Ask HN: Why are we still not encrypting email? - <AUTHOR> Was it enough for the webmail providers to claim outrage and encrypt internally then act as if we're all safe now, if only we use their service?
If they cared about privacy they'd be helping users to encrypt all email to any recipient.
If we cared about privacy we'd be helping the world to encrypt simply, via an open protocol that was actually usable. The EFF's efforts to push GPG/PGP are falling on deaf ears.
Would it be possible to change the protocols themselves to force TLS and potentially inline GPG functionality?
Let's keep talking and thinking about this. It's quite important, no? <comment><USER2> I think the webmail (gmail / msn / yahoo) made email encryption so much harder than it was when everyone used their own email clients. You need to install an extension which will talk to your gpg and pray that formatting / line wrapping doesn't break the content. It's even harder with signing only. (encryption will at least result in consistent/short lines) Even in outlook you can simply import your pkcs12 and click sign/encrypt and it's done.

On the other hand, keybase did something nobody else managed before. A number of my friends who never used encryption before actually have their own gpg keys. They may not be using them yet, but the keys are there (and probably in their system keychains) - that's a great first step.

What I think would really push things forwards at this point is an official google extension for chrome/ff/ie which allows gmail to talk to local gpg for signature/encryption. No messing around with textboxes - have it interact with the content as gmail sees it. Of course it would have to be opensource so people can verify it doesn't change the contents... And it should never touch the actual keys.

</comment><comment><USER3> Simply put, folks are lazy and do NOT care.

When 1/2 of your life is already on Facebook, email privacy doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Lastly, encrypt simply and GPG/PGP can not be used in the same sentence. If we want encryption to be universal, it need to be built into the system from the ground up, and transparent for the end user.

If I want to be "secure" email isn't really a system I'm going to be using any way. Maybe as a delivery mechanism for a already encrypted file, and even then that use case is marginal.

</comment><comment><USER4> Forcing TLS makes almost no difference as the mail is unencrypted at rest. It's also totally impossible to have private mail on a webmail service, since in order to operate it provides you with the mail, the keys, and the code that handles it.

PGP usability is poor, but S/MIME also exists (and is nicer in some respects) and hardly anyone uses that either. The real problem is key distribution. keybase.io have improved this slightly but not much.

Most people also prioritise ease of use and ability to read their mail in varied situations over mail privacy.

<comment><USER2> Lots of corporate outlook/exchange deployments use S/MIME. Unfortunately users are not aware of that.

Also S/MIME is included in gpg (gpgsm specifically), but barely anyone knows about that :(

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Public crypto should be a core service provided by the OS. Applications should be able to use that core service without having direct access to the keys. The OS on each of your devices should handle synchronising your keys between themselves, and should provide a simple facility for key material backups.

If we had this, I'm sure a lot more applications would have support for things like PGP. Because all they would need to do is interface with an API provided by the OS. If I had a tonne of money, I'd quit my job, hire a bunch of developers and work on this full time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can we get this guy a tonne of money, please?

Seriously. That's actually a new concept to me and makes a lot of sense. Would people trust an Apple/MS implementation fully? I'm not convinced, but something cross-platform that handles all the heavy lifting per machine- account would make a massive difference.

It might not solve the issue of webmail encryption on its own though, which would seem to require either a culture shift or an enforced upgrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work for Virtru ([https://www.virtru.com](https://www.virtru.com)) and we aim to make sending encrypted email from your existing email address as simple as possible. For example, send encrypted email to any recipient (even if they do not use Virtru) directly from your existing Gmail account in Chrome.

There have been a lot of competitors entering this space in the last few years, but getting people to change their behavior is incredibly difficult. Businesses which have a regulatory or compliance reason to use encrypted email are looking for products and solutions, but I have not seen the individual customer make a large effort to change their email habits.

I'd love to hear any feedback you might have if you give Virtru a try!

</comment><comment><USER6> I also think that the problem has always been key distribution and trust. Explaining such things to the average person is a fun exercise in frustration and sounds to that person like way too much effort. Classic PGP "Web of Trust" really is a lot of work, and while the Certificate Authority system is easier to explain, no one wants to pay an annual subscription to some CA to send secure emails... and then how are you going to distribute those CA signed certificates?

I really hope that with the big funding push, maybe Keybase.io helps circle this square and simplifies key distribution and trust enough that more average users will feel it to approachable. I'm not sure that they can, though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why is GPG/PGP still a pain in the ass to use? Perhaps not for people reading on HN, but my grandma doesn't even know what "encryption" means, much less how to use it. If you want to increase it's reach, you have to make it easy and on by default in a way that doesn't interfere with normal users (much like how a lot of websites are redirecting to HTTPS, now: it just works and the user doesn't have to do anything).

</comment><comment><USER8> In Germany two of the largest email services (30m users) started introducing encryption based on PGP.

[https://www.mailvelope.com/en/blog/gmx-and-web-de-launch- pgp](https://www.mailvelope.com/en/blog/gmx-and-web-de-launch-pgp)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm working on a project/business that makes it easier to give your users an easy way to contact you using PGP-encrypted email/messages.

If you like, send me an email, and I'll keep you updated. A launch is imminent.

</comment><comment><USER10> I stumbled over an interesting cross-platform approach that even has been audited: [https://whiteout.io](https://whiteout.io)

What do you think about it?

</comment><comment><USER10> I use GPG/PGP sometimes and Telegram-Messenger often and cut all connections (Facebook, private Gmail, Whatsapp).

It seems that this is very unpopular because many ppl just don't care about "this NSA crap" and think of me like "tinfoil hat" when I tell them something about security.

I really would like to teach some lessons so they know what this is all about but therefore you have to break the law in germany... They are going on being lazy and just use "what everyone does", I'm disappointed by humanity sometimes.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps I've misunderstood, but are you saying it's against the law to teach people about encryption in Germany? If so, what law is that?

My understanding was that "with its strict privacy laws, Germany is the refuge of choice for those hounded by the security services." [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/09/berlins- digital...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/09/berlins-digital- exiles-tech-activists-escape-nsa)

<comment><USER12> I think they were talking about a demonstration of "why they should care".

e.g.: perform a MITM attack on someone to show them why they should care

Doing so breaks the law in many places, I imagine Germany included.

<comment><USER10> Exactly! PPL don't care for encryption before I hack their WA/FB communications or show them the content of their "personal documents" folder... This makes an approach to teach them such important stuff much more difficult because it's rather theoretical.

A real attacker wouldn't demonstrate that but just use the material he gains to make money in any way or destroy the lives/careers of the people.

The law is called "Hackerparagraph" ([https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbereiten_des_Ausspähens_und...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbereiten_des_Ausspähens_und_Abfangens_von_Daten))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is similar to : why don't companies better protect their applications? Comes down to primarily laziness.</comment>


IAMA: We are members of the IE9 product team (for real now) - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_members_of_the_ie9_product_team_here/ <comment><USER2> Man, they are getting ripped apart in the comments (They had it coming with the previous response). Whats annoying is that the Product managers are still answering more questions than the engineers and as usual dodging a lot of them with PR speak. Its almost like someone has a gun to their head and they are really carefully with what they say.

 _Edit:_ It looks like Seth (an engineer) is answering more questions now after Reddit admin (Raldi) recommended that he do.

<comment><USER3> One marketer, one gun, and one engineer is better than having a team of dozens of PR flacks compiling a dossier on an interviewer and debriefing all interviewees: <http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/03/enough_about_me/>

<comment><USER2> Holy smokes, how did I never see this one before?

As it is I never had high regards for MSFT, but this takes things to a whole different level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the real team answering, with much less marketing-speak. (as opposed to the other "AMA")

What I've read so far, they have an _incredibly_ tough crowd over there, and they're handling it quite gracefully.

<comment><USER4> After ruining the web for a decade, I hope they (the IE team/Microsofties in general, not necessarily these specific folks) didn't expect something other than a "tough crowd".

There's a lot of pent-up emotion around IE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And it's going really well:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_members_of_the_ie9_product_team_here/c10vfkv)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, not so hot:

> -55 pts: _"If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a comment on Reddit"_ > \--Carter

> 43 pts: _You are a smug asshole._ \--EddieLomax

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is gold: [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_members_of_the_ie9_product_team_here/c10vmml)

The MS guy admits that hardware acceleration can be turned off in the config menu after saying IE9 can't run on windows XP because it requires hardware acceleration.

<comment><USER2> At this point I am starting to feel sorry for the MSFT guys. Its quite obvious that the engineers don't run the show, they just do whatever the profit-making overlords wants them to do.

<comment><USER8> I agree, the MSFT engineers ( _not_ the marketers) seem likeable enough. I think they're handling criticism reasonably enough and I think the Reddit crowd should understand exactly how little input these engineers get inside of Microsoft's development model.

(Still, I will continue recommending Chrome and Firefox to friends. IE anything is just bad.)

<comment><USER9> Disclaimer as usual: I dont speak for MSFT, yada, yada.

I rarely get into one of these 'defend-MSFT' threads but I couldn't let one more of these 'MSFT engineers are great but marketing is not' threads go by.

I think your characterization of how product managers and devs/PMs/test work at MSFT is way wrong and represents a simplistic 'engineers vs bean counters/marketing' of sorts (apologies if that's a strawman). It's always a tag team effort and it's not always easy to see the boundaries between marketing/biz dev/engineering. All sides take part in collective decisions. If you have any real issues with big product decisions for any product at Microsoft, you need to go to a VP or the executive team. And most Microsoft VPs are from a engineering lineage.

On a separate topic, I have nothing to do with IE but in this case, the product managers seem to be working really, really hard with what is a extremely hostile crowd. In some cases, the community has assumed what the real answer should be and even when they get the absolute straight line on why something the way it is, there is disbelief. (the truth as what I would hear if I met Dean Hachamovitch in an elevator and asked him the same question as a Microsoftie).

<comment><USER2> To be fair about the criticisms, it seemed to me like somebody made a list of things they could possibly do wrong while doing a reddit AMA (in front of a bunch of hardcore tech people) and then went on making those mistakes.

What were they expecting when they decided to do an AMA on Reddit? If their main goal was to make more people try IE9, and stick with it, I think they did a really horrible job.

<comment><USER8> I agree, I think the marketers failed at their own game (understanding their audience and selling themselves) today/yesterday. They sidestepped questions like politicians. If they had understood their audience, they'd have known this would not work, that details and direct answers matter.

As it is, they just revealed Microsoft's "feature" model—i.e., we only implement technology that is popular now ... on websites that are built around the lowest common denominator of web technology. IE6.

I stand by my statement that the programmers seem well-intentioned and honest (direct, even), where the marketers are clearly avoiding tough questions.

<comment><USER9> I have done several customer engagements in past teams from conferences to very private executive engagements where I've been the 'technical guy'. Since most questions flying at me are factual, it is easy to respond with factual responses.

But with any hard question which goes outside pure tech, I would deflect it some poor biz-dev/product manager who would have to weigh several things in his or her response - Microsoft's strategy, future plans (both disclosed and secret), competitors and their selling points, what this current customer expects to hear among a host of other things. It is a much harder job and I often came out looking like the 'technical guy who was a straight shooter, not like that other suit' though I had the much easier task.

This isn't some Microsoft thing alone. If you parse through any large scale engagement from any big company, you'd almost always see this pattern. Go to any conference and walk up to a large company's booth. If you ask technical questions, you'll often get the engineer to respond. If you ask some roadmap/competitive positioning/touchy question, you'll get directed to someone else. This is usually because the engineer involved doesn't know the answer/strategy/market positioning/whatever.

To say that one group is somehow more well-intentioned/honest than the other seems wrong.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it is wrong. The engineers have even been clearer and more useful when they're talking about policy.

Case in point:

The question comes up: "Why aren't you bringing IE9 to Windows XP?"

Answer from marketing guys: "XP isn't compatible." At best, the answer was "XP doesn't support hardware acceleration" from them.

Followup question: "How do you run IE9 in a VM?"

Answer from marketing: "Turn off hardware acceleration."

Response: "WTF?"

Engineer comes in: "Okay, let me clear this up... IE9 runs on top of D2D, which Windows XP hasn't got. D2D supports hardware or software acceleration, therefore you can turn it off for VMs. But the bottom line is that if we were to port IE9 to Windows XP, we'd have to write the lower levels from scratch, and it would become IE8 with a fresh GUI."

Response: "Okay. That, I understand."

Here's where the marketing guy either a) doesn't defer to the tech guy when it's appropriate or b) underestimates/misunderstands his audience and gives a flawed, unsatisfactory answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I could have sworn a member of the IE9 team had a comment thread a few weeks back asking for feedback here on HN. I cannot seem to locate it now however -- any help?</comment>


Authors American Collapse Book Foretold Political Attacks on USPS - <AUTHOR> https://vagobond.com/a-very-good-novel-coronavirus/ <comment><AUTHOR> So, when the post office approached the treasury and requested financial assistance to continue paying pensions, delivering the mail, and doing everything else the post office did – Trump didn't see a foundational institution of U.S. history – instead he saw a chance to stick it to that fucking Bezos.

He had a secondary reason, that actually might have been more compelling than the primary but which carried less emotional ammunition – the Democrats were increasingly clamoring for a mail in vote in the 2020 election – something that would hurt all the 'traditional' election rigging that all of his cronies were engaged in.</comment>


Show HN: Into-Docker – Never write another Dockerfile - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/into-docker/into-docker <comment><AUTHOR> I finally released my little Clojure/Docker/GraalVM CLI tool that makes use of special pre-packaged environments to enable minimal-configuration builds for common build tooling or frameworks. Check out the release notes [1]!

I've created the following builder images to illustrate usage and to tackle my own most common use cases [2] [3] [4].

I'd be super-grateful for any feedback!

[1] [https://github.com/into-docker/into- docker/releases/tag/v1.0...](https://github.com/into-docker/into- docker/releases/tag/v1.0.0) [2] [https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/intodocker/clojure](https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/intodocker/clojure) [3] [https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/intodocker/create-r...](https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/intodocker/create- react-app) [4] [https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/intodocker/clojure-...](https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/intodocker/clojure- graalvm)</comment>


Hateful and Confused: Blocked by Twitter, Promoted by Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@stephencobb/hateful-and-confused-b98b995d467f <comment><USER2> "The US has an image problem"

If that's true, then you could probably state that Twitter has a problem 1000 times that size.</comment>


Encryption might be the reason why we haven't heard from aliens - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/21/9363863/edward-snowden-alien-encryption <comment><USER2> This seems nonsensical to me. Just like internet protocols, any radio transmission is built on a layer of protocols that envelope the actual data being transmitted.

Encryption is applied on the data layers not to hide that something is being transmitted, but what is being transmitted.

However scientists aren't even trying to detect signals with any sort of data in it, but merely radio emissions that _look_ like they might come from something with an intellect.

If we haven't found anything like that yet, and encryption is supposed to be the reason, then that means that encryption would have to be applied at the most basic protocol layer in such a way that even the physical properties of the emission look like the universe's background radiation. Is there currently human technology that does anything similar to this?

<comment><USER3> What if it's such advanced protocol layering and encryption that those alien signals appear to us to be "cosmic noise"? Surely an advanced civilization would have advanced communication capabilities we haven't even considered.

<comment><USER4> > What if it's such advanced protocol layering and encryption that those alien > signals appear to us to be "cosmic noise"?

Another interesting way to speculate is the "under our nose" concept, which is the concept that the existing distribution of stars and galaxies, as well as the recorded background noise, might be the byproduct of alien intervention. Binary star systems are a popular speculative example of "starivore" civilizations that consume entire stars that have been moved into the alien civilization's own star system, and perhaps some combination of multiple stars in a single system are not "naturally" occurring in the absence of alien influence. To an unsuspecting observer, some forms of distant astronomical- scale engineering could be mistakenly interpreted as natural astrophysics that the observers then incorporate into their standard models when refactoring to account for all of the observed data... Usually the simple explanations are correct, but when your models require really insane updates to handle the observed data, perhaps there are other explanations? At the same time though, what recourse would we have if 99% of the visible universe was already astro- engineered?

<comment><USER5> If binary star systems were systems in which stars were moved into the system, we should see evidence of stars being moved and consumed. I have also read about stars being created (e.g., starting a fusion process with all the hydrogen and helium in Jupiter, Saturn, etc.).

There is currently no evidence which suggests stars are being moved. We should see either large gravitational tugs or engines such as Shkadov thrusters. The latter should be plainly visible. The former should be easily detected by extrasolar planet detection methods. Unless the tugs are spherical, the light curves of the tugs would definitely pique interest. In any case, moving a star seems a rather extreme and expensive measure. It is probably more effective to consume the star onsite and use the energy locally or send only the energy back.

There seems to be no evidence of stars being consumed, either. Dyson spheres (or swarms) have actually been searched for locally by comparing visible and infrared wavelengths over sections of the sky. None have been found. Intergalactic searches have also been done by looking for galaxies which glow too brightly in the far infrared. No luck.

It is not just a question of a mistaken belief that the artificial is natural. The properties of light are the same here on Earth as they are billions of light years away. Further, for all those galaxies and stars to be engineered in the same way aross billions of light years (with some points being unable to communicate with others since the Big Bang), is all but impossible. Life would have to evolve at effectively the same rate and come up with the same solutions in all those hundreds of billions of galaxies (and yet somehow be different here in the Milky Way). Given the variety of life on Earth and the variety of solutions it has evolved, that seems unlikely.

<comment><USER6> What if these things were done so long ago that we missed our chance to witness them?

<comment><USER5> There are hundreds of billions of galaxies at various distances from Earth. When we look out at those different distances, we are also looking out at time. So we have something of the full spectrum of galactic evolution. Even if these events happened "long ago" we should be witnessing them somewhere.

Locally, if these events happend long ago, surely they would have been here by now, harvesting our star.

<comment><USER6> That's also assuming such things are being being done on a large scale. My point is that we've only had the capability to see such things recently, while the universe is really old.

I personally just don't like definitive statements when there's no way for us to know the whole story.

<comment><USER5> I am open to the idea that there is evidence we don't have yet, but based on the evidence we do have, the original poster's point doesn't seem likely, even with modification. I understood your point, but as the sibling poster points out, we have the entire history of the universe essentially on display for us.

<comment><USER6> How can you be open to the idea there is evidence we don't have yet but still make a statement that the entire history of the universe is on display for us?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a plausible hypothesis. I don't know if somebody else has already proposed this as a solution to the Fermi paradox.

But it doesn't even need to be encrypted communication. Highly compressed communication is also indistinguishable from random noise.

Of course, only under the assumption, that aliens are using the same technology as we are.

<comment><USER8> Hollywood IT proposes that people who know nothing about computers all "know" that every computer thing that has ever been invented is trivially interoperable with every other computer thing that has ever been invented on a fast hollywood movie timescale given a sufficiently advanced computer mage to recite some incantations and be treated as socially inferior if its a plot requirement. I think everyone here is experienced enough to laugh at that.

There is an EXTREMELY close analogy in EE / telecom land where people with no domain specific knowledge think all radio hardware, modulation methods, protocols, are all trivially interoperable with each other. Sure... go ahead and try to listen to trunked public service comms using a spark gap era coherer detector, good luck with that. Or try to listen to 60s era SSB voice using 30s era AM receiver. Higher order PSK/QAM is indistinguishable from white noise on a non-phase oriented receiver. This is all before we get into weirdness like trivial line coding, think of old T-1 circuits and B8ZS "scrambling" to get around the clock sync limitations of AMI line coding. Try to use an aircraft NDB receiver on GPS satellites or vice versa in order to navigate. Or connect an accurate clock built to sync to WWVB to the GPS constellation instead, or again vice versa. Telecom, being usually run at the limit of hardware when it was new, is even less interoperable than "computers in general". Given poor interoperation pragmatic results on our own planet, the odds of communicating with space aliens is basically zero, even the odds of detecting are almost zero.

<comment><USER9> I am far from a HAM or radio pro, but doesn't SDR actually make some of this possible? Not using ancient sets to listen to modern signals, but using one set of kit to rule them all, as it were?

<comment><USER8> Only kind of. If someone hasn't seen fit to write the code for a 240 hz morse code filter, you don't get one. Or a very advanced AGC filter. Those are "easy" because you could modify an existing set of code, assuming open source application. GNUradio has a compile/run architecture although you can build rather highly configurable real time systems so it's "close" to programming in real time.

Harder is something like "digital radio monodiale" which aside from having an unfortunate acronym is a digital shortwave voice modulation scheme... without having the specs in front it would be very hard to decide where to start. There are military intelligence people who do exactly this stuff with captured enemy signals, given an enormous head start of knowing the rough technology level of the other side and maybe some stolen documents. Still its not easy for them. A good analogy would be imagine a radio intelligence officer in WWII heard some 8VSB over the air broadcast TV from 2015... honestly I think you'd end up with question marks for at least 50 years trying to figure that signal out in 1940.

Right now, perhaps we are getting a 40 dB below the noise digital data signal from space aliens. Without any idea how to build the specific demod, we're going to get nowhere, and a level that low below the noise floor will not show up on any normal waterfall so we'd likely miss it.

Existing modes tend to reflect hardware ability. So some gear some of the time is stable enough to use WSPR modulation which is an ultra low bandwidth digital mode for HF (shortwave)... some gear drifts in frequency too much to use it, today. Oscillator stability can be improved to make it work, but replacing the IF stages with A/D converters won't do it, takes more than just doing demodulation in software with SDR instead of in hardware to fix the root frequency stability problem. Its possible space aliens modulation method would assume close in phase noise or IMD performance beyond 2015 capabilities, because for them its trivial star trek dilithium crystal stuff or whatever, but we're not going to invent the noise free monochromatic oscillator for another 150 years or whatever, so the front end performance of our radios wouldn't be good enough even with a preprogrammed SDR on the back end to demodulate. Another example, we don't have the technology today or the legal framework to do "real" beyond ultra wide band RF work, but there's no reason to think space aliens wouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A slightly-off-topic thought related to the Fermi question.

What actually is the _point_ of communicating at sub-luminal speed between star systems or galaxies, _other_ than CETI projects? The delay between transmissions would make such communication impractical for day-to-day purposes.

Perhaps this is one possible explanation for the apparent lack of such signals. Either the aliens don't bother much with communicating at galactic scales, or they have developed a system of doing so at super-luminal speeds that eludes our current understanding of physics.

If this is correct then you would expect most artificial radio signals to be easy to detect and decipher, because the only plausible use for such signals is long-term communication with alien civilisations. And you might also not expect to find many of them.

<comment><USER6> Seems logical to me that a civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would have solved the problem of the extremely slow radio wave for interstellar communication. I would think we shouldn't be limiting such possible civilizations with the limitations we currently face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't even have to be encrypted. Just compressing the data makes it hard to separate from noise.

Turbo Codes and LDPCs used to transmit data over noisy channels (like NASA uses in deep space satellite communications or UMTS and LTE networks) look just like noise. I don't think Seti or astronomers have ever tried to analyze noise for some alien codec that might be transmitting.

<comment><USER12> "I don't think Seti or astronomers have ever tried to analyze noise for some alien codec that might be transmitting."

They can't. "It looks like noise" isn't a metaphor, it's a mathematical truth... it is _indistinguishable_ from noise.

This is, IMHO, another one of those cases where people like to do a bit of social signaling with their fashionable misanthropism, but we actually know quite a bit about this problem. The optimal solution for using the electromagnetic spectrum for signaling, even with our current level of technology, is to use it in such a way that it looks like noise due to compression and due to not using any more power than necessary, in any direction other than the necessary one. _Of course_ aliens do not sit there using four or five (if not six) orders of magnitude more power than necessary by broadcasting in all directions instead of using a directional beam, and _of course_ they do not sit there and transmit in an uncompressed format that is an obvious signal, so _of course_ we don't see their transmissions. It would be bizarre if it were otherwise. We have no reason to believe that aliens, who live in the same universe as us and are subject to the same engineering constraints as us, would be particularly prone to missing this incredibly obvious optimization.

(Math may be the one true cross-universe universal, but within this universe engineering is pretty universal too.)

<comment><USER13> Problem - humans have been doing all of the above for decades, occasionally as a deliberate attempt to communicate, but mostly by accident.

So I can't see how your comment has any basis in fact.

You're only going to compress a data channel if you're in a hurry. When a message is going to take decades or centuries to get somewhere, you're more likely to keep the encoding as simple as possible to increase the chances of reception.

Besides that, I can't imagine radio being used for interstellar communication at all. It's fine for "Is anyone there?" but unless your aliens live at geological rather than biological rates, it's far too slow for almost anything else.

<comment><USER12> Compressing increases bandwidth, which is forever going to be at a premium. If you want to improve reception reliability, you put error correction on top of that. This is all off-the-shelf tech here on Earth, to say nothing of what aliens can come up with.

"Besides that, I can't imagine radio being used for interstellar communication at all. It's fine for "Is anyone there?" but unless your aliens live at geological rather than biological rates, it's far too slow for almost anything else."

Well, it's the fastest thing available unless you're basically willing to hypothesize magic. Anyone willing to do so is welcome to do so, and I'm serious about that; I just advocate that you be _aware_ that you've switched to advocating magic. There's a difference between reasonable speculations based on real physics and arbitrarily advanced engineering, vs. new physics that despite all our research we still have little more than a whiff of, if that, and keeps crawling into ever more exotic energy domains to even peek at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there any point of this article? (serious question)

Or perhaps this was just some light-hearted conversation which has been reported as "news" because Snowden was involved. I can as well say that we have not yet heard from the aliens because we are yet to discover the Mass Relays and the Citadel (apologies to those who have not played the Mass Effect series of video games and this statement makes no sense).

<comment><USER15> Relevant xkcd:

[https://xkcd.com/799/](https://xkcd.com/799/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just because Snowden says something does not make it newsworthy.

It's more likely that we and the aliens wouldn't be using the same technology.

<comment><USER17> Kind of a facile statement. Radio waves are radio waves. The spectrum is the spectrum.

Any intelligent aliens are very likely to be using the electromagnetic spectrum for wireless communications. They might use it in somewhat different ways, but the technology is still essentially the same.

<comment><USER18> For intraplanetary communication, yes, I'd agree. But those signals shouldn't be strong enough for us to detect (otherwise, what a wasteful species).

Now, for interplanetary signals, radio does not look that interesting.

There's the problem that it, like everything else, is jut too damn slow. So just the assumption that long distance communication is common is already iffy.

Then, radio is either too hard to manage, or has a too long wavelength. Yes, some hyper intelligence out there may think differently, but from our current understanding, it looks way more likely that such hyper intelligence will still find it easier to send matter, neutrinos, or whatever it is that composes most of the Universe.

<comment> norea-armozel >For intraplanetary communication, yes, I'd agree. But those signals shouldn't be strong enough for us to detect (otherwise, what a wasteful species).

Many of our radio signals are detectable from terrestrial sources such as radio and air TV stations. Even Ham radio signals throw out enough power for their signals to be easily detected beyond our solar system.

<comment><USER5> Eh, not really "easily." If a comparable civilization was located around Alpha Centauri, we would have to focus the equivalent of an Arecibo radio telescope at it for many months, maybe a year, to detect its presence. That's "easy" in the sense that we could do it, but it's also very expensive to do and we won't do it without having at least some idea that a civilization exists there already. The farther out we go from Earth, the harder it is, and it gets impossible (in the sense that we lack the resources to do it) very quickly with increasing distance.

For interplanetary communication, tight beams would make way more sense than broadcast. And unless one of those beams is directed at us, we aren't likely to intercept it. This is really what SETI is looking for because it's the easiest thing to look for.

<comment> norea-armozel Yeah, but the fact remains that it's more likely we'll get a random stray signal before we'll get an intended broadcast from another civilization. I just don't see it as being one of those things any civilization is likely to do (what's the point of communication with another civilization at such extreme distances?).

<comment><USER16> If they determine that the random signal contains any sort of information, even if we can't understand it, I think they'd simply be happy to have confirmation of another civilization.

Getting a chunk of signal with modulation or one containing repeated patterns would be a world changer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone remotely interested in this idea should check out Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice [1], which is an entire (short) novel about how and why an extraterrestrial message would be encrypted. It's worth mentioning how why turns out to be the most compelling question.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_\(novel\))

<comment><USER20> A brilliant book which made me think that this is how science is really done. One of the questions is whether there is a message at all. How this message is first suspected (due to non-pseudorandom behaviour of a fraudulent table of random numbers) itself is a fresh idea. I found the various hypotheses in this book itself to be a very nice. IIRC, there is also an "opera singer" hypothesis that it is not the content of the message which matters, but its frequency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Or it might be that advanced civilisations use more advanced means of communication. In such a vast universe, clearly superluminal communication speeds, should they be attainable, would be used. Maybe we just need to "tune in" properly.

<comment><USER22> Or maybe aliens are still in the stone age.

<comment><USER23> This is possible but extremely unlikely, hence an unscientific assumption. You always assume the likely. That is is more likely that you are in the middle. You could argue that ONE of the steps to intelligent life is unlikely, incredible more unlikely as we assume. But the questions remains: Why are they not here? I am afraid we may not like the answer, whatever it is.

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

Related statistics: Doomsday argument German Tank Problem Capture Recapture

<comment><USER22> The answer is obvious to me: the chances of life are very small. The universe is very big (that's some underestimation). So it is likely, that we are not alone in the universe, but we may be so far apart in terms of space and time that there will be no contact ever. Just take a look how far our signals have travelled since we began transmitting — they only covered a small part of our own galaxy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Another reason is that unless they want to communicate with other species, they'd use only the minimal signal strength that is required for the signal to reach its destination, not a signal strength that is several orders of magnitude higher.

That and our limited brain capacity, which prevents us from recognizing and/or understanding a message from an advanced alien civilization.

</comment><comment><USER25> I like the thought, but encryption is not enough to hide it from us, it'd require steganography.

If all communication itself on Earth were encrypted, how much of a visible signal would we still emit? You wouldn't be able to decypher the communication, but you'd still see that _something_ is happening that's requires a structuring intelligence behind it. Unless they pay special attention to not only encrypting their communication but masking it as a natural phenomenon, steganographically.

If I shout an encoded message to you in a restaurant, the other people won't know that I told you to order the creme brulee, but they will know that I told you _something_. I'd have to discreetly tap my plate in order to mask it.

And even aside from that, you'd need to mask all other emissions, even those not designed to facilitate communication. On earth, you don't have to intercept and decrypt a rocket launch command, you can tell by the infrared (or whatever) emissions on your spy satellite.

<comment><USER26> Not so much steganography, but spread spectrum communications does achieve the effect you are looking for.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Years ago, I attended a talk from a professor about a networking system using the Lego blocks metaphor. In his examples, he had a block labelled "encryption" and another labelled "compression" and talked about how you could arbitrarily compose the blocks in the system.

To my eternal regret, I didn't call him on the fact that those two blocks are not arbitrarily composable.

Both encryption and compression make the resulting data look random (and you can't compress encrypted data), and compression seems to be a much more likely candidate.

P.S. And spread-spectrum transmissions, as someone else mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER10> This doesn't really make sense to me. Even if it was encrypted, you would still be able to detect a powerful, directed radio signal wouldn't you?

</comment><comment><USER28> Assuming that traffic analysis is useless in this case, and there's no unencrypted metadata.

</comment><comment><USER29> If it doesn't work the first time, try it again?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10246610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10246610)

<comment><USER30> From the FAQ: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

> _Are reposts ok?_

> _If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill > reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok._

> _Please don 't delete and repost the same story, though. Accounts that do > that eventually lose submission privileges._</comment></comment>


Sam Altman and the Internet lynching problem - <AUTHOR> http://danieltenner.com/2014/08/13/sam-altman-internet-lynching-problem/

<comment><USER2> It was a thoughtful piece, swombat, but it looks like the censors (human or automated) have manipulated its ranking.

This article has 10 points in just 38 minutes and is on the second page. In contrast, "Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury" has only 5 points after an hour. The standing desk article is on the front page and this article isn't.

<comment><USER3> Yep... Not sure why that is to be honest. I've emailed dang about it but no response yet!...

<comment><USER4> I was away all day and only just saw this.

The post got a ton of (what look to our system like) ring votes and was flagged by an algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is over thinking it.

What keeps a fight going is that two parties want to have a fight, they can't tolerate that somebody else gets the last word. If you refuse to get involved some other fool will get battered bloody.

The trouble with a long post like that is that it has a huge surface area and inevitably there is something that can be taken out of context and then the fisticuffs continue.

Rule 1 is don't get involved, but if you do get involved look at the methods (not the words) of s.i. hayakawa. You don't make rational arguments but you devise zingers of various sorts. One of the best is the falacious argument that requires your opponent to leave their world view to refute.

<comment><USER3> That sounds very interesting as a method... do you have some examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry, but 'why men tend to react to statements like "men are rapists" by saying "hey, wait a minute, not all men are like that." Because it's of course true – the majority of men are not rapists, wouldn't dream of being rapists, abhor rapists, would cut off social ties with anyone found to be a rapist immediately, etc. But since option 1 is totally not available (rapists are indefensible) and option 3 feels intuitively like a bad choice in the long term, many men will pick option 2, and make the obviously true statement that "hey, you're exaggerating quite a bit there, not all men are rapists".'

doesn't really answer it. The missing quantifier in "men are rapists" reads as "all" not "some". To suggest that of course the person uttering the statement meant "some" is to suggest a want of familiarity with the English language that I find unlikely. And of course, prefixing "some" makes it all less exciting, doesn't it?

<comment><USER3> "Black people are thieves" illustrates pretty well why the "some" cannot be taken for granted, even when it's logically evident.

Have a read through Scott Alexander's article if you still need more convincing: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are- superweapo...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are- superweapons/)

<comment><USER6> Perhaps my own ear needs adjusting, for I can't tell whether you are agreeing with me or not. For the record, I agree with you, the "some" cannot be taken for granted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is possible that your rank was reduced because of a detected voting ring. That would be my guess, of course I have no idea if there is an actual voting ring or not.</comment>


Exploring mullender.c – A deep dive into the first IOCCC winner - <AUTHOR> https://lainsystems.com/posts/exploring-mullender-dot-c/ <comment><USER2> Not so much "obfuscated C" as it is "embedding a binary into a C program". You can still do something similar with modern compilers:

        char code[] = { /* put your bytes here */ };
        ((void(*)())code)();

I believe it is technically UB, but it does exactly what you'd think it does, and if compilers started doing funny things with it, you wouldn't be able to write things like JITs at all. A tiny demonstration of this can be found at the bottom of C4x86: [https://github.com/EarlGray/c4/blob/master/c4x86.c](https://github.com/EarlGray/c4/blob/master/c4x86.c)

<comment><USER3> I think something like this gets disallowed these days as .rodata and .data gets mapped NX.

<comment><USER4> Using compiler hints, data can be placed directly in the code section.

Works on x86/x86_64 Linux:

char main[] __attribute__ ((section(".text"))) = "\xe8\x0d\0\0\0Hello world!\n"

#ifdef __x86_64__

"\x31\xc0\x8d\x50\x0d\xff\xc0\x89\xc7\x5e\x0f\x05\x31\xff\x8d\x47\x3c\x0f\x05";

#else

"\x31\xdb\x8d\x53\x0d\x59\x8d\x43\x04\x43\xcd\x80\x31\xdb\x8d\x43\x01\xcd\x80";

#endif

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author says "I tried to define 'main' as an array of shorts with a modern compiler and it did not like that one bit", but without saying which modern C compiler or what it didn't like about it.

This sort of trick should still be possible with modern compilers. GCC has the charming warning

      warning: 'main' is usually a function [-Wmain]

if main is declared as something other than a function.

Here's someone who got it to work in 2015, anyway: [http://jroweboy.github.io/c/asm/2015/01/26/when-is-main- not-...](http://jroweboy.github.io/c/asm/2015/01/26/when-is-main-not-a- function.html)

<comment><USER6> Author of the article here. This was simply meant to be a minor observation, the focus of the article is not an investigation about the various ways to define main in your program.

Anyway, this is the error I got if you're curious. (I left such things out because the article was getting long as is)

warning: variable named 'main' with external linkage has undefined behavior [-Wmain] short main[] = { 16, 18 };

This is on OS X so it's clang 11.0.3.

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry your comment has been downvoted. I can't imagine why. Thanks for writing an interesting article.

I realise this was a minor observation on your part, and I was remarking on it in that spirit. I'm sorry not to have made that clearer. I've found it rather dispiriting when writing of mine has been posted here, and the comments have seemed like nitpicking criticism, so I regret having given you that impression. One has to remind oneself that people who enjoy the article and have nothing to add will usually not leave comments, and so the comments give a misleading impression of how people felt about it.

The message you quote above appears to be a warning, rather than an error.

<comment><USER6> No harm no fowl, I appreciate constructive criticism but sometimes I'm on edge posting in these forums. It's like, this content is being posted to some of the best in the field - I want to be as precise and accurate as I can be.

Anyway, I'm glad you found it interesting =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's fairly important reminder that pretty much _every_ program we write has huge numbers of contextual and environmental assumptions built in - not just the obvious OS and envvars but things like the business model, the assumptions about how other parts of an organisation will react to certain outputs - it is often amazing to me that any piece of code can be understood by "outsiders" \- we all are writing obfuscated code.

</comment><comment><USER8> Having grown up coding assembly on the MC68000 (Europe, Amiga, demos ...) and spent years doing low-level embedded development on ARM Cortex cores it's really fascinating to see how similar they both are to the PDP.

<comment><USER9> IKR? I had an Atari ST which I coded in ASM and then I was in college and they had a PDP and the prof let me look at the ASM books and I was astounded!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like Gavin Barraclough's entries, the first is

[https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2001_anonymous](https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2001_anonymous)

Which I believe was a runner up, and was a PPC to x86 binary translator

and his winning entry:

[https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2004_gavin](https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2004_gavin)

Which was a protected mode multitasking operating system with a windowing system/gui.

because of course.

<comment><USER6> I will definitely be adding these to my list of potential article topics for the future. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It still compiles (without warnings) and runs on modern VAX systems (NetBSD 9, gcc 7.4.0, VAXstation VLC):

      claire: {4} cc --version
      cc (nb3 20190319) 7.4.0
      Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
      This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
      warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

      claire: {5} cc mullender.c -o mullender
      claire: {6} ./mullender
                                                                                :-)
      claire: {7} uname -p
      vax

<comment><USER6> Are you the VAX assembly expert I've been looking for? Can you explain some things (specifically the code after the PDP section)? If so e-mail me, I'd love to ask some questions. (The e-mail addr is easily found on my website)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Christopher Mills' winning entry for the 25th IOCCC (2018) is a PDP-11 emulator. Included with the BSD 2.9 image is the mullender.c entry -- you can compile and run it.

<[https://ioccc.org/2018/mills/hint.html>](https://ioccc.org/2018/mills/hint.html>)

<comment><USER6> This is on my list to investigate!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love the theme. It's quite similar to Cadey's blog. [https://christine.website/](https://christine.website/) Dark themes are so nice when done well...

<comment><USER14> It's Hugo's terminal theme [https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-theme- terminal/](https://themes.gohugo.io/hugo-theme-terminal/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very deep. Should have ask for and a 8" Wang word processor Disk and where is my 5...

But the real surprise is the Docker image. Can we have pdp-11 and Ibm 360 one? Tired of firing the dos mode version.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is like most of the program listing from home computer magazines in the 80s</comment>


Copyright is Broken - <AUTHOR> http://eev.ee/blog/2015/10/23/copyright-is-broken/ <comment><USER2> He's complaining about the problem with dōjinshi outside Japan.[1] Although Japan's copyright laws don't allow fan works, the tradition in Japan is not to enforce this.

If you really wanted to work on this problem, an interesting option would be to approach the Cool Japan Fund.[2] This is a venture capital fund, funded by the government of Japan and some big banks at about the $1Bn level, to promote Japanese culture outside Japan. (The government of Korea has been pushing K-Pop, and Japan is working on catching up.) They own an anime translation operation, a free anime site (daisuki.net), a TV channel, and, most relevant to this, a content creator training academy.[3] Kadokawa Contents Academy[4] is a training school for anime and manga creators outside Japan. There are currently branches in Taiwan and Singapore, with more to come. They might be able to give some advice on the subject.

[1] [http://www.animenation.net/blog/2014/08/12/34666/](http://www.animenation.net/blog/2014/08/12/34666/) [2] [https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/](https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/) [3] [https://www.cj-fund.co.jp/en/files/press_150330-1.pdf](https://www.cj- fund.co.jp/en/files/press_150330-1.pdf) [4] [http://www.kadokawa- ca.co.jp/](http://www.kadokawa-ca.co.jp/)

<comment><USER3> I'm going to post a bit of an unrelated (in that it is not related to Doujinshi) comment, but still drawn from a link you posted. Please forgive this, as I didn't have anywhere else to post it.

In the first link, it says,

>According to the 2012 CIA World Factbook, 98.5% of the residents of Japan are ethnically Japanese. Doujinshi arose largely due to the uniformity of intention, good will, perception, and morality of Japanese people.

This seems a rather poor reason to me. There doesn't seem to be any grounds to say that what's going on with doujinshi has anything to do with morality, and further the link between this sense of morality and being ethnically Japanese - as though this won't be found if other ethnicities were to co-exist on a larger scale.

Most countries are pretty homogeneous with regard to ethnicity (albeit not as high as Japan), so I'm wondering as to why the author has decided to pick up on this fact about _people_ rather than the elements of culture that have nothing to do with how ethnically homogeneous a society is.

The author implies that the first sentence automatically will lead to the next - I think that's a false link to make. As someone who isn't ethnically Japanese in Japan, it makes me feel uneasy as it just seems to be widening this gap that people make between ethnicities and countries of origin, especially with regard to Japan.

It's a borderline 日本人論 statement that I've seen is popular in Japan. Countless books about "Japanese style" and how it's accomplished through the "harmony" achieved by something innate in Japanese people or culture (that God forbid cannot be learned, silly foreigner! /s) that's brought about through the fact that Japan is an ethnically homogeneous country.

tl;dr rant about how I think the author makes a link between two unrelated things, and furthers the divide between two groups of people while still managing to be offensive during the course of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I understand his argument about gatekeepers, but Steam is a poor example. Steam itself provides so much more than a simple storefront as he describes it. By selling on Steam you also get

Steam API, which gives you

\- Achievements

\- Leaderboards

\- Cloud save

\- Steam Workshop - user generated mods and content

\- Multiplayer infrastructure

Steam community, which gives you

\- Forum

\- Social network - user generated content such as screenshots, game guides and fanart

\- Reviews - endorsements from several thousand actual players sells games far better than a flashy trailer

Whether these features are worth the 30% cut is arguable, but these services are far more valuable to independent developers, who don't have the time or ability to implement these, than to developers under large publishers, who may share these infrastructure within the games they publish.

<comment><USER5> "Market makers" are a very important economic function. Just because it's hard to put your finger on a tangible product, the fact that they were able to create a unified framework for selling games to customers is worth quite a lot of money. A lot of people had tried (and failed) to do similar things in the past. Those things you mentioned are almost irrelevant. The actual value they're delivering is being able to easily and economically distribute your game to a wide audience and, as a consumer, connect me with a large number of games. It's like trying to say the value of a road is the stopsigns and traffic lights on them, not the fact that it's connecting two cities.

<comment><USER4> Disagree. The 'market' is far less important when the good you're selling takes up no tangible shelf space - people have been buying games just fine without Steam for decades before Steam, and still are.

Steam itself, by dint of being another layer between gamers and their games, have to justify its existence and value to them, and generally does through a variety of features as well as its legendary sales. But being a marketplace and distribution network alone does not get you anywhere, not when the cost of setting up shop on the Internet is so low these days.

<comment><USER6> I don't think you would say any of this if you were an indie dev.

Actually I don't think anyone has said it yet, but the truth is 90% of the value of Steam is in marketing. Steam gives you millions upon millions of impressions from people actively looking to buy a game right now.

Steam also does a lot to reduce piracy by providing a seamless way to patch your game. This allows you to release tons of patches which make it very hard to torrent the current version of your game.

<comment><USER7> Steam certainly used to provide valuable marketing to indie devs, but these days it's so stuffed full of shovelware and Early Access games that might never be finished that it's not so great anymore. They don't even feel they need to obey consumer rights laws on stuff like false advertising, refunds, deceptive pricing, etc.

<comment><USER6> So do you make your living from Steam? I do and you just are wrong about whether or not the marketing is valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is ridiculous. You don't have the right to just take someone else's IP in order to make money. That is basically just taking advantage of someone else's marketing budget and hard work.

In this world you would never even know if a sequel to a game or movie is made by the original author or a cloner.

Maybe copyright periods are too long, but there is no way I should be able to release a game called Undertale tomorrow with the same characters and plot and slightly different art.

<comment><USER8> You seem to be assuming that derivative work doesn't require hard work of its own. I tried to make the point that this game is itself a derivative of other things, without which it couldn't exist.

Even if you did do that: why would anyone buy it in lieu of the original?

<comment><USER6> "Even if you did do that: why would anyone buy it in lieu of the original?"

Because of market confusion. I would generate sales from people who didn't realize they were not buying the original. This happens right now but it would be much worse if we removed all the controls.

"You seem to be assuming that derivative work doesn't require hard work of its own. I tried to make the point that this game is itself a derivative of other things, without which it couldn't exist."

I didn't say that at all. Honestly that seems irrelevant. It also requires hard work to plan and successfully rob a bank.

<comment><USER9> Trademark covers something that is "likely to cause confusion".

Eevee is not arguing for removing all the controls; there's not a word about removing trademark law

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree with @mediumdeviation about the Gatekeepers section remarks.

Steam cost real money to develop and operate. Valve also has additional operating expenses as a business. It's a free market and others are free to compete with Steam with a lower priced product. Additionally, the creator had a choice whether or not to distribute via Steam, and obviously the decided that the benefit outweighs the cost.

I don't mean to be rude, but I lost interest in finishing what at first appeared to be a potentially interesting article based on the naivety of these remarks. I would suggest to the author to give it more thought.

<comment><USER9> If you want to respond to mediumdeviation's remarks, please reply to him, not add a new top-level comment.

It's more readable to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> OK, there are like three things about copyright that I don't fully get:

1\. What counts as copying? 2\. What counts as _creative_ work? 3\. What counts as fair use?

For me all this three are huge gray areas. I honestly can't decide if derivative works from this game's characters could be sold freely despite what the original author says under the current US law. Please don't mix trademark into the question, I don't know if Undertale or its characters are trademarked or not. For the sake of clear discussion about copyright let's assume that they are not.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is some very strange logic here. It's so odd that I feel like doing some point-by-point rebuttals.

> Commissions are all well and good, but they don't pay very well and there's > a physical limit on how many a single person can do.

Which is why the creator of a creative work might be okay with something like that.

> The merchandise I had in mind was buttons and stickers and prints and other > physical incarnations of art. You see this kind of stuff sold rather a lot > at anime conventions

Which is precisely why it's not okay. You're not adding anything of your own, you're just profiting off of someone else's stuff.

Here's the question you should be asking: are you making a profit from something you did not create? If so, that money is not yours, you did not earn that money. You didn't make the video game, the story, the art.

> Copyright was originally invented for books.

While true, that's only because books were the first mass-produced creative works. By the time the US constitution came around (and the copyright clause in it), the concept had been well extended beyond that, even to the point where the idea had been generalized to technology andn scientific discoveries (in the form of patents).

> Fan work is created from scratch. It's new.

No, it is a "derivative work." Putting someone else's pictures given meaning by a game they created onto a button and selling it is not a "new" work. If it weren't, why not just leave out the stuff _you didn 't create_ and sell it on your own? You can't, that's why.

> Gatekeeping

This is a really idiotic excuse. Steam isn't the one telling you that you can't sell other people's art and taking all the money for yourself, the _people who made the art_ are telling you that.

> When copyright was introduced, "creators" were a sort of elite. You had to > have a lot of equipment and resources, or more likely, you had to attract > the attention of someone who had a lot of equipment and resources.

More self-serving rationalizations. Writing only takes talent and some time. Whether or not it was good enough to make copies of and sell is another thing. Copyright was set up so that _anyone_ could afford it if they were even a little bit serious. Copyright _protects_ the little guy against a bigger person with more resources at their disposal to copy your idea and make a profit off it. It gives them the right to their work because they're the ones that created it.

> Abuse

This section is completely irrelevant. The problems we have with our copyright and patent laws has nothing to do with protecting a small, indie developer, who made a legitimately good game, from being outcompeted by enterprising salesman who are trying to sell merchandising of someone else's work. When did people like Undertale become "multinational corporations"? You can't make someone seem like a faceless and souless being that it's okay to ripoff when you linked to their Twitter account earlier in the article.

It's people like the author of this article that copyright laws are _rightfully_ meant to protect content-creators from - people who can argue themselves in circles to not feel bad about ripping people off because they think putting someone else's game logo on a button is an "entirely new" work.

<comment><USER8> I'm not talking about putting someone else's art on buttons. I'm talking about artists putting _their own art_ on buttons.

<comment><USER12> Just so I understand what you're advocating - you're advocating that, if I, an artist, drew a picture of Mario from Super Mario Brothers, I should be able to sell that picture on some sort of physical media (button, pin, etc)?

<comment><USER8> Why not? It's your work. You can't really be competing with Nintendo, because they can't create that same picture, because they don't employ you. Also you are extremely unlikely to be making a material impact on the bottom line of a _multi-billion-dollar international media company_.

Also, this is a thing many people already do, so I'm really advocating that it's fine for them to continue doing it.

<comment><USER12> I don't think the fact they are a multi-billion dollar company has any bearing. If it does - where do you draw the line? Is it always okay regardless of the income of the original creator?

It gets stickier when you dive into other types of derivative work. Let's say you write a book and I translate it to Spanish. It's my translation of your story. Based on your framework, is it okay to sell at conferences in paperback form? If not, how is it any different than drawing a character I created and selling it on buttons?

<comment><USER13> Perhaps a translation would need permission, but a total retelling would be allowed. Can you find any problems with that idea?

I look at a translation as like a tracing of someone else's artwork. Not an original drawing of the same character.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem is this. In order to make money you need to be reasonably sure that someone can't take your stuff and sell it as their own.

This is a separate issue to stuff costing too much, or DRM.

Everything you create that is original is copyright to you. This is known as your moral rights. This means that if you come up with a novel character, design or mechanical item, you have the ability to exclusively produce, market, license or sell that thing.

This is good, because thats how the economy works. If you make an item, and a large corporation comes along takes them all and sells them as their own, that would be theft.

This however is a problem for giants like google, youtube and facebook. When you publish something to the giants, you sign away your moral rights. This is mainly to allow things like recompression and excerpts. (Because your emails/videos/photos are your own copyright, google must seek permission to display, alter or create derivative works.)

Its very much in their interest to dilute and dissolve copyright laws. They have managed to capture the general dissatisfaction at the high price of music and movies to push their agenda, which is to sell adverts on the back of someone else's work.

If we take a specific thing like dōjinshi, The people creating the subtitles are not breaking the law. The act of transcription is their own copyright. What is illegal is selling/distributing the video _as well_ without paying the original owners.

In the digital economy, we need strong copyright, or us small people will never be able to make a living.

</comment><comment><USER15> I fully understand the authors argument and disagree almost across the board. He should just strike a licensing agreement like everyone else. It's not hard.

<comment><USER16> It's hard enough to strike a licensing agreement of any kind for a song in a wedding video. Even harder to strike a reasonable one given how copyright works. Hell, Disney used to charge companies up to five digits to sing the Happy Birthday song in a movie.

Yet, anyone reading your comment might be mislead to think that companies are very reasonable about this and there might even be something as easy as Amazon.com to get licenses from. Not the case as it wouldn't make enough for the greedy and powerful as author said. If they want these rights, I think some equally-strong responsibilities are in order in exchange.

<comment><USER15> Calling a one man indie who just had a stroke of success greedy and powerful is silly. Indies are very easy to work with. Napkin agreements are legally sufficient. A simple email promising 30% of net receipts may have been enough to seal the deal.

Getting licenses from large companies isn't that hard either. Are you gonna make a bunch of money? Turns out big corporations love money. So if you're gonna make a bunch of money just contact their licensing department. It's available on their public website.

<comment><USER17> The problem is that that is too much business for individual creators to be bothered with. It is not a matter of whether they can literally do it if they behaved as a rational, rent-seeking Homo Economicus, but whether it's actually on their minds to do business first and not just act on their emotions and run away from the problem altogether, leaving money on the table. For artists, the latter is far more likely to be the case. We should not blame human beings for being flawed and fitting into our arrangement of society poorly.

<comment><USER16> I'd say the real problem is big players buy up or fund the best stuff. So, opposite of that commenter's claim, most people trying to license good content are going to be doing business with medium-to-large firms that are quite greedy and won't give the time of day.

In my wedding video example, it was so hard to get them on the phone and get the _two_ licenses that some companies briefly specialized in doing just that part for people. Fee was typically around $10,000. Far cry from my teacher in middle school contacting Cinderella copyright holder and paying a quarter or so royalty to allow us to do a Cinderella play.

So, if we're giving them control, I say there should be a requirement to make it easy to get a license from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One may ask for a license to sell own crafted things about something we like. It is legitimate that the initial creator has a control over use of his product image and a cut on the profits. Copyright is not broken. It would not be smart for the initial creator to strictly forbid any third party to contribute in the promotion and potential return of its product. But in any case it is up to him to decide and that is legitimate.

<comment><USER9> You're parroting the law, not giving any real reason. "It's legitimate" .. but why? Eevee has actual arguments here, namely that it doesn't promote the advancement of the arts at all which is the sole purpose of copyright.

Why shouldn't I be able to draw artistic representations of a game character?

I can draw a representation of Donald Trump with no problem (as many political cartoonists do) and I own that because I made it. Why the hell does some random digital character have more rights than a human? I know this is a bit of a silly analogy, but your comment is silly to begin with.

It's obvious that if I'm taking someone's art or work and re-selling it with some minor transformations, that's wrong. But if I put work into making something that has my flair, my touch, my innovation, why should the original artist profit from it?

<comment><USER18> I gave the reason, you are ignoring it. Because a creator has the right to decide how it's character is drawn, in what context it's put, for what it is used, etc. it is also a protection against parasites and stealers. If you don't understand that you are not a creator.

Create your own characters and the problem is solved. Or ask for a license. The creator may give you a free license if your drawings and use of it match his liking.

A copyright is a protection, not an interdiction. Ask the permission to the creator. The decision belongs to him and that is, in my opinion, right.

Don't down vote me if you simply disagree with me.

<comment><USER19> You seem to think that the right of a creator to control how people use their creation is self-evident, along with other self-evident rights, like the right to a fair trial.

Other people like me don't feel that it is self-evident, rather, we feel that it is only justified if it effectively encourages the sciences and the arts. Our axiom, the self-evident truth that we're working for, is the flourishing of arts and science, and if we can find a way to do that which doesn't allow creators to dictate what people do with their copy of Mario, all the better.

Once we realise that we're assuming different axioms, we can stop talking past each other.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you build and grow decentralised online communities? - <AUTHOR> ssia; I recently built https://twtxt.net/ as a decentralised micro-blogging platform based on the twtxt file specification format. So far so good, about ~1-3 new users per day. How do online communities form and grow? It would be pretty awesome if I could help anyone run their own instance and grow a network of twtxt instances. Share your ideas/thoughts and suggestions! <comment><AUTHOR> Another user just signed up on [https://twtxt.net/](https://twtxt.net/) and posted their first post! -- But as this thread's question states; I would really feel like I'v accomplished something positive in the world if just one person spun up their own instance! We as a society need to start thinking about taking back control and ownership of our data and the digital footprint we leave behind. Its yours!

<comment><USER2> > We as a society need to start thinking about taking back control and > ownership of our data and the digital footprint we leave behind. Its yours!

Head over to the Solid[0] project then.

[0] [https://solidproject.org](https://solidproject.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks interesting. Similar ideas :) I have a bit of a different focus though; mine is more focused on self-host ability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have a NNTP, although so far nobody joined (except for a few testing messages, and some of my own stuff) and nobody mirrored it onto their own servers (although I haven't yet implement the ability to forward from my computer, and IHAVE currently isn't enabled on my service; I can fix this though if people will want it in future). There has also been the suggestion to also include a web interface to configure and operate it for users who use web interfaces, as well as having the NNTP service for users who use NNTP. There is also the idea to support Markdown, which I also think is helpful, although there are two considerations that must be made: (1) Only articles with a "Content-type: text/markdown" header should be interpreted as Markdown; otherwise, it might mess up a display due to using things that isn't supposed to do. (2) It might be helpful to use a subset of Markdown without HTML features, to make it more readable even if you do not have Markdown on your computer.

</comment><comment><USER4> They grow organically. One person finds it valuable and tells another person who joins, and so on.

Twtxt is a neat format. I personally don't like the lack of new lines, but that's part of its simplicity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I love it too! I just wish I wasn't about ~4yrs late to the party! Oh well better late then never! My goal(s) right now are to help revitalise the twtxt community and build software and tool that help make it easier for _anyone_ to use. So far that's [https://feeds.twtxt.net](https://feeds.twtxt.net) and [https://twtxt.net](https://twtxt.net)

Yes (_just realised I used them here_); the lack of "multiple lines" does feel a bit limiting sometimes; but its not that bad really once you get used to it. I implemented twtxt,net's software such that you couldn't actually accidentally the format of the underlying twtxt.txt files that it writes to.

OTOH I did add Makrdown rendering support to the client (web) that is twtxt.net so you at least have a nice subset of Markdown formatting including pictures!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty cool, reminds me of feedweave \- [https://github.com/feedweave/feedweave- ui](https://github.com/feedweave/feedweave-ui)

The founders of reddit said they used to create fake accounts and have conversations with themselves when the site was starting to make it look like there was activity.

<comment><AUTHOR> :O That's a pretty deceptive way to get people to use your thing eh? NOt sure I want to do that ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think growing a community consists of consistency, inclusivity, and really driving discussions. Paying close attention to users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I agree. Can you elaborate on "consistency", consistency of what?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Of course OTOH; the _real_ question is how do we form decentralised communities of which github.com/prologic/twtxt is designed for? My main goals are to make it as simple as possible for _anyone_ (even non-tech folks) to spin up their own instance.</comment>


Git Commit History Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/2979844

<comment><AUTHOR> Notice what happens at the 5 minute mark. That is when Rails moved to Github last April.

<comment><USER2> I'm not familiar with how rails has been developed but I'm guessing the explosion is due to there previously only being a small group of people with commit access, as opposed to a sudden rush of people working on it when it hit github, right?

<comment><USER3> I think it's _mostly_ just that individuals were being properly credited for patches that they submitted, rather than them going through one of the commiters and the source control tool logging the committer as the patch author.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that is almost certainly 95% of it. Not like Rails was languishing in obscurity before it went to Github. I just thought the visualization was cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there an explanation anywhere about what the different aspects of the visualization represent? (colors, for instance)

<comment><AUTHOR> In the top left corner is a little legend for the colors. The bottom right has the date of the commit. I had to watch in HD and fullscreen to even see them.

It was generated with code_swarm: <http://code.google.com/p/codeswarm/></comment></comment>


Safer bash scripts with 'set -euxo pipefail' (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://vaneyckt.io/posts/safer_bash_scripts_with_set_euxo_pipefail/ <comment><USER2> All good points. I would also pass all shell scripts through shellcheck [1] as well. There is a command line version available for most Linux distros. You can add comments to your script to ignore specific checks.

[1] - [https://www.shellcheck.net/](https://www.shellcheck.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Since we're using `-o` already, we might like the equivalent "longoptions" form:

``` set -o errexit -o nounset -o noclobber -o pipefail ```

But `pipefail` isn't part of POSIX and will fail in dash, tcsh, and friends, so it's arguably better to go ahead and use your shell-specific builtin whenever possible---`shopt` for bash, `setopt` for zsh, _etc_.

``` shopt -s -o errexit nounset noclobber pipefail ```

For that matter, if we're using shell-specific features, we might as well use the appropriate bang pattern:

``` #!/usr/bin/env bash ```

or similar. It's also really nice that Shellcheck differentiates between shells based on bang patterns and changes it's behavior accordingly.

Also, I can't help but mention the bash unit testing framework, BATS!

</comment><comment><USER4> Hilariously I was having to write init.d scripts for a crusty version of CentOS yesterday and used `set -e` instinctively. Died inexplicably importing `/etc/init.d/functions` until I noticed a comment explicitly saying to _not_ set that.</comment>