than the more sophisticated model we have now.

</comment><comment><USER29> That's a pretty scary concept when we have the rise of the unstoppable, unaccountable and highly secretive spy agencies. Things will probably get even worse when Strong AI exists.

<comment><USER30> When -> if.

And if strong AI comes in to play the world will change in ways that any kind of speculation as to whether 'things will get worse or better' is totally moot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reminds me of megaphone:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Presentation slides (pdf, 55mb): [http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2014kul/materials/D2T1...](http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2014kul/materials/D2T1%20-%20Haroon%20Meer%20Azhar%20Desai%20and%20Marco%20Slaviero%20-%20Weapons%20of%20Mass%20Distraction.pdf)

PDFy mirror: [https://pdf.yt/d/Rw7qpWWchX0cd05f](https://pdf.yt/d/Rw7qpWWchX0cd05f)

</comment><comment><USER32> If you doubt this, then just criticize Google on HN or Reddit...

Google has thousands of employees and sock puppets on all social media discussions. It's especially blatant on Reddit.

Google is a charity and everything they do is perfect and for the good of humanity. They've never been involved in massive spying and with monopolistic practices concerning their spammy ads and search engine preference for ebay, amazon, trip advisor and others.

<comment><USER33> Negative comment, 2 karma and this is an only comment you made... You look like a sock puppet to me :)

<comment><USER11> maybe you are the sockpuppet?

<comment><USER34> Behold the futility of the sock puppet accusation in practice.

(Preempting "jerf is a sock puppet". Let's skip that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This has been going on in one form of another throughout history. But if you want to sway opinion on the internet, it's not that easy. There are a lot of voices and noise in the mix, compared to how it was a mere 20 years ago.

This is certainly important, but in the context of history, how people consume information is on a much better track, in my opinion things are actually getting better if you look at the big picture.

</comment><comment><USER7> Whenever someone says something you disagree with, just accuse them of being a sockpuppet of a shadowy conspiracy.

Then you can censor their view very effectively.

</comment><comment><USER36> Call me crazy, but it /has/ crossed my mind that #gamergate might have been a large-scale test of the ability to create widespread conflict and some degree of community crisis from thin air through sock-puppetry...

EDIT: I honestly don't totally understand what gamergate is, but am in awe of the resurging energy of the whole thing, and hence the observation

</comment><comment><USER37> A social group implies at least 2 persons.

Even if two people are in a room, and they start having a conversation what you find is that they will try to

* Censor / Re-Imagine themselves to present their POV in a better way

* Censor / Manipulate the other person to force their POV unto them.

The online is a complete extension of the offline, so its perfectly normal for all this to happen, even all the time !

</comment><comment><USER38> Seems like it would be an important public service to game as much online discussion as possible, persistently. Right now, the vulnerability of these discussion media is not detrimental to those running them. Make gameability of discussion media something that is actually visible, and the vulnerabilities will be patched.

<comment><USER39> Kind of hard to follow, what you are trying to say. Synergy.

<comment><USER38> Persistent, ridiculous gaming of discussion media would be good for society, as it would force it to become gaming resistant.

<comment><USER37> If you take away sock puppets you take away anonymity as well. Even if you make everyone use their name and face and display pic and ip address and location, there is no guarantee that a group of people will stop censoring another group with or without sock puppets.

If you care to count there are at-least 5 controls on HN or any forum since 1990.

1\. What gets on homepage ( Stickies ) 2\. Admin control 3\. Firewall 4\. Voting 5\. Moderators

If you take social groups into consideration then on HN you have at least

1\. Programmers 2\. Startup People 3\. Technical People 4\. Geeks 5\. Hackers 6\. Security Hackers 7\. College Students 8\. Academic People 9\. Trend followers 10\. Trolls ( my people )

These 10 groups fight amongst each other with the help of 5 controls above. Every forum is always like this, since its inception-middle-death.

No one really wins but the constant bickering about forces each group to outdo each other. Whether it is progress or going about in circles only time will tell.

Just because you can patch the fucking software doesn't mean people will change. You will probably add one more control level to make into a total of 6 and then __nothing __. Some other egghead will write about censorship 3.0

It is best to accept internet as it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> All the discussion here pointing out possible shill armies aside - is there some way to actually stop it.

How do we move conversations - Forward.

<comment><USER10> We voice our thoughts and opinions verbally, with our neighbors, coworkers and friends. Convincing people online in discussion forums is not the best use of our rhetorical time, I would argue that most discussion forums are actually honey pots, whether intended or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Are the sock puppets that frequent HN simply much harder to detect? It often surprises me that HN is not a target for these kinds of people; I like to think that I have a good sense of when this kind of thing is going on, but probably I'm less sophisticated than I think I am.

<comment><USER30> HN is definitely a target for these kind of people. It has gone so far as high level contacts between the bosses of these kind of people and the stewards to sort things out. That doesn't mean that it has stopped nor does it mean there won't be repetitions. Astroturfing, burying, and derailing all happen. The scariest aspect to me is not those that are paid to do this sort of thing, because I can see their motivation but their little helpers in the form of the gullible public. From the above you could probably conclude I'm a cynical old bastard these days and you wouldn't be to far off.

I suspect that any forum with more than a few thousand participants has elements that are trying to actively shape the conversation to serve their goals on it.

<comment><USER41> > The scariest aspect to me...are their little helpers in the form of the > gullible public

Well, given my rather naive comment above, I have to assume that I fall into this category to some extent. What would you suggest people do differently?

<comment><USER30> Be skeptical about _everything_ you read online and offline (but moreso online), check up on sources rather than to use citations helpfully provided to underpin some bit of information and in general read until the cows come home to make sure you have a solid foundation from which to make your own judgment, especially when it comes to history and any attempts to re-write it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hmmm. The only verified case of sophisticated, organized sockpuppetry in the wild mentioned by the article seem to be related to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and anti-semitism, and in every case they seem to be orchestrated to favour Israel. But all the comments here seem concentrated on the NSA, AIs, and even abortion. Now downvote me :)

<comment><USER43> Then clearly either you, or the article, or both are just another reeking layer in the American government's propaganda onion. Edward Snowden clearly proved, scientifically, that the NSA/CIA/Military Industrial Complex controls everything and everyone I don't personally agree with, especially on the internet.

Now go tell your controllers your mission has failed, Udik. If that even is your real name.</comment></comment>


Benchmarking Commit Logs: NATS Streaming vs. Apache Kafka - <AUTHOR> http://bravenewgeek.com/benchmarking-commit-logs/ <comment><USER2> From the looks of things, both are "fast enough".

What I'd like to hear more about now is ease of use - I'm told that with Kafka you have to be quite careful around planning the number of topics / partitions you'll use up front. Does NATS improve on that?

<comment><USER3> In NATS Streaming, you can configure the maximum number of channels (name of a topic in NATS Streaming). The channel is then created when a client either publishes messages to it, or create a consumer on that. A channel then logs message on this topic as a ring buffer based on channel limits (although you can set to unlimited if you have enough resources).

From a client perspective, there is no API to create a channel, you simply publish or consume:

conn.Publish("foo", []byte("msg"))

conn.Subscribe("foo", msgCb)

Hope this helps!

<comment><USER4> I'm very impressed by the small foot print of NATS server (2.8MB). It's definitely an interesting choice for IoT. We currently have to make a choice between kafka and Nats and the decision is not easy. :)

Is it possible to know if the cluster version of nats will really be available in 2017 ? Our satellite is only launched in 2019. We would use it in the data processing center.

<comment><USER5> Yes, clustering will be available in NATS Streaming in 2017 (the development has already begun, and it's a high priority item). Drop me an email - be happy to discuss further and learn more about your requirements/answer any other Q's you may have about it: firstname.lastname@example.com</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-illusionist <comment><USER3> This is a really terrible review. I really want to say something that contributes more, but my god, this person does not understand or even care to understand Dennet. Again and again, he elides over all of Dennet's reasoning only to seize suddenly on the conclusion, which prima facie he disagrees with, as an apparent absurdity or contradiction. I don't intend to write an elaborate dissection of the article, but just as a particularly egregious example:

"Similarly, when Dennett claims that words are "memes" that reproduce like a "virus," he is speaking pure gibberish. Words reproduce, within minds and between persons, by being intentionally adopted and employed."

The review can be summarized, in brief: "Dennet gives some 'ingenious' arguments that I do not particularly care to follow, but for all the effort, he does not seem to grasp the fundamental flaw - namely, that he disagrees with me."

<comment><USER4> Dennett's arguments are very frustrating because he refuses to engage with the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience, and how it could arise from physical processes. In dismissing this problem, he doesn't do much more than simply refuse to engage with it. "Consciousness Explained"? More like consciousness denied.

For example, he insists that our consciousness isn't quite as broad as we think, and presents ample evidence to show the we are aware of much less than we think we are. Great, but totally irrelevant for explaining the fundamental phenomenom of subjective experience. And yet it is presented as evidence that the phenomenon is really not a problem at all.

What makes this even more frustrating is that the existence of subjective experience is really the only thing one _can_ be absolutely sure of in this world (see Descartes and also the brain in a vat thought experiment). And yet it is the one thing that Dennett refuses to acknowledge.

<comment><USER5> We absolute can be aware of subjective experience/awareness.

Hawkins posited in "On Intelligence" that consciousness is simply the feeling of having a neo-cortex.

While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real", I really don't have any basis for believing/thinking that they could arise from anything else other than from physical quanta hitting my senso- sphere and being interpreted by a biological machine.

I also have no basis for not thinking/believing that this is not nonsense.

How you _you_ break the conundrem of primary-physics vs primary-mind?

<comment><USER6> It's a bit tricker than it sounds, though. We cannot be aware of the absence of awareness. This could imply that we can only be aware of a sense of 'awareness' insofar as it was in fact differentiated from awareness itself, though a missing second step that is probably familiar to you (but it's a bit late at night for me to articulate it coherently).

<comment><USER5> Are you referring to nothingness?

I think that most of us can remember being 'nothing' (this might be wrong), and it baffles me why people are afraid to die, which is simply returning to 'nothing'.

<comment><USER4> That's a preposterous claim. You obviously can't remember not existing. Memory is not magical, it is a biological process that records information during your life and allows you to reexperience it.

<comment><USER5> It's a boundary condition. I expressed myself badly.

EDIT: If you are a physicalist. Some people are not.

EDIT2: "The Truth" has nothing to do with whether one is a physicalist or not, but the interpretation of some various sub-sets of the facts inform various ... schools of thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> David Bentley Hart and Ed Feser, who is also mentioned in a comment here, are theist cranks who have both developed evasive "metaphysical arguments" which apparently tell us the universe has a "light of being" (DBH) or a "prime mover" (EF) which turn out, shock horror(!), to be the Christian God that they already believe in and their "arguments" tell us _nothing_ else (e.g. they don't tell us if the universe had a beginning or not, because, of course, they don't want to go toe-to-toe with physics). DBH and EF are the latest in a long line of "philosophers" paid directly or indirectly by the corrupt church to provide sophistries to make the billions of peasant believers continue paying their tithes. Let them, with their oh-so-deep metaphysical arguments, predict something true about the universe that physics doesn't yet know and then we might listen. I'm surprised the utterances of a crank like DBH would reach the pages of HN.

<comment><USER8> As it turns out, Daniel Bennett is an atheist materialist crank who has developed evasive "materialist arguments" which apparently tell us that the universe has no cause of existence, which turns out (shock, horror!) to be the standard atheist cant that he already believes, and so his arguments tell us _nothing_ else...

(Sorry, couldn't help myself.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone read this article? It is pretty horrible. It argues against explaining mind as a pure physical process that evolved by adaption. I am not sure what it is advocating instead but it isn't hard science but something else.

This author elevates the idea of consciousness significantly. And dismissing Dennett attempts to reduce it. Now I am not saying there may be weirdness in consciousness such as possible quantum processes which makes it hard to simulate on a traditional computer but it is still physical and ultimately reducible given sufficient technical understanding.

I do not support this articles approach at all.

That said I find Dennett long winded and boring to read. But ultimately he is right. I guess I buy his argument at the beginning thus reading his thousands of pages is very unrewarding.

</comment><comment><USER10> Dennet is a reductive materialist. He'd probably disagree with my hardline depiction of him, but, in my opinion, if it quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it's probably a duck. For what it's worth, he identifies as a 'teleofunctionalist' (???).

The author of the piece doesn't _seem_ to be a reductive materialist, so obviously Dennet won't jive with him. I'm also not a materialist, so I don't really find Dennet very insightful. For example, he denies the existence of qualia (and rejects everything that comes with that experience; see Nagel's famous _What is it like to be a bat?_ ).

With that said, I think he's made some pretty big contributions to materialism, in particular with regards to evolutionary theory and by providing some pretty solid theories of an 'emergent' non-hand-wavy consciousness. I don't really agree with his points and I think he's being crudely reductive, but dismissing the man's life work is kind of unfair.

<comment><USER11> _> he denies the existence of qualia_

No, he doesn't. He just says that qualia aren't what we intuitively think they are.

Denying the existence of qualia would mean denying that we have subjective experiences. Dennett doesn't deny that. But he does deny that many of our usual intuitions about qualia are correct, by showing how they lead to inconsistent and incoherent thinking about our experiences.

It's quite true that Dennett's view of qualia is very different from that of many other philosophers. But to say he denies the existence of qualia does not come close to doing justice to his actual views.

<comment><USER10> > Denying the existence of qualia would mean denying that we have subjective > experiences. Dennett doesn't deny that. But he does deny that many of our > usual intuitions about qualia are correct, by showing how they lead to > inconsistent and incoherent thinking about our experiences.

I don't think you're right. See here[1]:

> There is a limited use for such interpretations of subjects' protocols, I > have argued (Dennett 1978a; 1979, esp., pp.109-110; 1982), but they will not > help the defenders of qualia here. Logical constructs out of judgments must > be viewed as akin to theorists' fictions, and the friends of qualia want the > existence of a particular quale in any particular case to be an empirical > fact in good standing, not a theorist's useful interpretive fiction, else it > will not loom as a challenge to functionalism or materialism or third- > person, objective science.

According to the man himself, he thinks that they are "theorists' fictions" and "not empirical facts" \-- that's about as "they aren't a thing" as you can possibly get.

[1] [http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm](http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm)

<comment><USER11> If you're willing to draw a distinction between "denying the existence of qualia" and "denying the existence of subjective experience", then yes, I agree that "denying the existence of qualia" can be taken in its usual sense--"they aren't a thing", as you say. Everything Dennett says about qualia has to be interpreted with this distinction in mind.

However, I'm not sure the poster I was responding to would agree with allowing that distinction. Certainly many commentators on Dennett have interpreted "denying the existence of qualia" as "denying the existence of subjective experience", which Dennett does not do. For a person who refuses to allow the distinction, I think one has to simply disagree that Dennett denies the existence of qualia; he just says they aren't what most people think they are.

Another way of looking at this is to ask what, exactly, the word "qualia" refers to. If it refers to subjective experiences themselves, then of course they exist; but, as Dennett says, they might not be what most people think they are. But if the word "qualia" refers to something else, then what it refers to might indeed not even exist. Many philosophical arguments come down to people using words to mean different things and talking past each other.

<comment><USER10> > However, I'm not sure the poster I was responding to would agree with > allowing that distinction. Certainly many commentators on Dennett have > interpreted "denying the existence of qualia" as "denying the existence of > subjective experience", which Dennett does not do. For a person who refuses > to allow the distinction, I think one has to simply disagree that Dennett > denies the existence of qualia; he just says they aren't what most people > think they are.

I read a lot of his back and forth with Chalmers & co. (and philosophy of mind in general), and no one argues that Dennett doesn't think subjective experiences exist. But subjective experiences are _not_ qualia. Qualia are _phenomenal properties_ of experience. Presumably, one _could_ have subjective experiences _without_ these phenomenal properties. Indeed, that is what Dennett argues, see the IEP[1]

PS: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted -- guess the materialists have a bone to pick ;)

[1] [http://www.iep.utm.edu/qualia/#H5](http://www.iep.utm.edu/qualia/#H5)

<comment><USER11> _> no one argues that Dennett doesn't think subjective experiences exist_

I don't know if anyone has stated that directly. But I've seen plenty of responses to Dennett that basically amount to saying that the only way they can make sense of his statement that qualia don't exist is that he means subjective experiences don't exist. So even if they don't think he actually believes that, they certainly seem to be unable to interpret his philosophical claims any other way.

<comment><USER10> They are attacking a weak interpretation of his argument. It's a pretty good tactic (that might have some merit), but it's pretty uncharitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the big deal with consciousness? Isn't it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I'd expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts & abilities are programmed.

<comment><USER13> The big deal is that there's no observable difference between the world where your robot is conscious of itself and has subjective experience of its surroundings, and between the world where your robot merely behaves as such, speaks to you trying to convince you that it indeed has subjective experience, but in fact it has none, its experiences are just a movie screened in an empty cinema where nobody is watching.

This unobservable difference goes the most basic axiom of science -- if there's no observable difference, then there's no difference. Yet, somehow I have subjective experience. You might also have it, though there's currently no way you can convince me that you do.

<comment><USER14> Why do you think those worlds are different in a meaningful sense? You can distinguish them in your imagination only. If you were the God, I would believe you.

<comment><USER13> The meaningful sense is that I have subjective experience, yet I can imagine a world where there's no subjective experience of being me -- it is exactly the world _you_ are living in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The title would be clearer if it implied that it was a review of a single philosopher - Maybe "Daniel Dennet - The Illusionist"

</comment><comment><USER16> We cannot know the limits of our thinking because we cannot think beyond those limits (or something like that) - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER17> It's impossible to objectively explain the subjective. To do so is a category error.

<comment><USER18> How about positing a one-to-one correspondence between our subjective experiences and patterns of neuronal firings in our brains?

<comment><USER17> That would not explain why there is a matching.

<comment><USER18> But that's a different problem.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't explain whether the neuronal firings cause the subjective experience or visa versa.

<comment><USER18> Why can't they _be_ the same thing? All my experience is processed information (see my other comment in this thread about qualia [1]); information processing requires hardware; the hardware is the brain. My report of my experiences is itself changes in a pattern of neuronal activity which is determined by changes in what it and other patterns are doing. I say 'changes' to emphasise that the precise medium I'm running on is not fundamentally important and I cannot perceive it (the neurons) without the aid of a brain scanner. In principle I could be scanned and modelled by a brain scientist whose 3rd person description of what's going on exactly matches my 1st person description. Would that convince you?

[1] though I didn't mention it there, a quale can't usually be pinned down exactly because most of the associated ideas are inexplicit (cannot be reduced to propositions in English). I think this is why people consider their experiences to be ineffable in some way. Daniel Dennett's talk on Edge.org provides a discussion ("A Difference That Makes a Difference", Nov 2017)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Road Kill on the Information Highway [Myhrvold, 1993] - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/4PtM3XNS

<comment><USER2> I expect that the typical desktop PC around the turn of the century will be over 100 gigabytes - whether RAM or a mixture of RAM and some other sort of mass storage., and a typical LAN server here at Microsoft will have a few terabytes.

</comment><comment><USER2> video on demand systems used to replace Blockbuster and other video rental stores will dramatically increase the market for storage and should dramatically drive the price learning curve.

</comment><comment><USER2> by the year 2000, RAM will cost about $1-$2 per gigabyte.</comment>


Ars tests Internet surveillance by spying on an NPR reporter - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/06/what-the-nsa-or-anyone-can-learn-about-you-from-internet-traffic/?

<comment><USER2> I really appreciated this story. It's so hard to make people care about "small" data leaks when they have no idea what many "small" data leaks can lead to. The bug the journalists discovered that revealed Skype's contact list is the perfect example -- the programmer just did something completely "reasonable" (grabbing avatars) that ended up leaking a vital set of information. Imagine if surveillance was your full time job and you did more than just grab the low hanging fruit.

I was also quite surprised by Google's HTTP Maps flaw in HTTPS search. I'd have previously imagined this would be a standard security pentest that Google products would need to go through. Given how pervasive and important Google is to the digital ecosystem, even small flaws can have a profound impact.

I'll again state that this is why I feel so strongly that Google Analytics should be updated to be HTTPS by default[1]. If you hit a non-HTTP site, you're leaking all the information you would send to Google Analytics to anyone that's listening -- it goes across the wire unencrypted. Considering Google Analytics is on 60+% of the top 100,000 domains, this is a lot of information leakage. Referrers, time on page, browser details, operating system details, everything that Google shows a webmaster in Google Analytics also ends up in the hands of the passive observer.

[1]: [http://smerity.com/articles/2013/google_analytics_and_nsa.ht...](http://smerity.com/articles/2013/google_analytics_and_nsa.html)

<comment><USER3> This was a wake-up call for me. On my desktop browser, I can use SSL, NoScript, etc. to control what's exposed.

But on my phone I'm powerless. How do I know what each app is capturing and transmitting in the clear? If even Google searches don't use SSL, what hope is there for other apps?

<comment><USER4> In your mobile browser at least Firefox Nightly supports extensions - I have adblock, ghostery, etc. Aside from the privacy benefits it also makes a significant performance difference on my kindle.

[https://nightly.mozilla.org/](https://nightly.mozilla.org/)

<comment><USER5> You can use the stable version too, at least ABP, Ghostery and Self Destructing Cookies works fine on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like the "Pwnie Express PwnPlug R2"[1] is just a Mirabox[2] with an extra wireless card in the Mini PCIe slot and an external antenna. The PwnPlug R2 sells for $1095; the Mirabox sells for $150.

[1]: [https://www.pwnieexpress.com/penetration-testing- vulnerabili...](https://www.pwnieexpress.com/penetration-testing- vulnerability-assessment-products/sensors/pwn-plug-r2/)

[2]: [https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-58-mirabox- develop...](https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-58-mirabox-development- kit.aspx)

<comment><USER7> I only skimmed the description of it, presumably the cost is more about being pre-loaded with a good software package for pen testing as opposed to having to set it all up yourself. Could be a pretty decent expense, even for a bigger pentest shop that has the resources to make a standard process for building and setting up stuff like that.

<comment><USER6> Right, you are paying an extra $945 for them to install a wifi card/antenna and preload a bunch of open source software on it. I'm sure that for some people it is totally worth it, and others would rather do it themselves.

I mostly pointed it out because I've used the Mirabox for a bunch of projects and recognized it in the picture. Its a great little ARM box with 2 gigabit ethernet ports (hard to find a on dev board)and 2 USB 3.0 ports.

<comment><USER8> Have you ever used the Dreamplug? I'm still hanging onto mine but it sounds like the Mirabox might be a suitable upgrade. How's the kernel support? How's uBoot? (On the Dreamplug, you have to upgrade uBoot via JTAG once you get past a certain kernel version)

<comment><USER6> Yes I have used the Dreamplug, the Mirabox is a logical upgrade from that. The Mirabox uses a Marvell Armada 370 SOC. When I first got my Mirabox the kernel support wasn't great. But Marvell has been contracting with an embedded Linux contracting firm, Free Electrons, to get everything into the mainline. Free Electrons has done a great job and now you can run a stock kernel fairly easily.

The Mirabox comes with the Marvell fork of uBoot which is unfortunately quite old. It doesn't have support for device-tree, for example. I'm not aware of a newer working version from either Marvell or Globalscale. There was some initial work to get Barebox working on the Mirabox, but it is very feature limited.

On the plus side, you don't need a JTAG console to reflash the bootloader. Lots of Marvell SoCs support booting over a UART connection using an Xmodem protocol[1][2]. So you can reflash/unbrick your Mirabox using just the USB serial port. (I think that the Dreamplug also supports this protocol, but I have never tried to use it on one.)

[1]: [http://git.pengutronix.de/?p=barebox.git;a=commit;h=0535713b...](http://git.pengutronix.de/?p=barebox.git;a=commit;h=0535713bbfa059c1bc20da24d33bb183c4f555dc)

[2]: [http://git.pengutronix.de/?p=barebox.git;a=commit;h=6bb3a08c...](http://git.pengutronix.de/?p=barebox.git;a=commit;h=6bb3a08cd3864f3ee1b9f4becf26b55ac9c0a524)

<comment><USER8> >The Mirabox comes with the Marvell fork of uBoot which is unfortunately quite old. It doesn't have support for device-tree, for example. I'm not aware of a newer working version from either Marvell or Globalscale. There was some initial work to get Barebox working on the Mirabox, but it is very feature limited.

This was the situation with the Dreamplug before it got mainline uBoot support. Is there any hope for the Mirabox?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Scary that Google Maps wasn't encrypting significant amounts of its traffic (at least for the reporter in this article, since I know Maps has HTTPS support). Location data can be the most revealing of all.

<comment><USER10> One of the nicest things about this article is seeing that the Ars reporter (Sean Gallagher) reported at least _three_ information leakage bugs upstream, and the responsible parties have addressed them. How many news organizations can claim to have gotten security flaws fixed so directly?

<comment><USER9> Ah, I was interrupted as I read the article and that info was a couple paragraphs later.

That is awesome! Hopefully it also nudges Google to audit their properties for similar leakages to plug....and everyone else for that matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At this point, should we not just drop non-SSL traffic on the web completely?

<comment><USER12> Even SSL trafic leaks information about websites you are visiting, how much data you download (e.g. for email), how much time you spend, when do you do it, etc. More importantly, it doesn't protect you from the website (and any owner of any 3rd party plugin/widget/js/css/img on the website) from collecting data about your online behavior based on your browser signature or simple cookies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> None of this is shocking except for maybe how unavoidable sharing all this information online actually is. The default settings on most devices are not designed with privacy in mind. In order to avoid this type of data collection, you'd have to walk around with a dumbphone, avoid using any bank-connected services and basically only log on to the Internet via a VPN. Ironically, this usage pattern is so far out of the ordinary that it would make you stick out like a sore thumb.

In the decade between this type of data collection becoming possible and the mass populace becoming concerned about it, I fear we've passed a threshold we can't un-cross. This type of technology is so intertwined in our daily lives that avoiding it isn't a realistic option.

Things like Apple using random MAC addresses to scan for Wi-Fi APs are a start; but too many devices (Android included) use default settings that are far from secure. But it's up to the companies that make usable, mass-market devices to ratchet up the security, and I fear that they have little incentive to do so when their own ambitions include the same type of data collection.

<comment><USER14> > In order to avoid this type of data collection, you'd have to walk around > with a dumbphone, avoid using any bank-connected services and basically only > log on to the Internet via a VPN. Ironically, this usage pattern is so far > out of the ordinary that it would make you stick out like a sore thumb.

Have you considered trying this, or some implementation of it?

I, for one, would like to see websites that didn't install any tracking software. Specifically, I mean no Google metrics. If there was a news website that didn't install any tracking software, but instead just offered pages with cryptocurrency addresses, I would switch to that as my default news source in a second.

<comment><USER15> Google metrics aren't always used for spying on people -- news sites in particular drool over every possible metric to measure popularity, referrals, etc. to better tailor their online marketing (and sometimes story selection). It sounds weird, but I'm not sure a website without tracking would be as good.

<comment><USER14> No, I don't think it would be. For a company to announce that they were forgoing tracking would be a brave step. I understand that analytics is a really really useful thing for a company.

But, as a corrolary, what if Google Analytics alters the content in a way that makes it less useful? The obvious example here is clickbait articles (See, Clickhole), but I think there's other more subtle problems here. Isn't the job of a reporter to report what _they_ think is news, rather than what people want to read?

Beyond that, I am troubled by the spying on people. It occurs to me that even if I remove Google Analytics from my website, anyone coming to or going from my website will be subject to monitoring by Google. It's not exactly opt out.

Microtransactions are hard, though, that problem still hasn't been solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how much sensitive data from governments and companies leaks this way. It doesn't sound unrealistic for an attacker (a spy, a competitor, an inside trader) to pick a coffee shop frequented by low-level government officials and set up a fake Wi-Fi access point. I doubt people doing mundane administrative tasks are security-conscious enough not to leak important data this way.

</comment><comment><USER12> Realistically, it is _really_ hard to protect your privacy online unless you decide to stop using 3rd party services like email, calendar, file sharing, social networks, etc. All these services collect enormous amounts of information about everyone. The internet protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP) have not been designed with privacy in mind and the only way to ensure real privacy for internet users is to start from scratch and rethink the whole stack. Unfortunately, it is not going to happen thus users pretty much have a tradeoff: either to accept privacy violations from various parties or to (significantly) limit the use of internet services.

</comment><comment><USER17> _We contacted both AT &T and Apple for comment; Apple pointed us to AT&T, but AT&T didn't respond._

I'm shocked.

</comment><comment><USER18> How far would an always on VPN go to solving parts of these problems? At least it'd be encrypted to the VPN data centre.

I suppose from there it'd be in the clear, but at least it'd stop snooping at an ISP level. Or am I missing something, and would it be useless?

<comment><USER12> VPN is a tunnel. Your computer is on one end and there will be another computer on another end. The ISP or cloud provider on the other end will be able to spy on you even if you use VPN. And of course the website you are visiting has all the information in any case.

<comment><USER19> Yeah. What happens is that you are giving one more party - the VPN provider - access to your data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are there any guides on how to get started on penetration testing yourself? I'd quite like to run this experiment on myself and see just how much information I actually leak online.</comment>


Show HN: Archiejs – a Node.js dependency injection framework for large projects - <AUTHOR> The modules in ArchieJS are very similar to NPM modules, except that a thin wrapper gives them some lifecycle events (such as initialization or termination) and they are injected into one-other.<p>https://github.com/archiejs/archiejs-docs/blob/master/README.md <comment><AUTHOR> Documentation:

[1] [https://github.com/archiejs/archiejs- docs/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/archiejs/archiejs- docs/blob/master/README.md)

Demo apps:

[1] [https://github.com/archiejs/demo-webapp-mongo-redis- ticket_b...](https://github.com/archiejs/demo-webapp-mongo-redis- ticket_booking)

[2] [https://github.com/archiejs/demo-basicapp- googlecloudvision-...](https://github.com/archiejs/demo-basicapp- googlecloudvision-reciept-scanner)</comment>


Poll : What trading account do you use - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
  I am guessing a lot of geeks do stock or options trading at some point.
  I think it would fun to create a poll. Upvote below <comment><AUTHOR> 2\. TDameritrade

</comment><comment><USER2> IB Interactive Brokers

</comment><comment><USER3> Charles Schwab

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 4\. optionhouse

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Scottrade

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 3\. Fidelity

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 5\. E*trade

</comment><comment><USER4> Vanguard</comment>


China's Youth Are Caught in the Cult of Nationalism - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/01/chinas-angry-young-nationalists/ <comment><USER2> There must be a better word for this than 'nationalism'. After all, it was nationalism that drove my own country to fight for its independence, and establish a democratic government.

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing Foreign Policy loves China too much to call them totalitarian.

"To be a modern-day Chinese nationalist is to unknowingly agree to all of that and to become a de facto Han supremacist."

<comment><USER4> My Chinese SO has been called a "race traitor" by quite a few younger Chinese (of both genders) people who come to the UK to study.

One of her friends married an English man, her parents excommunicated her, saying that she had "betrayed China".

I have heard of Chinese students in the UK unironically comparing black students to monkeys and questioning how they got in (since monkeys are stupid).

I would call it ethno-nationalism.

<comment><USER2> Even ethno-nationalism isn't quite right. After all, my country split off along ethnic and linguistic lines, based on explicit justifications that the land belongs to our 'kin'. But all without any appeals to supremacy, national or ethnic (at least, such appeals didn't have much traction), and other ethnic groups living here were granted citizenship just like everyone else, and even special representation by guaranteed seats for minority groups in parliament.

What you're describing could maybe be called ethnic hate/supremacism?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are of course fools in China just like everywhere else in the world, they don't represent us all,however the articles does not agree with it or should I say the author is one of the fools? It is full of hate with some fake facts. I am not denying nationalism is a bad thing for the people, but I agree it is a good temporary strategy to rule fools especially in country like China. Open some books about Chinese histories and show some respect is all I hope to get.

<comment><USER6> > It is full of hate with some fake facts

Such as?

> I say the author is one of the fools

Ad hominem

> Open some books about Chinese histories and show some respect is all I hope > to get

Please enlighten us with your knowledge

Overall, your comment is low effort

<comment><USER5> I was about to say something back and just realize it would be against what I really wanted at first place, so I am going to just ignore all this from now on. I love HN and I still want be here in peace.

<comment><USER7> Why would comment you'd leave break the peace you have here at HN? Are you not confident you could write something eloquently without letting anger take you over?

Propaganda, misinformation campaigns is all about indoctrination - along with censorship and other hate-filled practices, is the process of preventing people developing critical thinking on their own - so they can rationally, logically, and without emotional attacks, describe their argument or counterarguments. It takes practice, and it takes developing emotional regulation - it's a lot of constant work especially when you're developing critical thinking, finding appropriate language to use, for specific arguments for the first time; even as a native English speaker, I'll find fairly often words I don't use often pop into my head, and I'll be sure to lookup dictionary definitions to make sure the word's meaning adequately fits what I'm meaning to say.

That the Chinese government has built-in this hate, reactions such as "betraying China" by being a "race traitor" is clearly priming the youth to be that as how Nazi Germany youth were indoctrinated into the SS. And it seems like we're getting the first real taste of this bad behaviour in Hong Kong - Hong Kongers who've had freedom to understand this for themselves, and why their protests are so strong. Is the rest of the world going to allow China to continue to practice and evolve this behaviour without strong economic punishment as soon as possible? I'm afraid democracy has been too unstable for too long, democratic societies weakened by long-term regulatory capture, not taking care of everyone adequately - not allowing for us to be as strong as we could be, should be, need to be to quickly mobilize against what's obvious behaviour to anyone with a more open mind, a more open heart, to see the patterns that are on the path of evil.

And it's easy to check for yourself, if you live in China, to find out how "free" you really are: are you willing to speak about Tiananmen Square Massacre online, are you willing talk in public about it - to ask other people what they have heard about it or if they know about it? This single reference point of suppression of violence in relatively recent history is a simple control mechanism to see who "falls in line" or who "falls out of line" with the propaganda - of those who want full control over discourse and over you, until they have a reason to come for you or your family members:

These "re-education camps" are considered concentration camps by the rest of the world, with horrific stories and international law violations - [https://nationalpost.com/news/canadian-went-to-china-to- debu...](https://nationalpost.com/news/canadian-went-to-china-to-debunk- reports-of-anti-muslim-repression-but-was-shocked-by-treatment-of-uyghurs) \- and other stories of women being sterilized for ethnic "cleansing," stories of organ harvesting from people here; all of which are only the stories that are getting out from these highly controlled and monitored environments. And then with the Hong Kong protests - there seems to be a suspiciously high amount of "suicides by fall" happening, or rather recorded as such by police - a story that is developing, however because it's drawn media attention - if that was a tactic of "suiciding protestors" was being used then they'll realize they can no longer use it for the attention it's drawn.

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Same for India as well to a great deal, but in India, it's not just nationalism, it's nationalism with a heady dose of religion.

</comment><comment><USER9> The China defenders can't seem to decide whether to argue that no, the Chinese are not extreme nationalists, or that they are and this is perfectly right.

</comment><comment><USER5> I cannot believe someone posted this on HN.

<comment><USER10> Yup, hating China is cool these days... people that have never been there nor understand the language or the culture are the ones that share all of this non-sense.

<comment><USER11> There is plenty of legitimate criticism to be made of the resurgence of Chinese nationalism - just as there is for American and Russian nationalism.

"Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority." ― Arthur Schopenhauer

<comment><USER12> And, we criticize American and Russian nationalism here. Why can't we criticize Chinese nationalism?

(And, yes, there is danger of painting with too broad a brush, no matter which nation's nationalism we are criticizing. Not everyone there is a nationalist, for any value of "there".)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inferring the Future of FPGAs - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/10/02/inferring-the-future-of-the-fpga-and-then-making-it/ <comment><USER2> I think you can find more mundane but much more widely applicable uses for FPGA fabric in future, especially if we start shipping them in most ARM CPUs. For example, you can compress and decompress memory pages in real-time, which (for streaming applications at least) is one way to increase RAM bandwidth, or reduce system cost. Or hyper-optimize grep, sed and awk, and a hardware- assisted bitonic sort library for your DB. Cheaper, faster, lower-power compute for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think that needs for running neural networks will emerge in datacentres. The demand is too low.

Nor is the FPGA the best thing to run them on. Even if you "bake" them into static integer models, that can be mapped directly to gates, that only possible for the smallest ones around. GPUs are pretty much what is the best as it is: an accelerator for doing a lot of low precision linear algebra.

And as a side benefit, you can play Quake on all those GTXes pressed into linear algebra crunching in datacentres. Jokes aside, being able to resell server hardware later on is a very good thing. Moreover, the sole fact that gaming industry is magnitude bigger than whatever happens in HPC will be the guarantor of (relatively) low prices.

<comment><USER4> FPGAs are much better than current GPUs for low precision NN computation (binary or ternary). Nvidia knows that (that's why they introduced experimental INT1 mode on their latest cards).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone recommend good non-vendor GUIs for experimenting with FPGAs on your own?

<comment><USER6> You can use verilator to simulate a design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not yet convinced we will see tons of FPGAs. They are less power efficient than ASICs.

Yes ASICs cost a lot more up front. But as the companies get bigger and bigger they can afford that up front cost.

The cost of making an ASIC has already dropped and would expect that to continue to happen.

Plus we have the issue of needing to integrate memory with computation to lower power use of moving around data and that is a even harder to do on a FPGA then an ASIC.

<comment><USER8> FPGA still has some advantages over ASIC development:

\- development speed of FPGA over the typical ASIC lifecycle is much shorter

\- the ability to field-program and correct a design flaw can not only save expensive iterations, but also to add new hardware features essentially as a "firmware" upgrade (provided the FPGA in the system has extra capacity)

There will always be a place for ASIC, but FPGAs provide some capabilities that are not available (impossible?) for ASIC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is interesting that one can write code (for which certain computational/logic structures are automatically inferred) describing hardware to run inference models, while inferring that such a piece of computing power will be useful to infer the future.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there a black bar above HN's top menu sometimes? - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/wew1OEd
I get that maybe once or twice a month, for a few minutes / hours on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (iOS).
Then it goes back to normal. <comment><USER2> To commemorate someone who has just died. Today John Conway: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843306](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843306)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I did note the passing of John Conway but I certainly did not associate it with the black bar. It could be interesting to make the connection more discoverable, ala Google's Doodles.</comment></comment>


Quantum researchers able to split one photon into three - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-02-quantum-photon.html <comment><USER2> Basic primer on spontaneous parametric down-conversion: it's an optical phenomenon where a photon of a given frequency (energy) is split into two entangled photons whose frequencies add up to the original photon. The resulting frequencies differ so you can separate the photons spatially by refracting them. Has long been a workhorse for experiments requiring a pair of entangled particles (Bell tests and such). You can buy SPDC crystals online for about $500 these days[0].

I guess they managed to SPDC a photon into three photons instead of two.

[0] [https://www.newlightphotonics.com/SPDC-Components/405nm- Pump...](https://www.newlightphotonics.com/SPDC-Components/405nm-Pumped-SPDC- Components)

<comment><USER3> If they get back together, then do they join to create the old photon? What if you stick one in a stronger gravitational field for a while and then later you stick them back together but maybe the phases of something are out of sync due to time dilation (or maybe they're in sync but just one has experience an extra second of life)? Does the resulting photon become entangled with the second-ago rendition of _itself_? Are we able to control an entangled photon well enough to run a process like this?

Sorry for the interested bystander questions.

<comment><USER4> Photons don't experience time dilation as they don't even experience time (since they're moving _at_ the speed of light).

<comment><USER5> Why do we associate the speed of time with the speed of light? Is this even valid assumption?

<comment><USER6> It is not an assumption, in layman terms: "speed of light" is a bad name. It is actually speed on interaction. Top speed of any interaction. Everything which isn't slowed down by mass has this speed, like light.

<comment><USER7> I've heard it explained as the speed of causality (that is, the maximum speed at which cause and effect can occur) and, like you say, anything without mass to slow it down, like light, will travel at that speed. It's the propagation delay for quantum states or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do they really split a single photon or just absorb one and generate 3 new one?

I assumed that photon is an elementary particle.

<comment><USER9> I doubt the photon is truly fundamental.

I've mentioned this recently in another thread but I'm pretty sure E=hf is hiding information and the units of plancks constant are wrong.

I think the equation should be

E=htf where h is in Joules/oscillation (quanta of energy) t is measure time and f is osillations/second.

Check out Juliana H.J Mortensen's work.

The upshot is that in this model, every oscillation of light carries the same energy regardless of frequency. This supports wave particle duality even more so than the current model, and takes the uncertainty out of the uncertainty principle.

<comment><USER10> Forgive the layperson question, but: if all light carries the same energy regardless of frequency, would this experiment (where one photon is split into three with the same sum frequency) not violate conservation of energy?

<comment><USER9> The idea here is that what people generally regard as a "photon" today is actually one second's worth of oscillations of light at a particular frequency. Imagine each oscillation of light as the true elementary particle instead. There are plenty of those elementary particles within the classical "photon" that can be split out into smaller "photons" of a different frequency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is so mind-blowing for me. Is there a "explain like I'm five" for this?

</comment><comment><USER12> If you split one photon into 3 entangled ones of 1/3 the energy, what is the expected outcome of measurements? They cant all be mutually opposite, though photons dont have spin.

<comment><USER2> Entanglement doesn't necessarily always produce opposites, even with spin. Measurements just become correlated in some way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very neat physics news in 2020 so far. It isn't easy to research something at that scale

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does this have any repercussions into cloning @ all ie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No- cloning_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem)

<comment><USER14> No. The no-cloning theorem is a real theorem of quantum mechanics. To discover a way around it is to find evidence of a new paradigm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I sometimes think one day in a lab we'll trigger a bug of the universe and whole thing will dismantle..

<comment><USER16> Actually something like that may indeed happen, but spontaneously, see about vacuum decay here [1]. Roughly speaking, the vacuum we know is meta-stable and eventually it can reach its zero state, but such change in any point in space will trigger a neighboring point to do the same and so on, so there will be a bubble expanding with a speed of light. The biggest problem is that the laws of physics of such vacuum are different and what is stable now will be unstable then, so atoms/molecules/anything made of them can no more exist. The worst is if this theory is correct, then such a bubble may already started to expand somewhere in the Universe and we will not know about it until it actually reaches us.

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

<comment><USER17> > the vacuum we know is meta-stable

It's not fully known if this is the case or not. If the standard model is accurate (which is a big if) then it's probably metastable but there is some still room for debate. See page 52 of [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.08124.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.08124.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Can a Videogame Make You Cry? - barry-cotter http://www.maisonneuve.org/index.php?&page_id=12&article_id=3203

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if anyone else has played Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars, but I remember getting quite caught up in that game's story. It was as much an interactive novel as it was a story-drive game, although I was much younger when I played through it and my opinion of it may be drastically different if I play it again.

The thing is, though, there are probably non-zero-sum markets both for the "interactive novel" type game and the story-less twitch shooters. It just takes a different person or mood to appreciate the genre in question.</comment>


Zoom's Achilles Heel - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/breadcrumbs-guiding-startups/zooms-achilles-heel-843d78ffedcc <comment><AUTHOR> Slack and Zoom's business model are often conflated, but they are very distinct in reality. Slack is built on network effects, while Zoom is built on virality. This also makes Zoom far more vulnerable.</comment>


Bivariate Maps with React and D3 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/angelozehr/bivariate-maps-react-d3 <comment><USER2> I love _the idea_ of bivariate color scales, but is it just me or they are hard to read?

<comment><USER3> It's especially confusing that the featured example uses the _lack_ of something (equality) at the maximum of one scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OK, now we just need a bivariate color palette generator

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems weird to pair D3 with React, since D3 is just another abstraction over the DOM, just like React. Why not just render the graphics with React?

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't see a reason for React to be used in this visualization either. It's been awhile since I've used D3 but I thought it could do this kind of rendering on its own?

        <svg
          width={width}
          height={height}
        >
          {geoJson.features.map(feature =>
            <path
              key={`path-${feature.properties.bfsId}`}
              stroke='white'
              strokeWidth={0.25}
              d={path(feature)}
              fill='steelblue'
            />
          )}
        </svg>

I was thinking maybe React was also used with this visualization in production (e.g. adding interactive elements for a published story), and so maybe the author found it easy to use React for the rendering too?

<comment><USER6> D3 can do this type of rendering, but d3 data joins and selections are often difficult for people to understand and master. The beauty of this approach is that it bypasses all that and uses map to loop through the geoJSON features creating each path element.

To me this is more readable and easy to understand, but you don't really need react to do any of this. This can also be done with plan js.</comment></comment></comment>


OpenToonz: Making high-end animation software accessible - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/17/2/opentoonz-2d-animation-software <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the AppImage the Morevna folks maintain: [https://gumroad.com/l/opentoonz-linux](https://gumroad.com/l/opentoonz-linux)</comment>


Nice HTML5 Lindenmayer-System Generator - <AUTHOR> http://nolandc.com/sandbox/fractals/

<comment><USER2> Great toy, love it cleanly in HTML5 -- casually playing with L-systems the other day, the best apparent tool was this bugged Java applet[0] that didn't render any of the labels for its fields[1].

Suggestions:

\- List the syntax it accepts on the page itself

\- Add the ability to step through iteration

\- Add the ability to scale with each iteration (and maybe change colour)

\- Clarify that 'e' means edit -- took me a while to figure out it had any different functionality than the 'x' close (also, perhaps the ability to edit directly in the Rules listing)

\---

[0] <http://cgjennings.ca/toybox/lsystems/index.html>

[1] Could be an OS X/personal setup issue, as when rarely I encounter Java applets, they seem to have serious issues.</comment>


Inside The New Google Tel Aviv Office - <AUTHOR> http://officesnapshots.com/2013/01/31/google-tel-aviv-office-design/

<comment><USER2> Nice office, but the HDR-to-the-max photography makes my eyes bleed...

</comment><comment><USER3> Holy shit that's nice.

</comment><comment><USER4> Disneyland for geeks!</comment>


Results of operation against child exploitation enterprise on Tor network - <AUTHOR> http://www.dhs.gov/news/2014/03/18/secretary-johnson-highlights-results-operation-dismantled-underground-child <comment><USER2> "[...]the Darknet's Onion Router, also known as Tor"

Dear me. That would sound quite insidious, and possibly coherent, to someone with population average knowledge about TOR. So the DHS is telling us this Tor is something dark and sinister and used by exploitative paedophiles.

I wonder what comes next..

<comment><USER3> "...So the DHS is telling us this Tor is something dark and sinister..."

Good thing then that the Government is on the case working hard to shut down this evil thing the Government funded and helped deploy.

I'm so glad the Government is here to help since you must always be on guard against mailign actors like the Government and we need all the help we can get!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let me start off by saying I in no way agree with the content of the website that was shutdown. With that said. I assuming that if the government can track and shut a website using tor that other governments can track and shutdown political activist websites as well. so much for tor.

<comment><USER5> The BBC article[1] says they were caught by a mistake made outside of Tor:

 _But the porn ring was broken when an item was sent through the US Postal Service to a child, Ice Cyber Crime Centre Programme Manager James Kilpatrick told Reuters. That development led the authorities to Mr Johnson._

If they can track Tor sites directly, they're not saying. To me this sounds like Bitcoin: it's anonymous as long as you never ever link a transaction to a real-world identity. Once you do, everything that was once anonymous is now linked to you.

This isn't really new either; for a long time now you could create a fake identity and use it for whatever purposes, and your real identity would be protected and separate until you made a mistake which linked the two.

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-26639092](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26639092)

<comment><USER6> parallel construction

<comment><USER7> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction)

That was my thought too [though I didn't know the term] - Tor has been compromised in the past hasn't it?

<comment><USER8> Tor hasn't been compromised, the Firefox installation that Tor is shipped with has been exploited before though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not going to lie, at the heart of this story is good news. Tor has consistently been a save heaven for child exploitation. This news is fantastic considering that these were genuine criminals that have been stopped and victims contacted. For once, I'm happy with DHS.

<comment><USER10> Boats has consistently been a save heaven for smugglers.

The Post office has consistently been a save heaven for drug dealers.

And so on. Those kind of statement is kind of pointless since each are just technology used by criminals and non-criminals alike. I would rather have people praise DHS for succeeding in doing technical heavy investigations, rather than focus on how much a save haven a specific technology is. Otherwise, it just lead demonizing of technology which is never a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> More discussion on reddit (including links to some of the indictments): [http://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/20rq0l/authorities_bust...](http://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/20rq0l/authorities_bust_tor_child_porn_ring_unrelated_to/) [http://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/20qzi6/pedophile_rin...](http://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/20qzi6/pedophile_ring_that_operated_through_tor_nabbed/)

Note that this seems to be unrelated to the Freedom Hosting exploit---I still wonder when we will see the results of that.

<comment><USER12> The freedom hosting exploit took place in early August. What do you think is taking so long before we see the results of that effort?

<comment><USER13> According to this press release, the site admin in this case was arrested back in June and has been in custody ever since, so maybe that's just how long it takes to tie up all the strings on this sort of thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Excellent, give them nowhere to hide and long prison sentences. I hope they rot.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's time to shut down Tor once and for all. I hear Al-Qaeda is using it, too!

<comment><USER16> Relax downvoters, this is sarcasm.

<comment><USER13> For the record, I downvoted it because I don't think that sort of sarcastic comment (posted on its own, adding nothing useful to the conversation) doesn't belong on HN, not because I missed the sarcasm.

<comment><USER15> Actually, it wasn't only sarcasm but kind of a TLDR.

The long version is: "This would make for a suitable precursor to a renewed attempt on cracking down on some of the liberties in the internet. I personally don't believe in gov't institutions being nice and I find it most sad that this being a farce is the first thing that comes to my mind.

Unfortunately, where I come from, child porn is the #1 official reason for any attempt of internet censorship."

<comment><USER13> Presumably people reading it would be split into two groups, those who understood it as the long version (and therefore already know the argument) and those who don't realise what it's a TLDR for. So either way it's still not adding to the conversation, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can someone explain why this falls under DHS and not the FBI?

<comment><USER18> There seems to be a big overlap between the FBI and ICE-HSI. Both agencies have legal authority to investigate the same types of crimes, and they have similar man power (both have ~35k employees, but the FBI has twice as many special agents [0][1]). Perhaps more interestingly, the DHS reports directly to the president, while the FBI is under the Department of Justice. Though the DOJ is under the attorney general, who is also under the president, so maybe this difference isn't interesting at all.

To me it looks like the US government wanted to double the FBI's size without saying that's what they were doing.

[0] [https://www.ice.gov/about/offices/homeland-security- investig...](https://www.ice.gov/about/offices/homeland-security- investigations/)

[1] [http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/faqs](http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/faqs)

<comment><USER19> That's a relatively large jump to conclusion you made. I doubt there's anyone in the US government (where, exactly, in the hierarchy do you suppose) that would have the skill to get that past congress (congress sets the budget for all of DHS btw).

As for the missions, from both your links:

"The mission of the FBI is to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats, to uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and to provide leadership and criminal justice services to federal, state, municipal, and international agencies and partners. It performs these responsibilities in a way that is responsive to the needs of the public and faithful to the Constitution of the United States."

"HSI conducts criminal investigations against terrorist and other criminal organizations who threaten national security. HSI combats worldwide criminal enterprises who seek to exploit America's legitimate trade, travel and financial systems and enforces America's customs and immigration laws at and beyond our nation's borders."

Yes there's quite a bit of overlap there. Maybe the key difference is that ICE's mission talks about customs and immigration laws specifically.

<comment><USER18> >I doubt there's anyone in the US government (where, exactly, in the hierarchy do you suppose) that would have the skill to get that past congress (congress sets the budget for all of DHS btw).

What do you mean? The Homeland Security Act of 2002 did pass congress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good job well done. Always feels better to work without competitors, right Haliburton?

<comment><USER21> Haliburton has a Child Porn division?

<comment><USER22> Child sex slaves would be DynCorp's specialty[1][2], but Halliburton has a Human Trafficking division named KBR.[3]

[1] [http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-2115403...](http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-21154038/)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables- documents...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables- documents/213720)

[3] [http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmOzaTXaM...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jmOzaTXaMkCsqiqqmIK6gc_rpg1g?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised I've not read "they were tricking young teenagers in sending pornographic materials in 4chan/b/ rate-my-penis threads".

</comment><comment><USER24> It bothers me that you can be arrested for just being a member of a website.

<comment><USER7> It bothers me that there were apparently 27000 members but they only have 300 active investigations [perhaps more will arise as they sift through the data].

Does it also bother you that just conspiring to kill someone is a crime?

<comment><USER25> It's gently worrying that some people have their ode titites stolen, and one use for those stolen identities is to register an account on a website sharing images of child sexual abuse.

Let's hope law enforcement are careful about arrests.

<comment><USER26> They need to be _really fucking_ careful. For child exploitation charges, the accusation is damn near as good as conviction, because if you end up in prison on a charge like that, even just to await trial, your fellow prisoners will also dispense "justice", heavy scare quotes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Low Cost Online Dev Bootcamp (Mentored Learning) - <AUTHOR> https://www.enginehere.com/

<comment><USER2> This is a really interesting platform for learning to code online. I was part of the pre-launch class learning Python.

To be able to live code with the instructor, to see his/her face and going one-on-one with the webcam seems to be the closest thing to an actual classroom.

Hours are good too if you want to learn while keeping your day job.</comment>


The Connections Between Race, IQ, and Neuroplasticity - <AUTHOR> https://bostonreview.net/race/michael-e-staub-mismeasure-minds <comment><USER2> This again? We all know our genomes, from eskimos to bushmen and almost identical, so all you get are local variations for local survival. I note that as man varied to move North he lost a lot of his melanism, because Melanin blocked the UV from the sun that made vitamin D (which man does not make = have it or die). They also lost some aspects that shed heat on the head = curly hair. Then he moved east across asia and south into India, ceylon, micronesia, and he had to have Melanin or fry where he stood. The people of India wondered about the stupid "Mad dogs of Englishmen - out in the noonday sun" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2YvYiWtovM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2YvYiWtovM) So we all have the same genes, more or less, and again we are all as smart as each other more or less, with local needs overlaid, where vital survival needs replace the need to parse Greek literature - as the Lion eats the brilliant British Greek scholar, and turn donates his pelt to the Swahili warrior...</comment>


Show HN: 1-click autocomplete server - <AUTHOR> http://endpoints.io/autocomplete

<comment><USER2> Looks nicely done and simple to use :) But I wonder why I wouldn't build this myself? It's not particularly hard and using a third-party service adds an extra dependency. Perhaps I'm missing something and the home page needs a better use case.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback.

not all developers want to deal with managing servers, dependencies, the initial sysadmin, and deployment.

the idea is to put a HTTP layer over these heterogenous environments so that getting any functionality is as simple as hitting a url.

and for developers, its the power of heroku with the simplicity of a pastebin.

<comment><USER2> So this is targeted at some app that ONLY needs autocomplete? Obviously if you have an app with any kind of backend, you're already doing all the other stuff. I think it's cool, just not sure I see the use case.

<comment><AUTHOR>
       http://endpoints.io/autocomplete

no, this code snipppet showed how to make an autocomplete server in 10 lines, and deploy it ready for use in under 1 click without the sysadmin hassles.

thanks we're looking for more examples & would love suggestions. but you can replace the ^ code with anything a nodejs app can do in the same editor. you get a full fledged linux environment running a nodejs server pulling the right dependencies based on 'your' code. more stacks coming soon.</comment></comment></comment></comment>