Americans Taxed $400B for Fiber Optic Internet That Doesn't Exist - <AUTHOR> https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/11/27/americans-fiber-optic-internet/ <comment><USER2> What website is this? It seems to focus a lot on how Trump is doing great, how bad muslims/islam is and on how we should focus on other things than global warming ("carbon dioxide is not a harmful chemical in the traditional sense of the word. It's actually essential for all life on earth—plants need it to live")

<comment><USER3> Even leaving aside the other content on the linked site, I do find it suspicious that the only source it cites for the headline is one guy promoting his own self-published book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's capitalism, exploitation of the poor by the rich. It concentrates power to the detriment of society. In EU Apple and FB are avoiding taxes, in US telecoms steal $400B from the public and gauge prices. Is there any way to keep money and power from concentrating like that?

<comment><USER5> This is not the result of Capitalism is the result of Governmentalism.

<comment><USER6> What are you saying? Regulation is _how_ you prevent raw capitalism from blindly spewing negative externalities.

Even Lenin came around to that idea eventually.

<comment><USER7> You cant steal from tax payers if you dont have access to tax payer's money..

Companies misusing public funds, and government allowing them to do it is an exemplary case of why people want smaller government. Because it does these kind of things.

<comment><USER8> The opposite of a bad government is not a smaller government but a better government. Your same arguments could be used to argue that a bigger gourvenement with more authority on companies could be a solution. Ultimately size is just a poor proxy for performance of a government and we need to start thinking in term of transparency and capabilities

<comment><USER7> > The opposite of a bad government is not a smaller government but a better > government

Except if you think all government is bad government. There is no reason to believe that chicago should raise taxes to prevent chicago from selling its taxpayers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a source that's not run by a self-proclaimed nationalist? [https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/contact/](https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/contact/) and isn't on a spammy feeling website?

</comment><comment><USER10> How does the US have 27.64 Mbps average upload? Even Comcast only provides <= 20 Mbps upload...

<comment><USER11> because it comes from people running speedtest/ookla: [http://www.speedtest.net/global-index](http://www.speedtest.net/global-index)

They say 70mbit download.. Akamai says 18: [https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state- of-t...](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the- internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-executive-summary.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > In fact, in 1992, the speed of broadband, as detailed in state laws, was 45 > Mbps in both directions — by 2014, all of us should have been enjoying > gigabit speeds (1000 Mbps).

This doesn't sound quite right to me? That's not how I remember 1992 at all.

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember hearing about this a decade ago. The fact that we apparently kept paying them is a condemnation of our entire infrastructure.

Likely where there's smoke there's fire. What else in our system is this broken?

</comment><comment><USER14> rayiner has convincingly demolished the book series upon which the article is based: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556)

<comment><USER15> To be fair, he only showed where the $200 Billion number came from and claimed that it's not an accurate way to evaluate whether or not the number.

I'd be curious if he still feels that US infrastructure is really swell seeing as US speed placement appears to have dropped.

I can say from my personal and work experience that U.S. connections are far and away better than large portions of the world. Peering agreements between companies are significantly saner than in some parts of the world, and the differences between wireline and wireless connectivity is pretty dramatic in terms of stability and speed. For US ISPs to be using wireless as a comparable service to broadband deployment is flat out fallacious.

ISPs have done fantastic work on backbone and datacenter speed and availability, but last mile consumer connectivity just isn't worth it to them financially. No amount of regulation or deregulation will make that worthwhile. This is why municipal ownership of the last mile is most likely going to be the long term solution if the US wants to increase speed and availability for anywhere but the most densely packed areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A couple critiques of the linked piece.

First off, the title is somewhat misleading. See this Reddit discussion on the same piece: [https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7gob2w/american...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/7gob2w/americans_taxed_400_billion_for_fiber_optic/dqkhyms/).

It seems like the "taxes" were really fees that went straight to the telecom companies. It's not as if the government collected these taxes, and then failed to push ISPs to roll out fiber or build public fiber of its own.

Secondly, this piece tries to make a number of comparisons to countries that have faster wired internet service, namely South Korea and Singapore. South Korea and Singapore have much smaller populations that are concentrated in urban areas, and are generally smaller geographically. The sheer size of the United States, combined with our propensity for sprawling suburban development, in addition to the higher throughput requirements of a much larger population, would seem to suggest that delivering widespread fiber capability will cost a lot more in the U.S. than in South Korea or Singapore. This is not even to mention the eminent domain issues and federal vs. local government conflicts that South Korea and Singapore do not face to comparable degree.

Third, the "recommendation" made at the end of the piece seems to be based on a bit of wishful thinking.

> "The Trump administration would be wise to make improving America's digital > infrastructure a priority. The South Korean model, market liberalizations > combined with hard investments, could be a viable model."

What "liberalizations" would lead to growth in fiber connectivity? For the large numbers of Americans with only one ISP choice ([https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us- br...](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-broadband- still-no-isp-choice-for-many-especially-at-higher-speeds/)), it's not clear what incentive there would be for a competing ISP to come in, make the large investments necessary to physically lay fiber, and then begin competing with the original ISP on price and service. There is tremendous upfront financial risk, and if the thesis of market liberalization is correct, namely that competition drives prices lower and speeds higher, the ISPs laying fiber may well never see a return on their investment.

Fourth, I think we should generally question whether massive national investment in fiber even makes sense at this point. Improvements like DOCSIS 3.1 allow for fiber-like speeds over traditional cable lines. At a certain point, we should ask whether gigabit speeds are really all that useful for most people.</comment>


Anyone have some good little snitch profiles? - <AUTHOR> I'm not a developer, SEO person, etc, who has insight on the many, many clients and servers trying to collection information from my macbook. Ad Blockers do a good job with published white lists. Does anyone have a good set of Little Snitch profiles? <comment><USER2> Wrong forum. Ask on security stackexchange.</comment>


Meet Instagram's Youngest Investor--26 head of Thrive - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/josh-kushner-thrive-capital-and-instagram-2012-4

<comment><USER2> Sigh. Trust fund baby's. It's hard to celebrate a home run when you've started on third.

Business Insider doesn't report in the article that his previous company, Votsu, had been sued out of existence. I wish I could have more respect for kushner....but I just can't.</comment>


Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 pass 10% market share, Windows XP falls below 30% - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/01/01/windows-8-windows-8-1-pass-10-market-share-windows-7-still-gains-windows-xp-falls-30/ <comment><USER2> I've been using my new Dell Venue Pro 8 (Windows 8.1) on the holiday break and although I've found technology boring for the past two years, I found myself quite enjoying this new little tablet.

Now, if only Windows 8.2 or 9 focused some needed attention on large form- factor ("desktop"), I'd be very happy.

<comment><USER3> I can't help but think that if there was a Venue Pro 8 with a decent dock so that you could use it as a desktop and take it to a meeting as a tablet would be just a no-brainer for corporate IT shops. I can't count the number of times I have seem someone running between meeting rooms balancing their laptop like a waitress running through a restaurant with a huge tray above her head. So, maybe a thunderbolt port for docking?

<comment><USER4> Being from the enterprise world I concur.

The short-term advancement I am looking forward is having my ipad mini and macbook air be a single core that can be docked a la Atrix and also become a full blown desktop on a dock a la surface 2 with gaming capabilities. Having it on a phone-size would be the next step but the 7 inch screen is so much better for reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the Windows 8 UX pretty much. I feel very comfortable with the horizontal scroll which is, imho, totally natural and in some sense more effective than the vertical scroll we got used because of smartphones.

Perhaps we're crazy, but at Theneeds we believed in Windows 8 and we released our app [1] even before iOS and Android... let's see what happens ;)

[1] [http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en- us/app/theneeds/9e1d48a...](http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en- us/app/theneeds/9e1d48a5-8c46-4723-ba46-9fc9cd6a8464)

<comment><USER6> Hey, that looks great. When I'm near my windows 8 computer I'll be sure to give it a spin!

<comment><USER5> Thanks. Let me have your feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's amazing to me that it is news that an OS which was released 13 years ago is now passing under 30% of market share.

<comment><USER8> If mostly all you do is fire up a browser to use the web then there's pretty much no reason to upgrade from XP, I'd expect there's a lot of machines out there which essentially fall into that use case, why spend money on something for no appreciable gain?

<comment><USER9> And post-XP a lot of things which used to be there and provided a "good experience" to some users are gone, so some things are more of a loss than a gain:

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

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_7)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_8)

And you might be surprised how many are still using 2K or 98SE, whole communities have developed around providing further patches and improvements. OSs that are "dead" in the mainstream continue on as things approach more of the "retro" community...

(I'm still using XP, haven't needed more than that. Will likely still use it even after MS stops support. I also regularly used 98SE up until around '08, then I dual-booted with XP until '10.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Were 30% of people really buying Windows XP machines last year? I think they meant "usage share" rather than "market share".

<comment><USER11> Thanks for that. I've just acquired a new pet peeve: not only is "market share" not "usage share", but usage share is not the same as web usage which is all web analytics can measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The movie _Hard to Kill_ should be remade about Windows XP and IE6 :)

<comment><USER13> IE6 is pretty much dead. It's IE8 that won't die.

<comment><USER14> Do anyone know the percentages of the split between XP/Vista/7 in the IE8 population?

<comment><USER13> Here's what I have from about 6 months of Google Analytics. This is a line-of- business web application. GA is only on the login page.

Visits 5,645

% of Total: 4.25% (132,872)

XP: 62.37%

7: 35.57%

Vista: 1.52%

Server 2003: 0.53%

That Windows 7 number scares me a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does "Linux" include Android and ChromeOS? One of my relatives got a Chrombook. two others got Android tablets. Other family got two new Android Moto G smartphones. Out of say 30 people I don't know anyone who got a new windows phone, tablet or desktop.

<comment> w-ll I got a surface pro 2 and am very surprised at how much I enjoy it. Playing games like Myst off of Steam blew me away. And this might sound crazy... but IE 11 is my default browser. Chrome is almost unusable on it but IE works great. Again, Very Surprised at how awesome it is.

It's a tablet size computer, NOT a tablet sized phone.

<comment><USER16> I think Firefox has been Metro optimized.

<comment> w-ll I haven't tried a Metro version but the latest FF in desktop mode doesn't have support for basic touch screen gestures, and doesn't support the stylus. Same with Chrome, but Chrome will outright freeze on pages that so far looks like some weird scroll configs (gmail after opening a few messages freezes)

IE 11 has at least basic gesture support, pinch-zoom, gravity scrolling (whatever its called). But what I really love is using the stylus, and IE treats that as mouse input, so you get hover, click, etc..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone know what the correlation is between the rapidly decreasing WinXP market share and the size of the large botnet pools?

</comment><comment><USER18> I think a bigger story from these statistics is the rise in Linux: "while Linux gained 0.17 percentage points (to 1.73 percent)"

Going from 1.56% to 1.73% is an ~11% increase, which is a pretty large rise (albeit from a smaller base)

Meanwhile, XP's "huge" drop was 7%. Which is a fair drop, but I wouldn't call it huge.

Seeing this rise in Linux is promising.

<comment><USER19> There is no rise in Linux adoption unless you count ChromeOS.

I use Linux on the desktop but it has been a while since I have seen or heard of anyone making the move to Ubuntu or anything else install-yourself on the desktop. However I do know of lots of happy Chromebook users.

There is no headline story here as far as Linux is concerned. As I see it there is a very slow replacement rate for regular PC's - 10% market share in over a year looks to me like only 11% of PC's have been replaced in the last year. Given PC's are supposed to have an average lifespan of 5-7 years that means Windows really is not selling very well.

<comment><USER20> PC's with 2-3 terabyte hard drives and 8+ GB of RAM are not that expensive, and download speeds are fast with broadband, which allows "excess" resources to be used to obtain and install a Linux iso within Windows using VirtualBox. So it's become a lot easier to experiment with Linux. I like Linux Mint.

<comment><USER19> [http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F027q8xw](http://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F027q8xw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you're a developer and use Windows for any reason then Windows 8.1 is a huge improvement over previous Microsoft operating systems. Only Windows 2000 compares. The built in type-1 hypervisor alone is worth the upgrade. Hyper-V is faster than virtual-box and other is becoming a real competitor to VMWare and Citrix products.

<comment><USER22> Maybe, but 8.1 killed all of our VS2005 projects. If you are a developer that doesn't want to do upgrades on potentially fragile build files it is not a god send.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very interesting. I think that Win8 is much much better to use especially when you have a touch screen.

</comment><comment><USER24> But this netstat thing is only taking into account those computers with Internet usage. Would the amount of corporate, administration, financial... computers limited to intranet usage be long enough to modify this graphic?

<comment><USER25> I wouldn't be surprised if XP's share increased. Most of the desktops at a large healthcare company we had as a client were still running IE6.

<comment><USER26> If that is the case, Windows XP share will drop rapidly over the next few months. When MS ends support for XP it will no longer be in compliance with HIPPA.

<comment><USER24> Not all have to fulfill the hippa. For instance I know one of the greatest stores chain in my country that is still using win2k. Good OS by the way XD...

<comment><USER26> No,but the parent mentioned healthcare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder where Chrome sits in this.

</comment><comment><USER28> Slow news day?</comment>


How Harold Lloyd Filmed "Safety Last!" - <AUTHOR> https://silentlocations.com/2012/02/29/how-harold-lloyd-filmed-safety-last/ <comment><USER2> It's common to make allowances when watching cinema from previous eras to make allowances for the times. With Safety Last, though, it is hard to see how one could possibly make a better version today. The restrictions such as the lack of sound, the black and white and the utter lack of post-production are completely embraced to make something you couldn't make another way, and the pacing is razor-tight even by modern standards.

<comment><USER3> I've found a lot of the better comedies from that period (Chaplin, Keaton) to be damn near timelessly good. Art films are hit-or-miss but when they hit they seem, similarly, just as interesting and powerful as they must have been then. It's the dramas that consistently struggle, IMO, with even the best requiring some serious patience and acclimatization to the time & style to enjoy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?corpus=26&smoothing=3&...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?corpus=26&smoothing=3&content=%22+safety+first+%22%2C%22+automobile+%22%2C%22+factory+%22&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%22%20safety%20first%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C%22%20automobile%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C%22%20factory%20%22%3B%2Cc0)

[https://www.google.com/books/edition/Safety_First/XxqjIqE4yq...](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Safety_First/XxqjIqE4yqIC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22%22+safety+first+%22%22&pg=PP109&printsec=frontcover)

> "The modern Safety First movement was born at United States Steel in 1906"

I was kind of surprised that "Safety First" is that old.

<comment><USER5> Tangentially - problems with "Safety First" I personally experienced: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u50lS_SxiSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u50lS_SxiSU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Essentially completely unrelated, but this is also a very good film about safety - "Forklift Truck Driver Klaus":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DILjd69C0o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DILjd69C0o)

<comment><USER7> If we're really going down this tangent, then here's my personal favorite safety film: [0]

[0] [https://www.rifftrax.com/shake-hands-with- danger](https://www.rifftrax.com/shake-hands-with-danger)

<comment><USER4> I just heard the musical sting.

Just the song if that's what you want: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmrs9GYkbqg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmrs9GYkbqg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I grew up with Maarten van Rooijen's silent movie feature, every week, 'silence is golden' it was called. Super interesting era of moviemaking when the medium was so fresh that almost every movie was an experiment in itself. The tricks used to make the movies and lots of excerpts were used to illustrate this bygone era. He was very enthusiastic about it and knew all kinds of details that made it come alive.

All of it was in Dutch though, so for an international audience even though it is about silent film probably not that interesting, and I can't find any of it online so unfortunately no sample episode.

</comment><comment><USER9> Harold Lloyd lost part of his hand when one of those comedy era bombs blew up on him. In all his later movies he has a prosthesis.</comment>


Tor exit node operator raided in Austria - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/6283/raided-for-running-a-tor-exit-accepting-donations-for-legal-expenses <comment><USER3> It seems like a lot of people are objecting to the raid/seizure itself in addition to the possibility of conviction, so I have a question. Is it reasonable for the police to investigate an exit node operator for traffic coming from his node, even if they know he's an exit node operator?

The way I see it, it's their job* to determine whether the traffic in question was relayed, or whether it was the exit node operator himself generating that traffic. In an ideal world, they could just call him up and ask nicely - <USER2> if he was actually guilty, he'd say "No, no way it was me!" and immediately start destroying any evidence. On the other hand, raiding someone's home or server rack and confiscating all of their computers isn't a great solution if most exit node operators are not guilty themselves.

I'm not aware of a good solution that avoids inconveniencing exit node operators without giving them some kind of blanket immunity to investigation that goes beyond just relayed traffic.

* - I'm aware that this might be impossible, but you can't know whether it will be ahead of time. It's possible that they could raid him and find no proof, even if he's guilty. It's also possible that they could raid him and find exactly what they were looking for. Like many investigation tactics, there's no guaranteed payoff.

<comment><USER4> In the strict public policy sense you could argue the raid/seizure either way; The pro-raid argument would go "This activity harms society by allowing criminal activity which is part of the economics of exploiting children, thus it is right for the state to step in and make these raids to identify and contain those threats." Then you could make the anti-raid argument, "The economic disruption of taking a legitimate business off-line and possibly causing irreparable harm to innocent citizens does not warrant such a drastic measure without solid evidence of complicity in the commission of a crime."

In the United States there is an analogous situation which is that of the 'high speed pursuit.' In the pursuit situation the officers have strong reason to believe the driver of a vehicle was involved in a crime and seek to arrest them. The driver of the vehicle doesn't want to be arrested and so they drive away quickly. If the officers give chase, they greatly increase the chance that harm will come to innocent bystanders. If they don't give chase they risk losing their suspect. Generally those debates come down to things like "what crime might they have committed?" and if it was failure to stop for a right turn, that is seen as not being as 'reasonable to chase' as hit and run vehicular manslaughter.

I tend to fall into the "Do the police work to figure out who the crooks are and if you need the co-operation of an end-node provider then get a warrant to compel that co-operation." But I also have spoken to officers who feel that such restrictions are 'red tape' and keep them from doing the job they were paid to do.

In this particular case we don't have the police version of the story. Perhaps they think this guy is complicit? Did they raid/seize any other end nodes? Did they have a warrant and what did it say? Had this person been involved in other questionable activities? "Presumption of innocence" is not a principle that extends outside of US borders so its always difficult to contextualize police action in other countries to Americans who take their constitution for granted.

<comment><USER5> > "Presumption of innocence" is not a principle that extends outside of US > borders so its always difficult to contextualize police action in other > countries to Americans who take their constitution for granted.

What? There's nothing particularly American about the principle, it's an accepted core tenet of all democratic countries and many of the others.

<comment><USER6> There is a wide spectrum for how strictly "presumption of innocence" is followed in various societies in practice though.

The creator of the Winny filesharing program in Japan was dismissed from his Tokyo University Research Assistant position as he went to trial:

 _"On May 10, 2004, Kaneko was arrested for suspected conspiracy to commit copyright violation by the High-tech Crime Taskforce of the Kyoto Prefectural Police. Kaneko was released on bail on June 1, 2004. The court hearings started in September 2004 at Kyoto district court. On December 13, 2006, Kaneko was convicted of assisting copyright violations and sentenced to pay a fine of ¥1.5 million (about US$13,200).[3] He appealed the ruling. On October 8, 2009, the guilty verdict was overturned by the Osaka High Court.[4] On December 20, 2011, Kaneko was cleared of all charges after a panel of judges agreed that the prosecution could not prove that he had any intention to promote the software for illegal use.[5] [6]_ " (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny#Criminal_procedure>)

He was definitely treated by society as if he were guilty of the crime as soon as he was arrested.

<comment><USER7> By that standard, suspects are often presumed guilty by society even in the USA (for instance, suspected rapists and other sex offenders). The presumption of innocence is still considered one of the core principles of democracy and/or the rule of law.

<comment><USER4> Its a fair point, its much more codified elsewhere than it was at one time. And to be fair the US has been doing things like locking people in Guantanamo without due process which is disturbing in itself. The point I was trying to make clear was that I recognize trying to interpret a story involving the actions of a the police in a country which doesn't have the same legal climate as the one I live in, it fraught with dangers in making assumptions that don't or won't hold up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We need a community fund that can be used for things like this. The equivalent of a hardship fund with an aim of protecting our internet freedoms. It's good for the world, it's good for us individually, and it's good for business.

Everyone throws a few €£$ in a pot and a few volunteers administer it and do a bit of due diligence to ensure cases are valid. I guess in the US this is the EFF, but there are plenty of cases outside their remit.

It'd be like social security but for legal battles - but I don't think contributing/not should entitle or exempt anyone from funds.

<comment><USER9> Agreed.

I think one of the biggest benefits of such a fund is that it could employ a lawyer who could look at cases like this to determine who is "worthy" of receiving funds.

I don't want to be that guy, but all I know about this is that a guy claims that the child porn that was found was due to him running an exit node.

I don't want to say the porn was his, but it's possible that the porn was his.

I'd feel better about donating if I knew a lawyer had investigated and found his story to be credible.

Hypothetically, what if it was his porn, and then internet raise 1000's of dollars for him and then have this info come out. I'd imagine most people would be like me and never donate to people like this again. After all who wants to knowingly help someone escape justice when they actually deserve jail time.

<comment><USER10> There are already quite a few funds like that, torservers.net and noisetor.net are examples of that, both have lawyers on stand-by. I recommend donating to these folks to keep exit nodes online!

<comment><USER9> I did not know that.

Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >Yesterday i got raided for someone sharing child pornography over one of my Tor exits.

Reason #1 why I will never run a tor exit node. I don't want to make it easier for child predators to get off nor do I want the legal issues they bring.

<comment><USER12> I always find it odd that people often tend to focus on pedophiles "getting off" rather than pedophiles hurting children. If we really want to protect children, we'd do well to find harmless ways for pedophiles to get off. It's pretty well established that giving people benign sexual outlets is an effective way to prevent them from seeking harmful ones.

I mean, yeah, don't run a TOR exit node because of the legal risk - that makes sense. Or because you're afraid it makes it easier to hurt kids... well, I don't know if it really does, but at least your heart is in the right place. But what business is it of anyone else who gets off?

<comment><USER13> Are you seriously defending child pornography right now? First off, the "harmless outlet" concept is absolutely not "well established." Pedophilia is a paraphilia. The desire grows as it is fed.

Furthermore, the reason you hear of child porn _rings_ is because those are what form - people share it with each other in a tit-for-tat sort of way. It absolutely incentivizes the production of more, which means more abused kids.

God damnit HN, I should have known a thread on a Tor node being shut down would bring out all the child porn apologists. Funny how that happens, eh?

<comment><USER14> I like how you jump from not being well-established to being definitely wrong. Everyone is telling you that citation is needed because it very much is. On topics like this a lot of people have strong opinions, far fewer have well- informed ones. We want the latter.

Here is my, I believe, moderately informed opinion.

As [http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/Adobefiles/porn.pd...](http://anthonydamato.law.northwestern.edu/Adobefiles/porn.pdf) makes clear, evidence that we now have says that widespread availability to porn has coincided with a massive decrease in rapes. Caused? Very hard to prove (as with most social statistics). But definitely coincided and there likely is some causal effect.

If that happens with regular porn, the natural expectation is that it is likely to happen with specific kinds of porn as well. If so, even though we don't have proof (and proof will be very hard to come to), we should be inclined to believe that the "harmless outlet" concept is likely valid.

Moving on, let's address your "paraphelia" comment. My opinion is that paraphelias are sexual orientations that we dislike for fairly good reasons. However all evidence that I'm aware of says that sexual orientations exist, have poorly understood causes, and are permanent. Penalizing homosexuality did not stop it, nor did allowing it create more. When we didn't have operations to allow transgendered people to become their mental gender, they still wanted it just as much. And so on and so forth.

Pedophilia is just another sexual orientation. (Actually many subdivisions exist, some are interested in girls, some in boys, some in both, some also are attracted to adult women, etc.) You aren't attracted to men or women, you're attracted to children. As with homosexuality, it isn't likely to ever be cured. Unlike homosexuality, there can be no possible consent, and expressing it is fundamentally against our moral values. Unfortunately sex is a very strong urge, and denying tends to fail in the long run.

There is no evidence that _any_ sexual orientation is affected by availability of stimulating materials. Therefore it is unlikely that child porn contributes to the existence of pedophilia. As for incentivizing - anyone who thinks that sexual beings need to be _incentivized_ to try to do what they are wired to do doesn't understand sexual drives. Full stop.

I give it better than even odds that if you get to this point, you'll think that I'm a "child porn apologist". You'd be wrong about that.

Why?

Because, as I said, child porn is interesting to pedophiles. Evidence that I've seen says that pedophiles actually will abuse children. Repeatedly. If you can track them down through child porn, and book them for that, you're probably doing the world a service.

It is kind of like going after Al Capone for tax invasion. It is not exactly what we didn't like him for, but it was what we could get him on.

Incidentally my opinion on whether child porn should be criminalized will change very quickly if I ever run into evidence that some combination of therapy and availability of child porn can allow pedophiles to remain in society and abuse at an acceptably low rate. (The idea of an "acceptable" risk of child abuse is revolting to many, but public policy accepts the idea of an "acceptably low" risk of all sorts of things, like death, dismemberment, etc. And, honestly, we're implicitly accepting that there is an acceptable risk of abuse every time we underfund programs to find and help people who are at risk...)

<comment><USER13> hey look at all those fucking words you wrote defending child pornography. I didn't read any of it, but you should forward it to your family, I'm sure they'd be very proud.

Glancing up I caught the phrase "just another sexual orientation." There's no point in arguing with this crap.

You people need to get out of this virtual bubble where child pornography is somehow a divisive issue and into the real world, where real children suffer real abuse at the hands of real people so they can get their rocks off. The lack of empathy is just stunning.

<comment><USER15> Hey, look how you seem incapable of arguing politely and convincingly, just because the issue is child pornography.

Pedosexual acts are forbidden because there is no possibility of free, informed, consent. There is an asymmetric power relationship between an adult and a child that the adult is probably not aware of. For this reason, and this reason alone, pedosexual acts are forbidden.

It's entirely reasonable to believe an adult and a child could have a healthy sexual relationship and some people will testify they had such relationships as children. The crucial point is that it is never possible to ascertain this was actually the case and is ever actually the case. If you are a pedophile in a sexual relationship with a child, it is entirely unreasonable to believe your relationship is a healthy one. To be on the safe side and because we cannot possibly differentiate, there is a blanket ban on such relationships.

Pedophilia is not forbidden. Like homosexuality, it is a minority sexual preference. However, unlike in the case of homosexuality, society is unlikely to ever allow relationships in which the physical acts to which this preference leads can have a place. As such pedophiles need to learn to ignore their feelings. They need help in doing that and we should support every single one that acknowledges his problem and seeks help.

Pedophiles are not people that abuse children. People that abuse children are criminals. Usually they are also pedophiles, but that doesn't mean you may interpret it the other way around. Most thieves are heterosexuals.

Now as to the issue of the Tor exit node. The fact that this instance deals with child pornography is entirely irrelevant. It may as well have been illegal medicine sales, exchanging stolen information or other illegal activities.

<comment><USER16> "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." - Oscar Wilde

Coincidentally, most of opinions here are being expressed with the help of the (optional) pseudo-anonymity allowed by Hacker News. Few would be willing to have such discussions with the same level of honesty offline or on Facebook given the public's level of hysteria. It would put a person in real physical danger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tor can be used for good and for bad. It's the very same problem that Cory Doctorow talks about in his lectures about the War on General Purpose Computing, and it's not an easy problem to solve.

I'm an admin on a social/gaming site (a MUD with appendant forum, blogs, and other community elements), and we have had to make a few decisions about Tor in the last couple of years.

Some background: the site is quite old, and we have historically encouraged users to sign up without needing to provide a unique ID such as email address. They _can_ provide one, but don't have to. In the last few years we have had the problem of occasional griefers log on and cause whatever social havoc they can.

Now, my personal feelings about Tor are generally quite positive, and I like the freedoms it provides people who are otherwise restricted by their ISPs or governments from accessing legitimate resources. Like many others have said, Tor is a tool that, while it can be used to do illegal things, is also used to provide a very useful service to people who need it to get on with things you and I take for granted.

Now, back to our griefers: We have a number of banning mechanisms based on IP or domain, and they tend to be successful because griefers usually get bored when they can't access the site for a couple of hours. However, because a tiny minority of griefers are more persistent, more technically adept, and figured they could use Tor to damage our community, we did a little bit of analysis and found that few if any legitimate users of our site came from Tor exit points, and we chose to block them. The alternative was to require a unique identity during the sign-up process, and frankly we wanted as few hurdles as possible to new users (anyone who knows the MUD community knows that it's in decline, and low-friction signups are pretty desirable). So we blacklist Tor exit points from our signup process.

The unfortunate fact is that some Tor users do bad things with the fantastic tool at their disposal, and end up spoiling it for the legitimate (and extremely valuable) use cases that make it such an amazing tool. Yet its very anonymity means that there is no easy way to allow one set of uses while disallowing others. This is a hard problem, and one I'm not smart enough to solve.

<comment><USER18> This problem may very well grow as IPv6 gains adoption. IP address won't be a viable indicator of identity.

What we need is a distributed, pseudonymous reputation system. In this way, honest users would have no problem signing up for services such as yours, but griefers would have much more trouble, because there would be a very real cost each time they destroyed one of their pseudonymous identities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I fully support TOR and I think that overall it's a good thing for the internet but legally I don't know if he has a leg to stand on. Being an exit node operator carries these risks which he knew about so the court system has him there. The danger if he is tried and convicted is that all it sets a dangerous precedent for the rest of the TOR network.

Who's to say where the blame stops? Can the relay operators passing the packets along be convicted too? I hope for the sake of the TOR network that he gets off on the charges because if he does not, less and less people will be willing to be exit nodes which essentially means the end of the TOR network.

<comment><USER20> Without knowing and understanding Austrian law you can't make such speculations. In the USA he wouldn't be breaking any laws.

<comment><USER21> I have friend here is the US with loads of bandwidth (he has a hosting business) and has talked about running a tor exit node, but fears that he puts his business at risk if he does that.

I'm interested to see why you don't think he'd be breaking any laws.

<comment><USER22> The Software Freedom Law Center has stated that in their legal opinion it is legal, however this does not mean that you won't get raided or harassed by law enforcement, it simply means you probably won't go to jail.

<comment><USER23> >> it simply means you probably won't go to jail.

...for a super long time. My bet (admittedly founded on nothing) is that they book you regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I will need to wait for his local news to confirm the story before I will donate. I trust him, but you can't just say I need all of your money without proof, that's like a certain Nigerian prince.

I really hope this is fake because its really sad to see people like William get caught in the middle of a situation like this. However, with my gut feeling this is real, I will be waiting for confirmation to submit my donation.

<comment><USER25> William has a long history on LET, he runs a hosting company and is among the most well-known users on the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What's next? If someone walks across my lawn with a backpack full of child porn DVDs I'll be liable for aiding a felon? I'm sure the authorities would agree that's absurd, yet it's fundamentally identical to this case.

<comment><USER27> Wouldn't a closer analogy be someone suing FedEx because you used them to ship a DVD of child pornography?

<comment><USER28> I think a combination of the two would be a better analogy:

A complete stranger knocks on your door and asks you if it's ok for FedEx to deliver an unmarked parcel of DVDs to your house, and he will collect them from you later.

You do not know his name or address. The package arrives. You open it and examine the DVDs, but find that they are encrypted. You pass them on as agreed.

Next day the feds knock on your door, saying they have a tip-off that some child porn, bomb-making manuals and stolen bank account details were delivered to your address. You tell them exactly what happened. They seize your laptop and search it for said materials, but find nothing incriminating.

Have you committed a crime?

I hope not (in both cases) but at the same time I think if the tor exit node operator is protected from prosecution for illegal material passing through the node, then the person passing on the mysterious package should have exactly the same protection.

<comment><USER29> The validity of that analogy strongly depends on whether local activists make a habit of passing packages with encrypted contents through your place, to avoid prosecution of a tyrannical government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What if the guy had an open Wifi router? And the neighbors downloaded a movie? This goes to show law enforcement does not know what they are doing.

I run a node as well and noticed other (far less severe) downsides of doing so. Registering on certain forums won't work and purchasing games on Steam doesn't work. These parties just blacklist the entire list of IPs published running exit nodes.

<comment><USER3> Should law enforcement just say "Oh, you have an open Wifi hotspot/you're running a Tor exit node, I guess this is a dead end, thanks for your time"? Investigating (including seizing equipment) to determine whether the traffic in question actually came from the Tor network seems like a reasonable idea. Otherwise, anyone running an exit node would have a blank check to do whatever they'd like and simply claim it was just traffic they were passing through.

I know that people like to pretend otherwise, but as long as there are crossover points between the Tor network and the public internet, there will be non-anonymous people in the real world who will have to deal with things like this. "I'm running a Tor exit node" is not (and should not be) a magical pass that makes you immune to any kind of investigation.

<comment><USER31> This is a great point. It needs to be investigated.

But, if he is found guilty and the traffic did come from tor than this is a lot like sending drugs through the mail and convicting the post office.

<comment><USER3> I agree on the general point, and don't think that he should be found guilty if he was just relaying traffic. However, I think that you have to be very careful about analogies like that because there's a wealth of subtleties. I'd like to investigate a couple of them here.

Most of us would probably agree that convicting the post office would be crazy, yet there's an entire continuum of package delivery services including the government postal system, private delivery services like UPS, professional couriers and asking your friend Steve to drop something off on his way home from work. If Steve gets caught delivering a package that contains drugs, his claim of being an unknowing "relayer" would likely be viewed with more suspicion than the same claim coming from a UPS truck driver.

That reasoning makes sense to us because we know how package delivery systems work, and have a vague idea of the probabilities involved. However, Tor is new and niche enough that you can't rely on an arbitrary person (or even a police officer or judge) knowing enough about it to make those same judgments. They don't know whether Tor is more like Steve or the postal service, and it'll take time before that knowledge is assimilated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can't empathize. With great power comes great responsibility. If you're protecting someone else's privacy by publicly running an exit node for Tor under your name, that's expected.

The open Wi-Fi analogy doesn't fly here. It's more than pure unawareness, you need to _purposefully_ install Tor and route anonymous traffic to the internet. That entails being held accountable for what this traffic is used for.

If an analogy is needed, the right one is giving the key for your P.O. box to anyone with a mask, then complaining you're being charged because they've found child pornography there.

<comment><USER5> You're begging the question. _Why_ does routing someone's traffic make you accountable for the traffic? Because _someone_ needs to be accountable?

I'm not sure analogies are very helpful.

<comment><USER32> > Why does routing someone's traffic make you accountable for the traffic? > Because someone needs to be accountable?

The evidence is on him now, so he has to prove it _wasn't_. Given Tor's anonymity, that's rather difficult, but it's his problem. Which is stupid in the first place, because he dug himself on this hole, and that's why I can't empathize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is William of Edis.at, the company offering the free Raspberry Pi hosting deal posted here a few weeks ago.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow.

William has received more than $1300 in Bitcoin donations in the past 3 hours.

[http://blockchain.info/address/1CPKAMtD4bcLrh8SRHfSxBBMmQQ5c...](http://blockchain.info/address/1CPKAMtD4bcLrh8SRHfSxBBMmQQ5cqahPZ)

<comment><USER35> Yea, um, trust me i didn't expect that - In fact i didn't even look until i read this now and it's true: balance 124BTC (I had around 7 before)...

Now i need to think how i can pay Bitcoins back when this is done (as i don't know if the source addresses are valid then still (if they ever were and not just a proxy source) and who sent what amount at mass sends...) Tricky, probably can't pay bitcoin back :(

<comment><USER34> Yeah, if they paid you directly from an online wallet, sending funds back to the address you received them won't necessarily get deposited in their account. And if they don't hold the private key, they can't sign a message to you with it...

You probably can't pay them back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Personally, I have 2Tb, and it's not legal (but not immoral). I can't imagine what legal uses an individual could have for 100Tb of storage.

<comment><AUTHOR> He owns one large ISP in Austria and has multiple personal projects. And no judge has ever said that running a Tor exit node isn't legal AFAIK.

<comment><USER37> I'm pretty sure he's an employee of the company (edis.at) not the owner (<http://www.firmenabc.at/edis-gmbh_EBkc>).

<comment><USER35> Correct, i don't own it - I just work there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I know little about the Tor community, but is there any verification of these sort of claims?

<comment><USER39> I briefly looked for other information about this and I found this thread on the tor-talk mailing list. The thread mentions he contacted the torservers.net team for a recommendation about a lawyer. The thread also mentions someone is going to provide better proof soon.

[https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- talk/2012-Novembe...](https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor- talk/2012-November/026616.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Well ... go on authorities. These pirate parties need votes. They are only at 5-6% now. Let's ensure that they can get at least 20% on the next elections.

</comment><comment><USER37> his twitter account with some further information <http://twitter.com/str0AT> [german]

</comment><comment><USER41> I'd honestly like to know how he paid for all this stuff: up to 30TB/day traffic according to arstechnica (costs surely more than 1-2k euro/month), loads of servers - all with the salary of a 20 years old ISP employee?

<comment><USER42> I'm a 15 year old 'kid` that has been pushing 30TB/day traffic thru a few Tor exits for months just fine, because I truly believe in freedom of speech.

You know, money isn't that hard to get. For me, a few weeks of coding got me a few thousands of euros. He was running an ISP apparently, and selling VPSs. I've been sysadmining a few boxes for a few VPS hosting companies and got enough money to run a few Tor exits pushing over 2Gbps for months.

(Also, I think that it's hilarious that me having my 15-year-old girlfriend pics is considered illegal, thanks to CP laws. )

I truly believe in this: <http://datalove.me/>

<comment><USER41> A TB of traffic will cost at least around €2-3 from most european (and other) ISPs with VPS so you basically claim to have enough spare change lying around at the age of 15 to pay €2000-3000/month just for Tor traffic because you're an idealist and after buying all the stuff a 15 year old normally buys first? ;-) I call BS, or rich parents.

(and btw., WW was not running the ISP, he wrote somewhere in this thread that he is just a normal employee)

<comment><USER42> > A TB of traffic will cost at least around €2-3 from most european (and > other) ISPs with VPS

The average bandwidth price I got from all the ISPs I used in the past was ~1 dollar/megabit. The ISPs I used for my Tor relays were ISPs I was using already for bandwidth-intensive HTTP hosting, so I already had quite a few deals for dirt cheap bandwidth.

I've been paying ~600€ per box (1Gbit, of which I was using at least 60% 24/7, getting to 100% during day hours).

> you basically claim to have enough spare change lying around at the age of > 15 to pay €2000-3000/month just for Tor traffic because you're an idealist

Yep. I got it mostly by selling iOS Tweaks on Cydia Store, private consulting with a few companies, freelancing, and sysadmining.

> and after buying all the stuff a 15 year old normally buys first? ;-)

The only thing apart from my tech equipment and servers that I'm interesting in buying is weed anyway.

> (and btw., WW was not running the ISP, he wrote somewhere in this thread > that he is just a normal employee)

Thanks for clarifying that he was not running the ISP. I misread it, probably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I feel like I should post this here too:

[https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq- abuse.html.en#WhatAboutC...](https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq- abuse.html.en#WhatAboutCriminals)

</comment><comment><USER44> People are working to verify that this isn't a scam.

<comment><USER35> <http://raided4tor.cryto.net/> and [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2012/11/tor-operator-char...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2012/11/tor-operator-charged-for-child-porn-transmitted-over-his- servers/) (has scan of the search warrant) should be good enough for now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> So can an ISP be raided because child porn went over its network at some point? I didn't think so...so I don't see the difference here.

</comment><comment><USER46> You should not be running a ToR exit node from your home.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

<comment><USER35> The exit in question was located in Poland - Not in my home, i never had any exit running at home. The server used in Poland was however (naturally) registered on my name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you go to a bank, rob it, and then walk outside to a waiting taxi, and have the taxi drive you home, is the taxi driver an accessory? I _think_ that in the US you'd really have to make a case that the taxi drive had knowledge of what had transpired.

<comment><USER47> If you go to a bank, rob it, and then hand the money to your friend for hiding, then your friend is an accessory. (Possession of Stolen Goods at the least)

Did he rob the bank? No. He may have just been at home, not involved in planning at all, you show up with $50,000, ask him to hide it and tell him it's stolen.

He was just used to transfer the goods, but he's still breaking the law.

Likewise laundering the stolen money is illegal, even though you didn't steal it.

<comment><USER48> Your scenarios are about knowingly transferring illegal goods. The Tor operator didn't know that illegal data was being transferred over his equipment. In the same way a webhoster isn't liable for the data his clients are hosting.</comment></comment></comment>


Rad Omen the startup band - Using the product as marketing. - <AUTHOR> http://www.radomen.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the first band that I can remember using this model, and it hooked me. I think there might be some useful lessons here for startups, but I'm speaking here totally as a consumer.

I'm a typical music listener, I expect. I have the bands I got interested in when I was a kid, and slowly over time I've been exposed to new music happenstance.

That is to say, I am NOT hard core. I don't go seeking out music. Must customers probably aren't out looking for your product, either.

Awhile back, someone linked to this bands video for a single they released called "Rad Anthem".

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfwEH8Ds4pg>

The video was hilarious and really engaging, along with the song.

They let you download the single for the low, low price of your email address.

Months pass. And today I discover I got an email- they have released their new album. This interests me, and even more, I can get this album for the low low cost of giving up my email address.

This I then do.

Now I'm a fan. I'd never heard of them. I liked the one song, but wouldn't have bought this album, probably, because I've been burned by one-hit wonder type bands in the past.

But when their next album comes out-- I'll know it, because I know they'll email me. And I'm happy to have them do so, because in all these months, since Rad Anthem came out, I've not gotten a single email from them. no spam. Just the notice when the album came out.

And I can promise you I will buy. I'm not hardcore, but having listened to the album, I really like it, and I'll happily buy their next one.

\----

I just thought it might be illustrative, entertaining or useful to hear my experience being marketed to and how it was successful. I spend so much of my time thinking about how to market to people, when I see it happening to me successfully, I want to take note.

Now, did Rad Omen give up their product? Yes and No, but they did not undermine their long term value.

The greatest risk facing startups is obscurity... they helped get over that by giving up their first album for free.... and I think they will do well with follow on releases as a result.

They also got ahead of the crowd here. Finding free singles is probably not that rare (though this is the first one I've seen) but free albums? That has special value.

And this from someone who knows jamendo (which has lots of free albums, but it is more needle drop quality, I think.)</comment>


A friend is learning QA, how can he help open source projects? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Please see: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15121351) \- I am still looking for a person to fit this role. I can also have this person fill many QA needs on the project in general.

My email is matthewvita48 at gmail dot com

Thanks!</comment>


Moving to the Bay Area - <AUTHOR> http://jessefornear.com/blog/moving-to-the-bay-area/

<comment><USER2> Welcome! Just moved here as well from Dallas earlier this year. In the city, would be happy to meet up if you're around. Let me know. vladik dot rikhter [at] gmail</comment>


No, of course, the iPad didn't kill HP's PC business. - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2011/08/19/hp-exit-the-pc-business-thats-utterly-thinkable/

<comment><USER2> Carly Fiorina took care of that task a long time ago.</comment>


IHOP says it's changing name to IHOb. Huh? - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/06/investing/ihop-ihob/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> I hope it's "burritos". International House of Burritos? How could you possibly go wrong?</comment>


The FBI Lost Our Son - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-lost-our-son-11570806358?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I believe the FBI on this one. He seemed more like a naive terrorist sympathizer than a source the FBI could rely on, especially after pursing a woman romantically who wanted to go to Syria (and after the FBI told him to leave her alone.)

It's likely true they never told him to go to Russia, content on having him simply report what he sees in online chatrooms from the comfort of his parents homes. He was moderately useful but not someone they could really trust for anything more than basic "internet chatroom" work.

<comment><USER3> The FBI isn't that holy, they goaded idiots into becoming "terrorists" so they can say "Good job us! We need more budget!", just look up "FBI entrapment".

And what about the phone they found? Presumably the journalist verified that it and the messages on it exist?

<comment><USER2> I'm not saying they're holy. They took advantage of a misfit kid, to have him do some entry-level intelligence monitoring chatrooms. I don't think they held him in high esteem either, likely knowing his allegiances to anyone in particular weren't very strong, other than some misguided sense to help the "underdog."

But there's no reason to think the FBI had anything to do with his Russia adventures. And I'm not sure how much responsibility the US has with bailing out Americans who want to pursue women who want to fight in Syria, etc.

The "FBI" didn't lose their son. Their son got lost on his own.

> Moments later, Agent Waters phoned. He asked what happened. "You murdered > our son," Mrs. Reilly yelled. "Don't ever talk to us again."

It is unfortunately very easy to get yourself in serious trouble, if not murdered in Russia. Their anger is _very_ misplaced, though I'm certainly sorry for their loss.

I only go with a skilled guide and personal driver, and I'm only going for boring business reasons! I've had a business associate who was kidnapped just for taking the wrong cab. (Basically, they get driven somewhere while the cab driver negotiated a fee for their return with their company.)

<comment><USER4> When was the last time you were in Russia? I've lived here for a few years now, almost intentionally trying to get into trouble, and I've yet to ever have any real problems. The biggest issue I've run into is food poisoning.

<comment><USER5> I'm from Ukraine, and I traveled there last year.

It's very safe in most places, and my hometown of Odessa is especially friendly for tourists these days (to the extent that I think that it's becoming _too much_ tourist-oriented). I've helped a Korean tourist find a way to the sea (she asked me in English) in the middle of November, long time before the tourist season begins.

Most cities in Ukraine are great tourist destinations.

Except for anywhere in Donbas, which in 2015 was a literal effin' warzone, and where people still die during the "ceasefire".

All reasonable people that could stay the fuck away from Donbas did so. That's about _two million people_ , just to give you the scale of things. Still, the area _attracted_ some people. The kind of people that downed that Malaysian airliner.

I doubt that guy made it anywhere close to combat. There's still law in Russia, but the moment he crossed into Donbas, he was a goner.

A remarkable investigative job by the parents and the journal, though.

<comment><USER6> > All reasonable people that could stay the fuck away from Donbas did so. > That's about two million people, just to give you the scale of things.

Did all the people in different villages just leave leaving their farms etc? I was seeing travel vlogs of "Bald and Bankrupt" and I see elderly people in former Soviet Union countries living alone in extremely remote places. Most of the places are sparsely populated with supplies coming once in a week or so.

In these conflicts do they harm the village population or is the fight limited between the armies in the region? What would they gain by harming elderly people?

<comment><USER5> The battles happened where they happened; nobody was specifically targeting small towns, but nobody took much care to avoid them either. There aren't any really remote places in Donbass, it's not that big of a territory - and most people live in the cities or large towns.

A lot of elderly people did stay. Ukraine does pay the pensions (which they absolutely rely on), but one needs to travel outside of DNR-controlled areas to get them. DNR also pays pensions, and some people, apparently, get two pensions; both DNR and the Ukrainian government are not happy with that, and so that won't last long. Russia is being more active now with giving the people there Russian citizenship, but one would need to go to Russia to get the pension.

All in all, it's a complicated mess, and the weakest get the worst of it; those people who live alone in villages are screwed.

Nobody gains anything by harming the elderly, but they are a liability that nobody really wants to take on. For Ukraine, it's dumping money into territory occupied by the enemy. It's a burden for Russia, which their citizens aren't too happy about either. DNR has little need for the elderly, but has to pay up if they are playing the "we are an independent state" game.

There is a mounting pressure to resolve this situation, but the whole point of this mess was to make it complicated (Russia didn't play a Crimea scenario in Donbass so that it remains a long-term unresolved slow conflict, like Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia in Geogia).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a very sad story, made no less sad by the fact that Billy is far from the only foreigner to die in that region. Hopefully this story will help discourage other naive young men from involving themselves in foreign wars.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Billy, an American of European heritage, who had knowledge of Arabic and > could approach potential terror targets online, had great potential value to > the FBI.

I get that the FBI was to struggling to recruit and train Arabic speakers for its programs post-9/11, but recruiting random Americans with self-taught Arabic to cosplay as cyber FBI agents does not speak well of them.

This is of a piece with stuff the FBI and DEA has done routinely in the "war on drugs," so I don't doubt it at all, but it's still a nasty way to work. It's not like they were turning an Al Queda recruit into a mole, this guy was running a whole constellation of fake accounts etc, basically doing stuff the FBI could and should be doing itself and not outsourcing to "informants".

<comment> barry-cotter You wouldn't be surprised at all if Russian intelligence sent an asset to their deaths or killed them themselves. Why would you expect anything better from the CIA or the organization that was responsible for burning 76 US civilians to death at Waco, or killing a mother holding her child at Ruby Ridge?

There are no good people working in intelligence, only bad people on your side and bad peoples working on the other side.

<comment><USER8> Who said I was surprised?

The CIA by my reading actually often does better by its collaborators than the FBI and has a certain sense of honor-among-spies that the FBI doesn't when it comes to this sort of stuff. FBI and CIA have both done awful things but they are different organizations with different MOs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://archive.is/YWTLl](http://archive.is/YWTLl)

<comment><USER10> Broken link. WSJ doesn't work in outline.com anymore. This article is impossible to read.

<comment><USER11> Are you using 18.104.22.168 as DNS? That could explain it.

<comment><USER12> Why doesn't Cloudflare work for archive.is?

<comment><USER13> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317)

<comment><USER12> ah thanks!

Hah, archive.is is something else. I went to [http://126.96.36.199/YWTLl](http://184.108.40.206/YWTLl) and got the default nginx page so needs host headers...

Then I do curl --header "Host: archive.is" [http://188.8.131.52/YWTLl](http://18.104.22.168/YWTLl)

and it hangs... eh?? well guess what archive.is blocked my IP after that first connection to the default nginx website...! can't even telnet 184.108.40.206 80 after that lol...

what a piece of work archive.is is....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A podcast episode with the journalist of this story: [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/the- journal/gmh37n](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/the-journal/gmh37n)

</comment><comment><USER15> Decent journalism of a sad story.

What the FBI is doing exploiting these citizens having limited employment opportunities without giving them any sort of actual long-term career path to look forward to, while simultaneously exposing them to real risks and a taste of legitimacy, strikes me as unethical, immoral, and unpatriotic. They're arguably setting up conditions for this kind of outcome, whether they intend to or not. I personally suspect it's an unintended consequence of their exclusive focus on the mission.

I want to feel bad for the parents but they're substantially responsible for raising such a naive fool of a son.

<comment><USER16> I would think part of the FBI's involvement here could also be to keep an eye on him. He came across as a very naive & influenceable person to me (converting to a religion, putting himself at risk by trying to meet a woman from a different country - which could've very well been a trap - woman who later tried to go into a conflict zone, going to Ukraine for <reasons>, etc)... I wouldn't be surprised if he one day ended up becoming one of the terrorists he was supposedly tracking (was he truly tracking them, or was he - maybe subconsciously - "into it" and the whole FBI thing happened to be a convenient way for him to get closer to the terrorist groups?).

<comment><USER15> Agreed.

I'd expect them to formally hire these people and have them working as teams with proper opsec and infrastructure provided for them entirely separate from their personal lives.

Instead they're left to work in isolation from home, more vulnerable to recruitment, if anything just to be treated as part of something more.

There's so much wrong with the situation the FBI is cultivating here. They basically treated this kid as a criminal turned informant as terms of his freedom. That's the level of concern for his and his family's safety they seemed to exercise from my read of the article.

VPNs were his only cyber protection? For all we know he was phished in a targeted attack that uncovered his true identity and affiliations.

<comment><USER17> Such an un-Silicon Valley view. Clearly FBI is disrupting the entrenched spy industry by using innovative gig economy tactics to source diverse spy- partners from non-traditional backgrounds.

0.5 * /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fascinating story. I'm really impressed with the dedication of the parents who retraced all his steps, contacted people he had met, found long forgotten photos, and eventually were able to find him in an unmarked grave in a foreign country of which there were no official records whatsoever he ever entered, and bring his remains home. The parents were incredible investigators.

As to the rest, it will always be speculation. From the article it does seem he himself made decisions to go places.

</comment><comment><USER19> Play stupid games, get stupid prizes. I feel for his parents. This guy lived about 10 different secret lives, lied to everyone who cared about him, was an extremist sympathizer, and repeatedly inserted himself into extremely dangerous situations. I don't think there was any other possible fate for him.

<comment><USER2> I, too, feel for his parents but not for him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The usual advice of opening in Private Mode doesn't work anymore as a workaround.

I found though one can search for the link in google, then click on it and it will let you in.

<comment><USER20> [https://github.com/iamadamdev](https://github.com/iamadamdev) works good in Chrome. I haven't tried Firefox.

<comment><USER21> Works on Firefox Mobile on Android with uBlock Origin and several other privacy add-ons also installed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I skimmed a bit, but is this article trying to imply that the FBI killed Billy in Ukraine because they thought he was trying to defect?

<comment><USER7> The implication I got is the men Billy found himself among men who didn't respect him (saw him as a walking wallet) and murdered him after he was no longer useful to them (they plausibly considered him a liability in combat since he didn't fit the mold of a soldier.) However I don't know if there was combat reported in the vicinity of Dibrivka during that particular time period. It's possible he was killed in combat.

> _" Billy was nearly the opposite—5-foot-7, 160 pounds, his features rounded > by a diet of snacks and fast food. His scruffy brown beard offset a receding > hairline; rectangular metal-frame glasses gave him a bookish look."_

> _" Mr. Polynkov sized up his new recruit as a traveler, not a fighter. In > his experience, soldiers of fortune didn't travel with wheeled oversize > suitcases. He tried to dissuade Billy from going to Rostov [...]"_

> _" Men at the camp forced Billy to pay their liquor tabs. "He was naive," > Mr. Victorov said. Billy's credit cards registered more than $2,700 in > fraudulent purchases and cash advances in Russia before he disappeared."_

<comment><USER23> I don't think he ever stood a chance with soldier of fortune types. The kind of guys who go to fight for Russia backed separatists probably eat guys like him for breakfast. From the description of his death it sounds like he might have been murdered by one of them. Maybe he ran out of money or he ticked off the wrong guy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Imagine if _any_ sort of change is possible in terms of regulation transparency, etc. You are tasked with writing a tailored / scoping a way to manage human sources:

Could you describe in words how to make a friend, or courtship that applies to every situation, or every person, and every situation?

Try to quantify how disruptive it is (or isn't) to send in a source, verse tap lines, etc. How does it effect their life?

Does it involve a foreign target or a US one? Should they be dealt with differently?

Can you write a regulation something flexible enough a wide array of circumstances / need to acquire information can be satisfied, but minimize intrusion upon people?

If someone had a better idea, what's wrong with that? But most people, including informant handlers themselves - which are human beings also - can't even figure out own personal relationships. I could only imagine how traumatic their family, love and social life has been for them to get in that position.

</comment><comment><USER25> This article reads like complete an utter BS. The FBI found him because his IP was found on a hard drive in an al Qaeda hideout? Then later says he used VPNs, etc to conceal his location.

This is someone's poor attempt at a Hollywood screenplay.</comment>


Tell HN: Don't worry about people stealing your ideas - <AUTHOR>

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." --Howard Aitken <comment><USER2> Hmmm... I'm seeing a quote, but not following how that proves nobody will steal my ideas.

<comment><USER3> Doesnt say nobody will steal your ideas, it says not to worry about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have heard about this. All the obviously good ideas have already been implemented, and others find your not-so-obvious ideas hard to understand. While this makes perfect sense, there is a chance that the people who get to know of your secret idea will understand it very quickly, and proceed to work on it.

The other advise about hiding ideas, which has nothing to do with this quote, is that its the execution of the idea which matters, not the idea itself, which is also very good advise. But again, someone else who steals your idea may be in a position to execute it better than you (more funding, more resources)

</comment><comment><USER5> Meh. That's not entirely true. When you're starting a company you can easily feed your existing competitors good ideas that they can act on if you haven't launched yet. Your existing competitors are probably in a much better position to evaluate your idea and may execute it more quickly than you can.

<comment><USER6> The bigger those competitors, the slower they are going to react. It is extremely rare for a large competitor to even acknowledge your existence for months, then they form a committee to analyse your product/service and make a recommendation, etc.

Your best bet is to make your business an attractive target for acquisition. That way you cash out early on the basis of huge potential future revenue.

Rinse and repeat ...</comment></comment>


Police using decoy buses to catch attackers targeting Apple and Google shuttles - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17071308/callifornia-highway-patrol-decoy-shuttles-apple-google-bus-shooter <comment><USER2> Why is the CHP publicizing this? I'd assume they'd want to keep it a secret. Unless it's just security theater.

<comment><USER3> I may be just a scare tactic to get the person to stop doing it. If the person keeps things random then it's unlikely they'll be able to catch then without a heap of luck. Pellet guns can go quite far and be made pretty silent.

<comment><USER4> I imagine they're also worried about escalation. The person who takes potshots with a pellet gun today, might do it with a long rifle tomorrow. They've already crossed a lot of moral and legal lines already.

<comment><USER3> Yup, it's just damn difficult to guard all busses all the time from a determined adversary. Hopefully the person backs down instead of escalating.

<comment><USER4> Hopefully, and there is no guarantee of further escalation, depending on the pathology/motivations of the shooter. Still, a lot of roads lead to thst escalatiom, especially if there is a thrill-seeking, or power-dominance aspect to the behavior. Humam behavior is notoriously hard to predict, but the biggest risk factors for violent, serial crime is a pattern of escalation.

For example, from the world of sexually motivated crime, the peeping Tom is a concern because they might escalate, but most don't. Of far greater concern is the peeping Tom thst stsrts to burgle underwear, engages in overt stalking behavior, etc. Once they reach the realm of attempted sexual assault, the risk of further escalation is much greater. By the same token the person who enjoys torturing cats today may become someone who tortures people tomorrow.

I worry a lot about the future patterns of behavior from someone who is comfortable shooting pellets at busses full of people. I would guess the police are too, since they've seen where this kind of thing can lead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >The hope, Sanchez says, is that if the decoy buses are also attacked the agency can "[look] at damage on the bus and [look] at what angle the projectile is coming from."

They're not saying it... but there must be cameras all over this bus to catch the shooter, right? Trying to figure out "the angle of the projectile" is almost nonsensical if they have a decoy bus set up.

<comment><USER4> It would probably make more sense to fly a drone with FLIR over the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I predict that there will be a rising tide of this sort of civil unrest until income inequality reverses direction.

<comment><USER7> Given that the US Gini index hasn't changed appreciably since the 1990s...why now?

<comment><USER8> Because now it's those darn nerds making all of the money, and people just can't have that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If they attack the bus filled with officers, does this also stack on additional charges for assault on the police?

</comment><comment><USER10> Presumably this very specific protection is paid for indirectly by the taxes Apple and Google pay.

<comment><USER11> Oh, I hadn't read anywhere that Google has changed its tax strategy to increase its effective rate beyond the 2.4% they've paid in recent years. But maybe so.

<comment><USER12> 2.4%? Their earnings reports say ~16%: [https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q3_alphabet_earnings_releas...](https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q3_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf)

Still lower than you'd expect given that the corporate tax rate was 35%, but way different from 2.4%.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I was looking at older data. Or maybe that's a 16% rate on 0.5% of their actual profits....

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/ireland-business- blog-w...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/ireland-business-blog-with- lisa-ocarroll/2011/mar/24/google-ireland-tax-reasons-bermuda)

[https://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-googles-refusal-pay- us...](https://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-googles-refusal-pay-us-taxes- means-us-taxpayers-fund-its-innovation-resulting-benefit-10)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If America doesn't get a handle on wealth disparity we're going to see a lot more of this, and certainly worse.

You can say that attacking the buses the wrong thing to do, but the moral high ground isn't going to stop it from happening.

<comment><USER14> How did Google employees making $250k/yr become the symbol of unfair distribution of wealth? Why not shoot at some CEO who makes $100m/yr? The Google employees on those buses are much closer in income to the typical protester than they are to the CEO.

For that reason, I say this is just senseless violence that has nothing to do with wealth inequality.

<comment><USER15> Because there's a concerted effort happening to point the blame at those who aren't the source of the problem.

<comment><USER16> PMC's sometimes get killed when they are protecting someone/something they are paid to protect/enable…

Employees of organizations like these could be considered PMC's in the eyes for someone who has out out for their employer…

<comment><USER17> "PMC" is what? Google didn't help. Thx.

<comment><USER16> Private Military Contractors

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had wondered when people would feel upset enough against the megacorps to attack them, but I didn't think it would happen in the near future

<comment><USER19> Bear in mind, this is merely an escalation (mind you, a violent one), of something that's already been going on since 2013. People have been staging protests in front of these buses for a while now.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bus_protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bus_protests)</comment></comment>