Why Rosyna Can't Take a Movie Screenshot - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexrad.me/discourse/why-rosyna-cant-take-a-movie-screenshot.html <comment><USER3> This is all ultimately pointless because it's not like the video decoder checks the integrity of its own code or the CPU running it or the compiler that compiled it or that the OS it was tested against is actually running. (Reflections on trusting trust.) Nothing actually cares about secure boot or end-to-end code validation; Apple doesn't even include equipment on their mainboards to do this anymore. Meanwhile, if you're going to grab pixels to pirate video, that's easy: HDCP is broken, so just grab it at the link layer. The key you need is on Pastebin!

Consumer DRM has always been a hardware-selling maneuver as far as I can tell. "You need HDCP in order to watch this video." "I do? But HDCP is broken." "Just buy a new monitor anyway." The Management Engine sounds like a similar scheme. "You need an Intel Management Engine to watch this video." "I do?" "Yes, it's very convenient for us that you need to buy a new computer even though your current computer works fine otherwise."

Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy to sell new computers, ignoring the fact that the pirates are still pirating movies without any problems. It's more funny than sad.

<comment><USER4> "Intel's just using Hollywood's fear of piracy"

DRM has very little to do with piracy. Hollywood know perfectly well that DRM will not stop a determined pirate and a movie only has to be ripped once to be pirated indefinitely.

It's about control. It's about the studios always having a seat at the bargaining table when new products/devices are being floated. They fear becoming a commodity supplier.

<comment><USER5> >Hollywood know perfectly well that DRM will not stop a determined pirate and a movie only has to be ripped once to be pirated indefinitely.

You know, I'm really not convinced they do. Everything I see from these people leads me to think they literally think this stuff is _magic_ , and they want the snake oil so badly they'll believe the people selling it over the people telling them the disappointing truth, every time.

<comment><USER6> As far as I know the DRM on DCPs (Digital Cinema Package) isn't broken. Yet. Maybe because relatively few people have access to the encrypted content. I guess the most important thing for the movie industry is to have the cinema window free from pirated copies.

<comment><USER7> Where/how is this used? I ask because screeners are definitely a thing.

<comment><USER6> Most digital cinema releases are AES 128 bit encrypted. For specifics refer to the DCI specification [1].

Screeners are from DVD/Bluray copies sent to academy members and such? If I'm not mistaken?

[1] [http://dcimovies.com/specification/DCI_DCSS_v12_with_errata_...](http://dcimovies.com/specification/DCI_DCSS_v12_with_errata_2012-1010.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My partner is an academic, a lecturer in film theory. She watches a lot of films, and needs to make a lot of short clips for her lectures, and to take a lot of screenshots for her papers.

This task is becoming increasingly difficult as time goes by. The most reliable method (for her skill level) is now to rip DVDs, removing various bits of protection, before playing the film using VLC on Windows and using VLC to take the screenshot. This is a pain, as she now uses a Mac primarily (as most academia seems to be doing so almost exclusively because it makes presentations easier - connecting to projectors turns out to be the killer feature).

For a lot of films though, she pauses a film and uses a camera directed at the TV. Or worse, she'll record the clip on a camera (using the camera's microphone).

Aside from things like Box of Broadcasts (which is for UK broadcast TV), there are few to no resources for academics to resort to for sources of film that will enable dissemination to students through materials and presentations. All clips are short (10-30s), papers feature only a few screenshots when published.

Regardless of the studio and technology company desire to lock things down and control distribution, there remains a very legal exception to their controls: education.

And of course, education has resorted to alternatives to these locks. There exists private torrent sites that are collections of obscure, international and predominantly non-Hollywood productions. Like torrent sites pre-Netflix, these are actually the most reliable sources of films that academics use for sources. Even when an academic owns a DVD (as nearly all do for future presentation and citation purposes), the torrents deliver files that the academic can use to create clips and screenshots.

As much as possible, I try and help my partner avoid such sites. They are good, but in the hard world of academia I'm not sure her career will survive trying to argue any form of legitimacy of downloading content for academic purposes for already owned DVDs.

There is a very real and present danger that copy protections will harm libraries and education. They already are.

<comment><USER9> The strangest part is that _according to the law_ (fair use) she should be able to do that. This DRM is effectively creating its own "copyright law", just like Cory Doctorow has warned us before.

The whole copyright gang from MPAA to OS vendors and chip makers are using DRM to expand the reach of copyright law. And you can't just say "well I'll just break the DRM, since it's legal for me to take the screenshot" either. Because breaking DRM is illegal...So in order to exercise one of your rights you have to break another law.

<comment><USER10> You're conflating copyright law. She is legally allowed to take screenshots and clips from copyrighted material. There's nothing in or about copyright law that requires content providers to make this easy.

<comment><USER11> The DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent technological protections in many instances where the result would still be fair use, if it weren't for the technological protections and the DMCA making circumventing them illegal.

It's not just that the content providers 'make it hard' \-- it's that their attempts to 'make it hard' are protected by law, not just by difficulty. Even if they DRM doesn't actually make it very hard at all, it's still protected by the DMCA.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act#Title_I:_WIPO_Copyright_and_Performances_and_Phonograms_Treaties_Implementation_Act)

<comment><USER12> If you read the section on exemptions, you'll see that there's one for exactly this case: decrypting a dvd for the purpose of criticism.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that is a temporary exemption made by the Librarian of Congress, as the law provides for such temporary exemptions (which can also be renewed by the Librarian -- or not).

Nonetheless, the existence of the DMCA as a legal framework, I think, belies the picture the original comment I was responding to paints, of "Just because there is fair use doesn't mean the content providers need to make it easy to copy their works." The DMCA specifically gives the content providers technological "challenges" the force of law, and makes it illegal to circumvent them, without any general exception for fair uses. There are some few specific exemptions ( _not_ a general one for anything that constitutes 'fair use' under copyright law), which are not actually part of the law explicitly, but temporary and at the discretion of the Librarian of Congress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The other downside is that you can't use custom software to fix up video. Netflix has a fairly poor player - more than one I've had to go torrent something I was trying to watch in Netflix due to one playback issue or another. From brightness to subtitles, to frame positioning (shifting the whole playback area down to fit better on my wall when projecting very wide formats) - Netflix offers nothing. Even worse for audio, where I often pump center channel dialog and perform normalization.

It's sad how advanced the tech is compared to how limited our use is. (For instance, it's technically trivial, but usably difficult to add Rifftrax (MST3K reborn) to a movie on Netflix.)

Edit: The really nasty part is that this technology in general isn't bad. I love TPMs, for instance. Gives me a fairly easy way to get relatively strong security, say, to store my disk encryption keys, without memorizing a passphrase. Trusted computing can allow the user to remain in control. But slipping in DRM gets people understandably upset.

OTOH, I can't find details on exactly how this video stuff works. Wikipedia points at the GPU part, making it seem like it's just the same HDCP-kinda stuff that's been around for a while. (Annoying, but ultimately a decision of your kernel to enable. As in, media isn't encrypted at the source to some Intel key.)

<comment><USER14> _Trusted computing can allow the user to remain in control._

Only as long as it's really the user the computer is trusting, and not some other entity. Personally, I don't really like TPMs or any of the other "safe computing" technology. In theory (and this is what everyone usually refers to when they advocate it) they can help the user, but in practice they're almost always being used to do the opposite and the path to freedom is insecurity (e.g. jailbreaking, running homebrew software, etc.) As the saying goes, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is."

 _OTOH, I can 't find details on exactly how this video stuff works_

That's sort of the point of DRM in general - you're not supposed to know how it works, because then you would be in a much better position to break it. It's no surprise that the details would be kept secret, and other security technologies are likely being used for this purpose - e.g. DRM'd PDFs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are chips with this feature sold in consumer devices? I'm planning to buy a new computer soon. How can I avoid or boycott the chips in question? Or can the feature be definitively disabled through the BIOS?

If I buy a computer, then I want to own it completely and not have arbitrary DRM bullshit remove capabilities. If I wish to take a screenshot of copyright content and share it with friends (fair use), then I should be able to do that, and I will be seriously pissed if my own machine gets in the way.

Does anyone know which chips include this feature, and/or whether it can be disabled?

<comment><USER16> All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine. There's a reason why the "reclaim your freedom" notebook is still a Lenovo X60.

Some of them come with larger firmware (5MB, making up vPro and AMT), others with the smaller one (1.5MB) that merely does the DRM stuff, but all of them have the full hardware access detailled in the article.

AMD is clean on the chipset side until kaveri/kabini. After that, they come with a "platform security processor". I think the GPU has some DRM features (mostly concerned with adding Macrovision noise to the output signal), but I'm not into GPUs very much.

Contemporary ARM stuff mostly comes with TrustZone, which can typically be used for DRM as well. AMD adopted the TrustZone model for their current CPUs, too.

Since Protected A/V Path and similar DRM systems require OS cooperation, the easiest way to stay clear of them is to use Open Source media players, on an Open Source OS.

If you want to avoid supporting proponents of such hardware assisted DRM systems, plain ARM systems that ship without fixed operating system (eg. the cuBox series, rPI & follow ups) are your best bet.

<comment><USER17> @pgeorgi:

>All Intel chips since 2010 or so have the management engine.

Do you have sources for this? I wanted to verify it, but after a few Google searches I could not find anything that states exactly that. I have a Haswell CPU, but I have no Management Engine settings in my BIOS.

How does the vPro feature correlate with the Management Engine? Because not all Intel CPU's come with vPro. Or is that only a firmware difference? Would be nice to see clearer in this issue, but most websites contain only marketing nonsense.

<comment><USER16> My source is that I work on coreboot, where we have to interact with that stuff all the time. It's actually somewhat hidden in our haswell driver because so much is now binary-only on Intel platforms.

But look at [http://review.coreboot.org/gitweb?p=coreboot.git;a=blob;f=sr...](http://review.coreboot.org/gitweb?p=coreboot.git;a=blob;f=src/northbridge/intel/haswell/finalize.c;hb=HEAD) whose comments refer to both "ME" (the management engine) and "PAVP", which is the "Protected A/V Path" referred to in the article.

One sure way to figure it out is to get a full image of your firmware flash, and analyze it. coreboot has a tool called ifdtool which can parse the "intel firmware descriptor", which is kind of a partitioning scheme for flash - <USER2> other things, to make room for the ME firmware.

Sometimes board vendors have full images available for download that you could use for analysis, but these days they're often smaller, shipping only the changed parts. flashrom (www.flashrom.org) might be able to read out the chip on your running system, but on Intel platforms in particular, this is often restricted and you'd need to attach some external flash programmer to read it out and be sure.

I think it speaks volumes that you have to work around such things on your own hardware in the first place...

As far as I know, vPro only requires the larger firmware and the use of on- chipset hardware, in particular NIC and GPU, since the vPro firmware doesn't support external devices.

I don't know if that's just economics (no need to write drivers for tons of devices, no desire to support other vendors' hardware) or if the ME is too limited for that - but my guess is the former.

One way we (at coreboot) can test ME involvement is to corrupt the ME firmware with an external flasher (while leaving everything else intact) and see the system either not start at all, or reliably shut down after 30 minutes. The exact behaviour depends on some wiring on the board, I guess.

<comment><USER14> From that file:

        pci_or_config32(PCI_DEV_HSW, 0xb0, 1 << 0);     /* BDSM */

What is "BDSM"? It almost seems like a strangely appropriate name for another DRM feature.

 _It 's actually somewhat hidden in our haswell driver because so much is now binary-only on Intel platforms._

One thing that I've noticed browsing around Coreboot sources is that the source code is rather opaque - full of "magic constants" with little to no meaning. It may be "open-source" and GPL, but I don't think it's in the spirit of open-source to have code that can't really be understood. I can get the same depth of information by just disassembling a BIOS and seeing what addresses it writes with what values. If anything, it feels like someone has found a way to "contribute" to open-source without actually disclosing much. (Aside: how do binary-only blobs get let into Coreboot? It sort of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?)

 _and see the system either not start at all, or reliably shut down after 30 minutes_

That second alternative is just scary. _Really_ scary, like a hidden silent killswitch.

<comment><USER16> When all you do is to write a single opaque value in a register, and never use those bits again, it's slightly excessive to give each of them a name. This also reflects in chipset documentation, which sometimes comes with pages and pages of "write X to register Y", and not much more.

The value is that the higher level structure is more easily visible when you know what is code and what is data (which is the main issue with disassembly), and the ability to quickly see that you haven't missed extra code that is executed in some sneaky place because everything in the output is accounted for somehow.

The options we have with coreboot are to have 8MB of unaccounted stuff, or 500KB of unaccounted stuff. The latter can be reverse engineered more easily, since the scope is known, and the complexity is a magnitude smaller (no code decompressing other code, jumping into it, ...). That was actually done for sandybridge. We even built tools to simplify reverse engineering (www.serialice.com)

As for the funnily named BDSM register: [http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...](http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/datasheets/4th- gen-core-family-mobile-u-y-processor-lines-vol-2-datasheet.pdf) calls it "Base Data of Stolen Memory". Essentially, both GPU and ME get assigned some system memory to work in, and that register contains the first address that isn't available to the CPU due to this arrangement.

That register itself is harmless. In older Intel chipsets, it was possible for the host CPU to get a peek into the ME's memory by messing with that register, which was used for some ME analysis in 2012 or 2013. Unfortunately they plugged that hole, and that register's role is more of the informative kind.

<comment><USER14> _This also reflects in chipset documentation, which sometimes comes with pages and pages of "write X to register Y", and not much more._

It almost feels like they're trying to hide something if they don't give any reasoning for what those values do... and so I'm rather curious as to what happens if they're changed. Some bits might have no effect, some could have catastrophic effects (e.g. if they control some of the voltage regulation circuitry), and some could have very _useful_ effects that they just don't want you to know about. Intel CPUs have had undocumented features since their introduction; it's not hard to imagine their chipsets do too.

<comment><USER16> For the most part it's probably that they kept things flexible that aren't strictly necessary, but it simplified their development process of the silicon.

So when they're done with the silicon, and routed all the traces, and so on, they can run their magic tool that measures delays and things like that, and then calculate the best performing set of values, and write them into the document.

It also allows them to dial back some of the values should they figure out that there are problems. I fully expect these numbers to change a couple of times between them finalizing their silicon and releasing it (and the reference code and documentation) to the public. Now consider how much trouble it would be, even for Intel and their world famous fabrication process, to create new silicon for each of those changes.

Take the tables in i945's raminit ([http://review.coreboot.org/gitweb?p=coreboot.git;a=blob;f=sr...](http://review.coreboot.org/gitweb?p=coreboot.git;a=blob;f=src/northbridge/intel/i945/raminit.c;hb=HEAD#l923)).

From the shape of these values, they're probably some delay configuration for the different types of DDR2 pins (dq, ctl, clk) going from somewhere inside the silicon out to the pin of the package, but I doubt that the documentation actually provided any explanation for them.

Of course, one of these registers could mean 'change all calculations in a way that the electromagnetic field contains the private key'. But they need a better way to enable that function than in firmware, where it's done for everyone.

In the end, I'm fine with such magic values in magic registers, as long as they make some sense (right register block for the current task instead of messing with the audio codec while initializing usb) and are unconditional (that is, no if (user_is_evil()) write_enable_tempest_register(); ).

If there are no unexplained conditionals, any backdoor would have to apply to every user - in which case they could just enable it unconditionally in silicon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just a note on the discourse: the point "I own it, I should be able to use it the way I want" feels like not really effective (as a rhetoric) in many part of the western world and in many social circles. I really feel for example in France it would be easily brushed off using analogy to construction permits or driver licenses, or just put the person in some crazy-libertarian box ("the kind that want to print firearms at home"). There might be ways of framing the issue that fit better in a socio-democrat context (Europe, etc.). Ideas?

<comment><USER19> Europe has strong consumer protection rights.

The angle to take is that media is sold misleadingly. When I buy a DVD / Bluray I am paying for a physical disc and a licence to use the contents of the disc. That licence is restrictive and restricts my rights more than law. Thus, I am not allowed to extract a short extract to use in an educational setting (fair dealings; fair use). Packaging and marketing of DVD / Bluray is unclear about this and gives the impression that you are "buying a movie", not buying some plastic and a licence.

<comment> Ar-Curunir Exactly, this is the main problem I have with the people who claim in comment sections across the internet that since I'm only paying for a license to play the content, I can't complain about owning it.

Nowhere on the iTunes store does it say, "Click here to purchase license to play video". Not on Amazon or Google Play either.

This is just a case of false advertising by content producers and distributors. If they can cheat me, why shouldn't I be entitled to cheat back?

<comment><USER20> You acknowledged that you were aware of these facts when you read the EULA (you did read it, right?) at some point in the past when installing or updating iTunes (or whatever other service). I know it's ridiculous but that's how it works, make sure to show a 50+ page 'you basically have no rights' notice that you have to 'agree', and you can strip whatever privileges you like from your paying customers.

<comment><USER21> Nobody reads EULAs. They are irrelevant in a historical context.

They'll clearly be replaced by consumer law at some point.

You don't have to sign a 20 page license to go into a shop and buy a banana, do you? And yet there are all sorts of property and purchasing rights (for buyer and seller) associated with that.

The correct way of talking about this now is to discuss what the consumer law should say which will replace EULAs.

<comment><USER20> Obviously I understand that nobody reads EULA's, and I completely agree that its crazy they even exist. Judging from the fact that I got downvoted for simply stating the obvious it appears people assume I'm ok with EULA's, but I'm not. That doesn't mean they don't exist though, and even though I don't know the intricacies of their legality, the fact that I'm not aware anyone ever successfully challenged an EULA in court (which would mean they should be history by now), I'm assuming that, sadly, content owners and distributors _can_ strip your rights by presenting you with an EULA that no-one reads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is what I call bullshit job - zero value for humankind created, tons of human hours wasted. (I would even say negative value since security holes will be found if not already in this microcontroller firmware)

<comment><USER23> I stumbled upon this PAVP thing in an old Thinkpad just last week. My first thought after reading about it was basically this. Somewhere, some very talented software developers probably spent years working on this obscure, essentially useless thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The Librem 15 project is trying to talk intel into letting them disable the management engine. It's the last non-free part of the system.

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem- laptop](https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop)

</comment><comment><USER25> Years ago, I remember trying to screenshot video on a Microsoft XP box. When I tried to paste the screenshot inside any image editing program, the video region would remain blank. If I correctly positioned the image editor window over the window with the video source, the video would show through this region, but the video remained positionally fixed to the screen. I cannot remember if this happened for all video sources though. Could this have been caused by DRM?

<comment><USER26> It was because of how HW accelerated video decoding worked. You would specify the coordinates of a rectangle on the screen where to play the video. Then you'd display a rectangle of a certain color (#010000, I believe), to be used as a mask.

The window manager could show windows on top of the video, and the masking would work even though the video decoding HW knew nothing about window management and vice versa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's bizarre foreign movie and music corporations (I'm Canadian) are dictating actual physical changes to computing hardware.

It's as bizarre to me as if US car corporations dictated I could only use premium fuel from Shell and monitored it in real-time.

</comment><comment><USER28> I only hope is that as bullshit like this becomes more and more prominent, people will become more and more educated in what is acceptable and what is not (since it will bite them more and more). Eventually, public opinion would shift into more and more negative outlook on corporations who practice such things.

Offenders' influence would then decline and people will become smarter, everyone wins.

<comment><USER14> _and people will become smarter_

Unfortunately, my impression is the opposite - people are slowly being dissuaded from discovering these restrictions by the promises of convenience, and when they do run into them, they're faced with heavy rhetoric to the effect of "it's for your security" so they (reluctantly) accept it. Incidents like this appear isolated and are downplayed by the majority, who will continue to use the very services that restrict them, purely out of convenience.

Corporations are diverting people's actions of sharing information into their own channels so they can exert more control over them - witness all the "share on Twitter/Facebook/etc" buttons appearing everywhere (I personally block them, but I know they exist); they sure are convenient to use, and as a side- effect of their use, it reduces the amount of people who will "manually" and directly share with others (and thus know more about the transfer of information themselves.)

The same is happening with other types of media too, as evidenced by all the efforts to hide the filesystem of devices from users, since one of the most open ways to share data with someone is to give them a copy of a file. They are even trying to discourage _linking to a resource_ , with browser vendors thinking of hiding URLs or parts of them. Ultimately, they are pushing for a world in which no one owns their (tightly locked-down) computing devices or has any knowledge of how they work (except for a few "specialists"), and all communication between individuals happens via some corporate intermediary. This makes it easier to censor and manipulate the users (probably to squeeze $$$ out of them), which is what the whole idea is about.

<comment><USER28> A comment so accurate it makes me sad :C

There isn't much one can do though as favoring convenience over not-so-obvious benefits of (abstract, for them) freedom seems to stem from the very human nature...

I used to think RMS' ideas were a bit far fetched, but with each such revelation that comes to light in the form of post on some relatively unknown blog those ideas seem more and more appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The best part is that it is only a matter of time until the IME is cracked and root kits come with bits that you will never be able to clean without getting a whole new computer. Did you know the IME can send and recieve IP without the host processor ever seeing it? It's the ultimate way to own a machine.

<comment><USER30> I would assume the larger purpose of IME is actually exactly as a platform for persistent undetectable system compromise. Purpose built for TAO? As conspiracy theories go it's hard to explain the existence and full capabilities of IME in this decade without some NSA involvement.

<comment><USER31> Please take the conspiracist nattering somewhere else. As explained in the second paragraph of the article, the features of IME were requested by large corporate IT departments and pushed mainstream by marketing pressure, with the addition of DRM bits as requested by the large tech vendors who need them to negotiate licenses with members of the copyright cartel.

You look at this and see a secure rootkit. A corporate IT worker looks at this and thinks that they can image a workstation remotely no matter what's currently installed. A security person looks at this and sees secure base platform starting from TPM on down which can be setup to keep malware from irrecoverably compromising the system (remember the recent Thunderstrike discussion noting that TPM would protect against that firmware exploit?).

All of these have tradeoffs which can be debated but it's just silly to pretend that the NSA is centrally directing the entire industry.

<comment><USER30> Anyone who requested the feature of "able to send and receive packets which are not seen by the OS" is either not really asking, or should be told no.

I mean, even if I have a pfSense or whatever box running in between, if I'm reading this correctly, there could be packets traversing the network I can't see?

And all of this has a "zero-touch" configuration capability. You know what that means, right?

The two together, simply put, _it 's a factor to consider_ when buying this hardware. People should be aware this feature exists, and what it's capable of. More than anything, it feels like this is unreported and under-discussed.

<comment><USER31> You're misunderstanding is what's going on here: if you need something like lights-out management, which is a requirement in any decent large IT shop, you by definition have a separate processor running its own operating system. That's the whole point: you can use this to power on the machine and initiate something like a software install when it has no existing OS install or a severely broken one.

Since that needs network access you either have the expense of needing separate NICs and ports – common in the server space – or having some way for it to share the NIC with the primary OS, which is popular because it costs significantly less and doesn't require wiring two ports for every computer. It's the latter capability which gives it the ability to send packets without the knowledge of the main OS since the traffic isn't processed by it in any way.

Again: this certainly could be abused but the capability originated for quite benign reasons – every large organization with an even marginally competent IT department wants the ability to do things like reinstall a system without having to pay to send a tech on-site to hit a couple of keys.

<comment><USER30> I understand perfectly well the IT requirements. However, capabilities which originate for quite benign reasons but which allow complete, persistent, and undetectable system compromise are typically called "bugs".

For example, I don't have any issue with remote power control. A secure form of Wake-on-LAN is wonderful, as long as the public keys are fully enumerable and totally under operator control, and the feature can be decisively disabled if desired.

To your point about packet processing, to keep with the Wake-on-LAN example, it's perfectly easy to share a physical port and keep the traffic fully visible to the OS as well as a separate processor.

If a remote party has permission to completely own my system, I want to see their name (public key) listed every time the machine boots, like the warning you get any time you access a government system;

      You are accessing a [Company Name] information system, which includes (1) this
      computer, (2) this computer network, (3) all computers connected to this network, and
      (4) all devices and storage media attached to this network or to a computer on this
      network. This information system is provided for [Company]-authorized use only.

      Unauthorized or improper use or access of this system may result in disciplinary
      action, as well as civil and criminal penalties.

      By using this information system, you understand and consent to the following:

      You have no reasonable expectation of privacy when you use this information system;
      this includes any communications or data transiting or stored on this information
      system. At any time, and for any lawful government purpose, the government may,
      without notice, monitor, intercept, search and seize any communication or data
      transiting or stored on this information system.

      The government may disclose or use any communications or data transiting or stored on
      this information system for any lawful government purpose, including but not limited
      to law enforcement purposes.

Such a warning, requiring an 'I Agree' click at each boot, would adequately explain the risks to end-users of having such a component active on their system. But apparently, the more common practice is to _hide the prompt_ at startup (typically Ctrl-P) to enter the MEBx Configuration screens behind another BIOS setting.

I'm not an expert at vPro or Intel AMT by any stretch, but upon cursory investigation, it appears the trust model (a.k.a all you need to completely own a system) is an easily obtainable certificate, and control over the DNS and DHCP server. It looks like the only thing that protects a system beyond this is a vendor-specific "remote configuration timeout" which would have to be reset by a local agent after it has expired. [2, 3] However, some Intel documentation claims that TLS-PKI "...allows a client system to be provisioned with zero physical interaction. Remote configuration is ideal for systems that have already been deployed into an environment..." which implies some way to overcome the remote configuration timeout... (See 'Alternate Path #2' on footnote #5)

[1] - [https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/10/07/intel- amt-...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/10/07/intel-amt-and- remote-provisioning-aka-zero-touch)

[2] - [http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03455054.pdf](http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03455054.pdf)

[3] - [https://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-1989#SECFAQ8](https://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-1989#SECFAQ8)

[4] - [http://downloadmirror.intel.com/21729/eng/RemoteConfiguratio...](http://downloadmirror.intel.com/21729/eng/RemoteConfigurationCertificateSelection.pdf)

[5] - [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-amt-use- case...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-amt-use- case-11-remote-configuration)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> [http://recon.cx/2014/slides/Recon%202014%20Skochinsky.pdf](http://recon.cx/2014/slides/Recon%202014%20Skochinsky.pdf)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813029](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813029)

</comment><comment><USER33> What is Rosyna? Googled it and came up blank.

<comment><USER34> The second footnote in the article is a twitter post from a user, @rosyna, who said that she couldn't take a screenshot of Netflix.

[https://twitter.com/rosyna/status/550702351703875584](https://twitter.com/rosyna/status/550702351703875584)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What I don't really understand is how this could be used to stop piracy. Sure, you could stop recording on a machine with Intel Management Engine, but wouldn't pirates simply use a computer without Intel Management Engine to rip media?

Unless the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine (sounds unlikely, how would you explain that to customers), how does it prevent anything?

<comment><USER36> > the media becomes impossible to consume without Intel Management Engine

That's why Intel management keeps greenlighting this project. Intel thinks that it if it can convince content producers to distribute media as blobs encrypted with Intel's public key (and maybe, say, Samsung's or Apple's), then we can transition to a world where consumer video files do work on most consumer hardware, but can't be decrypted outside the protected media path and ripped.

There's no reason this scheme can't work. OEMs and content producers just haven't been able to cooperate well enough to piece it together yet. Once they do, game over, except for the analog hole.

This scheme also has the side effect of creating a "moat" around existing OEMs. Sure, a new player can begin fabricating new CPUs, but existing media files won't be encrypted for these CPUs. It is literally a conspiracy against the public.

<comment><USER33> Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to- read.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html)

<comment><USER36> In our universe, the "debugging tools" that could defeat this scheme are ones that can depackage an Intel chip and read its EEPROM directly. What do you even use for that, a scanning electron microscope?

<comment><USER37> Part of me really wants to go into full libertarian cryptoanarchist mode to enable a safe way of doing anonymous Kickstarters for someone to buy that SEM and crack any new DRM that's being thrown at us.

But then I remind myself of this[0] and I realize we'd be probably fighting our own future. Our world is going downhill because it's too uncoordinated, not too coordinated.

We're in a really tough spot here.

[0] - [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

The relevant quote:

 _But coordination only works when you have 51% or more of the force on the side of the people doing the coordinating, and when you haven't come up with some brilliant trick to make coordination impossible._

 _The second one first. In the links post before last, I wrote:_

> _The latest development in the brave new post-Bitcoin world is crypto- > equity. At this point I've gone from wanting to praise these inventors as > bold libertarian heroes to wanting to drag them in front of a blackboard and > making them write a hundred times "I WILL NOT CALL UP THAT WHICH I CANNOT > PUT DOWN"_

 _A couple people asked me what I meant, and I didn't have the background then to explain. Well, this post is the background. People are using the contingent stupidity of our current government to replace lots of human interaction with mechanisms that cannot be coordinated even in principle. I totally understand why all these things are good right now when most of what our government does is stupid and unnecessary. But there is going to come a time when – after one too many bioweapon or nanotech or nuclear incidents – we, as a civilization, are going to wish we hadn't established untraceable and unstoppable ways of selling products._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What about graphic cards from Nvidia/AMD? What about the ARM CPUs from various vendors like Apple, AppliedMicro, Atmel, Broadcom, Freescale Semiconductor, Nvidia, NXP, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, ST Microelectronics and Texas Instruments?

Do they have similar DRM features too?

</comment><comment><USER39> [http://www.slideshare.net/codeblue_jp/igor-skochinsky- enpub](http://www.slideshare.net/codeblue_jp/igor-skochinsky-enpub)

It even has an embedded Java runtime.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't know much about HDMI, but couldn't I just run the video/movie in fullscreen and then capture the output from the HDMI and save the raw output to a disk?

<comment><USER14> Yes, HDCP has been broken for a long time and even if it wasn't, you could still capture the LVDS signal that drives the LCD panel itself.

But the problem is that those are _very_ high-speed signals(1920x1080 24bpp at 60FPS is around 350MB/s+) that require suitable hardware to capture, basically uncompressed video, and recompression would introduce more artifacts than the original. That's why pirates don't usually go this route; the result is only slightly better than pointing a good camera at the screen.

<comment><USER20> I always assumed most movies were ripped using exploits at various points in the playback software stack? At some point the unencrypted bitstream needs to be available to decode, if you hacked the player or GPU driver code to dump it at that point, it would be possible to re-assemble it into an unencrypted video file, right? You would use a computer without any of the DRM features the article is about of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> not much info at the top of the searches for Rosyna, what consumer processors is it in / going to be in? is it easy enough to just not buy it?

</comment><comment><USER42> DRM is a placebo against technology.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just use a camera to take a shot

<comment><USER44> You completely missed the point of the article. "Trusted computing" is back with a vengeance. The fact that your computer runs complex firmware (your coprocessor's firmware can run a webserver?) which bypasses anything above it is the problem. It means you don't own your computer anymore: your overlords grant you the right to use it under certain conditions.

<comment><USER43> Nope I did'nt that is one way to bypass the problem

<comment><USER26> The _problem_ is that you don't own your computer. You can't bypass that with a camera.

Who cares about movie piracy? Copy protection has always been broken and will always be. It isn't a problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What questions aren't we asking? - <AUTHOR> Bacteria, plants, and animals can do only so much.  They can solve basic problems.  But they can't solve problems of building spaceships like us because they have limits to their "minds" - because I'm guessing they don't ask those types of questions in the first place?
I wonder what our limits are.  What are the boundaries of problems we humans just don't have the grace of asking about, and therefore even solve?
In Wikipedia, under the topic of 'new mysterianism', there's a quote cited in Steven Pinker's book, "How the mind works", where he writes, "The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius—a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness—comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us."
What questions aren't we asking? <comment><USER2> How can we reduce the cost of food sustenance by an order of magnitude? How could this challenge be applied to a town, city, region, or type of citizen?

How can city-threatening wildfires be prevented? Malibu, Paradise, Chico, Santa Rosa, Thomas - and now how can these areas of desolation be stewarded back into a vibrant state? It could be possible to prevent the devastating mudslides some of these areas have now experienced.

My ideas around these questions have me imagining things that may require new systems of economy, agreement & responsibility. I look at our wild spaces, and I see messes of tangled bush. Can we manicure these lands in a way that encourages more vibrant growth of native species while creating natural fire blocks? What if these areas could also begin becoming food sources, helping with that first question I posed?

As it is now, most any ravine around my town is clogged with deadfall and could make for a city-razing fire in the worst of cases. Fixing this manually would be a massive effort, but what if we could set tens of thousands of people to task at it, while sheltering, feeding, caring for and educating them? If we can empower a much greater portion of our population to have these basic needs met, we may be setting free a number of great minds to pursue helping advance the state of our consciousness.

With the changes to jobs availability, we should embrace novel new ways to 'make a living'. The rules that have brought us this far are great. We're capable of improving upon them.

Can we create simulation games that would help us ponder these questions better? There are so many variables at play, this should be the next MMORPG fad. How else can we tinker with new ideas around massive human efforts?

How about we collaborate on sending money and resources towards robotics clubs, maker spaces, and other groups that obviously try to push the envelope of what's real?

<comment><AUTHOR> These are deep, important questions. I wonder how people will go about fixing the problems of food sustenance and wildfires in the years to come. Will we innovate incrementally or through big ideas?

When I was reading through your points, my mind popped up with the industries built in the 19th century. For instance, the steel business industry innovated itself to be inexpensive (e.g., via Bessemer Process), to generate not only jobs but also interesting economies. Though, there are also positive and negative externalities to think about with all this stuff.

I totally agree, pushing the envelope with real ideas is key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Any question I could come up with has probably been asked already, but here goes:

How do we know anything in the past actually happened? We are 100% reliant on memory, but an equally plausible explanation is that we materialized 1 nanosecond ago, pre-loaded with memory and state. And in 1 nanosecond we will cease to exist, but at any point in time we will never know if that is true.

Science and repeatable experiments, models of the universe etc. refute my statement, except science is based on the assumption that my statement is false, so it is a circular argument.

<comment><USER4> The question "what is truth?" is as old as time, and so important that we've created a system to analyze it and attempt to come to a consensus[0]. If an idea is untestable, it is logical and good for your sanity to assume that it is false until proven otherwise.

We assume that certain aspects of reality are real because they are testable and repeatable. We say gravity exists because every time we drop something, it falls down towards Earth, and if we apply other assumptions while looking out in the sky, we see other objects falling towards each other. The assumption is logical and testable.

It is impossible to test whether we just materialized, therefore it's safe to assume it did not happen unless repeatable testing indicates otherwise.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi drankula3, definitely agree. You make good points that we study things that are based on reality using science when we ask "what is truth?"

I still wonder if there might be constructs or frameworks 'out there' more advanced than "asking questions". When looking at evolution, I wonder if bacteria, plants, or animals have that frame of reference of "truth" and "asking questions". To me, it looks like "truth" and "asking questions" are things humans have constructed.

I wonder if "asking questions" is just a part of species evolution and I'm curious by the thought that there might be more powerful frameworks 'out there'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > What are the boundaries of problems we humans just don't have the grace of > asking about

> What questions aren't we asking?

I don't see the point to your submission. First you postulate that there are things we cannot think about, and then you ask us to think about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, sorry about that, I'm going to reword this and hopefully clarify my thoughts. I wonder about the limitations of us humans, as a species, and what we do when we ask about things.

I wonder if there are constructs and frameworks more advanced than "questioning". Is "questioning" that we, as a human species, do something that is just one primitive part in the scale of evolution?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, sorry about that, I'm going to reword this and hopefully clarify my thoughts. I wonder about the limitations of us humans, as a species, and what we do when we ask about things.

I wonder if there are constructs and frameworks more advanced than "questioning". Is "questioning" that we, as a human species, do something that is just one primitive part in the scale of evolution?

</comment><comment> 70122-_6 how close are we to a thunder_app on fdroid to increase your social footprint, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, 70122-_6, this is amusing. This is a question, indeed, I think most people aren't asking.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Daily Brief – Pulls news across sources into one site/email. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybrief.co/ <comment><USER2> Speaking right now in to Google Voice typing.

This is great but the problem with it is in the post-postmodern age we live in there is no editorial voice that can attain credibility in the traditional mission of Journalism objective sense.

I'm trying to come up with a solution and I agree this problem is extremely important.

Your site simply offers an editorialized version of the news. Such is insufficient to satisfy the information demand of even a niche Marketplace.

There has to be another Model. News must be more than a single personalized editorialized Viewpoint. This is the age where we using technology somehow find objective truth and we discovered the future of news.

There is no curated list. There was only a value selected on the continuum between totally agree with your own opinions and totally challenging them. Between living in the bubble and living in a larger world. Each person has their own Optimum Comfort level value on that continuum.

There are so many websites. Everything that prospers is based on the evolutionary principle of selecting for competitive advantage. Ideas that are better and more workable are advantageous. News media is a business of ideas. If you wish to succeed in the business of ideas you must have advantage. The future of news media is somehow to give to each individual their own Optimum balance of confronting and affirming viewpoints.

By Optimum we mean that summed over all individuals it maximizes the utility function of the common good.</comment>


Ask HN: How did you move from 'real' work to working for startups? - <AUTHOR>

Hey all. I am a 23 year old with a degree in mechanical engineering working in mining. In the 2 years within my company i have moved up from graduate mechanical engineer to project engineer. (unprescedented in my career/work). I have managed projects from start to finish worth millions of dollars. Only problem is, as good as I am at this, I really don't want this to be my life.<p>So my question to all you, is how did you jump from the 'real' world to working for a startup or finding your own business, and how do you recommend I carry my skills to this new career I so desperatley want. <comment><USER2> The short story for me is saved enough to give me a full year's runway and quit my job.

For you, since you are still employed at your job, I would suggest that you start chatting to people in your area that have started / are starting companies. Figure out how they did it. You'll learn much more over a beer than anything we can probably tell you here.

Then figure out what frustrations you want to solve for people. Think about whether they are going to have those frustrations five years from now and then go talk to them.

As for carrying skills over to a new career, given your technical background you'll have good project management skills and incredible knowledge into mining. What sorts of problems / frustrations can you solve for mining companies / employees? That's an easier way to start than how do I become the next google.</comment>


Our Vacation Policy: Take Some - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.balsamiq.com/team/2011/09/09/vacation-policy/ <comment><USER2> For policies like this, your company culture and the examples leadership sets are going to dictate exactly how something like this, or anything else not explicit, is followed.

If leadership often takes vacation and doesn't do more than basic email checking, if that, then employees will feel comfortable doing the same and enjoy this policy over your standard "you accumulate 5 hours of PTO per pay period."

If leadership rarely takes vacation and when they do they're basically working full-time anyway, then employees will be frustrated because they'll feel they have to emulate the same.

And as I said, this goes for everything. I was briefly at a startup where the CEO would be in the office from 11am to 8pm and it drove me crazy. Every time I left work I would wonder if he thought I was 'slacking off,' because he wasn't in early enough to see when I got in, just that I always left before him. Some engineers just emulated his hours, but given my various other life commitments, that was impossible. There's a reason why "go home on time" is in a lot of CEO advice books.

<comment><USER3> It's about the size of the company and quality of the communication between the management and team.

If your dialogue was better with the CEO then you wouldn't feel that way or just ask him/her easily.

<comment><USER4> If only people were rational enough in their behaviors and efficient enough in their communication for that to really be the silver bullet.

In a small company, there are rarely such neatly demarcated lines. Regardless of how well you communicate with your boss about arranging to be done earlier, you will feel the eyes of your coworkers when you head out the door.

edit: A notable exception being results-focused cultures that emphasize flexibility as a company value. If punching the clock is an expectation, it's hard to manage to be on a shifted schedule without there being at least a twinge of resentment when you head out earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Peldi, I think you're trying to do the right thing by treating people with respect and allowing them the freedom to make their own choices, BUT I think you are ignoring simple human nature and actually making their vacation time worse for them.

As others have said in the comments, in systems like this, people will take _less_ vacation than if there were a defined plan. Because there is no defined plan, one is set by example. They look to you and to their peers. I suspect strongly that you will take less vacation than them being the CEO of the company. I also suspect that their peers will gravitate toward taking less vacation, and human guilt will be the guide.

I urge you to reconsider. Instead give them a very generous vacation policy (20 days! a whole month!) and then MAKE THEM TAKE IT! You can do that by simply telling them 'You need to take a vacation' or just have a max cap on vacation (say 40 days) or have vacation expire after 2 years (time enough to build up a nice sabbatical).

</comment><comment><USER6> The company I work for recently adopted a NetFlix style "we don't track vacation" policy. It's been about nine months, and anecdotes (no data available - we don't track!) suggest total vacation time taken is less than half of last year.

I suppose that whether that's good or bad is pretty subjective.

<comment><USER7> Right.

Unless you literally mean take as much vacation as you feel is right and no matter how much you take (even 4 weeks straight), we won't ask questions, then I'd rather have a specific number.

For sick time, I think this is a great idea. I have unlimited sick time where I work, so I only take it when I'm really sick. It's like the saying that what gets measured gets done. The measure of legitimate sick time is not "do you have the time" but "are you sick," so that's what people use to judge when taking sick time. If it was "do you have the time" then as long as they had the time, people would feel fine taking sick time, even if they weren't sick.

If you tell me I can take as much vacation as I want as long as I need a vacation, then even to take a half-day, I need a justification. Every vacation day, or part of a day, becomes a risk that I'm going to look like I'm taking too much vacation.

<comment><USER8> _If it was "do you have the time" then as long as they had the time, people would feel fine taking sick time, even if they weren't sick._

Or even worse, the policy at my employer - within a given year you may take up to five of your accrued sick days no questions asked (assuming you have the sick days banked), but to use any other sick time you have, you must submit a doctors note as verification. As an incentive intended to reduce absenteeism, if you take no sick days in a given year, you're given an extra "free" vacation day usable during the following year.

What this means is that if you end up taking even one sick day during a year, you've lost your bonus vacation day. So now you may as well burn down the remainder of your five unverified days by calling in sick when you really aren't.

<comment><USER9> It seems to me that the reward for no sick days would create an incentive for people to come in with a cold/flu and spread it around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hi all, Peldi here. Thanks for the feedback. I don't know how much vacation everyone here is taking (I could look in the shared vacation calendar we have), but I'd say everyone is taking 3-4 weeks a year, plus some more time when they take their laptop to the beach and work half-days from there.

This is one of the policies that I fear might not work if we ever reach a certain size, but so far we're all happy with it...it's just not something we keep track of for other people, just ourselves.

Thanks again for the feedback, it's a big reason why I'm sharing our current policies.

<comment><USER11> I just want to comment that policy like this will cause you problems in recruiting a certain type of talent. Of course, that will be imposible to measure, but I can tell you none of my friends (we are little older but not so much) will not work for a company which has a policy like that. We just had a beer talk last Friday about that.

<comment><USER12> Could you please elaborate on why?

<comment><USER11> Reasoning goes like this:

\- If a company is really about "we don't care about how much vacation you take", then why not to give me minimum vacations? It seems intellectually dishonest.

\- How I do know how much of vacation I can take and whether that amount is preventing me of getting raise/bonus/promotion?

\- This policy means that my vacation will vary depending on manager and current project. I cannot commit to travel with my kids, I cannot commit to visit my parents... because who knows: I might have a different manager next month.

\- If I take two weeks vacation and none of my teammates are taking vacations, am I going to be fired? Are they going to consider me that I'm not a team player?

\- I can lose a job after working for year or so without taking any vacation, but if I did accure vacation I will get some money (kinda reward for working hard for a year and not taking vacation), while in case of "flexible vacation" I get nothing.

<comment><USER13> It seems like the one correct answer to the vacation policy question is, "Do what you want, as long as you don't hose the company."

If you want to work remotely for the next month and nothing depends on your physical presence at the office, fine.

If you want to fuck off for the next month and you're not on anyone's critical path, that's fine, too.

Restricting things a bit, "not hosing the company" could be interpreted to mean that you can take off when you want, but for absences longer than _x_ days you need to let your supervisor know _y_ days in advance so s/he can take it into account when necessary. It doesn't sound like this would be an unreasonable thing to ask, as long as _x_ and _y_ are clearly stated by the company and respected by employees.

This whole thread reminds me of why I don't work for other people. The idea of someone demanding my physical presence for a portion of each day, for no reason other than the fact that they can, makes me frown and cock my head to the side like a puzzled beagle.

<comment><USER14> _If you want to fuck off for the next month and you're not on anyone's critical path, that's fine, too._

But if you can do this, maybe they and you will think about whether they need you the month after that, too.

<comment><USER13> If you're doing good and valuable work, and the company acknowledges this, you won't _want_ to vanish for weeks or months at a time.

The overriding goal is to run an outfit where the employees want to be there. If you do that, then vacation-policy abuse will not be a major problem. If you don't, then vacation-policy abuse is the least of your problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would much prefer a generous but explicit vacation allowance. I feel that with the "take some!" vacation policy social pressure would prevent some from taking as much as they really want to. It's going to boil down to everyone implicitly deciding what's a fair amount and that will become the unwritten rule. I'd rather everyone just decide what's a fair amount and write it down.

That being said, a fair amount is definitely not two weeks (10 work days)! I'll never work for a company that's that cheap again!

<comment><USER16> It's one of the things that's always stunned me about the US - the 10 days vacation a year being a relatively common thing.

European law states a minimum of 20 days (which can include public holidays though often / usually won't). In the UK where I work 20 - 25 days plus 8 or 9 days public holiday is the norm, and 28 - 30 days plus public holidays not unheard of.

I seriously don't understand how people don't just go mad on so little.

<comment><USER17> For those that work, they do go mad. Haven't you noticed that Americans are obese drug addicts with little knowledge of world culture, don't speak any other languages at all, and love to declare war or otherwise bully anyone they can while shouting rah rah patriot freedom? That is part of what happens from never being able to take a month of vacation, which means no long trips to europe or south america or africa or anywhere really other than across the state line to the indian casino for a few days of gambling and buffet eats.

All right, perhaps not every one would go mad. There's quite a few jobs especially in bureaucracies like government and banks where work is a social club where they chat and drink coffee all day. These people probably don't need a vacation, but they are the ones where there is no problem for them to take it since they weren't contributing much in the first place.

It's the productive people that get backtalk from managements about vacation: "You can't go, we are in a crunch."; "This is a crisis, where is the team spirit."; "I can't believe you are considering taking 5 days off this year when things are the way they have been lately."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The problem I have with systems like this is that I've worked at a company that says this, but it can get dicey.

To their credit they really did mean take vacation when you want to, but to them, what that meant was, feel free to take a week or two if you want, or a random day if it pukes on the hill.

The problem is that my wife and I save our vacation, she's a teacher, and take 2 months every other year in Europe.

With the "typical" you accrue vacation policy this isn't much of a problem as long as you book in advance.

With this take what you want I've had some pretty heavy handed conversations about "not begin a team player" and taking advantage of the company when I asked to do this.

<comment><USER19> That's too bad.

My employer has "normal" vacation policies (though we accrue faster than most other employers), but most managers (including mine) won't blink if you ask for four weeks at a time. The CEO typically leaves the country for at least four weeks a year (as well as taking other holidays throughout the year), and my direct manager was gone for five weeks, with no contact, this year. I was out of the office for six weeks as well, though I did work remotely for about six days and spent four days at our west coast dev office (where my manager is stationed).

Another person mentioned golden handcuffs--I agree. There are some things that bug me about the way the company works, but when I look at what the company offers me, I'm more likely to either look past those things, or work to fix them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> After the rogue trader incident at SocGen, the investment bank I was working for _required_ people to take a week of vacation at a time (HR would actually verify compliance). Employees would have to declare in advance that they were planning a mandatory vacation so IT could suspend their remote logins and disable their card access to the building.

<comment><USER21> In my country you normally get 28 days of vacations of which at least two weeks must be consecutive — that's by law.

<comment><USER22> Where are you? I want to go to there.

<comment><USER23> 28 days is the minimum in the UK.

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

<comment><USER24> In Australia we have 4 weeks plus 10 public holidays (In Melbourne, one of those is for a Horse Race).

What I learned from that link though -- is that the concept of "Long Service Leave" is unique to Australia/New Zealand. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_service_leave>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not sure, but there are a few horror stories here in Bay Area about policy like this (you go for a two week vacation (no email, no phone) and you got terminated when you come back).

The problem is that eventually the policy like this will create a backlash and burn out. However, it will be hard to find why ... As of now, this policy will work because balsamiq is cool and hot. But after your company is not a startup anymore ('running repeatable business mode') you need to find something which will be more predictable. If nothing you might want to recruit a more senior people which do have a family. And then you will get into this "it is hard to find talent" bs.

Also if this is really a policy, why not to accrue minimum vacations anyway?

</comment><comment><USER26> Being an old dude, I'm probably not the target demographic, but this policy would not be attractive to me.

For one thing, when comparing positions, I like to have quantitative data. Ok: Position A gives me $150,000, expects me to work 45 hours a week, provides me 25,000 in benefits, and gives me 4 weeks of vacation per year and it requires 10 hours per month of commute / preparation time.

Then I can make a rough estimate of pay per hour, consider the qualitative aspects, and compare positions apples to apples. When things are vague, it makes comparisons more difficult.

</comment><comment><USER27> Healthy quantities of vacation time is one of the reasons I'm still in public education after 15 years.

Teaching in a public school isn't the easiest job in the world (nor the hardest, probably), and not everyone has the personality for it, but I really believe that having a lot of time off contributes to my mental / emotional / physical health and helps me to be an excellent teacher when I am working.

In my district, we get one week off around Thanksgiving, two weeks around Christmas, one week around Spring Break, and ten weeks off in the summer. Plus most of the state and national holidays.

I know people often suggest that the U.S. should move to a year-round school year, but I'm not sure the ills in public education would be solved by more days in the classroom.

<comment><USER17> I am a designer, engineer and entrepreneur, but I have also taught high school in the past.

As an engineer, I would not consider working for a place that had a problem with less than 4 weeks vacation. It is absolutely necessary to have that as a minimum to recharge and do a great job. If I'm not allowed to do what I need to to do a great job, I don't want the job, I tell people to give it to some lackey instead and just be comfortable with their full on corporate BS environment.

I think that the extremely lengthy vacations should be taken into consideration when discussing teacher pay issues. It's relevant since a lot of teachers take part time jobs in the summer, something 12 and 11 month workers can't do. Some even write books and generate additional income that way, and recognized copyright case law in the US has the cool exception that books written by full time academics are not work for hire by their bosses. That's not the case for those of us in engineering where companies try to grab all they can.

Teaching high school in the US is extremely emotionally exhausting. You're expected to be a social worker and you deal with people with problems, yet you have little training and no support or back up or authority for dealing with this. When I was a teacher, if I did not have the entire summer off, I would have gotten a gun and come in and shot the entire administration. Not because I am crazy, I've had a psych eval for security clearance and am completely stable. It's just how close to breaking being a teacher in the US will drive you. The system is incredibly dysfunctional. Work stress is comparable to being a soldier on the front line. Most teachers are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. I am not surprised when I hear of so many female teachers having sex with their students - that is not because they are pedos, it is a stress response from having a total emotional breakdown from working in a horrific system.

If the 3 months of vacation time was removed from US schools, we would see a wave of teacher led psychotic breakdowns, suicides and massacres that would be so legendary they would be spoken of 1000 years from now.

<comment><USER13> _When I was a teacher, if I did not have the entire summer off, I would have gotten a gun and come in and shot the entire administration. Not because I am crazy, I've had a psych eval for security clearance_

Um. About that clearance...

<comment><USER17> Yeah Bob, what about the clearance?

The crazy people are the ones that won't push back at a certain point of provocation. You hear about these women that stay with abusive spouses that beat them instead of leaving or killing the guy? They are nuts to put up with it, that's the crazy group.

By the way, a very Happy 9/11 Day to you. Speaking of which, I doubt it's escaped anyone's notice that it's perfectly OK for the US to use guns to mass slaughter people when it is ticked off about stuff that someone loosely related to them may or may not have done.

Hey why shouldn't it be OK for everyone then. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> 15 years ago, the company I worked for, piloted no limit on sick leave policy. The average number of sick leave taken fell from 12 days to 9 days. Company publised the statistics to employees and Only people whose sick leave exceeded 2 standard deviation were notified. We also piloted alternate Friday off, the absenteeism due to doctor, dentist, car service appointments fell off to negligible.

<comment><USER17> "Only people whose sick leave exceeded 2 standard deviation were notified"

I don't understand what notified means? Notified of termination? So each year the company measured which people had the most sick days, which would of course be those dealing with cancer treatments as such, and fired them? IF so, it is reminiscent of Jack Welch's notorious dictat to fire the 10% "at the bottom" each year.

No doubt I am misunderstanding the policy you are describing, which is why I am asking for clarification.

<comment><USER28> Notified means they and their manager were told that the sick leave taken exceeded the norm, there was no retaliation, just as a check of reasonableness of leave. I am not sure how longer duration illness were treated, may be put on short-term disability benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm sure this is well intentioned, but wouldn't it leave employees to doubt whether they're taking too much leave (i.e. "Is my boss testing my Commitment?"). I can see how people may land up taking less leave due to fear of being judged to as work-shy.

</comment><comment><USER30> I worked at a small company where I was paid hourly and didn't even have paid vacation. The upside was you could take as much time off as you could afford. The downside was I couldn't afford much, though I did come into a little money from an outside project and managed to take a nice 4 week vacation. :-)

I think a hybrid of that approach could work, where you get X weeks of paid vacation and can take more as unpaid leave. That way, everyone gets the benefit of being encouraged to take a certain amount of time off, and those who want more can have it without other employees feeling like people are cheating the system. However, I asked about this at my current job and was told that unpaid leave was "strongly discouraged". I think there's also some risk of being seen as "not a team player".

But I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who would rather have more time off than money.

<comment><USER31> Yea, I did something similar a while back and really enjoyed it.

> But I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who would rather have more time off > than money.

I suspect you're right, I think debt holds back a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> HR policies that treat people like professionals and adults are refreshing.

Sadly, not everyone can afford to hire only those who will act this way. It's expensive, and not always worth the cost.

<comment><USER33> They also only last until the company hits a certain size, and someone starts taking 4 months of holiday a year, because they can. In countries where you can't easily be fired, anyway.

Most stupid HR policies come about from an employee abusing the system. Come in before 9:30! No sick pay! etc etc

<comment><USER34> It's also worth noting that punishing every worker for the abuse of one, is a very common and stupid attitude. Get rid of the slacker, don't make it hell for the rest of the team.

<comment><USER16> That's great in countries with poor employee protection, but in most European counties getting rid of someone is easier said than done.

You tend to need a very good reason, backed up with evidence and, unless it's a major major thing, you need to have worked with the employee to correct the behaviour.

In a country like that a policy which states "Take some vacation" couldn't be used to discipline someone because the issue is actually that they're conforming with it a little too much?

It doesn't mean good vacation policies aren't possible though. For instance you can have flexible allowances. You get, say, 25 days as a basic allowance, you have to take at least 20, you can take up to 30 but you get charged for / paid extra for the variation from your allowance of 25 days.

That gives people the flexibility to have either more money or a very generous allowance, while still being manageable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I adopted that policy for myself. Being a freelancer, every April/May I head to the spanish south coast and work from there. Somehow I manage to accrue more hours than a normal month, but I'm pretty sure I hit the beach most days at 3pm (with my MBP of course ;).

As long as the work gets done and you're not holding anyone else up, who cares when you choose to do it?

</comment><comment><USER11> Hmmm... I like the idea 'take some' but then why not accure vacations anyway and 'force' people to take vacations before accuras expires?

Actually, in one of big companies developing world class mission critical software, my manager would send me an email saying something like "please take vacations since we are making Mercedeses and not Pintos".

Yes, there were pople working really a lot and not taking vacations, but it ended up that their designs are not well thought and implementation sloppy (yea, it is done faster than planed but locking was just not performing on SMPs), so they were passed during promotion / bonus time.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hm. The thing is, tech firms are known for having amorphous and ill defined vacation policies that seem very open in print, but in practice, no one takes it because you're not really allowed to.

So I want to know.

1\. What is the average number of weeks per year taken by US employees. This tells the reality apart from the showmanship.

2\. Please confirm that by "doesn't accrue" you mean that when you lay someone off, they are not compensated for time not taken off.

3\. Please explain why US employees are denied vacation accrual if your intent is truly to have a good vacation policy.

</comment><comment><USER36> This will also depend on the type of job. Programmers - sure, lots of different things work. We're a weird breed.

But your secretary HAS to be there every day from 8-5. Your phone and email customer support service people HAVE to be there during a specific set of hours and rotate in an organized way, and have set vacation times that don't overlap, etc.

When it comes to this kind of stuff with employees, it's always going to be tricky. There's always going to be exceptions to the rules.

Where I choose to work, I would personally like someone to tell me I have 2 weeks a year of vacation, and 1 week of sick time, or something to that effect.

For hours per week that I work, I would like that to be based on accomplishments, and NOT based on how long I'm sitting in my chair. I can spend 3 hours dwelling over a stupid problem, walk away for the night, show up in the morning and realize I misspelled a single variable.

</comment><comment><USER37> Simple suggestion: add a minimum, no maximum. That way you wipe out most of the downsides but keep the upside.

</comment><comment><USER38> Did anyone every work for a reasonably small company (i.e. where you still feel somewhat familiar with the rest of the staff) that was

a) distributed amongst the globe

b) where just the local labor laws for vacation time applied

(Note that I'm talking about operations where you still know your colleagues in Europe/Asia/America, not bigger outsourcing operations)

Even considering the different attitudes about vacation time(^1), I'd guess that something like this would breed more envy than it's worth it. If there's a slight disparity (even 5-10 days), it would probably work out, but if one team is working in Texas, have almost no holidays, don't get _any_ vacation time, whereas the other team is in Germany where you'll get your 4+2 weeks of holidays/vacation, this won't go down that well.

^1: We "socialists" are a pampered bunch

</comment><comment><USER39> I have only heard negative feedback on the "we don't track vacation days" policy.

How about if they say - you get a minimum of X vacation days per year and on top of that you can take any number you want. At least people will take the X days without any feeling of guilt.

</comment><comment><USER40> I love the spirit of vacation policies like this. Your results are far more important than how much time your butt's in a seat at the office.

My only problem with it is that (at least in the US) you're not accruing vacation time. So when it comes time to leave the company, you're not going to get any sort of payout for that.

I can't speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself and the people I've observed in various companies and startups: we don't take much vacation time. I don't believe I know anyone who has cashed out their time off in companies that have traditional policies.

So, in my case, while I like Balsamiq's vacation policy better, it has turned out that the traditional style has been a better deal for me.

</comment><comment><USER41> Our Vacation Policy: take some more than the rest and you are not a team player, take more than the CEO and you are out.

<comment><USER42> Ergo: nobody takes any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Slavery started when slave drivers realized that they could take everything, then give a little back, reluctantly, infrequently, and unpredictably, and engender gratitude instead of anger in their slaves.

<comment><USER17> I appreciate your insightful and relevant comment. Pity it's getting downvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Yeah, the company I work for does not track it but there is always sort of a sneering attitude towards people who take time off "You are not hardcore enough"

</comment><comment><USER45> I recently joined a startup that has the same policy. Unlimited sick days as well.

Everyone at the company is so new, though, that there's really date to see how it's working.

But I can tell you one thing. I'm feeling much better working for the company compared to the previous job where we had no sick days (I spent half my vacation days taking care of sick kids, or myself getting sick due to sick kids) despite the fact that the owner made a PERSONAL income of $2B from the company. I know that even if my kids get their usual winter time flus and colds, I still have actual vacation time left after taking time off to take care of them.

</comment><comment><USER46> Give people options and they will generally do the right thing. An intelligent, competent, highly productive employee who is hired by a fast growing and profitable start-up knows better than to take too much vacation to the point of looking stupid. Try this policy at your local dead-end job. Nobody would show up. Because nobody gives a s __t.

My point, hire smart people, give them a reason to give a s __t and they'll do the right thing.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is pretty similar to my current job and I really enjoy it. I took ~5-6 weeks of vacation last year, and it was nice to not have to worry about it. I didn't do more than 2 weeks at a time, but I'm pretty sure I could take a month off without any complaint if I really wanted to.

Incidentally, we're hiring if you want to try it out yourself ;)

</comment><comment><USER47> Zynga has a similar policy: <http://www.zynga.com/jobs/body.php>

</comment><comment><USER48> "We don't have deadlines"

What? How is this even possible? Even if one doesn't set internal deadlines, I can't imagine avoiding integration commitments with any number of third parties, whether they be strategic partners, clients/customers, api/feed integrators, etc.

<comment><USER10> We're lucky that we're very self-contained (little product), and when things break we're usually able to fix them quickly (again, small team and little product). :)

<comment><USER17> Are you saying then the deadline is always "ASAP"?</comment></comment></comment>


Creating purpose-built TinyCoreLinux Images - <AUTHOR> http://fabianstumpf.de/articles/tinycore_images.htm <comment><USER2> I wouldn't bother with this. There is an excellent project named Buildroot for the exact purpose. There is also Yocto but it generates bigger images in their recommended configuration but you can always tweak it.

<comment><USER3> Supermin[0] is another really cool tool that might be interesting. Though I still can't exactly tell if it's relevant.

[0] [http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/supermin](http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/supermin)

<comment><USER4> Supermin solves a narrow case: how to distribute an appliance [Linux-based OS disk image] as a very small download (typically 100K - 1MB). It works by observing that the end user already has the files they need as part of their host Linux OS (eg. /bin/bash, /lib/libc.so), and the distribution is just a skeleton of the disk image, which is "filled in" on the end user's machine by copying the host files in at the last second.

So it's not really applicable here, although I understand people use supermin to build chroots for Docker (as the author of supermin, I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing that unless you understand the limitations).

What is actually needed here is libguestfs, which is a pure userspace tool for building disk images that doesn't require root access and is built for scripting/automation and security. We have a tool built on top of libguestfs called virt-builder which specifically churns out minimal Linux distros very quickly.

Sadly virt-builder can't build TinyCore Linux yet, although it probably should be extended to do that. It would be a lot simpler to use virt-builder, than to go through the tedious and dangerous steps outlined in the article.

[http://libguestfs.org/](http://libguestfs.org/)

[http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html](http://libguestfs.org/virt- builder.1.html)

<comment><USER5> Unrelated(ish), but thanks for mentioning libguestfs! I've been passively looking for the solution to the non-root filesystem access problem for a while.

Also, PSA: this project has a program that can read and write Windows registry hives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As I get some pleasure out of writing scripts to build finely tuned minimal images like this, I found the article interesting. However, I think manipulating a qcow2 image directly via nbd is over-complicating it. I think it would be better to create a sparse file, mount that via a loopback device, work with that, and then convert it to a qcow2 image (or vmdk or whatever) at the end.

<comment><USER7> .qcow2 files have two main advantages when building system images compared to a loopback device.

First, when building a system image with make, it works best to have each step result in a separate image file so that make can rebuild your image when a dependency changes without having to completely start over. Using .qcow2 images means that only the diffs are stored in each image file, instead of having a dozen 4GB .bin files.

Second, because the loopback device requires root by default, you end up running "sudo make" as part of your build process. But with .vmdk or .qcow2 files, tools like libguestfs can mount the filesystem for manipulation without root. If you're planning to distribute your work, then "git clone && cd project && make" is more accessible directing your users to modify their user permissions or elevating to root.

<comment><USER8> When I've done this sort of thing in the past, the ability to work with a set of staged partial images was a very mixed blessing. It ended up being over- complicated and rarely taken advantage of. I've settled on local package repositories and a single image build step which compiles everything together.

The latter problem you describe, that of needing to be root, goes away if you don't use a loopback device but instead use a mountable filesystem image. `truncate -d1G os.img && mkfs.ext3 os.img && mount os.img mountpoint/` doesn't need root at any point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank you guys for all the links to related projects. I need to create embedded Linux image for a project in the near future, so your links are quite handy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone have an idea how a minimal base Linux image can run inside a browser? Like can we create a small virtual Linux server right inside a browser?

<comment><USER6> [http://jslinux.org/](http://jslinux.org/)

It's a clever hack, but I don't know of any practical application. Did you have one in mind? Or is it just for the hack value?

<comment><USER11> Depending what you want to do, there is also the OR1K Emulator running Linux - [http://jor1k.com](http://jor1k.com) and a generic x86 emulator - v86 - [https://github.com/copy/v86](https://github.com/copy/v86)

you can check a small benchmark here: [https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k/wiki/Benchmark-with- other-e...](https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k/wiki/Benchmark-with-other- emulators)

via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10498305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10498305)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone tell what are the differences between a TinyCoreLinux image and a Rumpkernel, and the practical implications of those differences?

<comment><USER13> TinyCoreLinux is just a small Linux distro. A rump kernel is a unikernel reusing netbsd code, running in a single address space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is the Linux kernel compatible with multiboot specification yet?

[http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot....](http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/multiboot/multiboot.html)

<comment><USER15> The grub multiboot specification is short-sighted, x86 specific, and generally useless.

<comment><USER16> Not _useless_ , it's a useful thing to have when you're trying to learn how to write Hello World as an OS - [http://wiki.osdev.org/Bare_Bones](http://wiki.osdev.org/Bare_Bones)

Are there any bootloader specs that are standard across architectures? UEFI comes to mind, and I'm sure you could boot an x86 board via u-boot.

<comment><USER4> Actually UEFI was very Intel-centric when it started out. It worked only on Itanium and x86. We (Red Hat) spent a great deal of time of a very talented colleague of mine porting it to Aarch64.

<comment><USER5> Aaaand the jawdrop happened when I reached the last word in that sentence. Wow, kudos.

Know of any cool videos or anything similar that demo UEFI functionality on AA64?

<comment><USER4> I'm afraid I don't have any videos. If you get the APM Mustang, it boots into UEFI.

<comment><USER5> ...ah, nice price (fair, but decidedly not RPi or CHIP scale). Mentally noted, at least :D</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The war on margarine - <AUTHOR> http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-war-on-margarine/

<comment><USER2> Since my son is allergic (not intolerant, really allergic) to milk and dairy products, I have come to appreciate how strong the dairy industry is. There are milk proteins in tons and tons of manufactured products. I remember a discussion with someone at a baby cereal company who lectured me on how good milk is nutritious and good for your health even tough she already knew I was calling because dairy products are deadly in that particular case.

I am surprised we don't yet have a war on the soy cheese used on some frozen pizzas.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting, but margarine is (a) pretty gross, (b) culinarily less useful than butter (the milk solids in butter are put to use in a variety of systems), and (c) probably less healthy than butter because of trans-fats.

<comment><USER4> That is interesting, but butter is (a) pretty damn expensive and (b) contains milk solids which are an enormous problem for those who are lactose intolerant, (c) as to whether it is gross or not, can't say, but I think that is a PPP (personal perception problem) :)

<comment><USER5> Butter isn't very expensive - expensive is a highly relative term, and I spend less on butter on a rate of consumption over time basis than I do on bread, or milk, or cheese, or any other single staple alone.

What it is is delicious, and I won't do without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A review of the study that compares margarine and butter from the risk of heart disease point of view, and some more links at the end:

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/10/butter-vs- marg...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/10/butter-vs-margarine- showdown.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> In the nineteenth century, there were still many people who argued that certain organizations had a "right" to profit. An excellent read on this topic is Stanley Kutler's _Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case_[0].

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801839831/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801839831/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=drinianorg-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0801839831)

</comment><comment><USER8> The last anti-margarine law in North America was only struck down in the last couple of years. The province of Ontario lasted until 1995, while Quebec's law was only repealed in _2008_.

</comment><comment><USER9> wow. i just learned a lot about margarine.</comment>


Eo: Yet another C object model - <AUTHOR> https://phab.enlightenment.org/phame/live/1//post/yet_another_c_object_model_but_better/

<comment><USER2> I still wish we would've done more with Xt instead of reinventing the wheel again and again. So when gtk was founded, they could've just replaced the Motif part of the GIMP, not start anew. I'm actually surprised that they didn't invent a new language back then. Well, there's Vala now, after that brief dalliance with C#.

[http://bitway.com/jordan/papers/USENIX/AppDev.html](http://bitway.com/jordan/papers/USENIX/AppDev.html) was a pretty interesting paper way back when.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope better than gobject. Any hope to see regular mingw builds?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can find them at [http://win-builds.org/](http://win-builds.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2drhe7/eo_yet_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2drhe7/eo_yet_another_c_object_model_from_enlightenment/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Is every object of a type _Eo_?</comment>


Playing with Parse.com API - <AUTHOR> http://hasin.me/2013/10/23/playing-with-parse-com-api/ <comment><USER2> I've been playing with it too, and have written my own API using Flask & Python for a local company application. I've based my architecture on most of their designs. Very impressed with how clean and intuitive Parse API seems to be.</comment>