Ask HN: Please review our new service - Zukmo - <AUTHOR>

We recently launched the alpha release of Zukmo, a service that is our attempt at solving Information Overload (http://www.zukmo.com).
If you come across any interesting content, you can add it to Zukmo with a single click using the browser button. It could be a bookmark, it could be an interesting person you see on Twitter, it could be an RSS feed or it could be your notes or to do list. We will process the content that gets added to Zukmo and make it easy for you to consume it on most devices.
The alpha release has the bookmarking component complete. Once a bookmark is added, you can search for it by using any term from within the content of the page.
Is this a service you that solves a problem for you? Any suggestions on features that will make the service more usable/attractive?
HN is pretty much our launch pad. We haven't publicised it much until now. Any feedback you could give is greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> I spent a few minutes thinking about why I would want this service. It wasn't immediately clear to me what benefit it would provide over something like delicious or just standard bookmarking features in your browser -- then I got it... it indexes the page and lets me search for what I'm looking for later using the full content, rather than just the tags I assigned or information that can be found in the URL or page title. That's something you might want to make more obvious for users that only spend 30 sec on your landing page. Bring out the value proposition right away in simple language, rather than making them wonder what the difference is between filtering, crawling, indexing, recommending, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, BTBurke. Good point. Indexing the entire content of the page so that you can search for anything within the page is a big part of what we do. However, there are several other things we do that we were trying to show on the landing page. For instance, we have an Easy Reader that shows only the essential content of the page without any ads, headers, menus, javascript etc.(similar to the Safari Reader/Instapaper Text View). The current version of the landing page is an attempt at bringing out all the stuff we do/plan to do.

You are right, though. We need to keep iterating on the messaging of the landing page until it is obvious to users within a few seconds of seeing the page.

<comment><USER3> There's something nicely alliterative about the key things that your service appears to help you do with interesting webpages: Save, Sync, Search, Share, Simplify

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. You explained in five words, what we tried to do with a hundred :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't use stumbleupon, but first thing i thought when I saw your page is "wow thats a big stumble upon icon". And when i compared them, they are pretty similar, just rotated.

<comment><USER3> I agree that it's a little too similar, especially given that it's a related concept. I'd make tweaking the logo a high priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is this different from historious? I use historious and instapaper to save bookmarks and read later, and I am extremely happy with the service. I might jump in if your service provided features of both, ie: indexing my bookmarks and making it available on my kindle.

Also do you provide bookmarklets instead of the firefox plugin? It would be easier for those of us who use multiple machines and may not be able to install plugins on all.

I do like the idea of indexing content other than just webpages, like youtube videos, rss , twitter etc. Does your system handle Twitter and RSS updates also?

I will be back with more feedback after I start using the service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks vkalladath for the feedback. We are indexing the entire content as well as have an Easy Reader that provides an uncluttered view of the page. Providing support for Kindle is a good idea. We are currently working on iPhone, iPad and Android apps. Will look into Kindle as well.

We do provide bookmarklets. Once you sign into the app, go to the "Account" tab and you will see "Bookmarklet" option.

We do plan on adding Facebook and Twitter streams as well as RSS feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://www.zukmo.com>

</comment><comment><USER6> It looks promising. Some of my initial comments.

It imported the bookmarks from Firefox just fine. But the categorization of the bookmarks is, sorry to be critical, but buggy. Examples I can say are,

1) Techmeme, Engadget, Techcrunch etc. pages not in Sci/Tech. 2) Cricinfo, ESPN, ManUtd pages not in Sports. 3) A page on Microsoft and Cleartype was placed in Entertainment!! 4) MSBuild tutorial on Health!

and so on. You need to fix this real quick I believe. As it's one of your main selling point.

1) The Search lens image can be clickable. I atleast expected it to be.Only way is to press Enter key. 2) If the search result don't return any results, don't change the categories left panel from general to search specific.

Overall I like it and may use it.

Besides, are you associated with AdventNet/Zoho? Just wanted to check as you have put a footnote for Vembu Technologies. Are they both related even? I might be mistaken.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks blntechie for your feedback.

The categorization of bookmarks was started with a set of seed urls. It will get better as more and more pages are categorized through it. We will continue to fine tune it.

Good points about the Search lens and about changing the left panel when there are no pages found for the search terms.

We are part of Vembu Technologies. Sekar Vembu, our CEO was one of the founders of Zoho. Vembu Technologies was founded in 2004.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Problems here on Ubuntu/Firefox. No problem with the account set-up. No problem with the Firefox plug-in install.

When I try to add this page, I get the "Adding this page..." but after a few seconds I get another window that has "Zukmo" at the top in large text, but the window is not large enough to contain further text. This latter window disappears after a second or less.

I think the window is asking me to log-in. But I am logged in to Zukmo.

One further thing. Forcing an icon into the status bar without the option to switch it off is a show-stopper for me. It's a decision that doesn't scale. If every plug-in did this, then the status bar would be a mess and its usefulness reduced.

<comment><AUTHOR> auxbuss, we haven't yet tested on Ubuntu. Will do that. Also, do you happen to have a script blocker on it, like no-script?

Option to switch off is a good idea. We will add it soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I consume more information offline than online .. I think.

Plan to make this a desktop utility as well, something that integrates with the desktop that allows you to right-click and "Zukmo" any given file. Even if you have to fake it by copying files to a temp directory and later sync them with your servers (why? better keep it private on users' machines.)

You will need integration with (MS|Open) Office sometime in the distant future.

Call Insync and see if you can integrate with their clients:

<https://www.insynchq.com/>

P.S. Nice clojure-like logo :-)

<comment><USER9> This is totally off-topic, but how do they make the text on their webpage look so good? Is that a CSS thing?

<comment><USER10> If you're referring to the white shadow of the text, it is indeed css.

      text-shadow: 1px 1px 0px white;

<comment><USER11> Thank you for the tip. I've always wondered how to make the fonts look engraved on the page.

<comment><USER10> You can also specify more than 1 shadow. You can add a light shadow below, and a dark one above, to achieve an "embossed" effect:

      text-shadow: -1px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,.4),  1px 1px 0px rgba(255,255,255,.4);

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I tried to confirm my email, I get redirected to: <http://zukmo.com/register.html?err=rk_invalid>

Also, If I try using the twitter button on that page to login, It throws the following error when it redirects to <http://www.zukmo.com/twitter?oauth_token=_____________>

"java.lang.NullPointerException"

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you click on the confirm email link twice? The first time you click it, the email is confirmed. The next time, we should show a message saying your email is already confirmed. But, we have a bug that doesn't show the message and redirects you to the register page.

We will recreate this issue and get it fixed ASAP. Do let us know if you are unable to login.

<comment><USER12> thanks. seems to work now.

Any plans on using the structure of one's bookmark files to tag bookmarks being imported?

I've got a ton of folders categorized properly viz. A Scripting folder with sub folders like PHP / JavaScript / Python etc. Would love to see those translate out to tags ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Search works well. Yes, the auto-categorization needs some tweaking, but I don't see that as the key benefit. Automatic indexing of destination content - that's what's really useful about Zukmo. The comment on highlighting this benefit is quite relevant in this context!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We will rework the messaging on the landing page and other pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks interesting. I'll test it.

Just created an account. First comment :

      * it would be nice if the account creation page was SSL'ed.
      * The Firefox extension is a nice touch. I'll tell you how it goes, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks wazoox. Do keep the feedback coming.

You're right. We should move the account creation page under SSL.

<comment><USER15> You asked for it ;) Sorry if I seem critical; it's intended to be constructive.

I imported my Firefox bookmarks. You've captured all the bookmarks themselves, but you seem to have discarded all other metadata, including (a) the hierarchical structure, and (b) tags and description. This is really unfortunate, particularly because your auto-categorization code seems to show a high degree of .... shall we say, creativity?

It looks like the only way to access this saved stuff is to actually visit your page. There's no way I can access it through the browser itself (as I can with bookmarks today). While you do have a FF extension, it doesn't seem to provide a means of accessing those bookmarks, only a way to add new ones. It may seem petty, but the need to open your web site to access a bookmark is enough extra rigmarole that I'm not going to bother.

As mentioned in another thread yesterday, I'm not going to log in using Facebook. It requires exposing my friends' identities, and I don't feel I have the right to make that choice for them.

For that matter, I'm never, ever, going to choose the option so that my new entries are posted into Facebook. Bookmarks (and other notetaking) is a tool, like turning a screwdriver. While I might post to a social site about the project I'm working on, I don't post about each screw I turn.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks CWuestefeld. Yes, we did ask for it :-) That is why we love HN and the constructive discussions here.

You raise a very important point. We did discard all the heirarchical structure and the tags. Our initial thought was that tags and folders are not needed as we can search for a bookmark based on terms we remember from the content of the page. However, the fact is that there maybe additional data in the tags and folders and descriptions that may get ignored. We are looking at way to add this data into our index so that it isn't lost.

We are planning on adding the search within the browser extensions. That would make it easy for you to search your Zukmo account without visiting the site.

About signing in through Facebook, it is just an option some users may find useful. They don't have to remember another password. Personally, I find the Twitter sign in option as I don't mind giving out my Twitter credentials. So, we decided to provide all three options: Your own email id/password, Twitter or Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Also .. The chrome extension's text overflows and could be confusing. You might want to look at that.

<http://cl.ly/c3f4661fe6f0ff3f3857>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks desigooner. We will be fixing it in the next build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do the bookmarks become public for others to read? I don't like letting everyone know what I read, for reasons of competitive advantage.

<comment><AUTHOR> No. All the pages added to Zukmo are private to you. Unless you take some action to share them, they remain private to you.

If you want to share them, you can explicitly share them via Zukmo. We also provide options to share the bookmarks on Facebook and Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A couple more items. There's no option to disable Twitter once enabled. There's no option to delete your account.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, auxbuss. The option to disable Twitter/Facebook after they are enabled as well as ability to delete your account are in the to-do list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does it do PDF? PPT, DOC?

<comment><AUTHOR> YES. We index most of the common document types. The list includes: Text (.txt) HTML (.html, .htm) XML (.xml) PDF (.pdf) Word (.doc) Excel (.xls) PowerPoint (.ppt) Visio (.vso) Outlook Archive Files (.zip, .tar) OpenDocument (.odf) Java (.java) Rich Text Format (RTF)

More info at <http://www.zukmo.com/faq.html>

<comment><USER18> Nice. The thought of ".java" being a common document type made me smile. Guess we know what it's written in ;)</comment></comment></comment>


I tracked all my health biomarkers in 2019. Here are the results - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ghatageanup/i-tracked-everything-in-2019-here-are-the-results-afa1bc9c0960 <comment><USER2> Ooh those, i head a different definition of biomarker in mind</comment>


Could Facebook be your next software vendor? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/could-facebook-be-your-next-software-vendor/

<comment><USER2> Heavens, that is a frightening thought.</comment>


What happens to a kid who's too smart for school? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsorganizer.com/article/santiago-s-brain-8f0306bd7ff5aff88ce68cbde1718cfe/

<comment><USER2> I find the title of this thread (based on the line from the article, I presume) deceptive: "What happens to a kid who's too smart for school?"

I'm used to reading, and seeing first hand, articles like this: [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,699423,00.h...](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,699423,00.html) [http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/08/17/students- at-r...](http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/08/17/students-at-risk-how- high-iq-kids-are-neglected-in-school/)

Even the article says: "The prognosis for exceptionally gifted students in America is poor. The only federal program that provides money for gifted education includes no provisions for the exceptionally gifted, and it was just defunded. The one reform pending before Congress does not distinguish between levels of giftedness and creates no new educational programs."

I think it is incorrect to say Gonzales is the general case. The other side is mentioned, but only briefly. There is a BIG problem with what generally happens to kids who are "too smart for school," but I'm glad Gonzalez is getting the education he deserves at such an early age.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clearly someone needs to found a Hogwarts-meets-Xavier-Institute for exceptionally gifted kids. An environment actually tailored to the exceptionally gifted, and one that included their actual peers would be incredibly beneficial not just to the kids, but to society. These are our future Newtons and Einsteins and they're being ground down into middle managers by the current system.

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazing story, but is it just me or does that article load as one massive block of pain-in-the-ass-to-read text?

<comment><USER5> Not just you. It's quite difficult to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know that I like how this article is written. It tries to peg him as exceptionally gifted, yet he's only learning basic chemistry (VSEPR theory and Bohr model) at a state school? They use some fancy sounding words, but I just don't think it's really that impressive.

<comment><USER6> How old are you? 12?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How, bottom to top, does a modern web application work? - <AUTHOR> Hi y'all.
While refactoring a very old PHP website, I wanted to make it as portable as possible so switching providers (such as DigitalOcean to some other VPS) would be easier in the future. I came across this: http://12factor.net/port-binding, talking about exposing the web site on a port. I had always wondered why Rails was usually on Port 3000 while my local PHP website just ran at some URL. I got to digging more and I think I started drowning in confusion. Does Apache listen on 80/443 and just spawn PHP processes (or so I've read?). Is this what it does with Phusion Passenger for Rails? If so, does Rails still get served at localhost:3000 in this case?
It mentions the Thin client for Ruby, which is a web server, that is built on top of Rack, which is a web server interface, but there is also a reverse proxy Nginx (but Nginx is also a web server)? Rack and Thin seem to have identical interfaces, so I'm not sure what is going on here. Why doesn't a PHP app have to do any of that? Is it because Apache handles it? Also I also don't understand the details of CGI, FastCGI, WSGI, etc. and why each language needs its own gateway interface. Is Rack the WSGI of Ruby? I understand (I think) that at a very high level, it is a specification for a web server that, instead of serving documents, can pass an HTTP request along to a program which returns a response, that the web server forwards back to the requester.
I feel like I have a lot of details but I have no idea how they all fit together. I think what I'm looking for would startanswer would start: "A user makes an HTTP request from their Browser to retrieve a web page sitting on some random machine somewhere. There is a socket connection established (IP:PORT#) and it sends streams of bytes under the TCP protocol..." <-- Not even sure if this is correct
Thanks in advance for any help or redirection to other resources! <comment><USER4> Your path to enlightenment begins by learning at a detailed level what a web server does, and what a web browser says to that server.

Do these tutorials:

[http://ruslanspivak.com/lsbaws-part1/](http://ruslanspivak.com/lsbaws-part1/)

[http://ruslanspivak.com/lsbaws-part2/](http://ruslanspivak.com/lsbaws-part2/)

[http://ruslanspivak.com/lsbaws-part3/](http://ruslanspivak.com/lsbaws-part3/)

And when you are doing web development, use this command to understand exactly what is being passed between client and server (replace port number with the port number that your server is running on).

sudo ngrep -W byline -d lo port 8001

You have progressed to the next rank in your journey when you understand in detail what a request (typically from a browser) looks like and how it is structured, and what a response (from a web server) looks like and how it is structured.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly the kind of resource I was looking for. Thank you. I hope he keeps making more tutorials because I am very interested in the other things on his About page. I'm still excited to see what other answers people have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can run 1 web server or 2. You need at least one listening on :80; it can either pass the request off to a module (like mod_php, mod_perl, CGI) or it can pass the request off to another web server. The 12factor site is espousing this second approach, separating the front-end server (perhaps nginx on :80) from the application server (perhaps apache on :8080/3000, running mod_whatever, or in their case, a standalone app server like Jetty/Tornado). Almost any web server can run as a reverse proxy, but mod_php/mod_perl usually require a specific server like Apache.

If you've got a dollar, and an hour, maybe run through setting it all up [1], then run lsof -i at the end to understand what's listening on what ports.

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- conf...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure- nginx-as-a-web-server-and-reverse-proxy-for-apache-on-one- ubuntu-14-04-droplet)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for making the distinction between the 1 and 2 web server set-ups. I actually have a DO droplet and I was looking to move the application to Nginx + FPM just for learning purposes so that tutorial is helpful. I've also read some of the other tutorials on Nginx.

<comment><USER6> The way I learned how to setup a server without using a control panel of some kind is by diving right in.

At first I messed around on a local virtual machine running the same distro I planned to use.

In a few hours I had NGINX, PHP-FPM and Rails apps up and running on a server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well it's good you're aware of processes and ports, because that's the key thing. Then I would focus more on how they relate to each other, and to the outside world.

Server processes bind to a port, and then run some code to handle inbound messages. For a web server, the inbound messages are string key/value pairs. By convention, there is special support for file access in HTTP, which is the path section of the URL. Webapps use the path just as an ordinary string.

There are really two parts to understanding the system: first, configuring all the processes and spinning them up in the right order. Second, once it's running, how messages flow through those processes. A reverse proxy is terrible jargon for a server process that listens on one port and forwards the traffic to another (usually local) port. (It's called a reverse proxy because forward proxies are used by clients connecting out to servers).

You might have 4 server processes. Nginx, Apache/PHP, Rails (RVM) and MySQL. The first three _can_ all listen on port 80, but we pick Nginx to serve that role, and configure it to do so and forward to Apache and the RVM, which are configured for arbitrary higher ports. Meanwhile, you've probably configured Apache and RVM to be able to talk to MySQL (with 'drivers') and configured them to know about your running MySQL instance. All 4 of these processes are probably emitting logs to disk somewhere, too.

Interestingly, in the absence of a request, all of these processes just sit there. They do nothing, and use precisely 0 of your CPU. It is only when a client process presents Nginx on port 80 with a new string that they all come to life: nginx first, then PHP (say), then, if the stars align, MySQL. The confirmation bubbles back up a distributed call chain and out to the client.

Yay, CRUD.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here is a detailed crowdsourced answer to the interview question ""What happens when you type google.com into your browser's address box and press enter?""

[https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when](https://github.com/alex/what- happens-when)

</comment><comment><USER9> This makes a great interview question. :-)

The short answer is that it depends on how you set up your webserver. Different languages have different defaults, and of course you can override the defaults and set them up entirely differently.

A typical PHP installation runs as an Apache module. In this setup, the Apache server listens for HTTP requests and looks at their request path and virtual host. When it finds one that matches a PHP rule (defined in your Apache configuration), it starts the PHP interpreter, setting variables like $_GET and $_POST from the request data. On very old PHP installations, it then uses the path to locate the PHP script, parses it, and executes it. In newer (post-~2005) installations, the server caches the compiled PHP script in memory and executes it again on subsequent requests, without having to hit disk to read the file contents.

A Rails or Django deployment circa 2007 would use Nginx or Lighttpd as the webserver, and then communicate with a separate application server over FastCGI or SCGI. The latter are simple binary protocols that are designed solely to communicate between webserver and appserver; they basically include the information in the HTTP request, but in a parsed, compact format that's fast to decode. The application server would then decode the request and pass it to a web framework to execute, returning an HTML response that is forwarded on by the webserver.

Why split the webserver from the appserver? Because running your application's code is typically slow and memory-intensive; it's usually CPU-constrained. Serving static files and parsing HTTP, meanwhile, is typically fast, cheap, and bandwidth constrained. If you connect the app server directly to the Internet, your memory-hogging application will sit idle much of the time while pushing bytes out to a browser on dialup or a cell network. Splitting the servers lets you scale them independently; typically, you need just a few frontend load balancers to serve many app servers. It also gives you fault tolerance, since if an app server crashes, the load balancer can retry the request with a different one.

WSGI and Rack are HTTP interface specifications for Python and Ruby, respectively. Basically, all your Python/Ruby code needs to run inside a server _somewhere_ , which talks some network protocol. A number of different web frameworks have cropped up to make programming webapps easier - <USER2> like Django, Pylons, and Flask for Python and Rails or Merb in Ruby - <USER3> these frameworks typically optimize for ease of programming. Similarly, a number of different appservers have cropped up - gunicorn and uwsgi for Python, unicorn and Mongrel and Thin for Ruby, Phusion Passenger for both - and these typically optimize for speed. A common gateway interface lets you mix and match between them. The reason why you need a different one for each language is that the app server and the webapp framework are typically hosted in the same process, communicating in-memory, and different languages have different memory representations. You don't always, however - uWSGI, for example, is written in C and can be used with Python, Perl, or Ruby.

Around 2010, people realized that HTTP was a perfectly valid transport protocol, and started to use it in place of FastCGI and SCGI. Now virtually all deployments use nginx talking http to one or more appservers that run the actual webapp code.

So to a first approximation, when your HTTP request hits a server, it makes a TCP connection to port 80 on an nginx instance somewhere. nginx parses the request (which looks something like "GET /myapp/index.php HTTP/1.1\n\n...headers..." \- HTTP is just a text protocol), looks in its configuration file, and matches /myapp/*.php against the rule for some app (pretend it's actually a Python/Django app running on the same physical server for illustration). It then makes an HTTP request to localhost:3000 on the server to talk to the app server. On port 3000, you have uWSGI running, which again parses the request, populates a Python dictionary, and invokes the callable given in the uwsgi config file. That callable will typically be Django's entry point, where Django consults its root urlconf and routes the request to your application code.

<comment><USER10> Not any more! ;)

<comment><USER11> Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER10> Well, by typing out such a well thought out and complete answer, I'd say it's value as an interview question has been somewhat diminished. Otherwise, a great writeup!

<comment><USER9> You can still ask "What's going on at the byte level on the wire?" or "What's going on in the GPU when it renders the page?" or "What's going on inside Django when it computes what code to invoke?" or "What's going on inside the Python interpreter when it executes it?" The beauty of the question is that it's almost infinitely deep, and there's nowhere near enough time to answer it all in an interview, and the depth to which the candidate _can_ go tells you a lot about where their specialty lies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apache is a web server that add parsers as modules (php). NGINX is a reverse proxy/web server that can proxy to other processes listening on other ports. (PHP-FastCGI running on port 3000).

BROWSER -> NGINX (80) -> PHP-FastCGI (3000) -> NGINX -> BROWSER

NGINX can also proxy on sockets

BROWSER -> NGINX (80) -> PHP-FastCGI (/usr/socks/php.socks) -> NGINX -> BROWSER

CGI just defines the interface, and the language would be implementing the interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very succinct answer! Thank you. I am still a bit confused as to what interface CGI exposes? Is it a way for a programming language to take a HTTP request? As in, PHP-FastCGI is an implementation in PHP of receiving the HTTP request as data, and then calling the appropriate handler in the application?</comment></comment>


A high-performance, zero allocation, dynamic JSON Threat Protection in pure Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ankur-anand/gojtp <comment><USER2> The author should describe this more clearly, without jargon or the word threat which seems an odd choice in this case. I had to read the whole readme to figure out it does length and depth validation on a json payload. Hopefully it handles streaming data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback, while "JSON Threat Protection" is also a quite used terminology, but yes would provide an description with common word too. Currently Streaming handling is in progress.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What is JSON Threat Protection?

JSON requests are susceptible to attacks characterized by unusual inflation of elements and nesting levels. Attackers use recursive techniques to consume memory resources by using huge json files to overwhelm the parser and eventually crash the service.

JSON threat protection is terms that describe the way to minimize the risk from such attacks by defining few limits on the json structure like length and depth validation on a json, and helps protect your applications from such intrusions.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the description, I'm guessing that using a specific object json parser (such as [https://github.com/mailru/easyjson](https://github.com/mailru/easyjson) ) would not be vulnerable to such attacks. They will just skip characters if the field is not found. And if a nested field is found inplace of a non nested one, they'll just error

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't get it. Are there really parsers that will allocate anything more than O(n) memory for a given maliciously crafted payload? Are there any examples/studies of this?

It seems that limiting your marshaled input size to something sensible for your application should do the trick just fine for most cases.

</comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't allocate itself, but it effectively forces a big allocation by only supporting []byte inputs. Typically people directly pass the request body to json.NewDecoder, as it implements the Reader interface.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is `func (v Verify) Verify(reader io.Reader) (bool, error)` function in the api, which will support the streaming part. Currently it's WIP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> what is a 'json threat'? What is the threat actor here? It seems like you do some depth / length checks on arrays and objects but it also 'validate's json somehow? [https://github.com/ankur- anand/gojtp/blob/master/jtp.go#L341](https://github.com/ankur- anand/gojtp/blob/master/jtp.go#L341)

<comment><AUTHOR> JavaScript object notation(JSON) is vulnerable to content level attacks. Such attacks attempt to use huge json files to overwhelm the parser and eventually crash the service.

JSON threat protection is terms that describe the way to minimize the risk from such attacks by defining few limits on the json structure.

Yes It also validates the json.

<comment><USER6> if the idea is "limit the size of JSON" you already have http.MaxBytesReader or io.LimitReader

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This should be the parsers job, not an external validation service. Those threats are very parser specific.

<comment><USER8> There are situations where you do _not_ want to parse the JSON, but do want to ensure that the JSON is not going to cause a problem. Such as a gateway. It would be a PITA for the gateway to have to know all JSON schema of all services it is protecting. There are XML validators that that perform similar functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> JSON threat? Like overflow of requests?

<comment><AUTHOR> JavaScript object notation(JSON) is vulnerable to content level attacks. Such attacks attempt to use huge json files to overwhelm the parser and eventually crash the service.

JSON threat protection is terms that describe the way to minimize the risk from such attacks by defining few limits on the json structure.

<comment><USER9> I see. Is that really useful? Worst case is a 500?

<comment><USER10> It validates the structure before fully parsing it and allocating lots of objects you normally wouldn't.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'The Social Network': reviewed by Lawrence Lessig - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zuckerberg-the-social-network <comment><USER3> This is not a "review" so much as it is Lessig explaining why the internet is different, and why it is important, and why it matters to you. Especially to you, reader of Hacker News.

Reading this review has further improved my opinion of Lawrence Lessig.

<comment><USER4> Every time I see a video of him speaking, or read something he has written, my opinion of him leaps forward. He uses a lot of big words and yet is able to clearly and simply explain that which needs to be explained. Why the Internet should not be governed by the industrial revolution's concepts.

<comment><USER5> "Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture talk at the 2002 Open Source Conference. The master of the simple slides shows us how it's done. And since, as he says, this is his 100th time for this talk, he has this bad boy down solid. Even though this talk is from 2002, his slide presentation style is still as fresh today as Axe Body Spray."[1]

<http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html>

[1] [http://www.knowhr.com/blog/2006/08/21/top-10-best- presentati...](http://www.knowhr.com/blog/2006/08/21/top-10-best- presentations-ever/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This review doesn't make much sense to me. As another commenter claimed, I wonder if we even saw the same film. All the complaints that Lessig makes are clearly addressed in the movie.

For starters, it's not at issue here whether the Winkelvii deserve $65M. The film makes it abundantly clear that they do not. They are simply payed off (at a cost comparable to that of a speeding ticket per one character) for expediency, as Zuckerberg would not appear sympathetic to a jury.

The lawyers are not presented in the film as wise elders. I certainly don't recall them having any better comebacks than the younger characters. If anything, the lawyers are frequently presented as sharks; amoral, chaotic neutral characters who try to glean assets from the younger entrepreneurs at every opportunity.

Lessig goes on to conclude that the real story here is not Zukerberg's drive, that instead the film should really be about platform, the internet itself. But this is not a film about how neat the internet is, whether Lessig thinks it should be or not. It is about Zuckerberg and his dogged ambition. It's about the steps he took to develop and expand his creation into a worldwide phenomenon. Obviously the internet made that possible, but to denigrate the film because the internet itself wasn't its central thematic focus seems obtuse.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's fair to say that Mark is the Bill Gates of our generation. A technical prodigy with limited social skills that saw a boundless opportunity and just took the leap. Now he is rich, powerful, and hated.

He is not a murderer or a saint. Just a dude who wanted to win more than anyone else.

No idea is 100% original and are usually the sum of many great ideas that already existed.

People who didn't take the leap fully just blamed him/sued him instead of trying to build something better. I bet you most of them couldn't if they tried.

<comment><USER8> > It's fair to say that Mark is the Bill Gates of our generation.

Hyperbole much? Zuck is no Gates by any stretch of the imagination. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates revolutionized the world and brought computers to the masses. Zuck built a popular website, and not even an original one, these things aren't anywhere near the same league.

<comment><USER9> "popular website" - the largest social network in the world that took the platform to 500 million people?

Bill gates didn't invent operating systems, word processors, or spread sheets - but he certainly executed better than anyone before him.

I'd put Mark in the same class as Bill.

<comment><USER8> I don't care if it's the most popular website on the planet, it's still just a website in an era of websites. Social networks weren't even close to new when Facebook came out; computers in every home was absurd when Gates and Jobs decided to make it a reality. It's not at all comparable to the change they brought to the world.

Mark's a billionaire, no doubt, but he's just not in that league, not even close. The world before Facebook is hardly different than the world after it; the world before computers were in every home is vastly different than the world after it. This Facebook worship is absurd, if it disappeared tomorrow the world would move on and hardly miss a beat. If every Windows PC disappeared tomorrow the world would basically collapse, business across the globe would grind to a halt.

Linux is a platform, Windows is a platform, Facebook is a toy.

<comment><USER10> What must a website achieve in order to be considered as influential as the creations made by (continuing the analogy) Bill Gates and Steve Jobs?

<comment><USER8> When the world economy depends on a website the way it does on PC's, then someone can claim to be in that category. Frankly I don't think that'll happen. The next big earth shattering thing on the scale of the PC revolution probably won't be a website. Actually, the Internet itself was the next big revolution after PC's, and probably then the introduction of the web. What's next? Who knows!

<comment><USER11> > When the world economy depends on a website the way it does on PC's

What do you call the internet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Imagine a jester from King George III's court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic...._

It annoys me that in a piece attacking Sorkin for having a cartoon vision of the world, Lessig uses an analogy with a cartoon understanding of the world himself. The British monarch in 1790 did not have court jesters, they were long gone ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jester> ).

<comment><USER13> I think this point is similar to that made in Nathan Heller's Slate article - <http://www.slate.com/id/2269308/> \- that Sorkin believes that Ivy League schools are still controlled by some kind of elite class (if not the WASP elite of old, some kind of new Internet-connected parvenu elite). Similarly, a member of King George the Third's court (jester or not) might assume that the United States was controlled by a landed aristocracy similar to that in England.

The fact that the 18th century British court did not have jesters is tangential at most. Call our theoretical author a macaroni (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroni_%28fashion%29> ) if you must.

<comment><USER14> I've been to parties in the bike room of the porc and I've been to Henley, both are pretty much as described. If anything Harvard is actually a lot more waspish and cliquey than they make it out to be. It's not the majority of the students but it has an enormous effect on the culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem with that movie is that it seems to describe Mark as both evil and a genius hacker. I think he's neither.

<comment><USER16> I've definitely heard accounts from credible hackers that Zuck is up there. I don't know him personally, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I do like Lessig's point that "Zuck's a genius, but so are many". There's a lot of insecurity around places like HN where people go, "baw, Zuck can't be a genius, because then not only would he be wealthier and more famous than me, but he'd also be more capable!" The "who's smarter?" argument is really a waste of time. It's highly likely that Zuck is an absurdly strong engineer. But, so are many others, possibly you included. Build until you hit your natural limits; before that, no one has any idea how "smart" you are, yourself included. Find your own market to win instead of taking the respect and credit away from him.

<comment><USER17> I'm a great deal more impressed by his status as the battle-tested CEO of a global behemoth at age 24 even though it is fashionable to dislike him. I've met a lot of skilled and innovative programmers, but self-made billionaires are in short supply.

<comment><USER16> Factual: Zuck is 26. But your point remains.

<comment><USER18> Didn't the point still hold at 24?

<comment><USER16> Yes, that's what "But your point remains" means. It implies it stood at 24.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just got home from watching the movie, fired up HN and was pleased to see this review. But now I'm wondering if Lessig and I watched the same movie. I don't think it portrays the Zuckerberg character as evil or the others as victims.

The Winkelvii, as the movie hilariously calls them, seem indignant not so much that their idea was "stolen" as that the geek refused to know his place, which presumably was to code things up for them in exchange for token equity. They're not bad guys, but they're angry that their skewed view of the world, with them naturally at the top, turns out wrong. The movie does not make it seem like the Zuckerberg character owes these dudes shit or that they could ever in 65 million years have created Facebook. They thought of an exclusive friends website merely because they were steeped in exclusivity to begin with. Only the Zuckerberg character grasps its real power. That's the meaning of the lightbulb moment where a friend asks him about a girl and he suddenly sees "relationship status" as a way for Facebook to address this need.

The Saverin character (marvelously acted, by the way - who _is_ that guy? - his emotional vibrancy is remarkable) is sympathetic but clueless, doggedly trying to turn Facebook into a small business that ekes out a bit of ad revenue. His dream for Facebook is that it be allowed to join the business club the way he personally craves admission into a prestigious student club. His happiest moment is when he gets an executive title; his main frustration that more mid-level ad execs don't throw him a few bones. The movie makes it clear that despite being "the business guy" he has no understanding of the business, whereas the Zuckerberg character grasps it instinctively, spends half the movie trying to explain it to him and finally gives up. On this point I think the movie gets startups right. I was rather astonished by that. The other point on which it gets startups -- and Facebook's significance as a startup -- right is in its emphasis on the founder as CEO. The contrast between Parker as the dot-com era founder who got deposed and Zuckerberg as a new generation of founder who retains control is pretty impressive historical precision on the part of filmmakers who presumably don't know much about startups.

(Incidentally, it also gets technical details right: the references to wget and Emacs in the opening scene made my jaw drop for a moment.)

As for Saverin, the movie consistently implies that he could never have remained part of Facebook, not because Zuckerberg is evil but because the abyss between the two of them is huge. Indeed, the tragic inevitability of their split is the core plot of the movie. (The Winkelvoss twins are mostly comic relief, and boy did those actors nail that.) It does, however, portray Saverin getting screwed out of his Facebook stock and Zuckerberg not doing anything about it; that was perhaps the one evil moment.

Even the Sean Parker character is only half-bad. He's a bad boy, but that's a dramatic device: the movie badly needs some shaking-up by the time Timberlake appears and his character comes with the trickster energy to do it. Beyond that, though, the Sean Parker character is the only one who gets what Zuckerberg is doing, the only one who gives consistently good advice, and the one who acts as a midwife to Facebook's birth as a real startup.

As for the Zuckerberg character, he's portrayed as an intense Asperger type who cares more about his vision than he does other people, but also more than money. The movie flirts with but eventually abandons the idea that he's motivated by petty revenge. His obsession is with making Facebook as big as it can get. I've never seen Zuckerberg as an Aspie type (and thought the actor overdid that aspect, going out of his way to hold the same furrowed expression the entire movie), but the obsession with making something great and refusal to let anything stand in its way are classic entrepreneurial qualities that the movie grants to Zuckerberg fully.

I think Lessig is wrong about the trite moral he thinks the movie is imposing on the story. The movie doesn't advance that interpretation, it vividly portrays some of the characters advancing it. That's totally different. The movie per se isn't concerned with individual characters. Everyone is granted his/her perspective but no one has any absolute status. What it's about is _The_ Social Network, not the online one, the real one.

I went to this movie grudgingly and left surprised by how bad I didn't find it. Guess I shouldn't be, since David Fincher is my favorite working director (or would be if I could forget the execrable Benjamin Button); as Bob Mondello said on NPR the other night, I'd pay to watch him direct the phone book. Beyond that, the acting is unusually good all the way down to the cameos (except the Zuckerberg actor is too monotone). Where I really disagree with Lessig is about the writing, which he loved and which to me was ok-with-awful- bits: it's smart the way that "smartass" is smart and has way too many TV zingers. (Even those, though, were toned down from the script that was leaked. That horribly contrived line everyone was quoting a few months ago where a girl tells Zuckerberg that girls will always hate him because he's an asshole, I'm happy to report, never made it into the film. [<\-- edit: oops! wrong!] Fincher has taste.)

<comment><USER6> That line was in the film, at the end of the opening dinner scene.

<comment><USER20> Accidental downvote, sorry. Yes, this is not only in the first scene but is revisited at the very end.

<comment><USER19> Yes, in the runner-up for worst zinger: "you're not an asshole, you're just trying hard to be one". Huh?

<comment><USER21> I don't think it was meant so much as a zinger. It was more of an outsider's clueful view of what the Zuckerberg character has been doing wrong all those years. Judging by the portrayal in the movie, the Zuckerberg character actually _has_ been trying really hard to be an asshole -- emulating the Sean Parker character when that role model stepped into view. Of course, he was initially told he was an asshole before meeting Parker; it seems he was aiming for that kind of sense of superiority before, though in a less focused manner, perhaps by trying to achieve a level of "cool" in general that was informed by the "coolness" of the assholes around him at Harvard. The Parker character just stepped neatly into the role of The Perfect Asshole for the Zuckerberg character.

Note that I refer to the characters, and particularly to the Zuckerberg character. I do not know enough about Parker to make any guesses about whether he is anything like the character in this movie. I also think that the real Zuckerberg either is not simply trying to be an asshole, but rather is an asshole, or has tried hard and long enough that he succeeded. Zuckerberg's now-famous quote about The Facebook's early users being dumbfucks for "trusting" him suggests he was an asshole from day one.

<comment><USER19> _Zuckerberg's now-famous quote about The Facebook's early users being dumbfucks for "trusting" him suggests he was an asshole from day one._

I don't agree. There are many things that comment might have been. For example, it could have been mock-cynical humour. The truth is we don't know and it's impossible to tell. What it undeniably is, though, is convenient for anyone who'd like some "evidence" to go with their pre-existing judgment.

I'm not that interested in Facebook and have never paid much attention to Zuckerberg, but after seeing the movie I was curious and read a few things. They confirmed _my_ pre-existing judgment, which is that he's nothing like the nasty Aspergerite of the movie. Also, a lot of people I respect feel protective towards him and stand up for him. That indicates something. So why, I wonder, do so many others hate him? Even if he has done every single bad thing that's been reported (obviously an upper bound on grounds for hate) the intensity of emotion people have about this guy still seems excessive. Well, there's a simple explanation at hand: he's the youngest self-made billionaire ever. _Anyone_ in that position would be widely hated. It's just easier for people to cope with his massive success if they can add the idea that he's an asshole -- these are two mental molecules that bond into a very stable compound -- because now the brain can say, " _I_ may not be the youngest billionaire in the world, but at least I'm not an asshole". Frankly, when we find ourselves feeling angry in this way, it's time to look in a mirror.

Oh and one more thing about the zingers: that script seemed to me to have been optimized for how many smug one-liners could be crammed into it, with no concern for how people actually think or talk. This is good writing? It's writing designed to get people to say "what good writing". I'm surprised that so many critics and smart people fall for this; it's the intellectual equivalent of mistaking ostentatious glitz for taste. To me, Sorkin and Mezrich are the real assholes of this story.

<comment><USER21> What annoys me about Zuckerberg is his own obvious connection to Facebook's in-practice attitudes toward user privacy.

Perhaps "asshole" is the wrong term for him, really. It's possible he even means well. Meaning well is no excuse for taking advantage of people, pulling regular bait-and-switch maneuvers, and generally doing things on a regular basis that show obvious and nigh-malicious disregard for the privacy concerns of millions of credulous users.

I have no problem with people being billionaires. I hope to be one myself some day (hope springs eternal), and I'd have nothing but respect for how Zuckerberg got there if he had not used such sketchy tactics as part of his path to riches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That is not a "review" so much as it is Lessig expressing hero-worship of Mark Zuckerberg and attempting to minimize the numerous substantive charges of unethical behavior that have been directed at Zuckerberg. The summation paragraph begins "Zuckerberg is a rightful hero of our time. I want my kids to admire him." I don't have an opinion about the movie (haven't seen it), but reading this review has greatly reduced my opinion of Lawrence Lessig.

<comment><USER23> I'm guessing you only read the first page of the article. The real meat and gist of what he was trying to convey was in the second page, where Facebook was compared to Nantucket Nectars. The movie "review" was just there to catch user attention, like authors do with the first few pages of a book.

Here's the key quotes:

"Instead, what's important here is that Zuckerberg's genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing. "

...

"As "network neutrality" gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea."

<comment><USER24> In doing so, Lessig is reviewing the film he wishes was made about the internet, rather than reviewing this film based on the story it chose to tell. (Which is a compelling story.)

This violates the first rule of movie reviewers-- we don't care how great of a film director you imagine you'd be if you were in a position to make movies, rather than just review them.

I don't like slapstick comedies, but I'd never criticize one fro not being a scream sequel.

<comment><USER25> Exactly. Mod parent up.

I did see the movie this morning at 10am.

Lessig faults the film for not telling the story of Chris Hughs and Sean Parker's utilization of the internet for nonprofits and the election of Obama.

 _This is a platform that has made democratic innovation possible—and it was on the Facebook platform resting on that Internet platform that another Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, organized the most important digital movement for Obama, and that the film's petty villain, Sean Parker, organized Causes, one of the most important tools to support nonprofit social missions.

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. _

I think Lessing really misses the point of the movie. What I saw was a young guy able to take VC money and not lose his post as CEO.

I didn't see Parker portrayed as a 'petty villian'.

SPOILER ALERT: In the movie, Parker first learns of thefacebook after a one night stand with a Stanford undergraduate. He asks if he can check his email on her laptop and notices the site. At that point, Stanford was one of the few university .edu email addresses allowed on the site. He is so convinced, thefacebook will be the next big thing, he needs to find the creators of the site.

Basically, Parker takes Fanning under his wing, suggesting he move to California. There is probably a 20 to 30 minute VC montage, where Parker helps thefacebook get funding, using his various connections. He also has Zuckerberg dress in his pajamas, (Parker drops him off in an Escalade and waits outside) and go to a specific VC, and has Zuckerberg tell the VC, Sean Parker says "Fuck you" and then leave.

I own Startup.com (the movie, not the domain), and also E-Dreams. Watching both too many times, neither movie had a happy ending for the founders (within the context of those specific startups).

Startup.com CTO is ousted by the CEO (the two founders were best friends). Kozmo.com's CEO got ousted by the VCs.

This movie left me feeling icky at the ending. Not "Requiem for a Dream" soul fuck, but you really don't know who is a good guy and who is a bad guy. It really isn't black and white like that.

It did, however, have one of the most cinematic uses of 'wget' I have ever seen.

Also, kind of cheap headline there. I thought it would be a movie review, not an articulated rant. I expect more from that Harvard law dude.

Also, I have never heard of Parker before this movie, I was only aware of Fanning as the Napster creator.

EDIT: Changed ambiguous pronouns

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _Zuckerberg faced no such barrier. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students. Neither with Yale, or Princeton, or Stanford. Nor with every other community he invited in. Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a "neutral network," a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform._

This doesn't ring true to me. It is the _lack_ of true freedom on the Internet that makes Facebook such an enormous success. If ISPs allowed users to connect to the Internet without any restrictions, it's quite possible they would be running the equivalent of web/mail/chat servers on their home computers, and a true social network might have evolved. As it is, such innovation is restricted to a much smaller group of individuals whose entrepreneurial motivations will impose even more restrictions on users (for example, web sites are springing up that require Facebook authentication, totally eliminating the choice to opt out of Facebook).

</comment><comment><USER21> Lessig tells a good story, and makes important points about the power and value of an Internet free from stifling regulation. He mistakes the source of at least half the regulation, though, and casts a scurrilous, unethical bastard of an entitlement-culture entrepreneur as the hero of his tale.

Success is not the sole measure of heroism. Private enterprise is not the sole source of stifling regulation. Let's find a better hero of Internet-based entrepreneurial spirit and wildly successful efforts to get ahead of the curve (such as Paul Graham, oddly enough), and let's not minimize the efforts of government to screw over the openness of the Internet by chalking it all up to caving in to corporate interests.

Last I checked, corporate interests had little benefit to gain from granting the Executive branch of US government the power to "shut down" the Internet, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER17> As someone who has often cheered Lessig's opposition to the status quo, I am greatly puzzled by this piece.

 _Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other "property"? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the "idea" of a social network is not a patent. It wasn't justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law._

If we take Lessig's factual assertions about the originality of the code as face value, it still seems as if Zuckerberg ripped off a lot of ideas that were shared in confidence, and repeatedly deceived the originators of those ideas into thinking that he was working diligently on their behalf.

I can't understand Lessig's criticism of the system as stated. It is not as if these ideas were found by Zuckerberg on a Usenet forum or overheard on the bus, and the Winkelvoss twins then went after him with an army of copyright lawyers; some sort of proposal was followed by some sort of agreement, and Zuckerberg was given access to the fundamentals of a business plan and the existing work product of two other programmers. Perhaps Zuckerberg had already had a vision for Facebook and simply accelerated his schedule in order to get it to market first; but if so, one wonders why he was wasting time on taking meetings for programming jobs.

What does Lessig consider the twins should have done instead? Would he be on their side if they had drafted a proper contract, NDAs, and stamped everything they ever put on paper with the words 'Property of ConnectU, hands off'? Or is it that he doesn't consider their idea sufficiently distinctive to be protectable by the legal system? Because he never articulates quite what he means, I'm left with the impression that Lessig considers the commons to extend to any exchange of an incomplete or unrealized idea, without regard for the context in which that exchange takes place. By this interpretation, the notion of a 'gentleman's agreement' is obsolete, what you own is limited to what you can control, and any lapse in total secrecy is your loss to bear.

Indeed, I saw this view expressed repeatedly during the fuss over the iPhone prototype earlier this year. Many considered the finder of the device the new owner, regardless of his legal obligations and his knowledge of exactly who had lost it. The value the finder, and subsequently Gizmodo, sought to derive from their possession of it stemmed from the very confidentiality and general unavailability of such prototypes. But many considered possession to be fully equivalent to ownership (on a moral if not a legal level), conferring the right to exploit what one possessed to the fullest extent possible. Quite why legal technicalities of a search warrant issued shortly afterwards should have offended their sensibilities so greatly, I can't say - they certainly weren't bothered by any statutory considerations, so it must have been to do with some inexcusable lapse of style by the police.

If we are not bound to respect each other's property or confidence by anything less than our full contractual agreement, does Lessig then see progress as the outcome of an arms race between zero-sum competitors? Why should I not steal his car if he steps out of it and leaves his keys in the ignition, and place the blame upon 'the system' if Lessig summons a policeman to his aid? The value of his car stems from its current configuration as a vehicle, and Lessig is arguing that designs do not belong to anyone in particular. the materials which make up the car - some steel, rubber and various kinds of plastic - <USER2> mere commodities, and at most I have laid hands upon some junk which just happens to be organized into the shape of a vehicle at present. If I drive it away and wrap it around a tree, what has Lessig lost? With enough time and ingenuity, he could reassemble the wreckage into a working automobile: others have done no less, so why does he feel entitled to have his idea of a car actualized at someone else's expense, just because it existed independently in the recent past?

 _You don't even have to possess Zuckerberg's technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today. Websites across the developing world deliver high quality coding to complement the very best ideas from anywhere._

Unless, of course, they decide to launch against you as a competitor instead, in which case you had best resign yourself to basking in the reflections of their glory.

Given the midnight byline on the post, I cannot help wondering if this was written with the assistance of a post-premiere cocktail. I hardly feel he would ignore such gaping holes in any counter-argument.

<comment><USER27> You're missing Lessig's central point: $65 million is a ridiculous amount to pay for whatever Zuckerberg got out of Harvard twins and amounts to extortion and abuse of legal system.

If we go by the movie, Zuckerberg and twins met at most a couple of days, they described the general idea of the site (which, by that time, wasn't anything original: it was My Space or Friendster except with exclusivity) and he agreed to program the site. Except he didn't and instead created such a site, from scratch, by himself, dodging the twins the whole time (which implies they had no further contact except the initial meetings).

That might be an asshole move but I don't see where did twins contribute anything worth remotely $65 million. If anything at all.

If you're under assumption that if you talk to me, describe an idea for a website to me and I go ahead and implement a similar idea (with no help from you) then you deserve any part of revenue for it, they you're very much mistaken.

The reason we have NDAs, contracts and other sorts of legal tools is precisely because the above scenario doesn't play the way you think it does and if you want to protect your ideas, you can either use trade secrets (i.e. don't blab about them) or get the other party to sign a contract that spells out his rights wrt. to ideas you're planning to disclose.

It really is that simple and Winklevosses won legal lottery - there was no merit in their claims.

<comment><USER17> Nobody suggests they made $65m worth of contributions. They got that amount because it was mutually agreed to reflect something like the value of what they had initiated considered as if it were equity at launch, and adjusted to reflect the capital gains they might have expected to enjoy from holding such a slice of equity. You think $65 million is a ton of money, but given that Facebook was valued at somewhere between $4 and $15 billion at the time, it's peanuts - something in the vicinity of 2%, at most. But nobody would care if it were expressed in percentage terms because it doesn't sound so unreasonable now, does it?

I do not agree that it is extortion and abuse. They made a case that Zuckerberg pulled, as you say, an 'asshole move'; and that he repeatedly misled them into thinking that he was devoting all his technical efforts to their mutual benefit, while they focused on other sorts of business development. I don't know precisely what that involved, but I rather doubt that just because they were not themselves programmers they must have spent the entire period sitting on the couch doing nothing.

Yes, if you want legal peace of mind and defensible security, then the best option is to have NDAs and watertight contracts all around. But if those are a prerequisite for any kind of trust to exist, then our legal system would bear a much greater resemblance to the code-based civil law systems which obtain in most of Europe and South America. As things stand, we give substantial weight to common law, with its emphasis on precedent and judicial independence.

You may dislike common law for its ambiguity and unpredictability - although I suspect you would chafe under the mechanical inflexibility of the alternative when you find yourself waiting a month or longer for the registration of your business to be completed so that you can legally start harvesting people's data for fun and profit. but either way, Zuckerberg started his empire in this country, and if he paid attention in his classes on American government he knew there might be some legal risks in what he was doing.

And when that turned out to be the case, he got over his egotistical reactions and eventually settled for a marginal sum, like a smart person.

<comment><USER18> I find it fascinating that the people on HN, of ALL places, aren't more sympathetic to that point. All of us that have built (or are building) companies have brought a Zuckerberg into our confidence some point.

Hell, most recently _I_ was a Zuckerberg. My partner had an idea and the foundations to pull it of. He just needed a partner (me) with the technical chops to make it happen. I could have spent a few days picking his brain and stolen everything I could for my own gain.

I didn't... and things have worked out really well for us.

For me Zuckerberg is a villian. I've never met the guy, but from what I can tell he committed the most unforgivable act imaginable. He stole a vision, and actively worked to string those who trusted him along as far as he could. That's not something to celebrate, it's something to despise.

$65M seems fair to me. Hell it seems low. Fraud really does pay sometimes.

<comment><USER28> If the ConnectU team had been competently-run, the founders would have realized that their idea was their biggest asset at the time (they had zero execution), and kept it more closely-guarded. Instead, they blurted it out to Zuck before he even agreed to work with him, while completely neglecting to employ the use of NDAs, non-competes, or similar documents. I'm loathe to defend a legal system so "random and inefficient" (as Lessig puts it) that it would allow the ConnectU team to extract $65 million from Zuckerberg regardless.

Was it unethical for Zuckerberg to take advantage of their ignorance? I don't think so. He saw an idea he liked in the hands of a couple of people who weren't implementing it correctly, so he did it himself. That describes about half the startups that exist today.

Was it unethical for him to lie to the Winklevosses in order to delay their progress as a company? Definitely. But at worst, it amounts to unethical intellectual bullying of an incompetent and inferior competitor. Given that he didn't break any laws, didn't steal any code, and didn't sign any contracts (to my knowledge), I find the eventual $65million settlement hard to stomach.

<comment><USER17> What is your source for this version of events?

<comment><USER28> What's different from this "version" than what you've heard elsewhere?

I've searched and found no mentions of NDAs/non-competes. The only contract ever mentioned is an oral contract, which means they told him the idea, and _then_ I he agreed to work on it. In addition, Zuck's subsequent deceiving emails to ConnectU are well-documented.

My point is not to challenge the facts about what occurred and when. My point is that the concept of "oral contract" is hugely vague: clearly Zuckerberg didn't believe he had a legal obligation to complete their website. And in this case, the ramifications ($65 million) of breaking such a vague agreement were much too high.

<comment><USER17> Your interpretation is not the only possible one, and fails to consider the significance of the fraud involved. If it was a story of two business guys who stole a pile of code and built a business I suspect you'd be demanding jail time.

<comment><USER28> Of course I would, but only because code is tangible. The legality of stealing tangible items/data is clear in everybody's minds.

However, an idea is NOT tangible, and in the absence of signed contracts it is NOT clear that using an idea told you by someone else is illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have a problem to understand how the non-dilute share works as described in the movie. Personally, I was told that the construction is very hard since the valuation changes each round.</comment>


How can we get Google Support? - <AUTHOR>

The Symfony project, an Open-Source project (http://symfony.com/), uses Google Groups to host its mailing-lists. The service is free and we really appreciate it, but for no reasons, Google closed our access to one of our mailing-lists (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/symfony2).
That happened a few weeks ago and thanks to some inside people at Google, the mailing-list reappeared. As the admin of the list, I received no email about the closing of the mailing-list, no explanations, and not even an email when the mailing-list reopened after a few days of black-out.
I was not happy with this situation but I thought it was just a glitch. But then, some days ago, they did it again. The mailing-list is not accessible anymore, not even by me (the admin).
There is no way to get support, no way to get in touch with someone at Google. This is really frustrating. Of course, this is a free service and Google can do whatever they want, but I would at least expect a way to get some kind of support (hell, I'm even ready to pay fot it)... or at least, some kind of email (even an automatic one) telling me what we did wrong (and I doubt that we did anything wrong as the mailing-list is moderated and we are only talking about yet another PHP framework).
HELP! How can I get in touch with someone at Google? How can we get by our mailing-list? <comment><USER3> They actively don't want to support you. Google have an official explanation - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0Z_HAzO3I>

It boils down to the fact that even if every customer needed 1 minute of support every 2 years that would mean they'd have to employ 6 trillion people (or some rubbish).

As I said earlier this year, Google have total contempt for their customers - yes, even their _paying_ customers. [http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles- customer-contempt-co...](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/02/googles-customer- contempt-conundrum/)

Self host. Don't rely on Google. Sadly, that's the only way to do it.

<comment><USER4> He talks about 1 billion people needing 10 minutes every 3 years would need 20,000 support people.

And Google could setup the fee for the support in such way that it is financially self-hosting.

<comment><USER5> Google can afford to provide support and not charge for it, Google makes plenty of profit.

The guy in the video acts as if hiring 40,000 people is ludicrous and unheard of. In reality, it's not even a large workforce compared to companies like Wal*Mart (2.1 million employees), Foxconn (1.2 employees) and Volkswagen (500k, employees).

Every decent company has customer support, Google couldn't care less. It doesn't even provide human support to advertisers, its source of income.

<comment><USER6> Whether Google should offer support, I don't know. But I'm not convinced by your argument.

The companies you name generally have low-skilled workers. Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive.

Also, this is not just greed vs empathy. Everything has an opportunity cost. Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes. This is a strategic business decision; either answer may be better for Google and its users.

Of course, they _can_ spend the support savings on Olympic-sized swimming pools full of pudding. But you seem to be _assuming_ they're doing that.

<comment><USER5> _"Google can spend $X staffing support lines for Gmail, or it can spend that money on developing features and bugfixes."_

Or it can do both, because its budget is basically unlimited. Besides, you can't create features or bugfixes simply by adding more developers to a project. If that were true, Apple would be hiring developers by the truck load. Instead, they work with small teams, even though the company is raking in cash.

 _"Google support would have to be high-skilled and expensive."_

Let's compare Google with IBM, which has 470,000 employees. I would say that many of those employees are highly skilled and expensive. IBM has twice as much revenue as Google, makes more profit than Google, while employing ten times as many people.

<comment><USER7> A lot of IBM's employees are consultants. They are not cost centers for IBM, they are revenue/profit centers.

Each consultant employee that IBM hires adds to their revenue and profit.

Adding call center employees to google would not add to revenue or profit unless they had some method of allowing them to capture more rev. Adding purely customer support people would not benefit google.

<comment><USER8> By that reasoning, nobody should have customer support. Yet people do, because burning your customers is not a sustainable business practice. Support is not a profit center, but in the long term profits go down without it. If people's only loyalty to Google is that their service is free, they won't be hard to woo away.

<comment><USER7> I am talking about Google specifically rather than a hypothetical company that may need phone support to keep their customers.

 _If people's only loyalty to Google is that their service is free, they won't be hard to woo away._

People's other loyalty to google is that their service works pretty much perfectly. There is no free or even cost based product that I know of that beats gmail, google maps, google docs.

Before you list a bunch of startups no one outside of the tech community has heard of, remember that in order for the public to know about these products, those companies have to pay google to advertise. In addition to having to offer an insanely superior service, anyone entering the field must also know how to monetize which is challenging.

If a true competitor arises, they can be acquihired and integrated in to google which further limits google's need to spend millions of dollars a year on call centers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm paying for our company's google email accounts. I did that solely so I could get access to their support.

The support experience was outstanding. There was a smart, informed person handling the case. It was a tricky case, there were a number of emails exchanged and several lengthy phone calls, and it turned out not to be Google's fault at all (it was Rackspace's fault), and yet they were courteous, helpful, intelligent, informed, hands on.

One of the best support experiences I've had - but it only happened after we started paying for our email accounts.

<comment><USER10> This is an aside, but does anyone know if there's a way to get Google Apps but keep using your gmail address? I'd be happy to pay the Google Apps subscription rate, but I don't want to go through the pain of switching my email address to a new custom domain. I'm guessing that you can set up a forwarding rule from the gmail account to the new one, and then use the Send As feature in the new account, but that seems pretty kludgy. Is there a better way?

<comment><USER11> As a Google Apps user, you do NOT want to do this.

You are well advised to host your email elsewhere and have it relayed to your normal Google account (and add the email address as a Google identity and a send-as in gmail).

I'll tell you why:

\+ Google Apps users are the LAST group of people to get access to new google products (Google+ for example) \+ You can NOT add new emails to your identity information \+ There is no appropriate way to transfer your identity

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the first hand feedback. What do you mean about 'not add new emails to your identity information'? I'm OK with missing out on the latest & greatest features/products. I also don't really care about Google+, if that's what your third point was talking about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a Google Apps authorized reseller. Even for me it is very hard to get support.

Recently we had a problem concerning the Gmail IMAP API and the X-GM_RAW extension.

\- [https://developers.google.com/google- apps/gmail/imap_extensi...](https://developers.google.com/google- apps/gmail/imap_extensions#extension_of_the_search_command_x-gm-raw)

Quoting from the docs: "Arguments passed along with the X-GM-RAW attribute when executing the SEARCH or UID SEARCH commands will be interpreted in the same manner as in the Gmail web interface"

But this is not true. For example, the in:anywhere filter will not work in the same manner as in the Gmail web interface. In fact, it is ignored. We opened a support ticket at the "enterprise support" portal (<https://enterprise.google.com/supportcenter/>), and after 2 weeks dealing with some entity that could very well be a chat bot, no solution.

By trial and error we discovered that in order to get the same result as "in:anywhere" you have to issue an IMAP select to the folder "[Gmail]/All Mail" - which has a different name depending on the user Gmail language settings - for example, its "[Gmail]/Todos" in Spanish (you have to list all folders and look for a folder with the "\All" flag).

The document is still incorrect today. Having a billion users is not an excuse for crappy support. Seems like the whole experience is designed to be opaque and frustrating, to make you feel like you were the character of "The Trial" from Kafka.

</comment><comment><USER13> What support? There is no support at Google and this is by design. If they had support it would not be possible to offer what Google offers. You are shut down by robot and that decision is final. There is no support. And robots do not tell what you did wrong because this would be knowledge on how to play robots.

I seriously wonder how long such a begging - please Google, good Google - <USER2> finally end.

<comment><USER14> He's willing to pay for the support. Just as most people in similar positions. Doesn't that change the feasibility?

<comment><USER15> No, probably not. Think of how much Google earns per employee. Now think of how much they would earn per support employee. The numbers are probably not even even the same order of magnitude.

Moreover, Google makes money from each mailing list (for example) by displaying ads. The revenue that they bring in from each list is pretty small; the key to their income is the huge number of lists that they support. So losing even 100 lists every week, I have to imagine, wouldn't put much of a dent in their income.

By contrast, the overhead and cost associated with hiring, training, paying (salary + benefits), and supporting an employee are pretty high, particularly when you're offering a commodity product competing with other commodity (and free) products.

From a user's perspective, it seems insane for Google to ignore the business opportunity associated with support. But I have to believe that they've run the math, and that ticking off a number of their customers is cheaper than charging them for decent support.

<comment><USER16> If you can't afford to support it you can't afford to run it.

<comment><USER15> I'm not saying that this is a desirable situation for users. But I also think it's clear that Google has made a calculated decision -- they want to offer their products for free to as many people as possible, and then avoid supporting them.

I would think that the lesson here isn't that Google should be supporting its products, but rather that people should think twice before using unsupported, free products.

I believe that it was Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, who said that if you aren't paying for a product, then _you're_ the product. And indeed, that's what we see with Google: They give away their products in order to sell your eyeballs to advertisers.

This doesn't make them an evil company (although perhaps other things do). They have a legitimate business model that seems to work for many people.

Complaining that Google isn't willing to offer support, free or paid, is an indication that your interests and Google's aren't aligned. They're not about to change, so perhaps you shouldn't run your service on their system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like how this has 366 up votes in the last 8 hrs and is at spot 15 as I write this. Perhaps there is a strong bias against whining about free services not having support.

Short answer: In order to get in touch with someone to talk to at Google, first talk to a sales rep for Google Apps and buy the product, ask the Sales rep to put you in touch with your assigned support engineer. Your costs are going to go up quite a bit.

Longer answer: These services aren't "free", they cost money and resources to run. Everyone knows this of course but for some reason it sort of doesn't sink in. You have exactly two choices here, one you can use someone else's "free" service and periodically get bitten in the balls when it either fails, decides to shut down, or randomly disables your access. Or you can build your own version of the service for your organization where you end up spending someone on your staff's "free" time to maintain it and some of your excess budget to "host" it. The good news is that nearly all the groups that might currently be doing this can get away with a single "business" class IP service with 1 dedicated IP address. So figure $60 - $100 a month depending on your location.

Seriously, that is it. Those are your choices. So suggestions:

1) First exfitrate all your meta data you currently use for Google Groups. Which is to say download all the email addresses and membership lists.

2) Second start looking around for an alternative solution (check in your organization perhaps someone already has a machine "hosted" somewhere they can donate to your cause)

3) Third, I really would talk to the sales guy (or gal) at Google to get pricing and while you are at it you can mention your having troubles and they may be able to contact someone inside who will help you out.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is simple: Don't use google Services, if you do not pay for it. (EDIT: Search is not meant)

GoogleReader is best example, Google has actually become evil.

@fabpot Did you take a look at Discourse?

<comment><USER19> Shutting down a free service that they own... evil?

<comment><USER20> If Starbucks invaded your city and used their cash pile to give away free coffee for years until there were no more independent coffee bars left, and then suddenly decided to close up shop leaving you with no decent coffee bars, would that make them evil? At least it would make them careless and insensitive.

A better option would be to a) charge a price and compete fairly in the first place, or b) open source or sell off the product so it could live on.

<comment><USER21> Assuming Starbucks coffee wasn't the crap it is, I'd be glad if they did so. New coffee bars can and would be opened once they left anyway, and until then, we'd get free coffee. Seems like an excellent deal to me.

In any case, "Starbucks" didn't prevent me from having some good homemade coffee for a few months now.

<comment><USER22> The problem is that after so many years of free coffee almost nobody will want to pay for it again.

<comment><USER20> Not only that, but people would probably be wary of investing too much in a new coffee shop. After all, if Starbucks changed their mind so suddenly, what's to keep them from changing their mind again?

<comment><USER21> Why do you consider it a sudden change of mind? They announced the "spring cleaning"[1] in 2011 and have been gradually closing services since then.

[1]: <http://googleblog.blogspot.pt/2011/09/fall-spring-clean.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The key is to find the Google people on the Groups team on Twitter. This is how I finally got an Analytics issue resolved that had been going on for months. Google employees generally want to help, there is just no way into the wall.

<comment><USER24> Sadly, public shaming on social media seems to be the most efficient way of getting issues resolved these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is why I'm working on a mailing list service to replace Google Groups. We're just finishing off things at the moment but maybe we can help you? We're planning on giving free accounts for open source software projects. Email me if you're interested: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER26> Unless you're doing something awesome, it's going to be hard to compete with a paid mailing list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> You can't unless you submit it to techcrunch and Google's pr sees it...

      I just spent a couple hours figuring out how to get blogger custom domains to play nicely with google apps.

It pains me to say this (CISPA, Elephant hunting et al) but Godaddy actually has decent customer support and last time I used it, it was based in the USA. Hell even Comcast has an office down the road.

</comment><comment><USER28> You're supposed to use g+ communities now. Have you not been following? E-mail based lists you say? pfffff, didn't you hear they're shutting down email and replacing it with 'Babble'?

<comment><USER29> This is the second most upvoted comment in this thread? Wow. I had to double check I'm not reading Reddit.

<comment><USER30> [HN Meta] Comments aren't ranked by upvotes. The stuff at the top has a combination of upvotes, recency, and a poster with a high average comment rating (discounting their most recent X comments). So if someone who is typically insightful posts something inane, it will still appear near the top.

(Edit: not that I actually think the original comment was inane. Forgot context when I wrote this -- sorry!)

<comment><USER31> >"[HN Meta] Comments aren't ranked by upvotes." //

How do you know? I've been told on several occasions that rank is by vote difference (ie up - down).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If people are willing to pay for support, then why do they stick with company that does not offer paid support? Why not simply switch some other company that has adequate support plans available?

I see also positive side in Google not catering all possible needs. This leaves space for smaller companies to cover these needs and make some money while doing it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks like @ianbarber fixed the issue..

[1]: <https://twitter.com/ianbarber/status/321942852823289856>

<comment><USER33> As of this writing, there's still no explanation as to why this Google Group was shut down. Google may shut it down again later today. I hope OP moves quickly to archive the list's contents and get that mailing list hosted elsewhere!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think the problem here is not only about Google providing support or not. The problem is when they are not providing support, how they make it possible for users to solve problems themselves.

If you are gonna close a user's account, either by human or by a robot, you should notify the user before you do it, so that the user can fix the violation if there's any, or find/migrate to an alternative.

Mailing-lists might not be the worst. I mean if you have a backup list including every members email address, you can email them about switching to an alternative. But imagine your Google Apps free account is closed without any prior notification. You suddenly cannot use your email. You decide that you can't have your email address dead knowing that emails sent to it just sink, so you sign up another custom-domain email provider (or build your own on ec2), and tweak with the configurations, which takes an hour. Then you go to your DNS provider and update MX records. Oops, DNS updates can take several hours even one day to synchronize. That's up to a day that you are worrying about missing important emails.

And it did happen before: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4825445>

<comment><USER35> > If you are gonna close a user's account, either by human or by a robot, you > should notify the user before you do it, so that the user can fix the > violation if there's any, or find/migrate to an alternative.

Google is not providing support to save costs. If Google implemented warning emails and some sort of compliance check or communication to indicate issues have been addressed, that would add costs as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Google Support - isn't it an oxymoron?

</comment><comment><USER37> This could be an idea for a startup. A middleman support service for contacting Google.

<comment><USER38> That's a terrible idea. You couldn't help those people as you don't have access to anything.

<comment><USER37> It's not terrible. You specialize by building up relationships with people at Google and when you're big enough they will have no coice but to listen to you and your clients. It will be a movement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It looks like Google underestimate consequences of such fatalistic behavior.

</comment><comment><USER40> Try mailman. It's pretty old, but it's pretty widely used for mailing lists.

<comment><USER41> The point is that he probably has many people already subscribed to this list which he will lose without getting it turned back on.

<comment><USER40> No. that's not the point.

Besides, you can download your subscribers from Google Groups.

<comment><USER41> I don't think you can download your subscribers if your group has been deleted, can you?

<comment><USER40> Of course not, but every good sysadmin knows to take backups periodically, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What are some good alternatives to Google Groups then? Seems like it'd be good territory for a startup?

<comment><USER43> It seems like good territory for a hobby project, not a startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have no evidence for this, but my guess is your group's name (Symfony2) fails a heuristics challenge, and was disabled by a bot. Perhaps other groups with variants on "phony" or ending with a number have been used for ill purpose by others.

(Yes, I realize Symfony is a software framework, but my hypothetical bot may be using name-matching alone.)

</comment><comment><USER45> Google should auction off customer support, like it does AdWords.

Hire as many support staff per product as Google deems profitable. When submitting a support request, I indicate how much I'm willing to pay to receive an answer. The highest bids get answers, the rest don't (or get slower answers depending on request volume and difficulty).

</comment><comment><USER46> Come on Github, just release the only feature you are lacking! mailing lists!

</comment><comment><USER47> If you have a Google AdWords account and are spending a sizable amount of money on it you'll have a dedicated Account Executive to help you manage your relationship with Google. I once worked for a small firm that was spending about $10,000 a month with Google and we had a dedicated rep we could call any time with our problems. This was years ago though so things may have changed.

Biggest benefit we got out of it was early access to Gmail, which was a pretty cool perk at the time.

<comment><USER48> You must have been one of the lucky ones. We too managed an account (several years back) with AdWords spending nearly twice that and never got any sort of dedicated rep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> A certain gmail Filter suddenly stopped working on February 25, 2013. I only noticed a month later, after missing several important emails. The issue with Filter on this particular string is confirmed with one other user, not just my accounts.

If you happen to have followed the tip in this thread, you better check your gmail aliases!

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621666>

</comment><comment><USER50> Really ridiculous. Makes we afraid, we host our company email service with Google. What if that just goes away and they dont even care?

</comment><comment><USER51> Were you able to get in touch with somebody at Google? If not, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz has a tip: search for them in Google+. Since Google is making a huge push for it, and since many of Google's employees' bonuses depend on the success of it, a lot of Google employees are on it. Enter your search term, then change to "People and pages" and voila. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER52> I just recently completed a survey with Google about my premier apps account. They mentioned my dedicated account rep...I had to clean my keyboard so much Pepsi came out of my nose.

Google needs to better support its paid services. If its free, support could be charged per case. But for the love of everything PLEASE let us at least talk to someone.

</comment><comment><USER53> IMHO, Google should make support liaisons (more) available. They have people who work closely with developers and then thousands of developers do the work for free and just interface with liaisons. Support should be this way, too. Give us easy access to some liaisons and provide a solid system for helpful volunteers to support the family of products.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've managed to find a fax machine in the Mountain View offices that someone _might_ be checking? Any use?

</comment><comment><USER55> Google apparently doesn't want (to help) me to pay for a renewal of Custom Site Search. The payment status is "Pending" and our account has been downgraded. Have I missed the news about the death of that service coming?

</comment><comment><USER56> When it comes to mailing lists, there's only Google and Yahoo. The support is extinct at both places but Yahoo has on and off development going with their Yahoogroups and I find it better than Googlegroups.

</comment><comment> tba-goog Hi Fabpot,

Your Group should now be restored and accessible. Please let me know at tba [at] google.com is it's not the case.

Thanks, Tzachi

</comment><comment> tba-goog Hi Fabpot,

I am with Google and will check what's going on / report back our resolution. Sorry for this becoming an issue.

Tzachi

</comment><comment><USER57> I work at Campus in London, which is owned by Google so there are quite a few Google folks around. I'll see what I can do.

<comment><USER57> @fabpot How can I contact you? I'm @blowski on Twitter.

<comment><USER58> One of these may help you get in contact:

<http://fabien.potencier.org/about>

<http://www.sensiolabs.co.uk/contact/contact.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> You should just open up a google apps account, I wanna say it's like 50/user/year.

They answer the phone in 5 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER60> Use a paid alternative. Money talks.

</comment><comment><USER61> It seems to be up right now. Did someone at Google reach out to you?

</comment><comment><USER62> Maybe Google thinks that a PHP framework is kind of a threat somehow. You know, PHP.

<comment><USER63> I thoughts so , or maybe google dont like anything French ( i'm kidding of course ,they bought sparrow ,didnt they ? ) , but strangely Haxe has been trying to participate the google summer of code for years but was rejected everytime.

I dont think it is a bot problem , there are a lot of unofficial symfony groups on ggroups.

My 2 cents :

\- redirect people to stackoverflow in the mean time.

\- build your own Q&A. I know it's a bit of work , but why not build an open- source symfony Q&A project ? i'm sure you could get support from any PAAS provider for free to host the app. Make it accessible through RSS so people can suscribe it.

<comment><USER18> Dedicated Stackoverflow Software based Q&A would be a option. Isn't there some place to vote for new Sites? When they are used regularly they become part of Stackoverflow network?

<comment><USER63> true , good idea , basically a dedicated stackoverflow 'sub' site ? you'd need to submit the idea to the SO team then it would need "backers" who would vote for the project , but it might be a great idea , indeed.

<comment><USER57> There is a Symfony2 proposal on Area51. But I agree with the discussion at <http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/36634/symfony-2> \- StackOverflow itself is perfectly adequate, and having two separate subsites would be unnecessarily confusing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>