Amazon follows Google and Apple and bans system-wide ad blockers on app store - <AUTHOR> https://adguard.com/en/blog/goodbye-amazon/ <comment><USER3> There seems to be a lot of misinformation about Apple's stance in this thread.

Apple explicitly allows and provides APIs to develop content blockers.

Apple does not allow content blocking through custom VPN implementations, seemingly because these a) introduce a performance impact, b) may be confusing for users as it's abusing the point of VPNs, and c) may allow more easy abuse, as VPNs can do a lot more than just block content. This is what the article linked as evidence for Apple's policy covers, and the statement provided by Apple, while not especially clear, does match up with this.

I think the title should be reverted to remove Apple, as they do allow ad blockers on the store (I personally use 1BlockerX [https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/1blocker-x/id1365531024?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/1blocker-x/id1365531024?mt=8) )

<comment><USER4> The linked app is a Safari-only adblocker which doesn't cover apps, so I feel the title is pretty accurate. There have been full system ad-blocking solutions developed for iOS and apple refuses to host them, it's a statement of fact.

`a` is permitted for other apps; `b` is, as far as I know, not a criteria anything else gets judged on; and `c` is the point of having a curated store, because any app "may allow [...] abuse".

<comment><USER5> It's not strictly "Safari only*. It works with any embedded web view that uses the SFSafariViewController.

For instance, ad blocking also works with Feedly - my RSS reader.

<comment><USER6> That's a rather uncommon exception. Very few apps load ads in a web view. Mainly because, imo, the ad platforms want a _lot_ more user data than they'd get that way. And fraud would be a bit harder to detect.

<comment><USER7> And hey fuck users, the ad platforms are the real good guys in all this right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am moving towards the much more radical solution of blocking advertising supported sites entirely.

I am not against advertising in general. It doesn't bug me that there are ads for car dealerships on TV, but the flood of personal injury lawyer ads damages the perceived legitimacy of the government and social system. (As well as the many other ads that are not aimed at getting people to spend their own money but instead to get benefits such as the "Medicare Advantage" scam.)

Web advertising and other distractions (pop ins, "will you let this site make notifications?", Taboolah, Outbrain, "This web site uses cookies...", 20 email messages a day about IBM Cloud outages that didn't affect me, "GDPR is here and our policy has changed...") are immediately harmful in terms of cognitive load (lowers effective IQ,) stress, mistakes, missed appointments, opportunities, bills not paid on time because you had to delete 200 spam messages and accidentally deleted something important. That and the phone that never stops ringing with somebody who wants to lower my interest rates...

I think long term you are training your brain to not accept the cues that "something is important". After 20 or 30 years of that who knows what that will do you? (Whenever I show my wife something from a porno site she can't see the content in the midst of all the lurid and animated advertising.)

It is like Milo Yiannopoulos; it looks like communication but it is better to think about it as noise, static, or nerve gas.

<comment><USER9> I blacklist any site that is anti-adblocker. You should grab an old computer and install pi-hole on it and you will be able to blacklist sites and just stop the ads from getting into your home. [https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi- hole.net/)

<comment><USER10> This is a great solution for hacker news types (I run pihole at my home - <USER2> it!) but it's not a feasible solution for most people.

We need a hard brake on adtech and a restructuring of business models, not a band-aid that only 5% of the population bothers to apply.

<comment><USER11> You mean like the GDPR?

<comment><USER10> The GDPR is a huge step forward and it would be wonderful to see something similar happen in the States.

<comment><USER8> GDPR is a disaster. Already I am getting overwhelmed by requests from people who don't want people to know that they are running a business at such and such an address and I can only assume they are running a criminal business.

There are two ways that "privacy" can be violated: (1) somebody exploits your data, or (2) somebody violates your space. Something like GDPR addresses (1) and might put an end to those shoes from Zappos that keep following you around, but it does not stop the disincentives that destroyed the world wide web.

<comment><USER8> (sorry for out of sequence reply but I could not reply directly to the message in question)

I run a business directory site, or at least used to until this morning. If I was like many people I would blame GDPR, but really I figured I rather spend the money I was spending on AWS on something else.

<comment><USER12> I'm still not getting this... did people get in touch and say "I don't want people to know I'm running a business at this address"? Or did they say "Please remove me from your business directory which you added me to without asking"?... and how does your mind jump to "must be criminals" \- are there intermediate steps in your logic or is it just: doesn't want me to have their business address on my database = criminals?

<comment><USER8> My directory was generated from public information (the Legal Entity Identifier)

The EU has been making moves towards financial transparency largely driven by the UK getting on the open data bandwagon. (Ten years ago they were much worse than the US in terms of seeing government data as a revenue source, now they are far ahead of other countries.)

This is endangered by Brexit and GDPR.

One part of the global governance crisis is that legislators have been captured by a "one dollar one vote" situation and in turn cannot maintain tax rates that produce sufficient government revenues. Thus the bureaucratic sectors have focused on keeping the lights on by trying to get people to pay what they owe. Given massive tax evasion by the rich that has to be a priority so general transparency around cross-border financial transactions has to increase.

Perhaps some people who want to be "forgotten" are not criminals, but when you look for specific cases of people who are making these requests they are frequently white collar criminals who are hoping they can sweet talk somebody again into another chance to lie, cheat and steal to pay for gambling or cocaine or whatever.

<comment><USER13> _Perhaps some people who want to be "forgotten" are not criminals, but when you look for specific cases of people who are making these requests they are frequently white collar criminals who are hoping they can sweet talk somebody again into another chance to lie, cheat and steal to pay for gambling or cocaine or whatever._

This seems like a slightly modified version of the old, "if you have nothing to hide..." saw and I don't like it.

<comment><USER8> I will put it this way.

I have an aunt who has a nursing degree, burned down a barn with horses in it and attempted to kill two people (her mother and her sister) by injecting them with insulin. At some point in between all of that she drove a school bus and for some reason decided to slash herself up with razor and claim that she was assaulted.

We heard that she'd gotten a job as a nurse and we we wonder how that happened. My father-in-law was in the hospital (not where she worked) and she changed his IV bag when it ran out and started beeping.

A week later we read in the paper that she was raiding the medicine cabinet at the nursing home she worked at and found out she was also stealing ADHD medication from her grandson.

Turned out she failed to tick the box that asked if she'd ever committed a felony and the employer was too busy to run a background check on her SSN.

Dangerous people are out there.

That kind of behavior is a direct threat to life but I think tax evasion, corruption, rent-seeking, a lack of responsiveness to problems such as global warming, homelessness, and affordable housing and similar behaviors threaten our civilization and one thing we know is that when a civilization goes down the people left behind turn their back on everything that civilization stand for. (Ex. look what happened when the Christians took over Rome)

The main thing our civilization stands for is individualism and if you like the idea of being able to decide anything at all for yourself (or people 50-100 years) you should have been helping turn the ship around 20 years ago and it might be too late now. (Eg. Listening to people like Frederick Hayek is the real "road to serfdom")

An Iranian physicist living in the UK threatened to sue me under the UK libel laws because he thought I brought attention to him that might lead Iranian grad students to come around looking for job. Well, I was chewed up and spit out by that system and I was not going to be intimidated by that -- if you are sitting pretty on a tenured job on the back of young people in an unfair situation you deserve to hear the voices and see the faces of people who are harmed by your privilege. It is not such a big thing.

Somehow your domestic intelligence service, foreign intelligence services, organized criminals, rip-off artists and other people are going to steal your information and the more that information is pushed underground the more impunity that they are going to operate under.

(To paraphrase Heinlein: a transparent society is a going concern)

<comment><USER14> This is one of the principal reasons the EFF opposes the Right to be Forgotten. It's more often used for censorship or crimes than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, my next smartphone will be iPhone, even if I prefer open source. AdBlockers are just too important. Not only they protect your privacy, but they also stop some malware programs that use ads for spreading. And don't Google & Amazon already make 30% from app sales?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hurry not, Apple did the very same thing last year: [https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/15/apple-reportedly-shifts- app-s...](https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/15/apple-reportedly-shifts-app-store- policy-to-stop-adblockers-outside-of-safari/)

<comment><USER16> That's not about adblocking but about using vpns for a purpose that is not a virtual private network. The general adblock system works in Safari as well as other apps that use web views though.

<comment><USER17> > as well as other apps that use web views though

Actually, they only work in the specific case of SFSafariViewController. This isn't available for any old webview to implement.

<comment><USER16> I was under the impression that Firefox Focus blocked ads in some other apps as well but that doesn't appear to be the case indeed, at least not in Chrome.

<comment><USER17> Firefox Focus ships with a content blocker extension, I think, so it can block ads in Safari and third-party apps using SFSafariViewController. Chrome uses a webview, so the content blocker won't work there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In my home network, I run [https://pi-hole.net](https://pi-hole.net) on a Raspberry Pi that is plugged into a USB port in the wall where it can't be seen. Almost all generic ads are blocked and those that do get through can easily be blacklisted. No need for any help from Apple/Google/Amazon. I wish I could somehow make it portable.

<comment><USER19> Don't worry, the marketers will get to you soon enough.

Google has already wedged themselves in as the "gold standard" dns provider. My gut says eventually Apple/Google/Amazon will start forcing blessed devices to use their own name services. For the good of the user, of course. Ahem.

<comment><USER20> That's okay if you run your own router. Point your device to that as default gateway, then the router can catch any DNS connections and do pi-hole style lookup mapping.

Pfsense is one good example.

<comment><USER19> That's a hard game to win in the end. Odds are the new and improved name services you're required to use won't really look much like DNS today.

Initially they'll be implemented as DNS over HTTPS, with devices being shipped preconfigured to favor those HTTPS endpoints over name servers provided by the local network. From there the traditional DNS bits will eventually be removed in favor of whatever proprietary mechanisms defined by Google/Amazon/Apple.

The only way to use Google/Amazon/Apple services will be by bootstrapping from hardcoded list of bootstrap ips in their product, secured by a similarly hardcoded CA certificate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > They need to realize that it is your device, your personal data, and it is > you who should be in control.

The idea is sound but it doesn't apply to Amazon, or Google's stores. They're under no obligation to host any app in particular and it should be expected that apps that bite the hand that feeds them would be quickly removed.

<comment><USER22> If people don't like it, they are free to direct their governments to enact and enforce anti-trust laws that address these platforms.

<comment><USER23> Laws don't protect consumers or enforce moral obligation and you know it. They serve as a facade to the population to keep society from disintegrating.

Direct boycotting of companies forces change very quickly.

<comment><USER22> I don't know it. Laws get written and enforced for lots of reasons, enforcing morality and protecting the population are among them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> IMO there's a moral problem with ad blocking, which is that it's basically stealing.

Like it or not, many popular websites and services online gain income from advertising. By using them while blocking their ads you're basically getting something for nothing by gaming the system. It's probably against their ToS (but who reads that right?). It probably says: We serve ads. If you don't like that don't use this site.

One might say that ads are distracting, annoying, resource heavy, and sometimes downright malicious. I think so too. However that is essentially the "price" of ads, and this price is known in advance. Blocking ads for these reasons while continuing to use the sites is not unlike eating at a restaurant and leaving without paying because you think their prices are exorbitant: It might seem morally justified but it's theft because the prices were known in advance.

I think one of the main reason people don't dine-and-run (yet install adblockers) is that it's hard to do a moral wrong so close to the source, e.g seeing the waiters, being there in person, risking an unpleasantness drama, etc. (This is well known psychological phenomenon which name I can't recall.) In contract installing an adblocker is fast and feels totally unrelated to the 2nd party. It makes it easy to feel like you're fighting the bad guys (ads and the terrible ad-tech) and forget whose revenue you are withholding for your own benefit.

Personally I resisted installing adblockers for a long time though eventually I caved in (ad-tech got really bad). I honestly don't know what the solution is.

<comment><USER25> I don't agree. If someone got a magazine, and before reading it they cut out all the ads are they committing theft? If I mute my radio while ads play, am I a thief? I'd bet that most reasonable people would say no. The content providers serve the ads, how end users interact with them is up to said users.

Ad blocking, in my view, is analogous to muting your radio. The content provider delivered the ads, how the user interacts with them is up to each individual.

<comment><USER26> > _If someone got a magazine, and before reading it they cut out all the ads > are they committing theft?_

While cutting the ads you'll get such a good look at them, ads companies will be thrilled and beg you to do it :-)

> _If I mute my radio while ads play, am I a thief?_

The behavior of people watching TV or listening to radio is well studied. Here's some facts:

1\. even if you change the station, you'll still see or hear some ads, especially if you want to get back to what you were watching, as people keep changing back and forth — and those ads are for brands mostly, therefore it's enough for you to see Coke's logo for you to pick it in a store as the "safe" choice

2\. many TV and radio stations synchronize their ads breaks

So are you committing theft when skipping commercials? If you use automation for it, the jury is actually still out and there have been several lawsuits already.

Also skipping ads might be legal still, but there are always legal loopholes. For example circumventing DRM is not legal and it's only a matter of time before media networks wise up.

And note there have been other doomsday scenarios in the past. For example the rise of VHS was a similar event, allowing people to record shows and skip ads. But even so, ads kept being efficient and publishers and media networks survived. However this time the automation has reached a level unprecedented in history.

What do you think will happen if companies start going out of business due to ad blockers? They'll start lobbying of course and lobbying works.

<comment><USER25> For magazines you could have a friend or a robot cut out the ads, for radio you could switch to a CD while the ads run. Basically, I'm trying to get at the more fundamental question: do users have an obligation to consume the ads that are served to them, in the manner that the content provider dictates? And if so, how should this be enforced?

<comment><USER27> >Do users have an obligation to consume the ads that are served to them

Yes, if it's part of the content and they want more of that content. But they have no obligation to want that content.

> in the manner that the content provider dictates

They don't dictate how you consume ads, they try to predict it and adjust for it, but they don't dictate your actions

>And if so, how should this be enforced?

Legally it shouldn't be. The advertiser can do whatever they want to their content to get you to consume ads, but they shouldn't be able to do anything past the boundary of their content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't know anything about AdGuard in particular, but the general category of "Adblocker that is a really a VPN that really just loads a DNS server to block ads" is really problematic as:

\- cause lots of weird networking issues (impacting perceived stability)

\- are often "Free" b/c they are swapping in their own ads and malware [1]

\- are just in general a poor way of loading a hosts/dns file that in many cases they don't even own (they're just pointing to a freely available one)

1 - [https://www.cloudwards.net/worst-free- vpn/](https://www.cloudwards.net/worst-free-vpn/)

<comment><USER6> I used adguard and still do without any issues. Maybe there are weird issues, but they are vastly overwhelmed by the immense data and processing savings from no data siphoning happening.

Adguard was/is a paid app that didn't substitute any ads nor collect data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I am running pi-hole at home and push out that pihole DNS to my VPN clients and my phone is always connected to my VPN. I never trusted any of these phone platforms to do anything in my best interest anyway.

Related, I cannot wait for the Librem 5

</comment><comment><USER30> Last time I looked at a "system-wide" adblocker, it was just a vpn service with proxied your traffic (not just DNS) through a who-knows-what server. That seemed really sketchy to me, and I doubt most users knew the implications of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may have looked on a bad one.

System-wide blockers on both iOS and Android do use the VPN API, but the idea is to intercept your outgoing traffic on the TUN interface, emulate the TCP/IP stack, and filter it locally, right on your device.

<comment><USER30> How do you know which one the app is doing? From my perspective the vpn was "on"

<comment><USER31> Not perfect, but you could connect to wifi, and look at the connections the phone makes.

Of course, it could change its behavior if it detects a cellular connection...

<comment><USER17> A better way would be to download the app and reverse engineer the binary.

<comment><USER30> And do that every single time there's an update?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Bans like this seems to increase the opportunity/value for "alternate" app stores outside the recommended vendor, offering things that the vendor wont.

EDIT: Point is that many apps receive a ban because they conflict with the interest of the phone vendor, but they can still be of great use to users.

<comment><USER11> Why would I want to put my apps in a store that is also going to aid users in bypassing my means of revenue?

<comment><USER33> Then you should sell your app not user-data.

<comment><USER11> I wish I lived in a world where that was the more feasible route. Sadly as it is, ad-supported is much more effective than the traditional model of paying for software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why should Amazon care? Because Amazon is a large advertiser?

<comment><AUTHOR> At least because of this:

* [https://developer.amazon.com/mobile-ads](https://developer.amazon.com/mobile-ads)

* [https://aws.amazon.com/mobileanalytics/](https://aws.amazon.com/mobileanalytics/)

Not as large as Facebook or Google (at the moment ~5% of top Android apps connect to their servers). Apparently, they are going to grow.

<comment><USER35> Yes, that's exactly it. FireOS is a fork of Android with all Google's stuff pulled out, and Amazon wants their piece of the mobile advertising pie as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I couldn't think of a better advertisement for AdGuard.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think ads are just fact of life nowadays and not necessarily a bad thing. Ads shouldn't be annoying nor should they be creepy. Like for example, if you google tips to lose weight, you shouldn't be bombarded by pictures of half naked dudes with six pack abs. Nor should you be seeing things you buy frequently due to the fact that you used an in-store membership card. I wish Google, Facebook and Apple would provide a way to say what kind of ads they'd like to see. Like I have no problem in seeing ads related to cool kickstarter projects, music equipment, tech devices, software development related tools, etc etc.

I mean sometimes that is what I only see and i am like happy with the fact that I am forced to see ads. And then other times I am starting to see things that I really don't care about simply because I had a whim to go down some rabbit hole on Google.

I think some developers use ads very responsibly and I think that overall denying those developers the right to generate money off your usage prevents them from growing their business and creating better products. I tend to think of flappy bird when I think of great ad placement. The ads don't get in the way of the game. They don't pop up while you are in mid game to try and trick you into clicking. They only appear after you died and they aren't full screen and annoying with a tiny little x you might miss.

I mean that is the kind of ads that I can live with and I think everybody else should have to live with too. Hell I even might give them a click every now and then despite the fact that I am not interested in buying the advertised product.

I just think of it like throwing some change in the hat of a busking street artist. It's the least I could do to encourage them to continue pursuing their art.

</comment><comment><USER38> The only way to consume content the way _you_ want to on locked-down devices is to basically MITM your traffic and run it through something like Proxomitron[1] or Proximodo[2].

I continue to find it ironic that the very same technology, often detested in discussions here, and present in the middleboxes that companies use to block/filter/inspect the traffic between their networks and the Internet, can also be used under your control to enhance your computing experience. I believe that everyone should have complete ability to modify the traffic that flows to/from the devices they own, and this is something which those who strongly support making connections "more secure" and harder to MITM often fail to consider.

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

[2] [https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo](https://github.com/amate/Proxydomo) (Japanese)

</comment><comment><USER39> I use a VPN service that happens to include an ad blocking feature. I wonder if that will be blocked too? It's PIA, which is very popular.

Of course the feature goes unused; I simply refuse to install an application that includes advertising code. Instead, if available, I pay for the ad-free version of the app. Bonus points if that's the only option. The play store helpfully points out most advertising built into apps, so this is pretty easy to do. Combined with Firefox for Android which lets me run uBlock Origin, I have a completely ad-free mobile experience.

</comment><comment><USER40> Don't system wide ad blockers rely on using a VPN to block ad traffic? Wouldn't that mean that you could just install the OpenVPN app and use a special ad-blocking proxy?

<comment><USER41> If you're going down this route, I strongly suggest PiHole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> System-wide Adblocker at the Apple App Store that doesn't exist according to the article:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id69121579?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adblock/id69121579?mt=8)

Creates a fake VPN that does the filtering

</comment><comment><USER43> At home, I just block ads and the DNS level. Run dnsmasq, send all known ad serving domains to 0.0.0.0, and have DHCP point clients' DNS to your dnsmasq server. Done! Site-wide ad blocking that works on all clients and platforms, without a VPN and without permission from any vendor.

<comment><USER44> The problem on iOS and other mobile devices is that, when not using WiFi, you don't have any place to put such a block.

I find iOS content blockers work decently but it is still possible to have an overwhelmingly better experience on the desktop due to the multiple crap- blocking mechanisms available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How hard is it really to run your own VPN from home, connect to it from iOS and have your home VPN block ads?

[https://github.com/BobNisco/adblocking- vpn](https://github.com/BobNisco/adblocking-vpn)

Why trust a third party that can monitor your traffic?

<comment><USER45> downloading the global ad blockers from the web (instead of the app store) is a more practical option

<comment><USER5> As long as you don't care about your privacy. Everything going through a third party VPN is yet another app that has access to your data.

With the built in web and web view ad blocking framework on iOS, the ad blocking app doesn't see your browsing history. It installs a JSON file that Safari uses to know what content to block.

It's not a complete system wide solution but it does protect your privacy.

<comment><USER46> Yes, I'm positive that the security/privacy risk is the reason why Apple banned VPN based ad blockers. There's no way for Apple to verify that VPN apps aren't siphoning off data, making the whole thing a gamble and huge PR disaster waiting to happen ("Apple found to have allowed internet siphoning apps on store for years"). Loss of blocking ads in apps is a casualty, not a goal.

If it didn't mean a revolt from countless app devs I'm sure they'd be perfectly happy to implement something similar to Safari's content blocker system for the entire OS.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. What does Apple have to gain from not blocking advertising? It makes no money from adverting. Blocking advertising not only hurts it's major competitor but would also force apps to monetize via actually getting people to pay for apps. They would get a cut from the revenue. Apple makes no money from free advertising supported apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> For those on Android, here's a great one that's open source. Get it on F-Droid, XDA, or build from source: [https://github.com/julian- klode/dns66](https://github.com/julian-klode/dns66)

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't mind advertising...

I just object to how advertisers screw things up. Moving text while I'm reading. Hijacking the page and navigating away. Auto-playing loud videos.

(These problems are really symptoms of poor design in JavaScript)

All I want is a good ad blocker for my mobile browser!

<comment><USER49> Firefox for Android supports full extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin or even uMatrix.

<comment><USER48> Yeah, but then I'd have to use Firefox for all my browsing.

Tabbed browsing on Firefox is abysmal. I also like going back into my browser history.

It's like Firefox was only designed for viewing porn.

<comment><USER49> >I also like going back into my browser history.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Firefox has browsing history, if that's what you mean.

There is a different product Firefox Focus which erases your history when the browser closes, maybe you're thinking of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm a big fan of AdAway on F-Droid, which blocks using the hosts file.

It does require root, however.

</comment><comment><USER51> How can an app block ads system wide? I would have thought that apps are sandboxed. Just less strictly then websites.

Can an app intercept the network communication at will? Can an app call any operation system function?

</comment><comment><USER52> I use AdGuard and it is great. It is not only ads that I happily block, but all the analytic, it is unbelievable all the requests that are made by apps, even when not using them.

</comment><comment><USER53> That's an unpopular opinion but I am ok with that.

I would rather pay for the apps I use (with money, not eyeball time) than continue this course to the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER54> Maybe they should focus on the quality of ads, because currently they are complete garbage. And privacy invading.

<comment><USER55> > Maybe they should focus on the quality of ads, because currently they are > complete garbage. And privacy invading.

I prefer low quality ads because I can be more confident that they won't effectively manipulate me. I like to avoid the influence of pure product- propaganda on my decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> "It's not antitrust if we all do it right?"

</comment><comment><USER11> I mean, you could just not use apps that rely on ads for revenue.

I personally like getting paid for my work, and being able to buy food and pay rent.

<comment><USER57> There are many other other ways you can do that, so I simply cannot find a reason to care for your "plight". I hope the ad industry burns in flames and everyone who works in it finds other, better things to build then garbage no one is willing to pay for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I use ad blockers since forever, howver I just find it extremely mean and unethical that a company like Adguard makes profit by depraving others from their lawful profits by blocking ads. Ad blocking by its nature should not be commercialized.

<comment><USER59> Brave (browser) is even worse.

Except they get bonus points for inventing their own coin which only exists to make the creator money, along with replacing ads with their ads.</comment></comment>


Cloudflare and FastMail: Your info is safe - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fastmail.com/2017/02/24/cloudflare-no-breach/ <comment><USER2> Love fastmail -- I have six domains. I can send/receive from whatever address I want.

<comment><USER3> I should just bite the price bullet and move to them. I've moved everything else off Google (even search), it's about time I move my email too.

<comment><USER4> As someone who loves Inbox and Gmail, what does Fastmail do that Gmail doesn't? It needs to do a lot to make it worth the high price of $36 per year.

<comment><USER5> I have been a happy customer for some years, after using Google Apps for domains (paid) for more than half a decade.

\+ You pay for the service, they are not mining your data.

\+ When you have an issue, it is easy to talk to real humans. I had some feature requests, my case was transferred to one of their tech-people in no time. One of my feature requests was rolled out on their beta version in a couple of days.

\+ They have a standards-conforming IMAP. So, it works much better with isync/mu4e/mutt/etc.

\+ Fastmail is fast.

\+ They are a big contributor to the open source Cyrus project. So a lot of their development ends up being available for everyone.

\+ They support push notifications in Mail.app in iOS. (Not IMAP IDLE, real push notifications.)

\+ subdomain addressing besides plus addresses. E.g. if my e-mail address is email@example.com_ I can give out firstname.lastname@example.com_ without first creating a virtual host _quux.foobar.xyz_. It makes it easy to create custom addresses that are a bit less obvious than plus addressing.

\- The spam filter is not as good as Google's, even after training it for you personally. I regularly (usually once or twice a week) get spam or malware mails in my inbox.

\- The mobile app is acceptable, but not as the Google Mail app. It's basically their webmail in a web frame.

<comment><USER6> One BIG MINUS is internationalization (couldn't care less about localization though), they still haven't completely fixed full text search for Cyrillic mail. Some weird behavior like not matching partial words, or otherwise omitting some legit search results, makes things difficult to find sometimes.

That said, even with that, it's much better than everything else on the overall UX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now _that_ is how a company pro-actively communicates to their userbase and the public at large! Honest information but inspiring confidence in their platform as well as their support. Well done fastmail! Kudos!!

<comment><USER8> Just to be fair, this is an instance of pro-actively communicating good(ish) news. Not everyone does this, so of course it's good to encourage more of it, but it's _much_ easier than pro-actively communicating bad news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would one of the apparently many happy FM subscribers share details of what kind of security they provide?

(It bears repeating: No email can be very secure.)

<comment><USER10> [https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html)

\- happy FM subscriber for 3 years

<comment><USER11> Also I didn't see it directly mentioned on that page, they're not subject to US law enforcement requests (unless they go through a Mutual Assistance treaty request) and there's nothing like an NSL in Australia: [https://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers- are-i...](https://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in-the- us-what-this-means-for-you/)

<comment><USER12> But see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes)

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but probably still better than the US or UK: [https://protonmail.com/blog/investigatory-powers-bill- email-...](https://protonmail.com/blog/investigatory-powers-bill-email- privacy/)

Their EU servers are in the Netherlands. Although I guess it's hard to know if any EU traffic goes to the US servers.

Australia does have similar laws but it seems they don't apply in this case: [https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/04/09/fastmail-is-not- require...](https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/04/09/fastmail-is-not-required-to- implement-the-australian-metadata-retention-laws/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm wondering if Fastmail provides better deliverability of incoming emails (have issues with lost emails in free Gmail account)?

Also if something goes wrong is there a mitigation plan in place to recover data and restore access of the user?

That's another major concern - to lose access to the account and not be able to recover it - because Gmail has no support.

<comment><USER14> I use mailgun to send automated alerts from our home network backup processes and security cameras.

When sending to a Gmail account, there is sometimes up to a 2 hour delay before the mail arrives, though usually it's within a few minutes.

Mail sent to a Fastmail account always arrives almost immediately.

MG does some kind of prioritizing based on the domain when using their free account. It's obviously an anti-spam measure. They might also have some kind of "warm-up" feature where if you send enough email with a valid FROM and TO address then they queue it faster, IDK. Not sure if they do the same thing with their paid plans.

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that they rate limit the number of emails sent to a domain per IP address, per hour. Email service providers assume that if you send "too many" emails to their domain per hour, it's "spam".

The same thing happens with my dedicated IPs (sending ~500k/mo). Yahoo is frequently rate limited. Gmail is less common, though we have years of good reputation on those IPs.

<comment><USER16> 500k/mo ?! Do you mind me asking if this is for a company or personal use?

Although I don't have any idea why even a few person compnay would have to send those many emails, your use of 'my' makes me wonder.

<comment><USER15> Our product is a SaaS for pet service businesses (grooming, dog daycare/boarding, training). The app has 34 distinct automated email types that are sent at various points. It's a _lot_ of email :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it better to use two different domains for API and static content then, in order for cookies to be only sent to the API domain/subdomain? That way, if there are requests to the static content that's served by a CDN (ie: Cloudflare), it won't contain sensitive cookie information?

<comment><USER18> This is good practice anyway because it avoids the overhead of sending cookies for static content when they're not needed.

<comment><USER19> In HTTP2 the opposite is true.

Single domain will help you with performance

<comment><USER20> Actually with http2 you can multiplex requests for multiple domains within a single connection. As long as the DNS for the domains is the same IP, and you have a single certificate covering both domains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What amazes me in Fastmail is how fast their web UI both on desktop and mobile. Especially compared to Gmail but it's also more responsive than Slack or Trello.

<comment><USER22> It does look crazy fast. I'd love to try it, but not worth the cost for personal use.

<comment><USER23> As someone who switched away from all Google products, including Gmail, I can definitely say it's worth the cost to me. In fact, I'd pay more than the current rate, now that I've had a chance to really use the service. It is fluid and fast in every browser I've thrown at it, including the work-required IE10.

In my opinion, the only thing they could do better is to provide an API for their file storage module, and I believe that is in the works.

You get what you pay for, and while Gmail is a good web client it is far from the best. Fastmail beats it hands down as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER22> I've already (mostly) moved away from google, at least for email. This isn't Google vs. Fastmail to me, this is Fastmail vs. Zoho. (Which I already have a free account with for my domain)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I currently use G Suite, and pay $5 per user per month. FastMail honestly looks like a better client than Gmail, but G Suite provides Google Calendar, Drive, and Docs, which all integrate together beautifully. Hard to justify switching to FastMail for the same cost and losing Drive, Docs, and Calendar.

<comment><AUTHOR> They do have a calendar, which is something lacking from ProtonMail (although I believe they are working on this). ProtonMail has a free plan and if you only need a single custom domain then it's cheaper than FastMail. FastMail only have a free trial but the standard plan covers multiple domains (you have to pay more for extra domains on ProtonMail).

Edit (numbers):

FastMail = $50/yr ([https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/](https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/))

Up to 100 domains ([https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html))

They also do DNS and static website hosting (but not with HTTPS)

ProtonMail = $48/yr ([https://protonmail.com/pricing](https://protonmail.com/pricing))

1 domain, extra domains: $18/yr per domain

<comment><USER24> ProtonMail seems to be focusing on high security and encryption as their value prop. My interest and needs are more in the web interface UX, speed, workflows, customization, Exchange (iPhone push) support.

<comment><AUTHOR> FWIW FastMail also comes with file storage and notes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thanks FastMail folks. I still use Gmail primarily (multiple labels per message feature), but I pay for an account so that you're still around when I need you to be.

<comment><USER26> Hm, what's preventing the switch?

<comment><USER14> I'm not OP, but the answer to your question is in his post: the main thing I miss about Gmail is the tagged labels, which make a lot more sense than folders and are quite an improvement in usability.

Other than that, I'm much happier with FastMail.

<comment><USER27> You'll be happy to hear that the JMAP work we're doing will make labels a lot easier to do on the FastMail interface

(on the downside, we can't yet account quota cheaply for that, so a message with multiple labels will count multiple times towards your quota usage at first)

<comment><USER28> That sounds intriguing! Is there a write-up about what you are going to do with labels?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I had high hopes for fastmail and it's an awesome product, just not quite ready for me yet.

I'm not yet at a point where I need to lug my reading glasses everywhere - provided I can adjust font sizes on my phone.

The fastmail app is just a wrapper over the mobile site and you can't adjust the font size. The font as it is is tiny and unusable for me.

I contacted support and while they were curteous and prompt, they basically said too bad and refused to give me a refund, even though I had purchased the year subscription just a few days before.

Still have good things to say about them, just wish the app were more accessible.

<comment><USER30> Have you tried a "real" email app (i.e., one that's not just a wrapper)? I've used K9 (Android) + FastMail for many years and it's been great. K9 has tons of features, including letting you choose font size (with some granularity - e.g. you can have different sizes for from/subject/body, folder/message view, etc.).

<comment><USER29> Good tip I'll try k9 out, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fuck. I use cloud flare for MX records to ensure I don't completely rely on FastMail for everything.

<comment><USER27> Pretty sure they're not affected by this thing - it was just http proxy rewriting logic.

(having said that - you may as well rely on us for MX records if all the delivery is coming to us - our DNS infrastructure is more widely distributed than basically anything else for exactly that reason)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> FastMail scores pretty well on this comparison of email providers based on privacy:

[https://thatoneprivacysite.net/simple-email-comparison- chart...](https://thatoneprivacysite.net/simple-email-comparison-chart/)

<comment><USER33> The scoring does not make sense:

FastMail has servers in the US and is domiciled in Australia, a Five Eyes country:

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

Mass surveillance and powerful security services do not go together with privacy IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does seem a little inconsistent.

[https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-chart- formulas/](https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-chart-formulas/)

"Our headquarters are located in Melbourne, Australia with servers at New York Internet and QuadraNet in the USA, and at Switch Datacenters in the Netherlands."

[https://www.fastmail.com/about/company.html](https://www.fastmail.com/about/company.html)

Maybe this?

"We do not participate in, or co-operate with, any kind of blanket surveillance or monitoring. (We also point out that Australia does not have any equivalent to the US National Security Letter, so we cannot be forced to do something without being allowed to disclose it.)

...

Unless prohibited by law, we will disclose to the account holder when we receive a warrant for their account."

[https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html](https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have been exploring other email services. I was checking out protonmail recently as fast isn't my top priority. Anyone like protonmail? I'll have to give fastmail a spin soon.

</comment><comment><USER35> Thank you FM. A happy subscriber

</comment><comment><USER36> Moved to Fastmail from Google last month, love it!

</comment><comment><USER37> For when a FastMail guy shows up here: Thanks for the note on this. And _hugs_ , because I love you.

\- Happy customer since November.

<comment><USER38> Group hug! FastMail is amazing.

<comment><USER39> Agreed! Paying member for 10 years here :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I ginned up this little tool tonight to help people out instead of grepping.

[https://bleed.cloud/index.html](https://bleed.cloud/index.html)

You can also run the python script on the website anonymously on your computer to dig sites out of your email, which is a good indicator that you have an account with them.</comment>


New price reduction for EKS. 50% yo - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/es4l29/new_price_reduction_for_eks_50_yo/ <comment><USER2> Half way to the free Kubernetes offered by other clouds...</comment>


Ask HN: Share companies you had worst interview experience with - <AUTHOR> One of the worst experiences that happens and I am seeing more of it is either companies going completely unresponsive or cold rejections after asking the candidate to be deeply invested.<p>One such experience was from slack. Huge time consuming coding exercise followed by long silence and unexplained cold(no-reply) rejection. <comment><AUTHOR> another similar experience that was submitted today to HN: [https://medium.com/@evnowandforever/f-you-i-quit-hiring- is-b...](https://medium.com/@evnowandforever/f-you-i-quit-hiring-is-broken- bb8f3a48d324#.g719vyvbv)

</comment><comment><USER2> SpaceX

<comment><AUTHOR> oh ok could you also elaborate on your experience?</comment></comment>


Facial recognition's 'dirty little secret': Millions of online photos scraped - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facial-recognition-s-dirty-little-secret-millions-online-photos-scraped-n981921 <comment><USER2> They make a big deal about IBM using images published under a Creative Commons license without asking for permission, when the whole point of CC is to give permission to anyone, without having to ask. The people who are now surprised that their images are being used for purposes they disagree with should probably have used a different license, but I guess the messaging around CC (which tends to emphasize reuse by artists) makes it difficult.

Using images with a restriction to non-commercial purposes is a bit more of a gray area, depending on how you separate commercial from non-commercial activity. Since they share the data set with researchers at other organizations (presumably including competitors), I'd consider it non- commercial enough, because they don't gain a competitive advantage, but the details might have to be fought out in court.

<comment><USER3> But the CC license requires attribution (and, in some variants, prohibits commerical use). It's not clear to me that IBM followed these requirements-- presumably a trained neural network counts as a derived work, so far as the CC license is concerned.

<comment><USER4> >presumably a trained neural network counts as a derived work

I just spent about 15 minutes trying to confirm that and... I have no idea. I suppose it's not surprising that a software engineer would not be able to suss that out in 15 minutes. Every definition I find tends to focus on on art, visual and auditory creations.

Disregarding a legal interpretation (you know, the thing that actually matters), I can see it either way. Certainly the model is based off of data derived from the characteristics of these images. On the other hand, if I saw e.g. a shade of blue in one of these images that I liked, would I need to provide attribution if I measured it and used it in my own work? I have no idea, I suppose I'm just thinking out loud here. I do understand the taking something to a logical extreme (the color example) is not the end all be all of legal arguments.

<comment><USER5> Isn't the purpose of a ML model to describe actual facts, derived mechanically and not creatively, and thus might not be subject to US copyright in the first place?

<comment><USER6> But you could argue that the weights of the model wouldn't be what they are without the copyrighted work. Since their model does use the work, apart of it was "derived" from that piece.

<comment><USER7> This isn't about the various senses the English word "derived" can have, it's about the specific meaning of the legal term "derivative work." That would start with including major elements of another work and those elements being subject to copyright (e.g. in the US, book titles are not). There's no point in talking about how one could argue that something wouldn't be what it is without something else, that's not the legal basis at all. In no legal sense are the Indiana Jones movies derivative works of the old 1930's serials just because they were sources of inspiration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not usually one to rant, but I'm getting a bit sick of media outlets behaving like they don't have a duty to understand the subjects they are writing about. While in the past it may have only been "techies" who understood these things, at least the general understanding of how privacy rules have developed exists in the populace. All of us read these articles and give the author the "laymans" excuse like a southerner excuses their grandparents' racist vocabulary. I'd like to make the situation very clear:

This article is clickbait, it's attempting to inflame readers by misinforming them and/or feeding common misconceptions. As journalists we should expect more of them. I do. We shouldn't allow ourselves the luxury of accepting "that's just the way journalism is now". It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't need to be.

I beg of readers: know when you are being played to raise agendas based on false premises. The author just wants to stir up the public so they have more to write about later. If by some chance the author believes anything they wrote, then perhaps NBC should consider moving them to the obits.

</comment><comment><USER9> A friend and I built a web crawler that published images to a pool of workers that generated feature embeddings for all faces it found. After indexing all the feature vectors, we had effectively built a search engine for faces powered by images found on the public web.

The results were terrifying and they really affected me in a very negative way. Needless to say, we moved on to other projects. The world is not ready for the harm such technologies can cause.

Our index contained 100+ million faces and the compute costs were obscene.

<comment><USER10> Pretty sure Google, Facebook, and Apple already have this. They limit it to little convenience features like "Auto-tag your friends" or "Here are some friends you may know" because they don't want to scare people, but they have both the data and the models to do large-scale person search over the entire world. If they wanted to they could launch a search engine where you snap a picture with your cell phone and they tell you who it is, what their home & work addresses are, who their friends are, where they've been over the last week, which businesses they like to frequent, and probably roughly how much money they spend.

<comment><USER11> Right, I don't want it matching general public but I'm curious why a subset of this feature isn't commonplace: celebrities. As a user, I want this all the time to identify an actor, a politician, musician, etc.

It would take a random _new_ photo and give you 3 or 4 likely matches.

Tineye only matches already known photos. Google/Bing image search will abstract a given photo and show you more of the same type: eg more white men wearing red shirts, rather than identifying the person and showing only photos of that person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article takes a very long time to raise that the photographs in the collection had Creative Commons licenses.

Perhaps the specific use they're being put to isn't covered by the particular CC licence of each one, but until that is someone's claim I don't see this is quite the issue it's portrayed as.

<comment><USER13> If it's a full on frontal photo, in a number of countries, it is not for the photographer to decide what the license of that image is and any such attribution as CC might very well be invalid.

<comment><USER14> Yes, and when uploading you are required to confirm you have the rights to do so with that photo. If we aren't going to be able to trust these type of self declarations we pretty much can't have websites where users upload photos anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The owner of Kabosu, the Shiba Inu in the famous Doge picture, puts hearts on peoples' faces. [https://kabosu112.exblog.jp/22453542/](https://kabosu112.exblog.jp/22453542/)

These include just strangers on the street - anyone who doesn't consent to public photos. There are thousands of lovingly censored faces in her photos.

If everyone had done this I guess the situation would be different...

<comment><USER16> This is common in Japan. If TV reporters are taking an interview in a street, for example, they hide the faces of random people passing by because they did not consent to being on TV. They really care about privacy unlike people in other countries.

<comment><USER17> See also: Germany and Google Street View.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At a recent event, all of my friends and relatives took lots of photos, then cautioned each other not to use Facebook to post or share any of the photos because of privacy and facial recognition concerns.

All of them did, however, use WhatsApp to share the photos with each other. <facepalm>

<comment><USER19> At the moment, whatsapp is supposed to be end-to-end encrypted. I get the don't trust facebook mantra though, it is valid.

<comment><USER20> Are group chats E2E?

<comment><USER21> According to the current version of the iPhone app, yes, my group chats are E2E encrypted.

I believe the mechanism is to use a generic / per message key to encrypt each individual message, and then use each recipient's public key to encrypt the encryption key before sending that (along with a link to the cipher text) to each end user.

This is also why sending a video the first time takes forever (encrypt, upload, encrypt key, send key, send link), while forwarding it to another person (encrypt key, send key, send link) does not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This brings up a very interesting and important question around differential privacy.

If I scrape millions of photos from Facebook (including yours) then train a differentially private model that can extract features from a new face, is that a privacy violation?

A differentially private model is one in which you cannot identify the inclusion of any single datapoint which means you cannot tell the difference between a model trained on the dataset and the same model trained the same dataset with the addition of your one datapoint.

You might argue it's a privacy violation because the scraping process might involve people looking at your images but if that was fully automated and nobody ever looked at your images - the model can be trained then the data inmediately deleted...

</comment><comment><USER23> The irony of all this being, when I use Facebook marketplace with a specially- created public profile that has no discernible photos I get accused of being a spammer. Maybe Facebook could implement some kind of trustworthy algorithm that says "we believe this account is not a scammer". And I don't have to deal with not being able to fully use online systems that assume a photograph==trust.

<comment><USER24> Even if you upload a photo, FB will block the account if the photo doesn't show your _entire_ face. I set up a Facebook account where, after a holiday in Morocco, my profile photo was me in a turban where my mouth was obscured by part of the turban. I got a message from FB saying that this was not sufficient and I would have to upload another photo where no part of my face was covered.

<comment><USER25> This sounds like bs to me. There is a significant number of users with profile photos that don't contain a face and this is the first time I'm hearing this...

<comment><USER24> Those users probably have performed various other actions that reassured FB they had not signed up to spam (joining groups, adding many friends, etc.). It was the combination of being a new signup with an emptyish profile and having no clearly identifiable face that led to my account being blocked, with a message that specifically said I would not be able to regain access to my account until I uploaded a photo where my face was fully visible.

<comment><USER25> Fair enough

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We are truly in the "revolution" part of the Information Age now. Our social and legal structures are as ill-equipped to handle problems like this as the Georgian-era England was able to handle things like millions of its people becoming factory workers.

I don't know what the future is going to look like, but, man, we're going to be going through some shit to get there.

</comment><comment><USER27> This sort of thing is the main reason why I do not put photos (or any other identifying information) of myself or others on the open web.

<comment><USER28> Not that this really helps.

The moment someone else puts up a picture that you happen to be in (esp. family, friends) and then tags it with your name -- your image and name be scooped and cataloged.

<comment><USER29> >...and then tags it with your name...

Even that's not wholly necessary required. If they can obtain data from your own Facebook app (or an app using the Facebook SDK), it can place you in that area around the time the photo was taken and given it's friends you have connections with on Facebook, it's easy enough to surmise it's you without the necessary confirmation.

Seems very Orwellian, to be sure, but not out of the grasps of the end-goals of data harvesting/profiling.

<comment><USER28> It's the intelligence/LE community's wet dream come true really... and scary on just about every level you ponder ( __* tin-foil-hat sold separately).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You mean that they cut ethical corners to get ahead in our competitive free market economy? Someone stop these mad lads!

</comment><comment><USER16> In Russia developers of face search engines like findface or searchface usually scrape images from largest Russian social network, VK. They usually do it following that motto about asking for forgiveness, and there are no effective legal countermeasures anyway.

I think there should be no problem to scrape other social networks like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter from the countries where there are no legal restrictions and the photos are considered to be a "public data". You can outsource face recognition tasks to such countries.

</comment><comment><USER31> There are lots of other ML models built using training data derived from the public. Voice models, gait recognition models, WiFi mobility models, Bluetooth location models, activity recognition models, emotion models, etc. It's essentially impossible for people to tell if their data was used to train these models. And it's very difficult to know what companies and individuals might do with access to both live data streams and these models. Worth thinking about though.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is stupid. People put their stuff on the Internet and someone used it. It's good, not bad. We all participated in training data at this point. Google crawls us all.

<comment><USER33> And sells us our data back via secret government contracts. Yay!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Someone once mentioned to me that scraping online dating profiles was an excellent source of thousands of faces nicely and cleanly labelled by gender, age, and ethnicity, if those are the class labels you are looking for.

I'd say there are lots of unethical use cases but also a few ethical use cases of such a trained model.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is no surprise to me and I wager that far worse is happening with your data.

</comment><comment><USER36> > The dataset does not link the photos of people's faces to their names, which > means any system trained to use the photos would not be able to identify > named individuals.

But isn't that like the point of a facial recognition algorithm? Recognizing individuals by their faces? Presumably from a reference image that has a name?

Also it seems pretty trivial to reverse lookup the images if they were from a public source and some of those will have names, unless they are significantly downsampled.

<comment><USER37> Not necessarily. One thing that a wide-net dataset can be extremely useful for is improving the neural net models to better recognize people outside the traditional academic dataset a lot of older-generation neural nets were trained on, which is to say: the sorts of people who have the time and need- awareness to put their faces in some university's dataset for training neural nets (which is to say: white guys ;) ).

You can use faces without names attached to improve the engine's modeling for recognizing human faces in general (and more importantly: improve the system's ability to distinguish human and animal faces).

(Your first comment is pretty interesting by itself, incidentally: both NBC News and your comment make an assumption that is not universially true about the technology. Face recognition is a much wider space than "recognize an individual by their face." Clustering of similar faces, emotion analysis, camera targeting, human presence / absence can all be done without name labels).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Not sure what the secret is. Who didn't know this?

</comment><comment><USER39> _> As the algorithms get more advanced — meaning they are better able to identify women and people of color, a task they have historically struggled with — legal experts and civil rights advocates are sounding the alarm on researchers' use of photos of ordinary people._

This is written as if algorithms were sentient beings overcoming the next level of obstacles, rather than just being written by mostly white men who train them on photos of people who mostly look like themselves.</comment>


Sex.com Dirt: Inside Details of What Went Wrong with Sex.com  - <AUTHOR> http://domainnamewire.com/2010/03/29/sex-com-dirt-inside-details-of-what-went-wrong-with-sex-com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This post is about the convoluted ownership of Sex.com but does not begin to tell the underlying "hack" that netted tens-of-millions of dollars:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com></comment>


Homeowners in Foreclosure Find a Rent-Free Approach - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/business/01nopay.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> What these people are doing is exactly equivalent to what tendentious tenants do to avoid eviction. We almost uniformly hold those tenants in contempt; they're perpetrating a fraud. The only difference here is that it's banks holding the loans, not independent landlords.

I see how you could sympathize with a ruthless defaulting homeowner; after all, what else are they going to do? Are we really asking them to vacate _early_ solely to make the bank's job easier? On the other hand: what they're doing is morally indefensible, and any costs to the bank their behavior incurs is largely going to be borne by good-faith mortgageholders and new prospective good-faith home buyers.

Maybe they shouldn't be bragging about this. Here's to hoping it catches up with them sooner than later.

<comment><USER3> A family member of mine is in the same position: they bought a house, and now they can't afford it. I'd love to feel as if the bank should be held accountable, but at the same time, I look at my family members, what he does, how they spend their money, and I can't feel sympathy. They dug their own hole.

And yet, the amount of entitlement coming from them is just insane. They feel as if it's not their fault; they point at everyone except for them. It's the governments fault they aren't getting money. Ignore the fact that they both dropped out of college, bought a house together before marriage, had a child before marriage, and are now on their way toward a second child, while basically unemployed.

I've tried to help. Bought them a computer for school, send them gift certificates so I know the money goes toward the kids. Bought them a washer for their clothes. But when they go out and spend $200 on a tattoo for a birthday gift (not to mention an iPod touch!), I can't help but wonder what they are thinking.

And still, the self-entitlement they reek of is horrible. My wife and I work hard, pay our bills, and still rent. We make more than enough to get a house, but we want to pay off the few outstanding debts we have, and save up money for a nice big down payment before we settle on a house. We look at them, and wonder how they were given a loan, how they could feel like they should get one, when we can't imagine getting one right now.

Maybe the lenders should be held accountable in some regards, but this doesn't excuse the borrowers. The worst part is the kids. With a second a month away, I just can't see how they'll be able to afford everything. I know they are using their credit cards right now, but spending it on stupid crap ($200 for carpeting for the new babies room.. seriously?)

Sorry. Long useless rant. Just had to get it out somewhere.

<comment><USER4> Hard to believe that 10 years ago you would often hear your average middle class white person say "those black people need to get a job!" -- when was the last time you heard that? An atmosphere of entitlements is overtaking the middle class in this country and it doesn't bode well for our future. The housing crisis will resolve itself in a few years-- the entitlement mentality lasts forever -- and destroys civilizations.

<comment><USER2> The entitlement mentality is hardly the only thing holding back the economies of Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "We could pay the mortgage company way more than the house is worth and starve to death,"

This implies that if the house was worth what they were paying that they would still starve to death and really they made a bad choice in buying the house in the first place.

"But the couple also refinanced at the height of the market, taking out cash to buy a truck..."

sigh...

<comment><USER6> For every unwise borrower there is an unwise lender. My sympathies are more with the borrower, since the lender, as the side that supposedly hired people with financial acumen, bears a majority of the responsibility for assessing risk.

<comment><USER7> In this case the problem lies with the political pressure applied by both Bush and Clinton on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to continue giving out more mortgages.

<comment><USER8> A bigger problem is the homeowners mortgage interest deduction. In terms of its stated policy rational, it is a complete joke, but modification let alone elimination remains political suicide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The banks don't want to foreclose, because they do better with "extend and pretend" ... until the day before the foreclosure they can still carry the worthless loan as an asset at 100% of its original value (if I understand this part of the process correctly).

Who is the greater criminal?

Some old lady living in a crappy $125K house in Florida--or bank execs who in concert with corrupt regulators are hiding billions in bad loans and meanwhile paying themselves 100K bonuses or more?

<comment><USER2> If you remove the word "criminal", which doesn't apply, and replace it with "bad actor", I'm going to go with: "they are both bad actors". Squatting in a $125k house you promised to pay for but now refuse to pay for is still bad.

This is the same lazy argument that runs though any discussion of any abuse of any service anywhere. "Sure, I stole 10,000 credit card numbers --- but the credit card companies are evil organizations that prey on low-income people, and they're the ones that are going to end up paying!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"They're all crooks."_

Let me see if I got this right... You borrowed money. Now you choose not to make the monthly payment that you have already agreed to pay. And spend that money on other stuff. And you call them the crooks?

<comment><USER8> Maybe both parties are crooks? This is not a zero sum game...they can both be crooks at the same time.

<comment><USER11> And unfortunately, the real "victims" in this episode are people who act responsibly by paying their mortgages and taxes while receiving very little interest on their savings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Chinese sees the housing crisis from a different point of view: The US cheated China out of billions by selling them bonds backed up by inflated real estate, money saved up by hardworking Chinese. It's a completely different take on the situation.

Someone had to provide the money in the first place. That someone sure as hell wasn't the banks, the banks were intermediaries. Often times that someone was a Chinese or German institution chasing higher interest rates with no clear understanding of what was being sold to them.

Who benefited from the transaction? Whoever sold the home. A lot of foreign money came into the US and stayed in the US.

</comment><comment><USER13> Imagine I decided to move into a foreclosed home and live there rent free until the banks could legally force me out? What is that called? It's stealing. Every month these people live in these houses they are stealing from the banks. Yes, the banks are at fault for creating the opportunity to get robbed but that doesn't justify the actions of these squatters.

Would you say that a rapist is justified in raping someone because they acted in a sexually lewd manner?

The "they had it coming" argument just doesn't hold water.

</comment><comment><USER13> Didn't these people learn in grammar school that two wrongs don't make a right?

<comment><USER8> In economic terms, two wrongs can certainly make a right. In many cases, having these people move out would serve no purpose other than to destroy the houses' values as well as the values of the surrounding homes. People who stay in their homes prevent squatters from moving in and perform some maintenance. Banks often make economically foolish decisions regarding foreclosure for a whole host of reasons.

Plus, after reading articles like <http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/panoramaexcerpts/Ali.html> regarding how mortgage servicers and banks deal with foreclosure, I'm disinclined to believe that they are ever acting in good faith.

<comment><USER2> Wait, you're saying you came by your principles on this issue through a _McSweeny's_ article about a couple who knowingly stated an income 12x their real income to buy a house that they could only hope to afford if the housing market continued to appreciate stratospherically, and who then blamed the _economy_ when their completely untenable loan blew up?

You do realize that it's perfectly reasonable to be disgusted with the mortgage originators, the Wall Street financiers, the CDO managers, the CDO manager's clueless investors, _and_ the feckless homeowners who got into bed with them, right?

<comment><USER8> The article I linked to is not fiction. Do you have reason to believe that the attorney who wrote it was lying?

And yes, I think the homeowners there pretty awful. But the banks didn't determine that they were awful before they acted in bad faith; they acted in bad faith from the get-go, for everyone, whether or not their actions merited such treatment.

And from where I sit, it seems like the banks and servicers are the ones who completely failed to do any due diligence and then blamed the economy when their unsustainable loans proved, well, unsustainable. The average person is functionally innumerate. They are going to make poor decisions regarding quantitative matters, especially quantitative matters couched in ways that are deliberately obfuscated. This is not true of the average bank. I expect better from them.

<comment><USER2> It's not fiction. But it's McSweeney's. It wasn't edited for accuracy or logic or fact-checking or bias; it was edited to make it read well. I like McSweeney's probably almost as much as you do, but would hesitate to cite it in an argument about economics!

Your other two grafs don't actually rebut anything I said. Yes. Banks bad. Very bad! Also: require Thomas to sit on hold to wait to talk to someone in Bangalore about mortgage. Ridiculous fees, too! Bad! Unfortunately: _still not OK to defraud them._ Contracts with bad evil banks? _Still valid._

<comment><USER8> _It wasn't edited for accuracy or logic or fact-checking or bias_

In general, I do not expect main stream publications to be able to edit articles regarding economics. Journalists and editors are astonishingly ignorant of basic economics, to say nothing of statistics or law. There's a reason that economics professor Dean Baker keeps an entire blog devoted to correcting the idiocies and distortions found in traditional reporting (see <http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/> ); it is the same reason that economics professor Brad Delong regularly lambastes major newspapers on his blog by chanting "why, oh why can't we have a better press corps?" (see <http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/better_press_corps/> ). So the fact that this article didn't appear in the Washington Post (where I've read "fact-checked" articles which presumed that inflation does not exist) doesn't really trouble me. It is written by an attorney and officers of the court are generally subject to sanction if they misrepresent cases.

 _I like McSweeney's probably almost as much as you do_

Um, I don't read McSweeny's; I read this article because it was linked from an economics/policy blog I respect.

 _Unfortunately: still not OK to defraud them._

I don't believe the behavior in question falls under fraud statutes.

This is surprising: generally we expect corporations to act in their best interest taking full advantage of their rights under the law, even if doing so violates the spirit of the law. How odd that we apply such different standards to individuals.

<comment><USER2> Your argument here seems to boil down to, "the Washington Post has inadequate editorial standards for business reporting, so we should be happy to cite outlets that have literally no editorial standards for business reporting." Sorry, I disagree.

But you should read McSweeney's. It often pretty excellent.

<comment><USER8> It is not just the WAPO. I've seen the same appalling ignorance in many publications. I've also talked to journalists and I feel very confident in saying that people in journalism generally don't have the skills needed to fact checking in this area. Beyond that, "fact checking" as traditionally done is a very narrow activity that allows all manner of deceptions to be published. Your childlike faith in the utility of traditional news organizations to ensure accuracy by fact-checking is charming, but also ridiculous.

And McSweeny's certainly does have editorial standards. Libel is still a crime, which both McSweeny's and the attorney who wrote the article are very much aware of.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Box Moves Ahead With IPO - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/box-inc-expects-to-raise-up-to-186-9-million-in-ipo-1420805949 <comment><USER2> So that explains it:

 _" At the high end of the initial IPO stock price range, Box would have a valuation of about $1.7 billion, including employee stock options and other outstanding equity.

That was below the $2.4 billion valuation TPG and hedge fund Coatue Management placed on the company in a round of funding last July. In that financing, Box agreed it would be required to issue more shares to TPG in the event it sells IPO shares at a lower price than expected."_

I like Box, I think they have a good model for cloud storage and they seem to be able to keep operational costs in line. And when they pulled their IPO last year the only reason I could think of was that during the Roadshow they realized that their later investors were going to lose money. This too was something I saw in the 90's where the valuation of a company at the last raise got "too high" for it to go public (the later investors don't sign off on it as they lose money).

I hope this means that some folks will think twice about valuations, but you never know.

</comment><comment><USER3> To bypass the paywall:

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fbox- inc-expects-to-raise-up-to-186-9-million-in- ipo-1420805949&ei=TimwVPi7Hc6ayASAj4HoBQ&usg=AFQjCNEeCrDLQCKN9OuZQSZ389J74zUZ0w&sig2=9BtrJ1LspAUjOuKYbpp_Qw&bvm=bv.83339334,d.aWw)

<comment><USER4> Is there a service that creates these google redirects?

<comment><USER5> Generally you just google name of the article.

<comment><USER4> Oh, it's a search result, I thought Google had some redirect functionality that was being misused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those willing to watch 30 mins, great summary of Box's strategy: [http://retailroadshow.com/sys/launch.asp?qv=016800407320261&...](http://retailroadshow.com/sys/launch.asp?qv=016800407320261&k=51888081269)

</comment><comment><USER7> At the $13/share pricing, Box will be paying its previous investors back penalty shares. Apparently they promised a share price of $20. [1]

1\. [http://pando.com/2014/07/08/boxs-updated-s-1-contains- onerou...](http://pando.com/2014/07/08/boxs-updated-s-1-contains-onerous- hidden-penalties-if-the-company-is-late-to-ipo/)

<comment><USER8> Also: they're "only" raising $100-$200m? They raised $150m a year ago when they punted on the IPO then, I believe. Is their burn rate so high that they need the money? If so, the IPO won't really buy them much time. If their burn rate is low, is right now really the peak of the market for them? It's already a "down" time to IPO, so why not wait? Are they worried that the price is going to cave in more and more? If I were looking at their stock price, that's what would scare the crap out of me.

<comment><USER9> Box's burn rate is the highest in the industry [1]. I would be surprised if they had to keep raising money or IPO or risk facing an impending bankruptcy.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/box-ipo- analysis-2014-3](http://www.businessinsider.com/box-ipo-analysis-2014-3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Article is paywalled, unfortunately. Have things dramatically improved at Box over the last year or so, since they delayed the IPO? Or is it just that the market is better for them? I'm really curious whether they do enough to validate their existence as a multi-billion dollar business alongside the several other cloud storage options out there (DropBox, iCloud, Amazon Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc). I'm sure their product is good, but is it IPO good?

I'm not much of an investor, so I won't be investing in their stock directly either way, but I do have to wonder just as a thought experiment.

<comment><USER10> From the article:

> As it prepares to go public, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will seek to > show investors it has reined in costs without sacrificing too much growth.

> Box spent 97 cents on sales and marketing for each dollar of revenue it made > in the three months ended Oct. 31, down from a ratio of $1.38 to every > dollar of revenue when it first filed for an IPO in March of last year. The > company's loss narrowed to $45.4 million in the latest quarter from $51.4 > million a year earlier.

<comment><USER11> Box is living proof of the concept "you can always buy marketshare."

The true test will be can they retain market share. Aaron says yes (what else would he say). His competitors say no (what else would they say).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last chance to cash in before investors realize that cloud storage is essentially commoditized.

<comment><USER13> Exxon sells a commodity in a highly competitive market and still one of the top 2 companies by market cap in the world.

<comment><USER14> > Exxon sells a commodity in a highly competitive market and still one of the > top 2 companies by market cap in the world.

Exxon sells a commodity in a market where there are a narrow enough set of nation-state sources that a small cartel of them can substantially impact world pricing by output decisions, where (both inside and outside the cartel) production decisions are substantially governed directly by government policy by nation-states, and where all the firms selling the commodity are either extracting it by way of agreement with the nation states in which it is being extracted or are directly controlled by a nation-state.

When you start hearing about production decisions by the Organization of Data Center Operating Countries, comparing that market to the one Exxon operates in might make sense.

<comment><USER13> Exxon's value has little to do with the actions of nation states. Rockefeller was relatively speaking wealthier than Bill Gates ($336 billion in 2007 dollars) before nation states got involved in the oil business.

The world's proven oil reserves are ~1.5 Trillion barrels. At 50$/barrel that's 75 Trillion $ before refining. You don't need a large slice of 75 Trillion $ to be ridiculously wealthy.

Large commodity markets require efficiency which might not be sexy, but it can directly translate into profits. Look at the world's richest people and you see several people from the Walton family because efficiency really can be worth far more than all the social websites combined.

PS: Not to mention 12 out of less than 200 countires are in OPEC and they controwl ~81% of the worlds proven reserves. It's fairly common for a small number of countries to supply the majoirity of a given comodity. EX: 81% of the worlds rice is produces by just 9 countries, and just 6 countries controwl 81% of the worlds coal.

<comment><USER15> Rockefeller was never worth $337 billion.

He was worth between $1 and $2 billion in his day, per the best biographies and historical information on the man.

That's a lot closer to $25 to $50 billion today.

The false hundreds of billions number is usually reached one of two ways: 1) by pretending Rockefeller still owned his former share of Standard Oil, represented in the form of the children oil companies today (Exxon et al.); 2) by taking Rockefeller's wealth as a share of GDP, and then claiming based on 2007's GDP he'd be worth X amount.

Both are absurd.

<comment><USER13> Note: I used relative wealth for a reason, doing a direct $ to $ conversion misses out of things like the US being on the gold/silver standard well into the 1900's. "Nixon Shock" Often people use things like how much bread cost back then forgetting that bulk food has become ridiculously cheap over time. A better measure is how much it costs to bribe a Politian.

In the end, there are a lot of ways of calculating wealth. However, the ROI was generally much higher in 1800's than today so simply looking at the value people were willing to pay back then is a poor way of calculating wealth. Looking at NPV corrects for most of this based on those calculations you get ~300B.

Also, 1) Ignores dividends so it's actually not nearly as inflated as you might think. And 2) is useful to figure out influence aka things like how much land some historical figure could buy. Or how many people they could employ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Levie owns 4.1% of stock [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1372612/0001193125142...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1372612/000119312514262075/d642425ds1a.htm#toc642425_16)

<comment><USER17> ~$50m, I wonder if he could have done better by selling earlier. Plus as CEO he probably won't be able to sell the majority of his shares least he signal lack of confidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Current headline is awkward: "Box Restarts IPO Process"

Actual WSJ headline: "Box Moves Ahead With IPO"

"Restart" sounded to me like they were starting over. But I guess it could be interpreted as starting back up.

IPO is expected by end of month.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was their original headline I copy-pasted, they updated it to the new, better headline since.</comment></comment>


Simple question - <AUTHOR> What can you recomend me to help me learn about internet. How it functions and how does server making work and other stuff like that? <comment><USER2> Check out the comments at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10375762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10375762) or [https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-Internet- work](https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-Internet-work) and whenever you see something you don't understand that you want to understand more deeply, Google it. (Wikipedia also has lots of information.)

Also, when you make a post the title should relate to the topic of your post rather than being something generic as "simple question". (i.e. it should be something like 'Ask HN: tutorials that explain how the Internet works)'; you can also search this forum at hn.algolia.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your answer and explanation of how to post. I much appriciate your response to my question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Please read the guidelines. Your post does not qualify for this site.

<comment><AUTHOR> I apologize for my ingorance ggggtez. I am new to this site and i dont know how to post a question. When i went to submit something it only said that if dont ad any URL it means that i am posting a question. I read the guideline but I am still confused as to how to post questions. If you could tell me what i should do i would be extreamly greatful for it.</comment></comment>


Green startups? - <AUTHOR> Why aren't there so many green startups and companies interested on environmental and planet causes?
In a moment where everyone is destroying the planet shouldn't there be more people interested in preserving it?
I'm interested in startups that try to help the cause, so if you have anything please share :) <comment><USER2> There are tons out there. Only YC isn't on their radar.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested if you know any. Or if there is another place, like YC, where I can keep an eye on.

Like a subreddit or whatever.

Thanks</comment></comment>


Show HN: Unsupervised Depth Completion from Visual-Inertial Odometry - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexklwong/unsupervised-depth-completion-visual-inertial-odometry <comment><AUTHOR> We trained a deep learning model to densify a sparse point cloud of a 3-D scene given an RGB image of the scene. Compared to other learning methods, ours has 80% fewer parameters while outperforming others thanks to the mesh triangulation and linear interpolation used as pre-processing steps. The paper describing our method has been accepted by the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020.</comment>


Correcting 360 Degree Stereo Video Capture - <AUTHOR> https://opticalflow.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/correcting-360-degree-stereo-video-capture-part-1-of-3/ <comment><USER2> Interesting and fun to read about experiments like these! Seems very well funded. As I read it the conclusion is that by combining multiple cameras (and possible dedicated depth cameras) a depth map / 3D model can be created, and that that is good for 360+3D / VR.

After working for a while on live VR video, I have come to the same conclusion. It's actually the basis for me and my company's current work in the area. (Perhaps there is interest in hearing more about our approach, if so here is a saved 360 livestream from an event last night when we talked about it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVQt0SrLzHY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVQt0SrLzHY) it's about 15 minutes in)

<comment><USER3> Looked like a nice meetup & thanks for sharing the video link. It was a bit hard to view the slides from within the video, do you have a copy of your presentation you can share as well? Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I know it's hard to see the slides, and I haven't put them up online, sorry... The plan was to split the hdmi signal and put slides etc on a virtual screen in the 360 video. ...but the hdmi splitter didn't work. It turns out hdmi splitters have a hard job (2way com in hdmi). We'll probably implement a loopback, so hdmi into the computer is looped back out untouched so there is no need for splitting it. So next presentation we'll stream should be more watchable!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds like a company that's trying to get noticed. If their tech holds up as well as they say it does, kudos to them, I hope Facebook sees them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author of TFA here -- it was less about getting noticed than my not wanting to let the technology and possibilities languish in our back pocket. It was less relevant a couple years ago because the 3D market kind of crashed, but more relevant today because of VR.

<comment><USER4> Wow, thanks for tracking this article down and making an account to reply!

(I'm not OP.)

I see.

As someone who has no idea about VR in general, here are a bunch of ideas. You've probably already thought of these, but here goes...

\--

Figure out how you want to react to the market - do you want to be absorbed into one company, or provide options for several? IMO, Facebook's [hyper]focus on VR at the moment is a bit scary - [http://i.imgur.com/fMcp2UZ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/fMcp2UZ.jpg) \- so while you would most certainly be promised the world by FB if your tech is what you're saying it is... well, it wouldn't take too long to see the edges of the walled garden once you were trapped inside it, I think, because once you'd been acquired that would be that.

I guess the main question is, how long do you think you can keep your approach well-veiled enough that other engineers won't figure it out and clone it? Given that timeframe, do you think merging with FB or Samsung or whatnot will give you more money AND opportunities than if you formed your own business entity that interacted with multiple companies? A buyout is obviously going to provide more money, it's the opportunity quotient that needs to be considered here.

If what you've built contributes the capabilities you're claiming, you'll need backbone above all else, to stick to your guns.

\--

Since you have experience with shooting video with this setup, I say start with that, and upload random things to YouTube. I imagine you'll get noticed pretty quickly whatever you choose to shoot; I'm thinking a mix of "very recognizable events for which your footage will be a useful contribution, while not stepping on the toes of the official broadcaster(s)" along with random candid/informal stuff to keep things from getting too serious (which I get the impression happens real quick in startup- or startup-alike situations).

I've constantly added the "if the tech holds up" conditional to my comments precisely because I've not seen how this compares in terms of actual footage. A blog writeup is great, but _you need video_. This is about video, people need to see it!

My total exposure to VR amounts to 5 minutes w/ an Occulus Rift (which left me with really sore eyes xD), and I've only seen a tiny handful of 3D movies (one of which I watched by doubling the height of an SbS video and crossing my eyes, which amazingly _didn 't_ leave me with a giant headache), so I'm absolutely unqualified to compare the quality of 3D footage... but with that said, I get the impression that even I would probably notice a difference looking at the result of this system vs. current systems. But I can't quantify even that without a reference to look at.

I recommend going all-out and processing some 8K video, 360° video, etc etc. (Upload the 8K to YT in 4K, with the original in eg Backblaze B2, which I understand is cheaper than AWS.)

\--

 _Possibly_ let people send you footage for you to apply your algorithm to, for testing / comparison purposes. This would be awesome for getting your foot in the door with multiple clients.

Maybe footage less than N minutes or seconds is free, with a pricing structure determined to sit just above the threshold that would shoo away people who would be a waste of time for whatever reason. (I have no idea how this works.)

In fact, you could probably net yourself a nice cottage-industry-sized income from post-processing people's videos for them, or make this model your entire focus, but that's not as heady as a buyout would be.

<comment><AUTHOR> All very good considerations. The "live" VR 360 capture market is really just getting started. I like the idea of "post-processing" as a service, especially. It might be down the road a few months though as the market for it develops.

<comment><USER4> :)

To me, it sounds like you have the perfect head start to this whole scene. I can see why you want people to know this exists...

Your quoting "live" there made me hesitate on the word for just long enough to start wondering about realtime processing, which I get the impression your system is capable of (if you were able to do SD card tests and instantly preview the results).

Now I'm wondering what would happen if you ran your software on a box in the cloud with a 1Gbit link, where people feed in their dual- or tri-camera raw footage, and perfect 3D (and maybe with a hefty premium, calculated depth info) comes out the other end - all in near-realtime. Can you manage less than 1s of latency? 500ms even? (Okay maybe I'm being too optimistic here)

Hmm, and maybe you could provide direct ingress support for broadcast packs....

And thinking about it, depending on how CPU-intensive your system is, you might be able to run this on relatively inexpensive hardware per 1G/2G link. (I know EPB offers commercial 10G installation in Chattanooga for $300/mo, but I'm not sure what their datacenter pricing is.)

I really like the idea of post-processing as a service - considering what options are on the table, that direction seems the least complex and the most straightforward.

(PS. Please excuse the rather non-provisional and overly concrete/direct/instructional wording style of my previous post - my brain's a little under the weather at the moment, and grammaring how I'd prefer to is proving occasionally challenging.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I think you're on the right track. Right behind me are 30 supermicro pizzboxes (some have GPUs) that are racked but powered down and looking very lonely (but with 6 dark fibers also feeling lonely at the moment). Perhaps I'd consider an "encoding.com for VR". Honestly, the main part I'm missing is real-time stitching, but maybe Facebook's open source release for their Surround 360 software later this summer will solve that!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Weekend project, Reclis, a social music recommendation service - <AUTHOR> http://reclis.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> I made this because I'm always trying to find good new music that's usually distributed free online by the artist themselves. My friends know this and are always asking me to tell them what new music is out, where to get it, etc, etc. So I made this as an attempt to let them know what I think is good and also for other people to recommend music to others. This is also my first Node project (I mostly program in Python and Scala).</comment>