The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max crisis - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis/ <comment><USER3> > With the dawn of the 1980s, however, Boeing's traditional way of doing > things seemed increasingly out of touch. Deregulation under US presidents > Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had changed the economics of the industry, > Greenberg said. "The idea was that if you had more competition, it would > drop prices for consumers. Suddenly, airlines are looking at this and > saying, 'Oh my God, we can't pass on the cost by continuously raising ticket > prices.' That put pressure back on Boeing, and on Airbus eventually, to > become cost-conscious."

I think the ultimate root cause that led to the 737 MAX crisis was de- regulation and the airlines race to the bottom on price. The whole reason for making the plane a 737 and not a new aircraft was to cut pilot re-training costs.

I used to think that highly competitive markets with low prices are the best, but now I am not so sure. Those kind of markets tend to push the quality down as well as squeeze the workers. Compare the union workers for the Big Three during the 1970's to that of the gig economy workers now. Maybe an oligopoly with high profits and strong unions is what is best in the long term? Or maybe, we need to alternate periods of disruption and highly competitive markets with periods of stability and oligopolies? I suspect we as a society will have to try to figure that out, and that it is not a simple answer.

<comment><USER4> Living in first world country it's easy to be biased against race to the bottom - it hurts previously very well paid jobs and breaks established status quo.

But that race to the bottom made cost of flying at least order of magnitude more affordable, and as a result likely saved and improved countless numbers lives (lifting out of poverty, ability to travel for treatments, ability to see your loved ones, ability to travel for work, etc).

And to put things in perspective - air travel is still safest form of travel, even accounting for MAX, and during this whole race to the bottom it was constantly improving, by orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER5> This kind of reminds me of the dril quote:

> drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people > get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,

[https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762](https://twitter.com/dril/status/464802196060917762)

Point being, just that something has some upsides does not mean that it is a good thing overall. I personally believe that if flying millions of people across the globe is truly impossible without reckless exploitation of people and resources, we should rather not do that, no matter what the benefits of that would be.

<comment><USER6> > no matter what the benefits would be

This is illogical reasoning. We should look at the cost/benefit tradeoff. Looking only at costs or only at benefits will not yield the best decision.

We need to draw a line somewhere between safety & cost. I'd argue it is _always_ possible to make something safer if you are willing to accept higher cost. Expensive plane tickets have negative externalities, and for some, does cost lives (inability to get treatments for ex.).

<comment><USER3> > inability to get treatments for ex.

I don't think that is a good example. If the treatment you need requires you to fly, that means it a very complicated diseases, or a rare disease that only a few centers treat. In any case, it is likely that the care is very resource intensive and is either expensive or heavily subsidized. In those cases, even if the airfare were doubled or tripled, it would not be the limiting factor in treatment.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't have to be a rare disease—it can just mean that non-basic healthcare is hard to access.

Example: I live in the Philippines. Its healthcare system is affected by two things: centralization and the fact that the country is an archipelago.

Most quality health care is happening in Metro Manila. What you find outside is generally very basic, and even in 2nd-tier cities like Cebu or Davao they may refer you to Manila for something you'd think they ought be able to do.

With travel by boat being … rather slow, with vacation time not exactly ample, and the average salary being low I'm quite certain that affordable flights ($25 Cebu - Manila) are making ample difference in terms of what kind of healthcare situations are being addressed.

<comment><USER8> So healthcare would have been better in the outer regions without cheap air travel?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I spent 45 years in this industry and the following describes exactly what happened in the mid 90's throughout the entire industry. As subcontractors, we were told that we needed to get on board with the new way of thinking, or we would lose our contracts.

>Inside the company, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction. A formerly cosy atmosphere, in which engineers ran the show and executives aged out of the company gracefully, was suddenly cut-throat. In 1998, the year after the merger, Stonecipher warned employees they needed to "quit behaving like a family and become more like a team. If you don't perform, you don't stay on the team."

<comment><USER10> _Stonecipher_

Always have an eye on the exit if your new exec sounds like he belongs in the next Bond movie.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like an AOL nickname.

<comment><USER12> Sounds like an easy to crack encryption scheme, probably used on IoT devices and cryptocurrency exchanges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a different view of the situation. I believe that the 737 Max disaster was directly caused by the idea that management is a valuable skill on its own, that _management_ is somehow separable from the domain-specific knowledge required in order to make an honest buck.

There are plenty of examples of engineers that make terrible managers, to be sure. But there are also plenty of examples of managers with business backgrounds that have absolutely _no_ idea about the consequences of their decisions. An optimal result requires skill in _both_ domains.

By this point, you might be thinking, "Hey wait, isn't it true that cost- cutting also had a role in the crisis? Wasn't there at least one engineer that sounded the alarm in a memo?" And my answer to that is a resounding _yes_. But the question remains, where the hell did that idea come from? At no point did anyone think, "I'd love to spike my profits this quarter here and have huge disaster that will tank us in the next quarter." Therefore the problem isn't one of simple pursuit of the profit motive, because it is quite clear that Boeing _hasn 't_ profited from this situation long-term. And that's why I have focused explicitly on this foolish, self-defeating management fashion at the top of my mini essay here.

This brings us to the topic of Boeing's future. I could be wrong about him, but the fact that they have selected a person who majored in _accounting_ to be their new CEO does not bode well for them. At the very least he has a major gap in his background to overcome, and at best I can only see them just managing to hang on instead of growing.

How does this relate to the merger issue? This management fashion I am speaking would have likely infected _both_ McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing had they remained separate. That's because companies hire people out of the same pool of people that learn this stuff in their universities! Maybe there is a case to be made that having separate companies would make it _slightly_ harder for them to both fail, but I believe that this isn't a very strong argument.

<comment><USER14> While I agree with some of your sentiment, I think it's worth pointing out that the recently-fired CEO on whose watch this debacle happened, was a lifetime aviation employee with an engineering background: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg)

<comment><USER15> He'd been the CEO since ... 2015. I think it's entirely unfair to push all the responsibility on him. He didn't build the modern Boeing culture. He inherited it, and by accounts I've read so far, was unable to change it sufficiently to prevent the accidents. It's _hard_ to change company culture once entrenched and I'm hesitant to scapegoat him when there are obviously a lot of other significant factors at play.

<comment><USER16> I agree he wasn't entirely to blame. Regardless, the handling of the MAX incidents was inexcusable. The moral deficiencies were innumerable.

<comment><USER15> Yes, of course. He didn't handle it well at all. The problems aren't going away with him stepping down, unfortunately, and considering his replacement, it doesn't seem like there's any interest in fixing the real issues that are plaguing the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I dunno. At first this article almost felt like damage control: it wasn't Boeing, it was those McDonnell Douglas peeps. But then it seemed to focus more on the engineers themselves and try to make them seem like a cozy family shop .. even before the big merger; Boeing was hardly that. It was (and is) a massive employer that has tactically distributed manufacturing to as many different states as possible (to help with lobbying efforts under the banner of job creation; distributed with a very wide net of employees).

Even without the Douglas acquisition, would we still be here with the 737-Max8 failure as bad as it is? I think all industry over the past two decades have gone down the route of maximizing profits and cutting costs. Hell, there are startups build around the idea of just ignoring or lobbying against legislation (Uber, AirBnB) and marking that arrogance as being "disruptive," as if they were some kind of civil rights pioneers.

It's really impossible to tell what would have happened without Boeing buying MCD, but I there is a good chance we would have ended up here eventually anyway. Focusing on MCD in this article feels more of a narrative tool than an objective critique and analysis.

<comment><USER18> In a lot of respects, I find modern business tactics skewing ever further towards being more and more harmful to society at large for the sake of business capital owners. Let's not forget the social contract and that we, as a society, allow businesses to operate while they remain beneficial to society.

I'm not saying remove capitalism but some modifications of our current state of capitalism are certainly in order. Perhaps this is tighter or different regulatory constraints, changes to some core principles (e.g. Citizen's United, business rights as "people", etc.). I'm not saying I have the answers or the quick examples mentionrd are the core issues, just that the future doesn't look great if current trends continue. We need to start a productive conversation and elect representatives willing to be a voice in that conversation to explore and try improvement options.

<comment><USER19> Is this a genie that can be bottled back up? Lets say you enact these magical regulations. Will the corporations stick around or will they focus on other countries where they have more clout? Similarly, will they use international levers of pressure to "fix" the issues any one country poses?

<comment><USER20> It can be. As bad as it seems today, the Gilded Age had even worse income inequality. The part that's frightening is what it lead to, and I'm afraid to say that the country seems to be going down exactly the same path as certain countries in Europe did around that time (rise of fascism, nationalist leaders lying through their teeth to secure power by any means, erosion of democratic norms and institutions).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "We thought that we'd kill McDonnell Douglas and we had it on the ropes," he said. "I still believe that Harry outsmarted Phil and his gang bought Boeing with Boeing's money. We were all just disgusted." More than that, he added, the company had "paid way, way too much money [for McDonnell Douglas] and we're still paying for it. We wrote off so many tens of billions of dollars for that whole mess."

A good lesson to not play games with hustlers. McDonnell Douglas was famous for being slimy, financial rent-seekers. They got hustled.

<comment><USER22> One great company after another destroyed by financial shenanigans. Avaya & Silver Lake Partners is another that comes to mind, but there have been many.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Stonecipher seems to have agreed with this assessment. "When people say I > changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it's run like a > business rather than a great engineering firm," he told the Chicago Tribune > in 2004. "It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company > because they want to make money."

Wow. In retrospect, this is an amoral path. Basically it's money over lives. Furthermore, this "intent" has cost them more financially.

<comment><USER24> And yet for Stonecipher it was a personally financially successful personal decision and none of the consequences will hurt him personally. When the rewards always go to the top (aka shareholders) and consequences always fall elsewhere, this is the predictable consequence.

We need some system such that shareholders and executives become personally responsible for these tragic yet predictable consequences.

<comment><USER25> Exactly this. No skin in the game will lead to these outcomes.

<comment><USER26> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why has antitrust died completely in America? Any hope of it coming back? I don't want one movie studio, one airplane manufacturer...

<comment><USER28> _> Why has antitrust died completely in America?_

1\. The Citizens United ruling allows unbounded money to flow into campaigns.

2\. Campaign funding determines election results.

3\. Elected officials determine what America does in terms of law and regulation.

4\. Billionaires pour tons of money into campaigns.

When you allow dollars to effectively determine elections instead of votes, the end result is oligarchy and the rule of the rich.

<comment><USER29> I used to ascribe to this notion, but 2016 proved me wrong about #2.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/campaign- finance/)

<comment><USER30> This proves nothing. Both candidates raised outstanding amounts of money. Without that, neither of them would have had a chance.

Also, it's a completely different ball game talking about which laws get passed vs which candidate gets elected.

<comment><USER29> If a 46% increase in funding is negligible, then I would think "2\. Campaign funding determines election results." would have to be modified.

Is your claim that above a certain dollar threshold money no longer has an impact?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Qatar Airways refuses to take Dreamliners built in South Carolina, due to quality issues.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing- dreamline...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/business/boeing-dreamliner- production-problems.html)

<comment><USER32> Then Boeing tried to deliver them just days before the end of the year but Qatar Airlines had them fly back. My guess is it really was that Boeing had not met the schedule for fitting the Qsuite and QA was having none of it.

[https://simpleflying.com/qatar-airways-flies-brand-new- boein...](https://simpleflying.com/qatar-airways-flies-brand-new- boeing-787-9s-back-to-the-us/)

<comment><USER33> >Qatar Airlines had them fly back

Must be quite a somber experience piloting an aircraft just deemed unreliable by your employer...

<comment><USER32> It was eight months later, the planes were fine. This was about Boeing trying to deliver planes CY19 for accounting reasons that did not have business class seating that can turn into a conference room, the reason QA chose to buy them in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What I don't understand is why the Boeing executives are not on trial for the negligent killing of 189 + 157 people?

<comment><USER35> Shouldn't then car industry executives be also to blame for negligent killing of the ones whose death was a result of a car failure related to planned obsolescence?

<comment><USER36> Absolutely. If there is a direct link between wilful negligence and death, executives need to go to jail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> From the article: "When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm," [Harry Stonecipher, the new CEO from McDonnell-Douglas] told the Chicago Tribune in 2004. "It is a great engineering firm, but people invest in a company because they want to make money."

I lay the blame at the feet of each person at the company who acted selfishly.

Selfishness gets an easy pass here on Hacker News --- well, just about everywhere these days, I guess. Take this recent thread, where the submitter confesses that he has been slacking off for 6 years at work. A lot of people egged him on. I remember one comment that advised him to double down and go Full Sociopath ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21964204)).

I could not think of a good rebuttal. I mean, I work hard even when no one is watching, because I am religious, but I did not imagine it going well if I just laid out the idea of a transcendental world. But the only solution I see is reformation of the individual, one by one, not revolution of the social structure --- change from the inside out, instead of the outside in.

The enemy is not the rich or the poor, the executive or the engineer. Any of these people can be dangerous, if their philosophy is maximum selfishness. Furthermore, no set of laws is clever enough to keep the peace if the majority of citizens are sociopaths. They will always find the legal loopholes. On the other hand, a country with the dumbest regulatory set-up would still run fine if peopled by saints, people who are the opposite of selfish, who are always asking, am I treating others how I wish to be treated?

<comment><USER38> > I mean, I work hard even when no one is watching, because I am religious

Interestingly, I work hard even when no one is watching because I'm not religious.

If you are religious, then by definition you believe somebody is always watching.

<comment><USER37> Thank you. What then would you say motivates you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is absolutely on target. I am hearing from friends in Wichita that the Textron Aviation merger with Beechcraft is creating the same situation as the Douglas-Boeing merger. I have friends that have been with Textron for a long time that are getting new bosses from Beechcraft and the term that is getting used is "well that was Beeched."

<comment><USER26> Hope they find making cluster bombs a rewarding career choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I dispute that McDonnell Douglas was 'on the ropes' before the merger - <USER2> MD-80/90/95 family was selling well, and while the MD-11 was not, the market at that time for wide-body jets was fairly soft. In addition the C-17 was still being made as fast as it could be at that time. I'd also point to the success of the Delta II heavy lift vehicle too.

Whats interesting to me, is the merger between McDonnell Aircraft and Douglas Aircraft was effectively a shotgun marriage. DAC was capital starved in the late 60's and merged for an infusion of capital.

<comment><USER41> The MD-80/90/95 didn't have a very big order book, and there was no replacement for it. The MD-11 was a failure, and the MD-12 was cancelled. Douglas essentially had no future after 2000. The military side was better, but the A-12 was cancelled, and they lost the JSF. The only bright spot was the Super Hornet, which was supposed to have been an interim aircraft until the JSF started to be produced.

<comment><USER40> 2000 is a bit premature, also in 97, the MD-95 was still a paper aircraft (first flight was not until 1998) - and the last MD-95 rolled out of Long Beach in 2006. Nor was a replacement for the MD-90 obviously needed

The MD-11 had the same issues the 767 had at that time, meaning the market for wide body aircraft was slow, very slow.

I suspect that had the merger with Boeing not happened, the MD-11, MD-90 and MD-95 would have continued on in sales for a while. I'm lead to believe Boeing didn't try as hard to sell the MD-95 (Boeing discontinued the MD-90 entirely because it competed in the same space as the 737) as McDonnell Douglas would have. I also suspect Boeing would rather have cancelled the ship as soon as the merger happened, but it would have cost them more to cancel it then, than it did by waiting 8-odd years.

Growing up in Long Beach, it was clear to all the people who worked at DAC, that Boeing bought them for their Military side, not for the commercial aircraft though.

In the end, 9/11 made the whole new aircraft market go squishy, and it lead to several project ends across the industry - most notably the 757.

<comment><USER41> In 1997, the 767 had 682 cumulative deliveries, and 120 unfilled orders. The 777 had 104 cumulative deliveries, and 221 unfilled orders. The MD-11 only sold 200 units total in its entire history.

The MD-90 was also non-competitive with the A321 and the 757. You can take a look at the sales numbers. By the mid nineties, Douglas was producing something like 20 a year, Boeing was doing about 50 a year, and Airbus was producing about 25 a year.

Douglas badly needed a cash infusion to get a competitive product flying. Their whole product line was derivatives of 1960s aircraft that weren't even winners in the 60s. Meanwhile, Boeing had introduced the 757, 767, and 777, which were all great aircraft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I am not an aeronautical engineer. A year or two ago I read a comment here that certainly _seemed_ legitimate that talked about airplane design and it went something like this (paraphrased because I can't find it now):

> As soon as you move the engines, you probably need to move the wings. As > soon as you move the wings, you need to redesign the airframe. As soon as > you do that you're designing a whole new plane.

I can't even remember if this was talking about the Max at all.

So it seems to me the core problem here is Boeing had reached the limit of what they could do with a 50 year old airframe while maintaining the common type rating and aircraft and engine design have simply changed. Airbus may eventually have that problem with the A320 family. I really don't know. But they don't have it yet.

Part of controlling costs at a budget airline is maintaining a single fleet (in type rating terms). The two choices here seem to be the 737 or the A320.

The Max came about because there was a huge captured demand for it from the likes of Southwest. Would this have happened without the MD merger? I can't say but I'd be surprised if it couldn't given the demand from budget airlines.

Of course people like to take an issue like this and tie it to whatever axe they want to grind too.

<comment><USER43> > Airbus may eventually have that problem with the A320 family. I really don't > know. But they don't have it yet.

Airbus is already fly-by-wire on the A320, and they know how to do it not _too_ stupidly. They can provide the same control laws and feedbacks to new models without introducing ugly hacks on top of mechanical commands. That helps.

I believe other Airbus families already use controls that are _very_ similar to the ones used in the A320, and even if that's not of the same type rating that probably also ease training a lot.

The 737 will eventually have to go; even the somehow modernized versions are a quite outdated way to make big commercial airplanes nowadays. (And the whole idea of grandfathering regulation is utterly stupid, btw.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> political corruption brought the 737 max to the ground. once a manufacturer has power to do their own QA instead of the FAA or any other independent authority, you're doing stuff on a 3rd world status level. no oversight. investor driven.

</comment><comment><USER45> This piece kind of reads like the HP / Compaq merger.

<comment> Iwan-Zotow You mean Xerox/HP merger

<comment><USER46> You mean the Digital-Equipment Corp/Compaq merger

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Recently the highly controversial bill S.386([https://antis386.org/](https://antis386.org/)) that mentioned Boeing used $9/hr India engineers to write some level of the software used on its airlines, is this true if there are any insiders who know something about it?

Without a competitor Boeing has no intention to make the safest product anymore, however, Airline unlike others, must make sure safety/quality remains to be the No.1 priority. Any outsourcing should be carefully thought out before running towards the cheapest offer offshore.

</comment><comment><USER48> Previous discussion on basically the same story: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21304277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21304277)

</comment><comment><USER49> See also: Lockheed purchase of General Dynamics aircraft division in 1990s...

</comment><comment><USER50> Companies merge, split up, get acquired, go bankrupt.

It's what they do, and there's nothing inherently dysfunctional about that. By themselves, these actions don't cause mines to collapse, plans to fall from the sky and highly polluting vehicles to be put on the road with full knowledge of the company's senior leadership. If there is a systemic cause for these things -- it's yawning gaps regulatory oversight (and enforcement).

But these gaps aren't accidents, and don't arise in a vacuum, either. Nor are they mere byproducts of what should otherwise by a working system.

In effect, they're there by _design_. They are exactly the desired outcomes of a system -- and the governing ideology behind it -- that enshrines the "right of capital" as a fundamental right. And which (not coincidentally) seeks to protect the exercises of this "right" from the inevitable consequences of their actions, as much as it can get away with doing so. With carnage and tragedy being the inevitable results.

Because that's what it was designed to do.

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

</comment><comment><USER51> Are we doing an another round of armchair aviation engineers outlining ad nauseum all the reasons they believe the 737 Max cannot possibly fly and should never have been considered that ignores all the evidence that the two accidents were successfully root-caused to an issue that has now been fixed and is undergoing an understandably and embarrassingly lengthy process of certification? Seems to be an almost daily ritual on HN these days.

Yes Boeing has issues; especially in their senior management. That's why they are struggling to keep up with competitors in the cheaper/faster/more efficient/less noisy category (aka. the market). But also, the 737 is still one of the safest and most successful planes ever and last year was one of the safest years in aviation history with many thousands of them flying around every day. Once patched up, the max will be part of that fleet for decades to come and is unlikely to bend the excellent safety record in any statistically meaningful way regardless of the current sentiments or the recent accidents.

IMHO, Boeing has some corporate culture issues to sort out and it definitely does not help that they operate as a state protected monopoly that mostly acts to shovel defense money around and enrich contractors, share holders, politicians, lobbyists, etc. involved with cutting up that pie. But lets be real, every other big aviation manufacturer works exactly the same way and it seems to work fine in terms of safety.

Fundamentally there are no good technical reasons for the hundreds of 737 maxes to be permanently retired over real, perceived or imagined risks. Yes, there are some technical issues that are addressable, are being addressed, and require lengthy inspections & certification to verify that they have indeed been addressed. That's basically what's happening because they are fixable issues. There are no known un-fixable issues here, no known show stopping design flaws that can't be worked around, no known unacceptable (i.e. uncertifiable) hacks, etc. Some of the fixes may indeed lead to some retraining effort, which I'm sure is annoying but not fatal for Boeing. And yes, there's brand damage and Boeing is probably going to have to do some pro- forma rebranding (737 maxi-cosi, anyone?) and symbolic modifications.

When their choice is to go out of business or attempt to fix entirely fixable technical issues they'd be complete idiots to get sucked down the first hole. Permanently retiring many hundreds of planes that once fixed are perfectly good for decades to come is just not going to be a thing. Boeing going bankrupt over this under the current political climate is also not a thing. To big to fail means rules can be bended, changed, abused, or otherwise ignored. That's how this happened to begin with. One way or another the FAA will ultimately rubber stamp whatever needs rubber stamping.

Some time this year, the thing will resume flying and Boeing goes back to licking its wounds and planning the next iteration of its products. I imaging they'd be tempted to unshelve some projects they had for future products as well and dust off what lingering R&D capability they have to come up with something new. That'd be a smart investment.

</comment><comment><USER52> Sure lets blame 40 year old merger

</comment><comment><USER53> Imagine if the FTC actually still did their job, not just how much more innovation and competition there'd be, but also lives saved.

</comment><comment><USER54> Capitalism is working in this case. Boeing is being punished. Market forces are not always instantaneous. The China boom made investors demand unreasonable returns for domestic companies as well. A good business plan and making solid money over time is no longer acceptable. The China boom changed the expectations of investors to unreasonable rates. But the China boom wasn't capitalism. The Chinese economy is highly controlled and this influence on more capitalistic markets is what happens where the two separate markets converge.

<comment><USER55> Yes. If enough customers die using a product, people will stop using that product.

<comment><USER13> Both of you have a point! I believe that I have identified a crucial factor in my comment here ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656)) that identifies the root of the problem. I hope that it helps in resolving this disagreement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> McDonnell Douglas to blame for 737 Max crisis? I don't think so. But full marks to the PR team that thought up that retrospective self serving disinformation.

</comment><comment><USER57> Looks like Boeing is the biggest producer of aircraft in the world. What is the problem again?

<comment><USER58> People dying, because cutting costs was considered more important than due diligence. Might doesn't make right.

<comment><USER13> I agree with you, but what do you think of the point I have made here, which is that there's an even more fundamental problem _drove_ the awful, immoral cost-cutting? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21972656)</comment></comment></comment>


So, today, for the first time in *25* years of Apple, I downgraded - <AUTHOR> https://buzzways.at/collection/704/ <comment><USER2> Got tired of re-buying 2011 Macbook Pros because it was getting kinda ridiculous. Decided the only things I actually care about are Lightroom, the keyboard, decent drivers and power management, and a terminal app.

New machine is a Dell XPS 15 running Windows. Keyboard and build is almost identical to Macbook, no N-key rollover but I can live without. Otherwise, meh, why is everyone still so attached to these dumb overpriced machines?

<comment><USER3> That Dell is the first laptop I have used that has a build quality and trackpad that is truly equal (if not better) than Apple's. I bought the Precision 5520 pre-installed with Ubuntu, and have never loved a machine so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not only am i still running on a 2012 Air because of Apple's seemingly conscious middle finger to developers, but i refuse to purchase any >= 2016 laptops for my company. We have made roughly $30,000 in laptop purchases in the last 24 months. All have been aftermarket '14 and '15 MBP's with loaded ram and replaced batteries. This isn't what i want to do, but i refuse to service keyboard and heating issues on a regular basis.

But i get it. Anything that doesn't run iOS amounts to quarterly revenue rounding errors. But until i can develop iOS apps ON iOS (shiver), their laptops remain a prerequisite to the app store's viability. I have to imagine this current path will come to back to bite them in some measurable way aside from the financials mentioned above.

<comment><USER5> Middle finger to developers is right.

It's even worse for us in ops who are supporting you devs.

You want to develop on OSX, but Apple terminated their 1U server line aeons ago, so build farms and CI pipelines that are actually building all those wonderful iOS apps are forced to use racks and racks of mac minis -- a consumer-grade product not in the least suitable for enterprise use. They've gotten worse over the years too, as last I checked their RAM is now soldered on to the motherboard so it's not even upgradable. Cooling of these racks of mac minis is a nightmare, and it's a real waste of space as well, as there's a lot of wasted space in the racks betwen the four mac minis per U. Mac Pro's were another option that was just as bad in its own way.

Theoretically you could run OSX on a Supermicro or something (as a so-called "hackintosh"), but it's not supported and (though IANAL) seems to go against Apple's Terms of Service which only allow running OSX on Apple hardware, so it's usually not a realistic option, even though it might be a lot less hassle than running on dinky consumer-grade Apple hardware.

I'm not sure if Apple even has half a clue as to what it takes to support its development ecosystem, or maybe it just doesn't care because it's raking in the dough hand over fist no matter what they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It always pays to look at the alternatives. Sometimes the latest _isn 't_ the greatest. Unfortunately, time is particularly cruel to computing hardware and software. Downgrading to an old laptop is, at best, a _temporary_ fix. The author of this article should consider other OS's and hardware manufacturers.

<comment><USER7> >Unfortunately, time is particularly cruel to computing hardware

Not anymore, not really so. A desktop I own from 2008 is still usable for daily browsing after an SSD upgrade, and runs all the games I care about playing (given that I play rarely).

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I just purchased a new notebook, and it was really odd to switch to a new machine that's not phenomenally better than the old one in multiple ways. When I switched from a 2008 Dell Inspiron to a 2012 Asus Zenbook, it was a huge upgrade: dim 720p -> bright 1080p, HDD -> SSD, much more compact, much lighter. My new notebook is basically the same than the old one, except with newer components all around and better upgradability. (The soldered-in 4 GB RAM was the only real issue with the Zenbook.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> See also Maciej Cegłowski's "Benjamin Button Reviews The New MacBook Pro" [https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the...](https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the_new_macbook_pro/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess the author didn't buy the version with the touch bar. That thing is not just useless, it's actively detrimental to the user experience.

I cannot count the number of times I accidentally pressed escape, or had to press twice for one of the buttons to register.

</comment><comment><USER11> I get it that he's ranting, but there's nothing new here.

Apple software quality started to go downhill a long time ago, and now their hardware is catching up. It makes sense because hardware has a longer lead time. Anybody who disagrees can try explaining the mess that iTunes has become, or why I have to reboot both my phone and laptop (almost) every time I try tethering.

<comment><USER12> For what it's worth, I don't think I really remember iTunes ever being remotely good.

I remember being forced to use it when I got my first iPod over a decade ago and it was an awful bloated mess which couldn't deal with my mp3 collection properly (~50+GB at the time). I could count on it to just corrupt or reformat my iPod, crash, hang or corrupt the library at least once a month.

It left a very bad taste in my mouth and I have not purchased Apple hardware or software since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a 2015 MacBook Pro that I.T. has offered to replace.

Nooooope! By the looks of how things are trending, I'm keeping this thing until I move on or they fire me.

</comment><comment><USER14> I got a new MBP for work, and every time I go home to my ~2015 model I am so happy to not be typing on this new shitty keyboard, and that is to say nothing of the oversized trackpad always accidentally causing me to move my cursor with my palm.

<comment><USER15> But this is still subjective. The objective problem is the reliaility of the butterfly keyboard, but there are people who prefer it and the giant trackpad. I really like them and when I had to use my old MBA for a week I suffered not because of that shitty TN display but also because of the input devices on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been looking at the librem 15, I like the idea of a mostly open source laptop, I'd like to do some more digging to see if I can find something more or less comparable to the macOS experience though.

Maybe, elementaryOS 5 + librem 15?

</comment><comment><USER17> >but now I could randomly fail to click something if I rested my palm wrong.

Anyone else dislike the larger trackpad because of that?

<comment><USER18> Frankly, I have the 2015 MBP and this still happens to me every once in a while. So a bigger track pad is one of the _many_ reasons I have no intention of "upgrading" any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 2015 mbp for sale. I gotta say, 2018 is not error free, but it is fast, and it works, and it supports 2 4K monitors without an eGPU.

I can charge, run external hard drive, and 2 external monitors, and 3 usb devices and and speakers and an SD card on 1 cable. I do wish the cal digit dock was included, though.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm in a similar situation: I used to use a 2016 macbook pro with touchbar, but couldn't tolerate more with it, so I switched to a 13' macbook air(while I can still buy this device) earlier this year. I couldn't be more happier.

One thing I disagree with the author, is that I don't think this is _downgrade_ , I consider this is an _upgrade_ , cuz there's more in a computer than just the spec.

Tho I'm not sure what I will use in 3 years, there might not be trustworthy macbook air anymore then.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am sure the Dell XPS 15 that gets mentioned a lot in this thread is an OK alternative, but IMHO nothing beats the OLED screen eye-saving and AI-goodness of an Alienware 13

</comment><comment><USER22> One advantage Apple has here is they've eliminated the tyranny of choice that I see with non-Mac laptops.

Which one should I buy? How much should I spend? What do I really need? I am paralyzed.

OTOH, I know an MBP will do fine, and the price is $1200, which is steep, but I have nothing to compare it to.

Not saying this is good, but I would think this drives a lot of inertia, which Apple is certainly counting on as they try to improve their profit margins.

</comment><comment><USER23> These tweets bring up valid points, but it's obvious that the conversation is optimized for Twitter and not getting anything done.

</comment><comment><USER24> I own two identical 2015 macbook's pro (I live in two places).. and I love to read articles like this one :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Honestly I'm shocked that there isn't a company in the SFBA that just buys up busted 2015 MBPs and refurbs them to sell at a much higher price. Maybe they're afraid of getting sued into oblivion by Apple. Or maybe time travelers from the future are depleting our recent timeline of 2015 MBPs.

<comment><USER26> Repair shop owner here. A 2015 MBP is basically 3 parts: the screen, the logic board, and what Apple calls the "top case" (the metal component where your keyboard and trackpad hang out.)

RAM went bad? Tough, it's soldered onto the board. LCD cracked? Well, Apple doesn't make parts easily available to anyone except Apple, so unless you're Apple authorized, you're stuck buying them from resellers who've stripped them from other laptops. That screen replacement runs hundreds of dollars.

It's the unfortunate reality of Apple making non-repairable, soldered-on boards to make their laptops a few mm thinner.

I highly recommend the Dell XPS series. I switched over to a Dell XPS 15 and really like it!

<comment><USER27> Would a RAM socket and a regular module physically fit in place of the soldered-on module?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nothing new here. And no discussion about what he misses in the older one, etc.

<comment><USER29> I disagree, each complaint is something that he didn't have with the previous hardware or software

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ugly Black Slab over Shiny Aluminum Thing any day.</comment>


SOPA died in 2012, but Obama administration wants to revive part of it - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/05/sopa-died-in-2012-but-obama-administration-wants-to-revive-part-of-it/ <comment><USER2> Secondary liability for service providers and hosts on the internet remains a serious threat to the open web. Service providers should not be held accountable for the content of their users.

This effort to bring back parts of SOPA, combined with a recent push by state attorneys general[1] to compromise Section 230 of the CDA are extremely concerning to me.

[1] [http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130724/12...](http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20130724/12345123927/state- attorneys-general-want-to-sue-innovators-children.shtml)

<comment><USER3> That was actually one of the key points of SOPA -- it extended DMCA-style service provider protection to payment providers and ad networks. As for the "streaming" provision, that was (inartfully) meant to penalize the day 0 crowd, especially for unreleased media. It was not intended to penalize people downloading, watching, or what people who read this site consider "streaming."

The language could and should have been cleaned up then; it all got lost amidst the SOPA screaming. Penalties for "streaming" are covered by the DMCA inside the US. It's how YouTube and UStream can exist. And I think we've seen precisely how many felonies and how much jail time resulted from cover songs and Justin Bieber lip dubs since that law passed 15 years ago.

But right now someone outside the USA can take another party's shady (or well- intentioned stream) of a pay per view, wrap ads from an ad network around it, and accept PayPal in order to see the "unrestricted stream" (scam). And there's no legal framework to deal with it.

That's obvious scammy theft regardless of where you stand on copyright. And all the "good guys" (ad networks, payment providers) remain liable whether they respond to takedown requests or not. SOPA let people take down the ads and PayPal links if they couldn't get the site down. It gave PayPal and Google the same kind of process and liability protection for payments and ads that YouTube already enjoys for video.

This needs to get fixed and techdirt, boingboing and others need to hire someone with minimal legal expertise (optimally Congressional litigation support experience) if they're going to keep hammering this for pageviews and anti-copyright cred.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the future, there will be a more extreme version of rickrolling. People will send you links and if you open them, you will be sent to jail.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never understood how prisons could be allowed to become private businesses. It's "evil" by definition.

<comment><USER5> By definition? That requires some justification.

The justice system still sets the parameters and manages the procedures by which sentences are handed down. If a court determines you're going to prison for 10 years, you're going -- the private company manages your environment for that time.

And given that private parties also manage your medical care, hospital stays, air travel, car manufacture, work environments, home building, and thousands of other mechanisms and environments that determine your safety and quality of living, I struggle with finding a moral difference when it comes to prisons.

You could argue that these other things are voluntary and prison isn't, but it's involuntary even if run by government; most inmates would opt out either way.

And I think it's highly naive, this distinction between private companies as greedy, interested parties and government agencies and functionaries as objective arbiters of truth and goodwill. Either way you have ridiculous salaries, internal power struggles, marketing/perception, budget committees, and cynical people inured to the hard realities of the lives they affect.

<comment><USER6> A prison is a place where people are deprived of liberties. A society can justify depriving people of liberties. A private interest should not have the right to do so.

Yes, it's not the private interest who condemns the prisoner, but they run these facilities at a profit, turning what should be a rehabilitating environment into an environment that is designed to promote full prisons to enrich an individual.

A good prison should work at a financial loss because there should be a societal benefit to rehabilitating inmates. If a higher prison population turns into a financial incentive, there is no incentive to help inmates or even reduce recidivism.

This is especially true when you consider how many minor offenses can send people to jail in the US. It is also interesting to consider that when slavery was abolished, many plantations turned into for-profit prisons; or that the incarceration rate of the US is the highest in the world.

<comment><USER5> The government delivers citizens into the hands of private management all the time: required insurance policies, training programs, licensure, etc. Mandating that every obligatory service be not only funded, but _implemented_ , by government would extend its rolls of employees, budgets, laws and legal complexity, competencies, and requisite voter knowledge beyond any reasonable possibility.

You seem to be ascribing a negative to the mere profit focus of a private company, rather than the outcome. We could do the same for insurance, medical practice, automobiles, plane travel, lodging, and everything else important; but we don't, because private companies in the open market perform better.

Would you then deliver everything important into the hands of government monopoly, despite everything we know about the benefits of competition, for the moral premise rather than results? And if you think the _results_ weigh against private prison companies, might we restructure the government/private arrangement before nuking wholesale the notion of the market?

WRT the incarceration rate, I'd have to see something linking that to private companies running prisons, rather than problems with the justice system itself.

Consider the abysmal performance of government-run schools, among others, as a counterpoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Think about the starving artists - decades of downloading have crippled the entertainment industries so much thay there are no new artists, songs, movies, video games, software comlanies, television shows -- oh, wait...

<comment><USER8> I think you think this is more clever than it actually is, because the music industry has been torpedoed over the last dozen or so years.

<comment><USER9> music industry != music

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a confused and confusing article.

The "streaming" to which it refers could mean any of a number of different things depending on the context you choose to read it in. Those contexts include:

(a) "Streaming" as laypersons define it; literally viewing unauthorized streaming content from a service like Youtube.

(b) "Streaming" in the SOPA analysis, as Zittrain and (unfortunately) Techdirt are discussing in the article linked from this WaPo post.

(c) "Streaming" in the Klobuchar bill, which makes a very specific change to copyright law that isn't nearly as sweeping as SOPA.

(d) "Streaming" as described in the Commerce report.

I assume the WaPo is referring to (c) or (d), since that's the interpretation that squares with the headline. But then why is it talking about Justin Bieber and SOPA?

Specifically: the Klobuchar bill closes a loophole in the copyright law that results from streaming being classified as "public performance" and not "distribution". Like other criminal infringement statutes, it requires the infringement to be commercial in nature to be prosecutable --- you have to build a business on your unauthorized streaming to have committed a felony. Unlike (as I understand it) SOPA, the Bieber Youtube upload would not be a crime in the Klobuchar bill.

The Commerce report doesn't even advocate for Klobuchar; it merely recognizes the loophole in the law, which obviously does exist: you can build a Pirate iTunes Music Store and be charged with a felony, but build a Pirate Netflix and it's a misdemeanor. That is, in fact, a weird legal result.

Finally, Bieber's opinion about his fans uploading unauthorized copies of his work is probably not relevant. Bieber sold his commercial interest in those works to recording companies, for spectacular amounts of money. It's easy for him to advocate for his fans right to traffic in unauthorized copies of his tracks; they're not his property anymore, and infringement is someone else's problem.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for this. Onc clarification: the "Bieber YouTuBe upload" takedown scenario remained a DMCA issue. The non-commercial = non-felony language was actually made even more explicit under SOPA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aynrand125008.htm...](http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aynrand125008.html)

Everyone's a criminal then law-enforcement selective enforces law on who they want taken care of.

<comment><USER8> No, every does not run a business feeding unauthorized streaming copies of movies or songs to customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah, try killing this one too. And the one after this. After that. Followed by another one. See where this is going? We have to remove the root, not the leafs.

</comment><comment><USER12> I read SOAP... I'm so relieved it's not.

<comment><USER13> For what it's worth, I came here to say a similar thing. I was jubilant that SOAP had finally been put to a well-deserved rest.

Well, of the two, I'd agree that SOPA is the greater evil. By a slim margin, anyway.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 What if you don't stream the copywritten work, and instead download it for later viewing/listening?

<comment><USER8> Neither of those are criminalized; this is an example of the kind of confusion the WaPo article has created by being absurdly imprecise about "streaming".</comment></comment>


Don't Even Think of Using Encryption Software to Escape NSA Scrutiny - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/24/1218418/-Don-t-Even-THINK-of-Using-Encryption-Software-to-Escape-NSA-Scrutiny <comment><USER2> And this is why we all need to start encrypting everything. Every HTTP request, every email. There's strength in numbers and privacy in a crowd. They may have massive resources but they're not limitless, we have the technology available to render tools like PRISM unfeasible for the foreseeable future, the choice is ours.

<comment><USER2> I can't edit that now but actions speak louder than words - get your GPG key set up today: [http://gpgtools.github.io/GPGTools_Homepage/keychain/](http://gpgtools.github.io/GPGTools_Homepage/keychain/) It takes 5 minutes, tops. If you've spent 5 minutes talking or worrying about this issue you owe it to yourself to do it. Set it up with your favorite email client and encourage your friends to do the same.

My public key is here: [http://sho.ch/alexgraul.publickey](http://sho.ch/alexgraul.publickey) and on the gpg keyserver, where's yours?

<comment><USER3> I've had my public key available on my website for years. Nobody uses it. The problem is social: people are not in the habit of using encryption and only the technically adept have any idea how. Even my correspondents who know how to use gpg don't bother.

<comment><USER4> That, and the fact that public/private key encryption is difficult to understand on a conceptual level, uses poor, inconsistent, or misleading terminology, and has a user-hostile interface with GPG or a buggy and error- prone interface with Enigmail. The problem is social in part because we've done such a poor job packaging and marketing the solution.

<comment><USER5> This, a thousand times this. I could write an entire post on the key metaphor alone. I don't think anyone has ever had their conceptual understanding _improved_ by calling the codes you use to encrypt and decrypt things 'keys'. If we insist on calling them that, can we at least make sure to explain _why_ it's called a key, instead of giving people the impression that it somehow works like an actual key?

<comment><USER6> maybe the public key should be called a lock.. lock and key makes sense to me

<comment><USER7> Except in other contexts, the use of the public and private keys is reversed. I use my private key to generate signatures: does it aid understanding to tell someone to use my "lock" to verify such signatures?

<comment><USER8> Just tell the user he can't sign things without a profile, and make keys with each profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a non-American, apparently I'm already fair game, so there's no harm in using encryption.

<comment><USER10> What is quite telling (at least within US media coverage) is that it is apparently only controversial that the NSA is spying on those in the US. The complete disregard for everyone else in the world seems almost casual, as if it isn't an issue at all.

But indeed, let's keep using encryption. It is, after all, the US government that has a long history(1) of trying to keep encryption out of our non- American hands.

(1) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER11> Why would you expect the US government, or ANY government to respect the right of privacy of citizens of other countries? The first duty of government is surely to protect the interests of the country to which it belongs - note that I'm in favour of governments belonging to countries, not the other way around. And that first duty surely indicates that any government should do its upmost to pry into the business of anybody where doing so will offer advantage to its citizens.

Furthermore, it would be weird if this didn't happen. And if your country, whichever one it is, isn't doing this, and some horrible thing happens which might have been avoided by this kind of spying, then your co-citizens will be rightly outraged and demand to know what the hell your government thinks it is doing.

But, equally, your government might [ought?] to consider what it can do to protect its citizens from foreign spying.

Most wicked in all of this is not that the spying takes place, but that it does so within the most diaphanous of legal frameworks. I understand that my government might want to spy on me if it thinks I'm involved in something illegal, but I damn well want a clear, unambiguous, legal framework that says who gets to authorise that spying, for how long, and on what grounds. Oh, and the person who does that authorisation had better be a judge, or an elected official that I can un-elect.

All this we're-so-clever-because-we-found-a-way-to-subvert-the-law-by-cleve- interpretation nonsense needs to be stopped in a career ending way for those doing it. Oh, and the politicians who gave it a wink and a nod need to be named so we can decide what to do with them at the next election.

In summary, countries spy on foreigners. Always have. Always will. But that doesn't excuse them spying on their own. That kind of behaviour has a bad reputation, for a bunch of historically valid reasons.

<comment><USER12> The current state is a sadly very country-centric perspective.

I'd like to live in a world where we all were able to assert our rights, as stated most elegantly under the Declaration of Human Rights (1).

Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 14: (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The USA's own Elanor Roosevelt was the Chair of the CHR, which drafted the Declaration, and the US is a signatory. (2)

(1) [http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/](http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/) (2) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights)

<comment><USER13> Well, maybe, but I think I somewhat prefer the old fashioned way where at least a democracy or republic looked after the interests of its citizens, and hopefully the citizenry had some concept of ethics and fairness towards others in the world.

Now we seem to have this attitude of "Justice for _all_ (multinational) corporations!". Voting the wrong way is terrorism, as far as some of these interests are concerned :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe we need the "Herd immunity" of a large number of people using encryption software. If a sufficient number of people are using encryption, then targeting those users becomes less worthwhile.

<comment><USER15> In a world were most people would use encryption, NSA and other agencies would just backdoor consumer hardware or libraries such as OpenSSL and pretend to cry over their sudden loss of power.

Technology is not the solution to this problem, it is society and it can be solved by rule of law, accountability, revolution and such old forgotten concepts.

<comment><USER16> OpenSSL? You mean the open source software with a million eyes on it?

Technology is not _the_ solution to this problem, it is _A_ solution, among others.

<comment><USER15> Really, a million eyes on it? Okay, lets go with that,

to compile OpenSSl you need a compiler and an entire toolchain, an operatingsystem, microcode and hardware. In any layer it is possible for an organization such as NSA to do its dirty deeds.

They dont fabricate their own chips/hardware for fun. Well, maybe for fun too, but not only for fun.

<comment><USER7> Sure we can't go around trusting trust. OTOH most of the compilers in general use see a number of eyeballs. Ditto for the operating systems. I could even see this becoming the case for hardware eventually. An evil system must model the system that relies on it in order to attack that relying system, while remaining functional in general. The longer you make the chain that inserts your nasty code into higher-layer objects, the more complicated, fragile, and discoverable the attack becomes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This doesn't follow. The article makes two points:

1\. The NSA is allowed to store and analyze encrypted data longer than unencrypted

2\. US citizens' encrypted data will be treated the same as non-citizens'

It still seems you have a much better expectation of privacy by encrypting your data and trusting to mathematical proofs that it would take thousands of years to break it; rather than leaving it in the clear, and trusting to five year storage limits and the supposed privileges of American citizenship.

<comment><USER18> Keep in mind that as a rule of thumb, its useful to assume that the NSA is about 20 years ahead of the public in crypto research. Even if systems like HTTPS and Tor appear secure today, the NSA may already have knowledge of weaknesses that we don't.

<comment><USER19> Do you have any kind of source or citation for this? Where does "20 years" come from?

<comment><USER18> I think I first heard this when I took a crypto course in college and read Applied Cryptography, by Bruce Schneier.

There was a section in there about the development of DES. At some point the researchers at IBM showed their work in progress on DES to the NSA, and the NSA made a few suggestions on improvements, one of them was a different set of S-Boxes (basically a bunch of constants used as part of the cipher.) IBM analyzed the new S-Boxes and could find no weaknesses so they used the ones the NSA recommended.

Over a decade later, differential cryptanalysis was discovered and it turned out that the tweaks the NSA had suggested made DES particularly resistant to differential cryptanalysis.

After doing some googling, it seems like the gap has closed since that book was written. They are still ahead, but not as much as they were in the 80's and 90's. Or maybe that's just what they want us to think ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a small conspiracy theory going, that they are using this sort of articles to discourage people from using encryption.

I suggest that we all create a handful of large files from /dev/random, make torrents out of them, and seed them until their servers bleed out.

<comment><USER21> For me it´s not a theory, thats what I said in my comment and I´m pretty sure they ARE actually using these articles to discourage people from using encryption.

Your idea of seeding some /dev/random or attaching some /dev/random to emails sounds like a great idea, and also funny, to me. We should definitely do that!

<comment><USER22> Is 1 gigabyte fine?

<comment><USER23> Make a quick website (hosted on Github or whatever), with a bunch of torrent links to a bunch of huge encrypted files.

Then spread the word and give them something to spy on.

<comment><USER21> Wouldn´t they probably find that github and just discard those torrents from their cryptanalysis?

<comment><USER24> What if some percentage of the torrents there were used to transmit secret information?

<comment><USER23> 1GB per 1B of hidden data. Let's see how fast we can fill their storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd rather prefer they store my encrypted data forever over storing my unencrypted data for five years. Yes, they might be able to break the used cipher during my lifetime but there is at least a (good) chance that they will never see my data in plain. Therefore I have to completely disagree with the headline.

<comment><USER26> XKCD once had a very salient comic on this point: [https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

The idea being, you _think_ they can't break your encryption, but they can just break your fingers one by one until you tell them the password.

<comment><USER27> It's not really useful in defending this point because the threat doesn't scale.

The NSA can't hire enough heavies to break fingers of every person sending and receiving encrypted data (assuming they could even find the people sending and receiving it without first decrypting).

<comment><USER28> Could be a new jobs program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Great, so the choice is between using everything in the open, unencrypted, and then _maybe_ they won't look at it, or encrypt it and then there's a very high chance they'll look at it.

It seems to chill speech either way. This is why the wholesale spying must stop.

<comment><USER21> I´m pretty sure the unencrypted communications will be automatically parsed and processed to look for certain patterns or keyword, and if not found, ignored, but after processing nonetheless.

They can attack an encrypted communication and probably decrypt it, but they just want you to be afraid of encrypting with fear of being targeted so that they have it easier to process your information.

But that´s a fallacy and a puny tactic to make the general public afraid of being under scrutiny because of the very reason of using encryption.

They might be able to decypher encrypted communications if they are the minority, but even with their big supercomputers and billions of dollars, I doubt they would be able to process people´s communication if encryption was the majority of communications.

And these articles work towards the NSA´s goals and agenda misleading the public in thinking that it´s better not to use any encryption at all. If the public was educated on this subject and everyone used encryption, I guess they would have a really hard time processing all this information...

<comment><USER30> "They can attack an encrypted communication and probably decrypt it"

Why this assumption? The NSA has NO super-human abilities.

And one of their jobs is to protect gov secrets. Which is why they participated in the AES standard. If you really believe they can decrypt AES, then you believe they chose an algo that is insecure, than would allow China, Russia and others with similar abilities to read any of our nation's secrets.

Not to mention, that there are currently no known attacks that would allow them to decrypt AES in any reasonable amount of time, even if they had every single computer in the world.

If you really believe the NSA can decrypt anything, then you're out in conspiracy-theory land, with magical yet-to-be-invented computers, and humans with super-math abilities.

<comment><USER31> > The NSA has NO super-human abilities.

No, but they do have a larger hardware budget than you. And a larger budget for crypto research.

<comment><USER32> A larger research budget than the entire open cryptographic community? Maybe. But it's not just about budget. A lot of the smartest cryptographers don't work for the NSA anymore, because they like to publish their research, and/or because industry pays better.

If you haven't broken the algorithm, a "larger hardware budget" really isn't helpful at all. Key sizes are big enough that the laws of physics prevent you from brute-forcing them. From Bruce Schneier: "If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2^192. Of course, it wouldn't have the energy left over to perform any useful calculations with this counter." [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_c...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html)

If they've made a huge breakthrough on quantum computers, they could break the popular public-key algorithms, but could only halve the effective key size of symmetric algorithms.

<comment><USER31> > Key sizes are big enough that the laws of physics prevent you from brute- > forcing them

A lot of it still boils down to password guessing. The limitation is in the user's choice of password, not the laws of physics.

Given the techniques listed here [http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how- crackers-make-mi...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers- make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/) (e.g. generating password guesses with Markov chains) suprisingly long and un-obvious passwords are found without brute-forcing the whole space. In other words, you have to pay attention to a whole lot of lateral things to actually be secure. The mathematical properties of the key-space don't matter if your OS has been backdoored and a keystroke logger installed.

<comment><USER32> That's only true if you have a copy of the user's encrypted private key. You've got that if you've confiscated his hard drive, but it doesn't go over the wire. The key itself is random.

A keylogger bypasses the whole thing but so far nobody's accusing the NSA of hacking lots of domestic computers, and that would definitely do away with the excuse that "we didn't know he was in the U.S."

<comment><USER31> > That's only true if you have a copy of the user's encrypted private key. it > doesn't go over the wire.

I know several people who have put all of their (strong) website passwords in a 1password/keepass/truecrypt file covered by a password that they can remember and type; and then put that on dropbox. Over the wire. I am assuming that this is compromised now.

> nobody's accusing the NSA of hacking lots of domestic computers

Except for here [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies- said-t...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap- data-with-thousands-of-firms.html) and [http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open- enterprise/2013/06/how...](http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open- enterprise/2013/06/how-can-any-company-ever-trust-microsoft-again/index.htm)

> "we didn't know he was in the U.S."

I am sitting in front of a domestic computer that is not in the US. The line about "but only for non-americans" is no reassurance whatsoever to the world.

<comment><USER32> Yes, some people will do silly things.

I was familiar with both those stories, and neither is about the NSA hacking into domestic computers (by which I mean, computers in the USA, which is "domestic" for the NSA). Voluntary cooperation by firms is not the same as the NSA surreptitiously installing keyloggers.

<comment><USER31> > Yes, some people will do silly things.

And yet you were arguing a few comments up that the keyspace that 1password etc use was too large to ever crack. But you have to remember some master password. Your crypto is only as strong as the weakest part.

> domestic computers (by which I mean, computers in the USA)

I'm sorry, I thought that you meant "computers in people's houses". In the USA or not, I could _not_ care less.

> Voluntary cooperation by firms is not the same as the NSA surreptitiously > installing keyloggers

The keyloggers is a logical endpoint of what they would do with the 0-day exploits mentioned in the two articles. Not directly related to the "cooperation by firms"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> US Persons are protected from surveillance without a warrant. This is a right guaranteed to them by the Constitution. The burden of establishing if someone is a US Person should fall on the government agency performing surveillance.

If they cannot establish if a US Person is party to the conversation, they should assume one is and remove the potential of violating this constitutionally guaranteed right. This could be due to a failure of the service provider (Google, Verizon) to collect this information (they don't), or the fact that the communications are anonymous or encrypted, etc. Proving a negative can be tough, but that burden is the government's to bear.

Of course there is also a moral component… I'm pretty shocked that as patriotic as we are about the sacred rights of the constitution, we somehow feel that it is morally ok to not afford these protections when dealing with foreigners. The Declaration of Independence says:

 _We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness._

With the rights to be enshrined more specifically later in the Constitution. How can anyone passionately agree with these words and not believe that the just treatment afforded to US citizens should somehow not be afforded to non- citizens, or citizens who choose to use a particular software program?

<comment><USER34> Lawyers on HN and elsewhere have been pretty unequivocal in stating that the 4th amendment protects possessions, not communications.

<comment><USER35> Phone calls are protected by the 4th Amendment but emails are not. (Under current interpretations of the 4th Amendment.)

<comment><USER36> Well, even phone calls are weird.

The Supreme Court said that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy while using the phone, and that therefore the 4th Amendment applied. Part of the reason people had that expectation was that Congress had introduced much stronger regulation of telephone circuits in 1934 so it wasn't like just anybody was allowed to tap into utility lines.

However the only protection is the _expectation_ of privacy, which Congress can take away by saying "you should not expect communications to be private in these situations". And that's exactly what they did in 1968 in response to those Supreme Court decisions.

One important provision of that law were that the President was allowed to take " _such measures as he deems necessary:_ "

 _to protect the nation against actual or potential attack or other hostile acts of a foreign power, to obtain foreign intelligence information deemed essential to the security of the United States or to protect national security information against foreign intelligence activities_.

EMails have less expectation of privacy, though Congress did try with ECPA (which was passed when POP was the way to obtain email, not IMAP). But even ECPA gives broad exceptions for FISA surveillance.

<comment><USER7> _Part of the reason people had that expectation was that Congress had introduced much stronger regulation of telephone circuits in 1934 so it wasn 't like just anybody was allowed to tap into utility lines._

I wonder how well we would take it if we discovered that in addition to the NSA, Gmail was also sending all communications directly to Joe Blow in Podunk, Indiana, for his personal edification and entertainment? After all, it's not like we had any expectation of privacy for our email. What laws would this violate?

<comment><USER36> Well, is Joe Blow a Google employee? It might not break any laws at all in that case.

If he's not a Google employee it would probably violate ECPA, but ECPA explicitly allows foreign intelligence surveillance to occur (even over the Internet), so that wouldn't help against government surveillance being done in accordance with FISA.

<comment><USER7> No, Joe Blow is just some random dude. He did Sergey a solid once, and in return he gets access to all of Gmail. ECPA is a dead letter, and was specifically about government not private actions anyway.

My point, which admittedly I'm still not making clearly, is that it's weird to consider phone calls to be some sort of judicial fluke that was far outside accepted 4th Amendment jurisprudence. Americans didn't want the government listening in on their phone calls. Since we clearly couldn't elect a government that would abstain from that noxious practice, it was a good thing the third branch stepped in for a time to stop it. Maybe sometime in the future we'll be that fortunate again.

 _If_ one is uncomfortable with the Joe Blow example, consider how much _worse_ it is for the government to be reading all of Gmail than it would be for Joe Blow to be doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Actually, if I go to the trouble of encrypting my data, I have nothing against someone storing it indefinitely. That's the whole point of encryption — it no longer matters who has the data, it only matters who has the key.

<comment><USER38> You have nothing against someone storing it indefinitely, but I bet you have a problem with them now thinking you might be a bad guy. Will they listen to your phone calls to find out if you are in fact a bad guy?

<comment><USER39> True. In a perfect scenario I would rather the NSA not store my communications at all, and have them no reason to even look at me to assume I am either good or bad.

But, unfortunately, looking at the absolute pushback from congress and the white house over this whole thing, it's pretty clear the citizens have absolutely 0 say in the matter. After all, we're just ignorant sheep. They're the ones will all the knowledge and we should just trust them. We're not going to be able to change the NSA's policies or magically make everyone follow the constitution and the law to the T overnight. This is a compromise on our end.

The NSA may have a large amount of resources for storing and running attacks on my emails, but they don't have limitless resources. For every hour they spend bruteforcing my keys to recover a sappy "Just thinking of you <3" to my wife, the less time they're spending bruteforcing someone else's emails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Personally I thought encrypting stuff was just a temporary middle finger, and denazification the long term solution? After all, you don't get safety by complying with commands from your predators, that just gives them ideas.

So how about simply ignoring all that. Think of vampires; they can't get in without your permission, and sunlight kills them real fucking quick, so quick you will doubt they ever existed. Sure they can be dangerous, but their main tools are lies, and foolishness of their victims.

As Assange pointed out, censorship betrays fear. These people have nothing but a huge house of cards. Even if they ruled forever, they have nothing inside; they are a clenched fist around nothing, around a bluff, around fear. So they already lost anything humans can loose, they already went the way of the dinosaur, at "best" they can take us all with them.

They have my pity, and those who are still able to get out I wish the best, but the rest should simply learn to know their place already.

Regards, a deluded narcissist, writing from the fortress of his mind, unimpressed by noob stuff such as death.

</comment><comment><USER41> Since I am not a citizen of that country I am quite happy to "not be treated as a United States person". And from the other point of view, Americans and American companies are surely aware of organisations other than local ones that they might want to keep secrets from, so I'm not sure that this information should change anyones behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER42> Even if you don't encrypt your communications, can you be sure that NSA will not store your data indefinitely? Sure, they can pass the raw unencrypted data through their system, parse out the important bits, save them in a database with a unique key for you and then throw away the raw data. Are you OK with that? They have lied in the past and might even keep that raw data as well. How will you know?

IMO, best bet is to keep it all encrypted. It sounds like an attempt to scare people into leaving their stuff open.

<comment><USER43> Exactly. We're operating on the assumption that they are telling the truth. I think that's a pretty stupid assumption.

This is just a scare tactic to get people to _not_ use encryption, but it's also dimwitted because they could get a lot more mileage by saying "we can break all forms of encryption" and the American public would probably believe it (even with Snowden/a vocal minority calling out the NSA on the lie). The media would most likely propagate the lie because they don't seem to care about the rights/freedom of the people in the US more than creating a scare frenzy.

In summation, the NSA are liars and will keep your data regardless, so encrypt everything, don't put anything sensitive on Google, Skype, Dropbox (you'd have to be _really_ stupid to do this anyway), and call your senator.

<comment><USER35> It's possible they're pushing the story now as a scare tactic, but the source of this information is a document from the DoJ authorizing the NSA to collect and store U.S. data in certain cases, leaked by Snowden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> But, but, but we know for certain that there's nothing to worry about, nothing wrong, no violation of the Fourth Amendment. How do we know? Because the FISA court, all bow down, assume an appropriately servile, submissive, obsequious, respectful posture, told us so!

And we all know that the FISA court is infallible, the great Wizard ("pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"), deserving of all our trust, right?

Thank you; thank you; thank you, oh wonderful, all knowing, all seeing, all wise, all powerful, wonderful FISA court watching over us and taking such good care of us!!

FISA court, I don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, or how to contact you or review your work, but I know that you are now watching over all of us.

What a new day! For 200+ years we've had the restrictive Constitution from those skeptical founding fathers and suffered under such paranoia as

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance"

when all we needed was the wonderful Father FISA court! Why didn't the founding fathers think of this???? I can believe that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and even Pol Pot thought of this -- why not our founding fathers?

At a secure, undisclosed location in the private chambers of the FISA court:

"Darn, why can't we keep those ink pads for our rubber stamps in stock?

Oh, well, the rest of the day is shot. Back to watching those SnapChat intercepts from Sweden!".

</comment><comment><USER45> To whomever came up with that title; Never, Ever tell people not to encrypt things!

</comment><comment><USER46> If you are using Tor correctly, they can't target 'you' because they don't know who 'you' are. Also, have fun storing indefinitely all of my banal communications until forever.

<comment><USER47> >If you are using Tor correctly

How can you be sure "they" are not running the exit node?

<comment><USER48> They still don't know the source of the communication. Running an exit node means they can see where traffic is headed as it emerges from Tor, not that they can magically determine from whence it came.

The problem here is that the destination can identify you. You, after all, are the one paying for that VM instance at that IP address within AWS. Who else would be connecting via SSH?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Isn't every https page load and form submit an "encrypted communication"? This article seems to imply that any secure online surfing or shopping would trigger this "capture the encrypted communication" stuff. Thisvdoesbnot make sense.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is a distraction. If you don't trust the NSA's oversight, then you should assume they keep everything for ever and taking issue with them being able to eavesdrop so easily.

If you do trust the oversite, it makes sense that they keep encrypted data around since they have no easy way of knowing if its from a US person or not. Once they decrypt it and find out it is a US person, thats where you should focus. It should be as if they collected US Person data originally and should count it as collected when they actually got it, not decrypted it.

As to the argument that the NSA could count anything as encrypted. Yep, they could. See point one.

</comment><comment><USER51> The NSA's resources are finite. The more people that use encryption the more resources needed to store and attempt to crack it.

Not to mention a push for users to continually adopt stronger encryption.

</comment><comment><USER52> I always wondered why there are no mainstream mail clients which use encryption by default. With "by default" I do not mean that it's an option that may be turned on or not. Rather, as soon as an e-mail address is entered when composing a mail the client should search the key servers for available public keys, import them and encrypt the message. Likewise, it shouldn't even be possible to launch a mail client without having generated a key pair for your address.

I see of course that there is this movement towards webmail, and this makes things more complicated. Wouldn't it be possible to write an online version of an encryption-friendly mail client? I mean, a web service which polls your mails via POP/IMAP from any server, and where the encryption is done client side in javascript. If that doesn't exist, maybe we should write one.

</comment><comment><USER53> Isn't this giving in and doing exactly what they want, always using unencrypted communications?

The question is, how much do you want an unchecked organization with no oversight to know about you? Do you trust the NSA to know everything about you and never do anything wrong with it, 10, 15 or 20 years from now?

<comment><USER53> Also, Snowden himself said that encryption works:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward- snowden-n...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa- files-whistleblower#block-51bf3588e4b082a2ed2f5fc5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Random question: Is there some way to troll NSA by 42 zip exploits, i.e. a zip file that includes always bigger and bigger emptied zip files, only this time with relatively easy to crack passwords. Would be fun giving these some suspicious sounding names and sending them around in circles.

</comment><comment><USER55> If only we could get spammers to encrypt everything they send...

<comment><USER56> If only encrypted email was accepted, precisely that would happen :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> unless everybody else does...

</comment><comment><USER22> Along with the headline, the layout of the header picture (with the man holding the flag) gives me the creepy 1984-ish vibes.

</comment><comment><USER58> Sounds like US citizens should have an unencrypted email signature saying:

My name is XXX, I am a US citizen. My address is YYY. By the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution and supported by federal courts, the contents of this email are encrypted, private, and require a valid warrant to be intercepted, stored, or accessed by the US government.

</comment><comment><USER59> What if we all start attaching files with random content to our e-mails? An extension could do this automatically. Can the output of "dd if=/dev/urandom of=unicorns.pgp bs=1 count=1024" be easily distinguished from a real pgp file? No one could ever decrypt these files.

<comment><USER60> Attaching random content to emails reminds me of Emacs's 'M-x spook' command (and I'm not even an Emacs user).

As for distinguishing random data from PGP that is very easy: PGP messages (even binary ones) have some headers that determine who the recipient is, what encryption is used, etc. See here for the format of PGP messages: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880)

What you could do is to generate a public/private PGP keypair, then _destroy_ the private key, and encrypt your /dev/urandom data using that public key.

<comment><USER59> In that case one could create an extension that creates a PGP keypair _for the recipient_, attaches encrypted crap to the e-mail, and deletes the private key. Is that what you mean?

The idea is to add by default an encrypted message to all e-mails that contain nothing useful, to make it indistinguishable from e-mails that do contain useful encrypted stuff. Is that possible? Does it make any sense?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Is using a service like privnote a plausible way to communicate privately? According to the privacy policy, at no time is any note held in any readable format state on their servers. Also each message 'self destructs' after being opened one time.

<comment><USER62> Always assume "No" unless you have a bunch of established crypto researchers who've looked at the system and who are prepared to use it themselves.

People might say that "there are no posted attacks for privnote", but that just means the bad guys haven't told you they can crack your encryption. Since bad guys will never tell you that they can crack your encryption you must not assume lack of evidence of cracks is the same as lack of cracks.

([http://pablohoffman.com/how-privnote-really- works](http://pablohoffman.com/how-privnote-really-works))

There's some stuff that is vaguely worrying about privnote.

Really, learn GPG / PGP. Help other people learn it. Fix the UI. Fix the documentation. Sign everything. Encrypt everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Doesn't matter, you should still encrypt anything. If they manage to break it, cool. If they use it against you it will become public knowledge what ciphers have been broken by the 404-Agency. Then just switch to a different cipher or up the bits.

</comment><comment><USER64> I starting to get the feeling that the best way to "encrypt" my data and stay safe from the watchful eyes of all the various agencies around the world is to just to go back to good old fashioned mail that physically gets posted in a box!

</comment><comment><USER65> This article is idiotic, should I stop using HTTPS too? Telnet in to work?

</comment><comment><USER66> If you are considered a foreigner they have to break the encryption. If you are US citizen, constitutional restrictions have to be overcome. Nothing lost when encryption is used.

</comment><comment><USER67> [http://www.garykessler.net/library/steganography.html](http://www.garykessler.net/library/steganography.html)

</comment><comment><USER68> the statement "communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning" tells me that it doesn't even have to use Tor or be encrypted in any way. Double entendres, for example, contain 'secret meaning' and thus would also be included just as easily as encrypted communication!

</comment><comment><USER69> Whatever - I am not a USA citizen - so they keep my communications anyway.

</comment><comment><USER70> I wish things weren't the way they are.

</comment><comment><USER71> I'm routinely hostile to people who use the "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" apology. Few positions encapsulate a more dangerous concept of proper relations between the state and its citizens. And yet, when I think about how I actually live my life, my basic assumption is "I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm okay." The difference between how I think and how I behave is pretty glaring.

Yeah, yeah, three felonies a day. I know. But there are a third of a billion people in the US. Given a billion felonies a day (more or less), it's easy to find comfort in statistics and probability. Honestly, I've got bigger and more likely problems to worry about than getting sucked into some Kafkaesque nightmare (though, like an attack by shark or bear, it's not impossible).

No, what really concerns me is the emergence of a belief that the government is an impervious citadel, fortified against any democratic control or correction. When stuff like the spying scandal, or the crime spree on Wall Street, goes unchecked (let alone unpunished) it saps political will in general, and that leads to a social environment that really is intolerable. A tiny portion of the population resorting to encryption doesn't do anything to change that. The truly appropriate response is a political one, and one that goes well beyond the mass surveillance issue in particular. Specifically, we (the people) need to recover control of our own Congress.

The mushrooming scandal with spying fits a broader pattern of regulatory capture, adding to the constellation of toxic effects that result. But at the heart of all this corruption, there's a relatively vulnerable target. That's because the mechanics of capturing legislators rest of four key pieces: private campaign finance, closed primaries, gerrymandered districts, and the revolving door between public and private offices.

Before the apathy goes to deep, we need people to coalesce around a set of conditions for winning office. Specifically, no legislator gets past the voters if they haven't committed themselves to changes that make them exclusively beholden to the voters (i.e. open primaries, non-partisan redistricting, public election finance, and a lifetime hell-ban on going to work for the industries you once "regulated"). If someone promises to do all this, but balks once elected, throw them out systematically. Keep doing this until there is a critical mass of legislators who can push through reform that makes legislators dependent on the people alone. Not their financial backers, not their future employers, not their political parties, and not the voters they hand-pick.

Lots of folks aren't worried about the NSA at all. There's a fairly disturbing number who actually think mass surveillance a good and necessary thing. But regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, there's a good chance that _something_ about crony capitalism bothers the daylights out of you. Different people will have different reasons for insisting on the basic "you- work-for-us-alone" condition for winning office. That's fine. As long as people will hold legislators to it, the restoration of government of, by, and for the people can happen.

But aside from this - from the sustained and forcible assertion of exclusive control over legislators - I don't see how the spying problem, or really any major problem, will resolve itself satisfactorily.

</comment><comment><USER72> what an awesome country you have there, eh?

here's the rationale: if we don't have total awareness and snooping power over this guy private stuff, he must be doing secret stuff and we can't know if it's bad, therefore we have reason to believe he must be a TERRORIST(are you still using this one or have you admitted to yourself that the objective is just `total information awareness`?)

also, cannot stop LOVING that non-americans basically have no fucking rights whatsoever.

<comment><USER43> As an American, it's pretty sad. As if the rest of the world wasn't getting sick of us already. Let's stick our noses into everyone else's business _all the time_ , start a bunch of wars for the obvious benefit of our corporations, crash the world economy (btw we're doing more derivatives trading again so expect another crash lolol), and now spying on every person in the world, US citizen or not.

On top of it, instead of our media telling us "WAKE THE FUCK UP AND LOOK AT WHAT YOUR GOVERNMENT IS DOING!!" they are saying "Gee, where will Snowden go next lol?!?! Ohh he's in Moscow now, neat!!!!"

I think the endorphin rush people get from receiving a Facebook message on their portable distraction device outweighs the negative feelings of the government spying on every aspect of our lives. People don't know what's happening two feet away from them, much less in their government or the world (besides what big media tells them).

We're sliding fast down a slippery slope while chuckling and playing Farmville on the way down.</comment></comment>


In Defense of Sass - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lrdesign.com/2009/02/in-defense-of-sass/

<comment><USER2> I've been using Sass since it came out and I love it. The author's tips are great - I came to the same conclusion myself. I think you could easily overdo nesting in Sass if you're not careful but like he mentions, it's really not necessary. It's been very handy for me on a recent (large) project - it's readability has been a great time-saver.</comment>


AmiKit, a free project that turns your computer, tablet or phone into an Amiga - <AUTHOR> http://www.amikit.amiga.sk <comment><USER2> I am downloading it now, but it is really slow.

It appears to be an ISO file. I guess I can run it in a virtual machine to test it out?

I wonder if it is like the old CommodoreOS that used emulators and ROMs and disk images to run the old Commodore stuff but this one with Amiga only. CommodoreOS was a GNU/Linux distribution and went out of business when the owner who was doing it had died. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_OS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_OS)

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

According to Wikipedia it is an emulator and needs ROMs and Disk images for classic Amiga emulation.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the Website:

"For AmiKit to work, you do need Amiga ROM and Operating System AmiKit includes more than 350 of the finest Amiga programs.

We've done all the hard work for you so that your high-end Amiga experience can begin right away.

With AmiKit you can surf web, read emails and documents, listen to or create your own music, burn CD/DVDs, edit images, play games and much more - all in good old Amiga way."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty cool. People wanting a nodern Amiga experience are still best trying MorphOS. It's beautiful and runs snappy on old Macs. Cost money if you want to keep it or run for 30+ min without reboots.

Personally, I hate monocultures and oligopolies. I'd like go see a good Amiga make a comeback combined with superior tech as a differentiator. Maybe language, security, reliability, GUI... something to push things forward with Amiga part just making it interesting.</comment>