Apple 'On Schedule' to Terminate Music Downloads by 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/12/06/apple-terminate-music-downloads/ <comment><USER2> Am I missing something? This appears to be some random site with a random source but all the comments here seem to be treating this as a real source.

<comment><USER3> > Apple has told DMN that no such phase-out plan exists. One source has > repeatedly insisted that the plan not only exists, but that it is 'on > schedule,' or even ahead of the original schedule.

Apple denied it when they first said it, and they deny it now. [0] But some anonymous source continues to say it, as of two years ago.

I'm not seeing why DMN should be taken seriously.

[0] [http://mashable.com/2016/05/12/apple-itunes-kill- downloads-m...](http://mashable.com/2016/05/12/apple-itunes-kill-downloads- music/#E.ClrFTl18qE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "All of that is raising concerns about an overloaded iTunes, especially > among Apple engineers who are increasingly frustrated with the platform."

How were they not frustrated before? I can't be the only person (engineer or civilian) who finds iTunes to be among the worst applications Apple's produced, and it's been that way for years.

<comment><USER5> Should be Corrected as : I can't be the only person (engineer or civilian) who finds iTunes to be among the worst applications _ever_ been produced, and it's been that way for years.

<comment><USER4> Agree, was trying to come up with examples of worse software and failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Pulling out lower-performing formats, especially music downloads, helps to > solve the issue._

Yeah, that's the problem with iTunes. The ability to play local music files really bogs it down. /sarcasm

I don't use iTunes, so I don't care if they do this as long as the vendors I do use (Amazon, Burning Shed, Bandcamp, etc.) continue to provide downloads.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't help feel like a customer stuck in a consumer's world sometimes. I love buying and supporting individual artists on Bandcamp.

<comment><USER8> Same, if this article is accurate, it would phase out the channel (iTunes store) that I use to buy singles & albums digitally. I don't buy music files from Amazon or Google, since the UX is better as an iPhone user with iTunes music store.

I use Spotify for general listening, but certain tracks, I'll buy on iTunes to have available offline (for what I thought was an indefinite period of time).

<comment><USER9> If you download the files to your laptop, you'll still have those files to keep and transfer between your devices. I bought most of my music on iTunes, then copied it across to my Android device via a microSD card.

(Incidentally, I'm still looking for a good Android music player for my offline files. Google Play Music works, but it isn't very elegant & it's hard to browse when you have lots of artists. I guess I'm wondering what the modern day Android equivalent of Winamp is.)

<comment><USER10> Poweramp [1] has a really nice UI (even with an ugly website) and properly refreshes when new music is added to the filesystem. I wrote some code [2] to rsync my music from iTunes to my Android phone over wifi as I got sick of all the buggy syncing solutions.

[1]: [http://powerampapp.com/](http://powerampapp.com/) [2]: [https://github.com/jakecoppinger/android-itunes- rsync](https://github.com/jakecoppinger/android-itunes-rsync)

<comment><USER11> I've been using Syncthing [0] for syncing music between all of my devices (Android phone included) for quite a while and it has always worked perfectly for me.

Curious if you also consider that one of those "buggy syncing solutions" you mentioned? And if so, what issues have you experienced with it?

[0] [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >>> and the grayed out collection becomes de minimis.

Ya, it's de minimus until my favorite tunes go away. You don't have to be a conspiracy nut to understand what is going on here. They don't want old music on their new devices. Me listening to an old MP3 of my favorite band is, to Apple (or google or anyone else) a waste. Every minute I;m listening to that I'm not listening to <<hip new pop song 12>> via a streaming service. No data to extract. No products to pitch. No data plan to top up. No need to link my car's stereo to the cell network.

We are free to listen to anything we want, so long as its on _today 's_ list of approved tracks. Just forget what you were listening to yesterday. Pretend it never existed, because it doesn't exist and never did. I cannot think of anything more antithetical to rock and roll than calling any music 'de minimus'.

My car's stereo plays mp3s. It plays them when I am in the mountains and out of cell range. It plays them when I am on the lower deck of a car ferry. It plays them when my phone is dead and I don't have a charger. It plays them regardless of what boarder I cross. It will play anything I ask regardless of where it came from. And it won't tell anyone what I listen too alone in the car on my way to work. Nothing in Apple's walled garden shows that sort of loyalty.

<comment><USER13> The world is being fractured right now into too many individual groups. It used to be that if you strayed to far from the opinions of your peers, you would be isolated, and forced to come back to the center. This restricted freedom, but allowed for unity and made for a stronger, more cohesive and well adjusted population.

Nowadays, there is no center. No matter where your individual preferences lead you, there is a group on the internet to validate them. With everyone pursuing different goals and interests, there is no center anymore. This leads to disharmony and chaos.

By Apple controlling what you listen to and when, they are attempting to help society. If you, me, and everyone else was excited about the new Miley Cyrus album, think of how much more together we'd be as a whole. We'd have something in common with our physical neighbors, something to talk about and share. Being part of a collective, IRL, is far better than the poor substitute of some Reddit group.

In the end, what Apple is doing is _helping people_. And, I for one, can't see how anyone can so readily dismiss what they are doing as bad, simply because they limit the functionality of their products a little bit.

<comment><USER14> If that's what you call helping, I don't want any part of it. I prefer not to be force fed garbage by Apple or anyone else. Why would society need a center that's formed of mediocre--at best--culture? Why shouldn't people be able to have their own opinions that are different from those of their "peers". Sorry, what you describe is rather nauseating and disgusting. If this is what Apple does, the less of it society gets exposed to, the better. This isn't helping-- it's controlling. I'm not sure you understand what "helping" means at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If true, quite shocking for Apple's music's monetization ability. I would consider it a falling from grace since they were "trailblazers" and changed the industry with the iPod.

>The iPod is a line of portable media players and multi-purpose pocket computers[2] designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about 8 1⁄2 months after the Macintosh version of iTunes was released. As of July 27, 2017, only the iPod Touch remains in production.[3]([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod))

Music sales have been dying for a while though and turns out , a Apple was apart of it.

>Since the introduction the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, music sales have plummeted in the United States -- from $11.8 billion in 2003 to $7.1 billion last year(2013), according to the Recording Industry Association of America. ([http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/25/technology/itunes-music- decl...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/25/technology/itunes-music- decline/index.html))

<comment><USER16> Yeah sure but streaming is where it's at now, and Apple have a piece of that pie. So I don't know why it's a fall from grace. They know which way the wind is blowing.

[https://www.ft.com/content/94c5cdb0-4a26-11e7-a3f4-c742b9791...](https://www.ft.com/content/94c5cdb0-4a26-11e7-a3f4-c742b9791d43)

> Streaming revenues will rise 37 per cent to $9.1bn in 2017, PwC estimates, > while sales of physical formats will drop 10 per cent to $7.7bn

<comment><USER17> Letting Spotify, rather than Apple themselves, cannibalize music download sales was stupid.

Also, it's the end of one of Apple's moats: your previous purchases. Spotify works on any device. I will say that Spotify is pretty shit on Android, but that's just laziness on their part. (Issues I've had, all on stock Nexus or HTC android phones: crashing. Muting google maps. Not pausing when disconnecting headphones. My laptop and phone fighting over who controls the playlist. Playlist corruption. Their Android team is, at best, C players. And lazy ones. Every time I get suckered into letting Spotify update there's a new bug.)

<comment><USER18> Music hasn't been an Apple "moat" for the iPhone since shortly after it was introduced. Apple started selling DRM Fred music that you could play anywhere by 2009.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So this is just a rumor with anyonymous source reported by a single site?

</comment><comment><USER20> So what happens to all these albums we've bought on the iTunes Store? Despite the money we've poured in, we are on the same level than the next kid who just joined the Apple Music streaming service last month? That will push people to reconsider their loyalty to the company and their service.

<comment><USER21> Nothing AFAIK; they're plain old AAC files. Apple eliminated FairPlay DRM on its iTunes Store purchases ages ago.

<comment><USER22> My guess to what the GP is asking is if the files will still be downloadable from Apple even if they are not selling the tracks anymore. My reading of the article, makes the answer to that question vague, saying:

"But you can always go back and listen to the downloads, they always will work,"

Does that mean if you still have the files, they will work (which is obviously the case) or does that mean they are available to download at anytime once bought from Apple, but will not be available to be purchased in the future...

<comment><USER23> The re-download feature is actually relatively new (though my hazy memory is thinking it's probably more like 10 years old now...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well I guess I have to go back to buying CDs, then?

I will always want to own my music collection.

<comment><USER20> Or vinyls :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I keep catching iTunes use over 1GB of memory without even playing any music.

Additionally, playing and managing the music you OWN is becoming harder and harder with each release. I'm sure they'll kill this feature eventually.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really wish we could have a different Model. I dont really like Streaming Music because I am not owning the Music at all, I am merely getting some access to it. And many times Music Label decide they stop providing access on the Platform, that means some parts of my music collection are gone.

I really wish we could have a hybrid approach. For the same price per month, I can only listen to the same song maximum of 15 times a month, and it gives me some credit to buy music. And those Credit are accumulative.

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems like it should be technically feasible to capture the bits of a streamed song. Are there rogue players that can divert the content to a file?

<comment><USER24> iTunes will happily stream Apple Music to an AirPlay device, and AirPlay is unencrypted ALAC.

Alternatively simply play through a digital audio output and capture it that way.

<comment><USER27> >Alternatively simply play through a digital audio output and capture it that way.

You have no way of knowing what the data's original quality is at, and its introducing artifacts from analog output back into a digital form, which is then outputted to analog again. Its an option, sure, but its like saying "get all your music on youtube."

<comment><USER28> They are suggesting going digital-out (on the source) to digital-in. No analog.

But as pointed out Audio Hijack does the same thing virtually with a kernel extension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm almost sure that Apple still sells more music than movies and almost certainly tv shows. If they have kept those, I doubt they will discontinue music sells. It's not like it costs a lot to support.

<comment><USER15> Source?

<comment><USER18> Well no direct source but if Apple is going to discontinue sells of music because of declines, then they would also do the same for movies.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-itunes-falls-short-in- ba...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-itunes-falls-short-in-battle-for- video-viewers-1499601601)

And what do you think would be the totally addressable market of selling tv shows when you can get almost any broadcast tv network show on demand a day after it airs through your cable company for free and a week after it airs for free from the websites/apps of AbC, NBC, CBS, and FOX.

You can get any TV show on demand the next morning from the CW whether or not you have a subscription.

If you have cable and miss a show it's available usually the next day on demand either from the cable company or by signing in using your cable credentials from the individual cable providers apps.

Then take into account that almost everyone has a device that they can buy and play digital music on in the optimal method. How many people who want to buy video digitally and would prefer to watch it on a TV have an AppleTV?

AppleTV is far from the most popular settop box and it's the only way that you can watch content on a TV (besides connecting your iPhone with a $70 gadget). Both Google Play and Amazon work on the most popular set top box - the roku.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What are they planning to do when you have no connection?

<comment><USER30> _You can also download your content so that you can listen to or watch it when you 're not connected to the Internet._

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204839](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204839)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> TL;DR: Unsubstantiated clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER32> I terminated music downloads in about 2009 - right about when Spotify came out.

I do frequently use the offline playlists feature, however.

<comment><USER25> How do you tolerate 192kbps?

<comment><USER33> Really?

\- how do you 'tolerate' driving over less than perfectly flat roads?

\- how do you 'tolerate' looking through a window which was cleaned more than half an hour ago?

\- how do you 'tolerate' using last year's PC?

\- how do you 'tolerate' linving in less than a full democracy?

\- how do you 'tolerate' ... well, anything 'less than perfect'?

192 Kbps is perfectly usable for most occasions. You're not going to hear the difference while listening in a car, using a pair of 'less than perfect' headphones, in a noisy environment. If you want to listen to music with high dynamic variations in ideal listening conditions you might want to use something better but that's about it.

<comment><USER25> In all of those cases I have no choice.

I do, however, have a choice for listening using high-end system while most headphones and cars make no difference in fidelity.

Then there is problem of fragmentation. Far from all artists use same network, so you'll end up paying for multiple services to get the same thing.

<comment><USER33> There is no fragmentation if you insist on getting downloadable content. Storage is cheap, get your own server and stuff it with your music. Install a streaming server (something like _Subsonic_ / _Madsonic_ /etc comes to mind, _mpd_ also works when configured correctly) and point your devices at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Tomorrow I cancel Apple music and start using Bandcamp more. Something I've been meaning to do for a long time and this pushes me over the edge.

Bandcamp needs an app where I can listen and buy with one click.

<comment><USER35> I don't understand how that follows from the story. Can you explain your thinking here?</comment></comment>


Pirate Bay Founder Held in Solitary Confinement Without Warrant - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-held-in-solitary-confinement-without-a-warrant-131211/ <comment><USER2> I thought this has become standard procedure for high-profile hacker types. It comes down to uneducated LEOs (all over the world) that think hacking/computing is the modern-day equivalent of sorcery or magic, and thus the person of interest has nearly unlimited powers if you let them near a device, another person that has access to a device, or even other inmates that have access to people that have access to devices. I think once Mitnick was put in solitary, it just became the way things are done now.</comment>


Yale Adds Another Stop To The College Hacker Circuit - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/09/yale-adds-another-stop-to-the-college-hacker-circuit/ <comment><USER2> This was a pretty amazing weekend here in New Haven, CT. Yale expected a few hundred... a thousand showed up, from all over. I had the pleasure of being a judge, and, of the three amazing winners -- I will use what they have built.</comment>


Who will build the Health care Blockchain? - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608821/who-will-build-the-health-care-blockchain/ <comment><USER2> What exactly will be solved in healthcare with secure document timestamping?

<comment><USER3> I could imagine (encrypted) health records could benefit from a blockchain model for distribution and dissemination as a distributed database...maybe.

<comment><USER2> Blockchain is a very poor and extremely expensive _database_. All it's good for is _timestamping_ documents, and it's still expensive at that compared to systems with a central authority.

The difference between the two uses is that we do have decentralized and/or distributed data stores that are quite efficient, so it's very dumb to force timestamping service to work as a data store.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you create? What's your creative process? - <AUTHOR> What do you guys do to keep your mind sharp and agile? What are you guys creating. Whether amateur or professional what fields and mediums do you dip your feet into and keep maintained?<p>I see a lot of creators around me being from Brooklyn. All over Williamsburg, whether it be musicians, DJs, modern artists, performers, etc. How is their mind different from mine (not strictly scientifically speaking) from a habitual perspective? What habits do you nurture? <comment><USER2> Define "creative process"? Is it a state of mood, when random new ideas come to mind? Or may be not ideas, but specific problems solutions? Or may be you refer to a specific activity, like painting?

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything from idea to execution.

Whatever you take it to mean really.

How does one sit down and just produce? Across 1 or more mediums?

I see people creating videos, music, merch, social media presence, and pushing that.

How to get into that mind frame? The one of just create, just deliver, just ship it, and worry about the criticism later if at all.

I think tech and art can learn a lot from each and hother.

I know these are some unclear half baked questions, but my mind is all over the place and I'm having a hard time forming good questions, but i hope you still understand, or have anything to say at all. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> > i hope you still understand, or have anything to say at all

sure, i can say something, but this will be misleading. If you have open mind right now, then random advices will lead you to certainty point, that unlikely to be aligned with your goal. Use the First principle to define your goal, then build your question upon it, then you may get valuable advice from someone.

<comment><AUTHOR> my end goal is to just be more informed and aware of others perspectives and processes. so anything you can and do say wouldnt harm that end goal.

please do share whatever you have to share

thanks again</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Its time to elect a new organizer for the New York Tech Meetup, I'm supporting Sanford - <AUTHOR> http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/polls/162043/

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer, this is probably spam, or might be flagged as such. If the moderators feel that it is not in keeping with hacker news, take it off. Now let me state my case.

In New York City, the New York Tech Meetup is THE event for startups. Presenting at the meetup is a big deal in the growth of any New York based startup. I know that there are a lot of members here from New York

I moved to New York because of the New York Tech Meetup and Sanford. Detailed in this post [http://paddymullen.com/2008/11/08/how-i-moved-to-new-york- ci...](http://paddymullen.com/2008/11/08/how-i-moved-to-new-york-city/) .

Sanford gets tech and people. If other people are voting, or voting differently I'd be interested to hear the hacker news opinion on candidates.

Sorry if this is spammy or off topic

<comment><USER2> I agree with your comments about Sanford, but as for "the New York Tech Meetup is THE event for startups" part, I'm not so sure.

Other than delicious (which was presented to a much smaller group, when the tech meetup was more hacker-oriented and far less marketing/gong show glitz style like it is now) what successes have come from startups who've demoed there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly I couldn't tell you for successes of startups who have presented there.

I think Sanford would do more to bring the meetup back to a hacker type event, than the other candidates. Sanford is an engineer.

So far as hacker event in NYC go, the best that I have found is lispnyc.org , by far the brightest room I have ever been in.

<comment><USER2> _I think Sanford would do more to bring the meetup back to a hacker type event_

That would be a welcome change.

 _So far as hacker event in NYC go, the best that I have found is lispnyc.org , by far the brightest room I have ever been in._

I agree. I'm looking forward to the lispNYC party next week.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Charts that estimate risk events will have one Covid-19 positive individuals - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jsweitz/covid-19-event-risk-planner <comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/jsweitz/covid-19-event-risk- planner/blob/...](https://github.com/jsweitz/covid-19-event-risk- planner/blob/master/twitter_image_031020.jpg?raw=true)</comment>


Amazon Buys Maker of iPhone E-Book Reader Stanza - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20090428/bs_nf/66241 <comment><USER2> Wow. That's a smart move. I always thought Kindle is out-dated on arrival. People only like to lug only one brick if at all possible. And it seems a little odd that they would lug something as big as a Kindle, when they can do the same on their phone. I know I wouldn't bother with a Kindle.</comment>


Add a konami easter egg to your site - <AUTHOR> http://diegocalderon.info/tutorials/2013/05/02/konami-code-win/

<comment><USER2> For more easter eggs: <http://easteregg.in/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! I added a little edit section on the post to point people their. That's really neat!

<comment><AUTHOR> there*

jeez</comment></comment></comment>


'Dramatic decline' in average age of Florida coronavirus patients - <AUTHOR> https://www.wptv.com/news/state/florida-gov-ron-desantis-to-give-coronavirus-update-at-florida-international-university <comment><USER2> Patients in this article refer to positive tests and no hospitalizations. The article also mentions that they are currently not showing symptoms or only mild symptoms. This is expected based on our understanding of the disease. Media editorializing the headlines to be misleading to the general public is also expected based on the past few months.

<comment><USER3> Huh? How is the headline editorialized? It's factual and includes a quote from the governor.

<comment><USER4> Because someone becomes a patient when they're being treated by a doctor, not when they simply test positive but have no apparent problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Possibly the correct headline is something more like "Florida has nearly enough tests now".

The average age of a COVID patient should be roughly the same as the average age of the population. If it isn't that suggests, on the face of it, biased testing.

<comment><USER6> > _If it isn 't that suggests, on the face of it, biased testing._

Not true at all. Covid-19 doesn't infect people equally. It seems children are less likely to be infected at all, not just sickened.

It doesn't spread equally, because certain age groups are more likely to live in group housing.

And what is Florida's "population"? Lots of people vacation there. Do you count them?

<comment><USER5> There have reports both ways. It seems quite reasonable that nobody has been looking very hard where there aren't any symptoms. [https://www.livescience.com/can-kids-get- coronavirus.html](https://www.livescience.com/can-kids-get-coronavirus.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since the beginning, Florida has been acting to protect the most vulnerable to serious complications. And it's working. It is widely understood that young healthy people are very low risk so those same young healthy people are using that information to get back to life with very little risk.

</comment><comment><USER8> What I find interesting is that many are asymptomatic. If this is true, and means that the disease does not cause meaningful harm, should we be worried? Is this going to be in reality more like a 24 hour bug?

<comment><USER9> For young people going through the disease asymptotically and having anti- bodies is like winning the lottery: they can socialize freely and stop worrying about infecting their family with the virus.

So unless the age of hospitalization goes down, it's a good sign.

<comment><USER10> This is if you get long lasting antibodies from an asymptomatic case, which seems to be unclear.

This seems to be early researcher needing more confirmation, but see for example here: [https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-antibodies- lost-10-wuha...](https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-antibodies- lost-10-wuhan-study-patients-within-21-days-1511850)</comment></comment></comment>


Our most successful game is also our least profitable - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YannSeznec/20130820/198453/Gentlemen_Or_how_our_most_successful_game_is_also_our_least_profitable.php

<comment><USER2> This is blogospam. The Gamasutra article it references ([http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YannSeznec/20130820/198453/Ge...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YannSeznec/20130820/198453/Gentlemen_Or_how_our_most_successful_game_is_also_our_least_profitable.php)) written by the actual developer involved, is much better. He mentions that because they used Unity, supporting Android in addition to iOS meant an extra few days of work, so even lackluster Android sales can easily get to the break even point. They also aren't too upset with the situation:

"Many people assumed that we were really upset about this statistic. In retrospect, talking about the piracy numbers on twitter probably implies that we were unhappy, but in reality the number of pirates just confirmed to us that we made a game that people love to play! The people who are pirating our game are also playing a surprising amount, with really great engagement - these are no casual pirates just downloading because they can. So this confirmed to us that our game design is solid, and that we've made a super fun game that people enjoy. To be honest, that is really great. It's unlikely that any of these pirates would have bought the game anyway, so we're just glad that people are playing. Android makes piracy very easy, and thanks to that Gentlemen! is being played by more people around the world than all of our previous games combined."

And understanding of the problem that how would Chinese people pay for it anyway?

"This was our first Android release. We probably could have done more to avoid the massive piracy of our game - or, even better, convert pirate users into paid users. I think that Android apps are definitely going to get pirated no matter what...I can only dimly imagine the level of piracy that a truly successful paid app has. However if we had anticipated this situation we probably would have included some sort of in app purchase, perhaps to unlock extra levels or game modes. At least then the pirates would have the opportunity to pay us a little something if they were enjoying it so much - the main problem is that most of these pirates probably exist in a commercial ecosystem where the Google Play store does not even exist, and it doesn't occur to them to buy any games from there at all."

</comment><comment><USER3> The Gamasutra article this blogspams is much more interesting:

[http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YannSeznec/20130820/198453/Ge...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YannSeznec/20130820/198453/Gentlemen_Or_how_our_most_successful_game_is_also_our_least_profitable.php)

Target for sales was 2,000:

 _So far we have sold 1,114 copies on iPad, and 144 copies on Android._

Excellent reviews:

 _8 /10 on Edge, 4.5 stars on Touch Arcade, and a 9/10 Gold Award on PocketGamer._

Android statistics:

 _144 copies sold, 50,030 copies pirated_

Built with Unity, Android version only took 2 days of additional work so still worth it.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a bit light on details. I know from personal pirating that the vast majority of things I downloaded I never touched or only opened once. Especially as a teen, with slow modems and BBSes, it was more of a status/fun thing to hoard as much as you could get.

I'd like to know if they have telemetrics installed that show how many game sessions are being played on unique installs. The article also admits it's titled Gentlemen, which is a hit song. So maybe some hacked up version of Google Play provides universal search, this gets to the top, downloaded, opened, then closed and forgotten about as the user tries to figure out why the song didn't start...

<comment><USER5> The real Gamasutra article, written by the developers, points out the unusual levels of engagement of their pirates. Even if they got it by accident, they still like it at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Some people will pirate anything just because it 's available_

So they wouldn't have bought it anyway? Whats the fuss about then?

<comment><USER7> Are you kidding me?

<comment><USER8> A pirated copy isn't a lost sale.

Software/music/movie pirates usually fall into very few categories:

* never willing to pay for it

* willing to pay, not willing to put up with current and known barriers

The first category should never be assumed to be a lost sale, however the second _could_ be assumed a lost sale.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's a very safe assumption that most of the people are in the first category.

<comment><USER8> You're right, also I never made such an assumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, because it had the same name of a popular PSY song, it was near-impossible to find in searches, and sold 114 copies.

But let's not focus on the fact that it was marketed poorly, nobody reviewed it on any game blogs, or the fact that there actually _is_ a market for this game (remember that Gabe Newell said that "Pirates are just Underserved Customers"). No. Let's focus on how 50,000 chinese and russian pirates, who can't use the Apple App Store, have somehow destroyed this developer.

How about the truth? _A poorly-marketed and budgeted game with a forgettable name found an untapped /blue-ocean market in China and Russia_. Kotaku probably can't get as many clicks with that tagline, though.

</comment><comment><USER10> Another reason not to make games. For the first time we have the ability to quantify the sales generated by the "free advertising" of piracy, and it doesn't amount to any real sales.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that rule is meant to apply to places where 95% (?) of software is pirated. Can you even buy the game in China?

<comment><USER10> I'd like to see the breakdown. It only said that "much" of the pirated downloads came from China and Russia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While this is an interesting idea, I find it a lot more fun to not have 2 people holding something you're playing with.

I wouldn't even have bothered to pirate it :P They're lucky they got 50k people to look at it imo. This method of playing went out... um... shit... with um... Crossfire? Hungry Hungry Hippos?

</comment><comment><USER13> By people who would've never bought it in China, either because they can't (no access to Play Store) or won't (too little money to pay for "apps").

<comment><USER14> That doesn't make it ok.

<comment><USER15> This argument doesn't make any sense. They cannot buy it.

The smart thing to do would be to treat that as free advertising, and to milk the outrage to get good PR in markets that can buy it.

Also, try going freemium, with ads.

I.e. you can't really control what other people do, but you can accept reality and look for a way to turn it to your advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you stop making games, pirates will have nothing to pirate except the 40 billion games that came out before yours, and nothing of value will have been lost.

</comment><comment><USER17> They are equating critical praise with success instead of sales. I think that's pretty unusual, and I wonder why they would say that it is a success.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is why I chose to make my game 100% login based; no access without a connection and an authentication.

Piracy is simply too rampant.

<comment><USER19> I bet it doesn't feel great for the people who don't have a connection available and are getting punished because of other people's actions.

<comment><USER18> Yep.

I intend to sell this game - no ads - and provide regular updates and improvements, along with "in-app purchases" (It's going to be a browser/FireFoxOS game). I have no desire to have this work leeched, and I want the user community to feel comfortable knowing that they are all generally people who pay for things rather than copying them without recompense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How many more sales would you get if the price were $1 or $2, instead of $5? That's quite a leap to make.

</comment><comment><USER21> Someone made a game expecting it to be monetizable on the basis of selling and retaining a monopoly on "copies"?

lol. Except for the outrage that they expect to control what I can or cannot do with my computer and its data. Seems they made a poor choice for them.

<comment><USER22> Do you feel the same about say, the NSA snooping your data? After all, you never lost access to your data, they just made a meaningless copy of it.</comment></comment>


Announcing Rust 1.11 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/08/18/Rust-1.11.html <comment><USER2> Most importantly, the finished MIR revolution [0] will finally allow developers to focus on new exciting features, like ergonomic "impl Trait" [1], incremental compilation, or even the beginnings of Gc [2].

[0]: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/35764](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/35764)

[1]: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/34511](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/34511)

[2]: [http://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/08/18/gc-support- in-r...](http://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/08/18/gc-support-in-rust-api- design/)

<comment><USER3> AFAIK the MIR isn't on in 1.11 yet.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the stable release is lagging behind a bit, as it must be stable :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Adding to_degrees() and to_radians() methods to f32 and f64 seems a little out of place, considering f32 and f64 are numbers without units. Why not include to_celsius() and to_fahrenheit() then?

<comment><USER5> Technically radians and degrees are dimensionless since they're ratios.

More to the point, though, is 'sin' and 'cos' are also methods, so having 'to_degrees' as a method seems reasonable.

<comment><USER6> Also, methods can be called with a function-like syntax, if you prefer:

        let r = f32::to_radians(5.0);

        let x: f32 = 5.0;
        let r = x.to_radians();

<comment><USER7> Shouldn't to_degrees and to_radians be part of a trait that f32 and f64 (and potentially other types) both implement, rather than being independent methods directly on f32 and f64?

<comment><USER6> Over the course of Rust's history, we have tried a number of times to get a trait hierarchy for numerics working, and it's always had problems. It's still a general open question.

<comment><USER7> I'm not suggesting a trait hierarchy for numerics, or a numerical tower. I'm purely suggesting putting individual methods or families of related methods into independent traits that each numeric type can implement. For instance:

        trait AngleConversion {
            fn to_degrees(&self) -> Self;
            fn to_radians(&self) -> Self;
        }

        impl AngleConversion for f32 {
            ...
        }

        impl AngleConversion for f64 {
            ...
        }

Operators like + and / already live in traits; why not put methods like these into traits as well, so that users can implement them for their own types (variable-precision floats, decimal floating point, etc)?

(As a side note, can a trait accept an AsRef<Self> in place of &self or self, so that register-sized objects implementing Copy don't need to use &self?)

<comment><USER6> As always, it's a tradeoff. Doing something as a trait is hard for its own reasons, at least in a standard library. Should radians and degrees be two traits, or one? If we pick wrong, are we okay with having that be stable forever?

Plus, since you can define your own traits, if this is functionality you need, you can just do it, and delegate to the inherent implementation for those two types.

<comment><USER8> We really do need to spend time on the numerics APIs though... I would love to pour some time into it again... just figuring out how to fit it in with all the other stuff I'm doing :(

I agree with the caution though. This takes time to get right.

<comment><USER9> The advantage of the current approach is that you can just define the traits you need in your crate, and the standard library does not have to stabilize unrefined interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm enjoying that bors is a named contributor. Finally the recognition our robot overlords deserve

<comment><USER6> Bors does a lot of work every release! Bots are people too :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> crate-type = ["cdylib"] sounds really interesting!

"With this PR a "hello world" cdylib is 7.2K while the same dylib is 2.4MB, which is some nice size savings!" [1]

1\. [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/33553#issue-154141126](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/33553#issue-154141126)

</comment><comment><USER12> > We're excited about features like MIR becoming the default and the > beginnings of incremental compilation, and the 1.11 release has laid the > groundwork.

The changelog is silent about these two points, so does it mean that -Z orbit defaults to "on" in 1.11 and -Z incremental can be used in 1.11?

<comment><USER13> I think it's on in the 1.12 beta, which was also published today. The orbit switch was switched on during the cycle that just ended, so I'd be surprised if it was already on on the stable.

<comment><USER14> Additionally, 1.13 removes the [old AST backend]([https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/35764](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/35764)) so MIR will be on by default.

<comment><USER15> Not merged yet, but removing drop flags is a major milestone. So awesome

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congratulations and thank you to the Rust team/community!

As always, I've updated my Docker image: [https://hub.docker.com/r/jimmycuadra/rust/](https://hub.docker.com/r/jimmycuadra/rust/) (available on quay.io also if you prefer that)

The tags "latest" and "1.11.0" are now both Rust 1.11.

<comment><USER17> Good job! Why don't you support beta/nightly versions? Here's mine btw: [https://hub.docker.com/r/scorpil/rust/](https://hub.docker.com/r/scorpil/rust/)

<comment><USER16> It's been discussed before. Here's an example of an attempt at doing that and discussion about why it wasn't accepted: [https://github.com/jimmycuadra/docker- rust/pull/4](https://github.com/jimmycuadra/docker-rust/pull/4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the documentation of Iterator.sum [https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html#metho...](https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html#method.sum)

> When calling sum and a primitive integer type is being returned, this method > will panic if the computation overflows.

I thought Rust's strategy for numeric overflow is to panic only in debug mode. Has that strategy changed or is this a special case?

<comment><USER6> This _might_ just be an oversight, would you like to file a bug? If not, I can.

<comment><USER18> You go ahead.

<comment><USER6> [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/35807](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/35807)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Build scripts can now emit warnings.

Nice! This one bit me pretty bad when first getting into Rust so it's nice to see it improved.

</comment><comment><USER20> Quick Rust noob question: I heard there's a new book in writing. Should I wait for it or read the current one?

<comment><USER6> Author here!

You can check out the new book here: [http://rust- lang.github.io/book/](http://rust-lang.github.io/book/)

We're working on the new book because the old book isn't as good as it could be, but that doesn't mean it's bad: a lot of people have told me that they really love it. But I am hyper-critical of my own work, and there's a lot of ways you can improve something that's already good :)

As you can see, the new book isn't really far enough along to fully teach you Rust yet. I would maybe check out the new material first, and then just read the existing book afterwards.

<comment><USER21> Cool! One thing I hope you can fix: That page hijacks cmd-option-{left, right}, which are (or can be) used in Safari for tab switching. Very annoying. Apps that hook the arrow keys should _always_ check for whether shift/alt/ctrl/meta keys are also down, to avoid trampling on people's keyboard shortcuts.

<comment><USER7> > Apps that hook the arrow keys should always check for whether > shift/alt/ctrl/meta keys are also down, to avoid trampling on people's > keyboard shortcuts.

The majority of pages shouldn't intercept up/down either, because that breaks the ability to scroll the page. Only pages that will never involve scrolling (such as whole-screen web apps or games) should do that.

Left/right can be OK, as long as you never expect your page to need horizontal scrolling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Amazing Rust announcements (core and third party) have been coming in constantly for quite a while now.

So much win.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does the addition of MIR have any immediate positive impact on compile times or binary optimization?

<comment><USER24> Servo's compile time went down by about 20% or so. We think that it's because non-zeroing drop enabled LLVM's memcpy optimizer (which is currently pretty fragile pending the MemorySSA rewrite) to do a better job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can't wait for the bottled homebrew for it to drive it around. It's still at 1.10.

\--HEAD just hangs forever on 'Checking out branch master' for some reason for me.

<comment><USER26> Any specific reason for using Homebrew? Rustup [1] works great.

[https://www.rustup.rs](https://www.rustup.rs)

<comment><USER25> I did just that now. Wasn't even aware of it. Main page of Rust offered me pkg only.

<comment><USER6> Yes, rustup.rs is still technically in beta. We will make it the official, recommended way when it's ready.

(I've been using it daily for months and it works well for me)

<comment><USER25> It's listed in Downloads [https://www.rust-lang.org/en- US/downloads.html](https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/downloads.html) That's how I found it. Didn't know rustup.rs was affiliated domain, so I didn't want.

<comment><USER6> It says right on it that "rustup is an official Rust project. ", though I can see why you might not trust that. If you ask in IRC, most people will point you to it first these days.

<comment><USER25> Of course it says, but I can also state I am a Queen of England. Should've been stated on rust-lang.org that it's legit! :)

<comment><USER6> Yeah. It does link to the rust-lang-nursery org, but I totally understand the hesitancy. Then again, it is just in beta, so it's not as hyper-important right this moment for everyone to use it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Low-Latency Rematch: Performance of modern Java on data-heavy workloads - <AUTHOR> https://jet-start.sh/blog/2020/06/23/jdk-gc-benchmarks-rematch <comment><AUTHOR> Original article and discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465660)</comment>


Chrome deploys deep-linking in latest build despite privacy concerns - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/chrome_deploys_deeplinking/ <comment><USER2> Amusingly, I built a (private prototype of an) extension for functionality almost exactly like this a while ago. My goal was to be able to bookmark arbitrary long articles (or single-page books) "in the middle"—without the author providing an anchor permalink—and then come back to them where I left off, precisely by embedding my scroll location on the page into the fragment of the bookmarked URL. It worked pretty well, and mostly obviated my need for any service like Instapaper/Pocket.

I always wondered why browser bookmarks don't just _work like this_ , even if doing so required storing additional metadata outside the URL itself.

One thing that's interesting about this functionality in Chrome specifically, is that due to the nature of Chrome's PDF support, these URLs should allow you to deep-link into a PDF from outside it, which hasn't really been possible before.

Still quite a way from Xanadu transclusions, but it's a start.

<comment><USER3> For those confused by the "Xanadu transclusions" part, it's basically quoting documents through hyperlinks (somewhat like OLE embedding on Windows).

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The quote about DNS seems wrong to me

""Consider a situation where I can view DNS traffic (e.g. company network), and I send a link to the company health portal, with #:~:text=cancer," he wrote. "On certain page layouts, I might be able [to] tell if the employee has cancer by looking for lower-on-the-page resources being requested.""

I thought DNS requests just get the domain, not the hash and not even the page requested.

But lets play along. How would sending a link tell you anything apart from if a user clicked said link? How would links to existing anchors example.com#h3-subtitle be any different?

<comment><USER5> also #fragments aren't sent to the server at all, unless this changes that (a major major change if so)

<comment><USER6> Does this matter when the server (well, multiple servers when you throw in ads as well) are running their custom Javascript on the client, which has access to not only the viewport coordinates, but the URL itself?

<comment><USER5> does this add an additional vector to that case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think a lot of the comments in this thread are trying to evaluate the privacy concerns on merit, which makes sense, but IMHO it's also instructive to look at the fact that other W3C members don't want this included and Google is able to do it anyway. Perhaps that should be the bigger cause for alarm than any one feature.

<comment><USER8> In Google's defense, and basically because I like this particular feature, I have to point out the obvious ... most new browser features happen _before_ and not after standardization.

The standardization process is meant for reaching agreement among browser makers and to provide clear specs for those features. But it isn't meant for exploration.

That has always been the case. Even Mozilla does it. And if not, then you can't really get the browser vendors to agree on mostly anything a priori, without market validation.

Standardization works as a refinement of already existing work. E.g. Google came with NaCL/PNaCL which was basically their own ActiveX, Mozilla came with Asm.js in response and the end result was Web Assembly, which is objectively better than both and that wouldn't have happened without that prior art.

The W3C doesn't guard what gets implemented in browsers. It never did. And if browser makers willingly participate in the standardization process, we should thank them, because they can always stop doing it. Because really, retreating from the W3C would mean absolutely nothing for computer illiterate people.

<comment><USER9> To elaborate, the process for standardizing browser features today is whatwg managed, not w3c. And it's basically "write a proposal, solicit feedback, implement the feature in one browser, and if it's ever implemented in 3 browsers it's part of the standard".

<comment><USER10> WHATWG is mostly HTML and DOM/browser api:s, ECMAscript is by TC39, CSS is still in W3C, URI schemes (which this is about) are in W3C, as seen in this draft being hosted by WICG, which as far as I can tell is a W3C group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, what a dumb justification for the privacy concerns. URL hashes aren't even sent to the server, let alone have anything to do with DNS. We already put sensitive stuff in URL hashes, like OAuth tokens.

<comment><USER12> Read again. Their point isn't that the fragment is sent to the server or DNS.

Their point is that you can infer the existence of a certain text on a page the user views (even via https) by sending them a link like this and observing the browser loading resources that would be at the bottom of the page. The only reason the browser would do that is if it scrolled to the bottom, confirming the text you put in the link is on the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article says the folks at Google have this short docs to address the concerns:

Scroll-to-text Fragment Navigation - Security Issues

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YHcl1-vE_ZnZ0kL2almeikAj...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YHcl1-vE_ZnZ0kL2almeikAj2gkwCq8_5xwIae7PVik/edit#heading=h.uoiwg23pt0tx)

<comment><USER14> I don't have access to this document, is there a mirror?

<comment><USER15> [https://pastebin.com/raw/M1yQMK3h](https://pastebin.com/raw/M1yQMK3h)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What? A DNS lookup doesn't include anything but the hostname and anything following a hash is never sent with a request from the browser.

<comment><USER17> I think the idea there is that there would be lazy-loaded content from another site that would only load when someone scrolled far enough to see the highlighted word, which will automatically happen with this feature.

The title of the Forbes article is too hyperbolic for my tastes and while this could be a security concern in very specific situations it's being overblown.

<comment><USER16> I think that would need to be a designed attack, not something that would apply to 99% of websites. The only legitimate resource (that could be used as a canary) being loaded far down a page would be an image (and that kind of requires it to be lazy loading as well).

<comment><USER18> Latest Chrome defers out-of-viewport images on its own, or at least tries to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I avoid Chrome due to privacy concerns, but I actually like this feature ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Many times I'm looking for an existing anchor for linking to a certain section of the page, because the author did not bother to create a table of contents and many times that anchor ID is missing.

Also — I was under the impression that anything that comes after # is not sent to the server, being a fragment meant to be processed entirely by the client.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER19> Let me give you an example. It will be contrived for simplicity but there are circumstances that will seem more real-worldish. Lets consider the following scenario:

\- you visit a page at example.com that contains private data about you (e.g. bank account number, medical conditions, what have you)

\- this page loads external resources only when they are scrolled into view

\- it also hotlinks some image below the fold that a potentially bad actor can see requests to (maybe the image is on their webserver, maybe you're on a corp network and they can see dns resolutions, whatever)

So now I link you to: [https://example.com/privatepage#:~:text=Account%201](https://example.com/privatepage#:~:text=Account%201)

Did the image get requested? If yes, I know your account number starts with 1; if not, I know it starts with something other than 1. Rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER20> > Rinse and repeat.

How exactly would you as an attacker perform this rinse and repeat action?

<comment><USER21> and why would a bank site hotlink to an asset owned by someone else?

All the security concerns I've seen for this seem quite contrived to me. And I say that as someone who assiduously avoids google products*

(*alas, except at work, because I can't really choose that)

<comment><USER20> I think this is the perfect storm.

1) Privacy-conscious browsers are trying to get exposure, so they are stretching an extremely narrow privacy risk into something extreme.

2) (I also believe) media companies are worried this will rob them of ad exposures, so they are incentivized to cover this as something scary.

3) The "bad guy" is Google. This means the amplitude of the story is immediately 10X larger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seems like a useful feature to me. You could just train yourself not to click on hyperlinks with the aforementioned tag. And like another comment says, it shouldn't be a privacy issue unless you are running over HTTP, since the resource URLs are encrypted.

<comment><USER23> I agree that it's a useful feature and not a privacy issue, but I will say that it's nigh-impossible to avoid clicking links like these. I already try my best to strip out tracking parameters in query strings, and avoid shortened URLs. But they're simply everywhere, and sites/email try their best to hide them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> IE6 is back, baby! All that's left is deep integration with some proprietary Google "standard" (I'm thinking AMP) and it'll be the early 2000s all over again.

<comment><USER25> It'll be like the early 2000's if switching to another browser was most likely just IE6 reskinned.

<comment><USER26> Microsoft Edge, which is built on Chromium, would fit this parallel nicely.

<comment><USER27> And brave, and vivaldi

<comment><USER28> And Opera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The example that the security researcher gave seems moot: the same thing would happen if the employee simply scrolled down on the page manually, no? And we already have the ability to link to anchors on a page, and that's not considered to be a privacy issue. Can someone explain how this is actually a meaningful privacy issue?

<comment><USER18> Say you have a long page that lists "Pre-existing conditions" at the bottom, and near that section is also a unique image or other external asset. If you click on the link and cancer is in your list, the page will scroll and load the related assets instantly. Without cancer in your list, you'd only load those assets through human scroll, which would most likely look different timing-wise. Thus you can determine with high probability whether your target has cancer listed (if you have access to DNS records, as mentioned in the example, and the target is using a browser that delays offscreen asset loading - like this same latest Chrome).

Whereas anchors tend to be generic (#preexisting-conditions), this new scroll behavior can be used to create an existence check for any user-specific text on the page (in carefully crafted scenarios). There are probably other variations that could be devised on this concept, since it allows indirect page interaction that can bypass authorization walls (since the browser would transmit cookies normally and such).

<comment><USER23> This is absurdly difficult to pull off with very little payoff. You'd need to be sniffing the traffic of a network. Then craft a URL that contains a unique image near your text fragment query. Then somehow send that URL to the victims on your network. _Then_ check how long it takes for them to load that image upon clicking the URL.

I'd like to call myself a privacy advocate, but this is just absurd. The pros obviously outweigh the con of a very precise and targeted attack that leaks a predetermined bit of information.

If you've got their DNS records, you've already violated plenty of their privacy to get the information you want. No need for this text fragment "attack."

<comment><USER30> >I'd like to call myself a privacy advocate, but this is just absurd.

Yeah, my read of this is that it has nothing to do with privacy, people who want to block change for some reason have just learned that "i have privacy concerns about google" is a catchword that will get you some press coverage, and are essentially hijacking the actually valid and important privacy concerns to push forward their unrelated opinions (and promote their browser product).

<comment><USER21> This is my take on this, too.

As a FF user, I'd love to see FF implement this too!

<comment><USER31> FF is considering implementing something in this space, yes. Note that there are at least two proposals for how this could work: one that is already deployed via a polyfill on various sites and the Google one. They have various functionality tradeoffs, and unfortunately Google decided to make up a wholly new thing instead of improving the existing thing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm not convinced this is a problem. In terms of ways we leak privacy on the web, this seems very low on the priority list.

<comment><USER33> Seems like a great excuse to create click-bait headlines – not much else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Confused. As I understand it, anything after the # in a uri isn't sent over the wire.

So the only way someone could see that you're navigating to a specific fragment is some sort of deep chrome logging, or chrome plugin, etc. And if that's the case, cat's already out of the bag for everything you do already.

<comment><USER35> I was confused as well. I think (from some other comments) that the issue is that you can scroll to text that is specific to you and others might not have on their page (e.g. 'cancer' on some medical page) and then somehow gather from the requests that you scrolled there. It seems pretty hypothetical, but I can see the issue with forcing a scroll depending on what text is on the page, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There are plenty of reasons one would want to switch away from Chrome, but potential abuse of ScrollToTextFragment must be the most contrived one.

</comment><comment><USER37> Just like everything else. Millions of users won't understand what this is talking about, or care for that matter.

</comment><comment><USER38> Hmm. The use case of linking to a specific location in a document, really appears to be more of an issue with websites not actually using ids that could be anchored to. If every paragraph had an id, you could get 95% of the way to the desired functionality by just making it easy to copy a link to e.g. www.example.com/foo#paragraph4.

At this point, Wikipedia is one of the few websites I use regularly that actually works in this way.

</comment><comment><USER39> No doubt because most large web corporations have completely switched to javascript for their anchors (ie, #) and no longer use HTML spec anchors that actually work. I'm looking at you Microsoft Github.

<comment><USER40> > I'm looking at you Microsoft Github.

Where don't anchors work when javascript is disabled? (With admittedly very brief testing just now, I couldn't find any such cases.)

<comment><USER39> On every single repo index page that has "anchors" that I've tried over the last year. The markdown is now interpreted different so anchors are class="anchor" and not real anchors. Maybe you didn't fully disable JS? Make sure JS is disabled before you load the page and you've cleared your cache (ctrl-f5 in FF-alikes).

I just went to the most recent github tab in my browser session and found one instantly: [https://github.com/quiet/quiet#dependencies](https://github.com/quiet/quiet#dependencies)

<comment><USER41> Can't say I've noticed it, but then I'm going around with Javascript enabled, so it's not like I would.

That said, the github one is a sort of interesting case, insofar as they're doing it to avoid user-generated content clashing with their page-chrome ids... while still preserving a readable URI that matches what the content creator expects. Which doesn't seem like an unreasonable case, to me.

You'll note that there _is_ a real anchor on that link -- [https://github.com/quiet/quiet#user-content- dependencies](https://github.com/quiet/quiet#user-content-dependencies) \-- which works without Javascript. It's just rather inaccessible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can somebody explain to me how is this more of a privacy concern than the rest of the url, often containing the title sluf, date, id, tags and/or filter parameter of the page ?

</comment><comment><USER43> Is it possible to agree with the assessment of severity of this privacy issue without being regarded as supportive of the way Google uses its monopoly to force certain webstandards on the web?

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't get it. This is the least privacy reducing feature there is. It's a great feature.

Wouldn't be nice to have people worry about this while hundreds of other actual privacy reducing features go unnoticed?

</comment><comment><USER45> Was it wrong of me to be amused when I got to the end of this post on internet privacy concerns and Google, only to see a link at the bottom encouraging me click in order to follow the author on Facebook?

<comment><USER46> And I couldn't read the article because of my adblocker

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Could someone explain this a bit better? I've read two articles on this this morning and I still don't understand what the privacy concerns are with this feature. Thanks!

<comment><USER48> The feature in question is the ability to use fragment (# in a URL) to link to matching text rather than just an ID. Here is the key line with the so-called privacy concern.

"Consider a situation where I can view DNS traffic (e.g. company network), and I send a link to the company health portal, with [the anchor] #:~:text=cancer. On certain page layouts, I might be able [to] tell if the employee has cancer by looking for lower-on-the-page resources being requested."

So they could send someone a link to a page with a fragment, trick them into clicking it, and matching text and watch for DNS requests being lazy-loaded to learn the fact that they clicked it.

It's convoluted nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment> Avi-D-coder Last week I switched to Firefox nightly on desktop and Firefox preview on mobile.

It took some configuration, but I'm not regretting it at all.

</comment><comment><USER49> For those concerned, I believe you can just disable this behaviour via this flag: chrome://flags/#enable-text-fragment-anchor

</comment><comment><USER50> They should have used XPointer instead of reinventing the wheel. It has a much more effective syntax.

</comment><comment><USER51> i don't think you can arrive to any conclusion based on analyzing traffic/dns reqs made alone.

How can you tell a user didn't jitter scroll and caused more content to show up?

What if it was a 404 page.

How's the intruder able to see the query param anyway? if it's non secure all bets are off.

The same argument used revolving around text can be made about words in a domain name.

</comment><comment><USER52> What was wrong with just `example.com/#section` instead of `ScrollToTextFragment`?

That seems to complicate things for no good reason.

</comment><comment><USER53> If I'm understanding his correctly, google actually changes the HTML to have these anchor tags?

<comment><USER54> No, it's a selector, but one that can include the actual text in the page. So instead of having to select based on a pre-existing anchor, like `[http://site.com/page#anchor`](http://site.com/page#anchor`), you can link to `[http://site.com/page#understanding+his+correctly`](http://site.com/page#understanding+his+correctly`) (though that's not their format). No need to alter the markup.

Though, I'm curious how this works when text is broken apart over spans or divs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> All this fuss should have been about lazy loading of resources. The leak is there

</comment><comment><USER56> Why is this feature so interesting it got implementation priority? Does this enable some commercial activity by Google?

</comment><comment><USER57> Uhhhhh, you do realize the anchor (#...) is not sent to the server, right?

<comment><USER58> The attack depends on measuring the timing of resource-loading that in turn depends on the free-text search the attacker can get the victim browser to do on his behalf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> As a developer, how do I lend my support to stopping google from trying to steal the web?

Something actionable, something specific to my semi-unique position as a developer?

<comment><USER60> As a first step, at least: Use and contribute to Firefox (or other non-Blink- based browsers, but there aren't many to choose from...), and encourage those you support/influence to do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Imagine telling someone in 2003 or so that the most popular web browser fifteen years later would be made by DoubleClick and imagine what their reaction might be.

<comment><USER62> Something like "wow, software development will improve so much! You will make a web browser in a double-click."

<comment><USER63> The year is 20XX. You return to your slave cube to find what you assume is a PC running "Plan 9 from Microsoft". You are shocked at it's convenient features:

The world's information is merely one click away.

The world's browsers are simply two clicks away.

Dispensing candy is an easy ctrl-triple-click.

Bootstrapping a compiler is just the konami code backwards.

Printing the screen is really simple as hitting PrintSrc and loading your printer with $300 cyan ink cartridges.

However turning the computer off is a week-long process that involves arguing with the built-in HAL9000

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Will never use it. Read what Google did with JS websites and recommendation to implement hashbang and escaped fragment to provide prerendered version.

You wont. Because it didnt work and killed SEO. Than after years they silently removed documentation about it. Not providing any way to transition to other ways without damaging SEO ever more and moreover, it was impossible to do anything about it because server does not receive data after hash.

And now Google tries to force new standard that is technically broken. Dont use it. It is a trap. It will hurt your SEO sooner or later!

</comment><comment><USER13> EDITED and hour later: A couple of people have pointed out it's back, they've made some changes and marked it as public now.

There was another article on this same topic this morning with this:

"Google's engineers have not ignored worries about the security and privacy risks. To their credit, they've gathered them together into a single document and they've clearly been engaged in understanding what people are worried about. It's just that they've concluded the concerns aren't that big a deal or can be dealt with to their satisfaction."

That Single Document is here, and I went and had a read this morning, but now I get permission denied, I guess it was getting too much attention?

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YHcl1-vE_ZnZ0kL2almeikAj...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YHcl1-vE_ZnZ0kL2almeikAj2gkwCq8_5xwIae7PVik/edit#heading=h.uoiwg23pt0tx)

I wish I would've save a copy now. It hand some decent details on the various vulnerabilities and how they are handling (or ignoring) them.

<comment><USER65> It's available and listed as (PUBLIC) in the title now.</comment></comment>


Airbnb can't go on unregulated – it does too much damage to cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/24/airbnb-unregulated-damage-cities-barcelona-law-locals <comment><USER3> I fail to see what _exactly_ are the claimed problems here. The article contains unproven claims like:

 _Rents for residents are being driven up, in Barcelona as well as Berlin, New York and elsewhere._

Rents have been going up everywhere because of the real estate market moves, not AirBnB. It's disingenuous to throw it on AirBnB.

 _In Barcelona, it used to cost €250 (£221) for a short-term rental permit. Now that such permits are no longer being issued, they change hands for up to €80,000._

This is the problem Barcelona government created by artificially limiting the supply just like NYC did with taxi medallions. What do you expect?

AirBnB is the good thing and its great to see these brave startups going up against government sponsored monopoly on artificially limiting taxi and hotel ownerships only to small group of rich people. These oligarchies exploit poorest people to generate passive income for the rich. In ideal world, people would vote out government passing such laws but their lobbiests have perfected the art to sweep these laws under the rug. AirBnB allows to utilize spare capacity available in the already dense city that is doing no work at optimal pricing.

Anyway, there is absolutely no other claims or proof or data I see in this article. I wouldn't be surprised at all if these articles are sponsored by the hotel lobby.

<comment><USER4> The level of economic illiteracy in the media these days is just incredible.

<comment><USER5> Or everywhere. Which brings me to a pet peeve:

Why is Economics not taught in regular schools?

All sorts of arcane trivia is taught to kids, but how a modern society actually works is never explored.

<comment><USER6> It is? I took an Econ class in high school in California

<comment><USER7> We didn't have anything of the sort here in Australia. But hey, at least we learnt how to calculate the inverse of a matrix...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with AirBnB is not AirBnB. It's hotel regulation.

What ABnB has demonstrated is that there is a vastly underserved market for regular travellers, who have no interest in 'having their sheets changed every day' \- rather, they just want a decent and convenient space - and they can't afford the $250/night for a boring room 'corporate' rate.

If hotels and their regulations were efficient - then AirBnB would only be used what is was kind of meant for: either sharing/hosting - or - renting out fairly 'special' places that just don't fit regular criteria.

Most AirBnB stays are a matter of price and convenience.

The fact that I can stay in cities, in a decent place for less than 1/2 the cost of a hotel is what makes me hate AirBnB less than hotels and city regulators.

Something is deeply wrong with the hotel and regulatory areas there or else AirBnB wouldn't be a huge-huge thing.

A commenter below about a building that seemed to be AirBnBers ... think for a moment how even _more_ efficient it would be if the whole dam thing were just a hotel, with a maid staff that only cleaned and changed the sheets between stays and could provide keys/keycodes. As it stands, even AirBnB is not near real 'cost efficiency' because there's so much 'little overhead' with each rental.

Not only should that building be a hotel but it should be _cheaper_ than AirBnB! In fact, if markets were reasonably competitive AirBnB should generally be more expensive.

I understand that individual patrons don't have nearly the safety and regulatory expenses ... but it doesn't add up.

City regulators and hotel operators need to figure out a slightly different model.

<comment><USER9> Preface: I dont actually have a set opinion yet on whether Airbnb is net good/bad.

How much of this is regulation thats around to protect the society that the hotel is operating in? Changing those sheets everyday isn't just for having clean smelling sheets, but to prevent pests such as bed bugs in some localities. For instance there's probably tons of people whod jump on doctors/dentists who lower the price by not cleaning all their tools properly, but we have regulations requiring it because it can create an epidemic that causes negative externalities to the wider community.

I think I'd have less of a problem with Airbnb if there was any sort of enforcement of health laws or putting effort into not supporting people who sign leases saying they won't do Airbnb but do it anyway.

Having a lower price just shows that is the most efficient use of scarce resources in that specific situation, it does not show that it's good for society.

<comment><USER8> "Having a lower price just shows that is the most efficient use of scarce resources in that specific situation"

No, it's not 'specific'. The 'rent' marketing clearing price for a locale is a function of a vast array of economic inputs. That's the whole point of free markets, and why it's difficult to dictate terms around it.

The fact that there is a vast influx of AirBnBers in so many areas is not a small things, it's really quite apparent that the artificial controls set by zoning are far more constrictive than we ever thought - and they should be loosened. There are all sorts of external surpluses lost when markets are not efficient.

Also - I fundamentally doubt that people are just 'getting sick' because of AirBnB and 'not having their sheets changed every day'. I just don't believe it's an issue. FYI hotels have stopped changing sheets every day as well, they usually say 'to preserve water' which is BS - it's cost - but they generally do make the bed and clean every day which is unnecessary.

I would probably ban AirBnB for anything but special kinds of places, and maybe not allow it in residential buildings, at least allow building owners/coops to enforce it.

And then also be far more lax with hotel zoning and regulations as well.

Every city wants more 'tourism' until they get tourists and they get pissed off. Well, those tourists bring in tons of cash.

Every city wants business to invest and 'high tech' jobs until the locals complain about 'Google values' and 'home prices'.

The market for both hotels and taxis is just too vastly distorted - and we all lose - especially consumers who would only be able to afford 1/2 as much travel otherwise.

There should be a lot more hotels and taxis.

<comment><USER10> I experience the exact opposite in regards to "getting sick". When I travel, which is quite often, I have a greater chance of getting sick when I stay in a hotel. I suspect it's like being on a plane where you are breathing air that has been recycled with hundreds of other people. It's noticeable enough that I definitely need to collect hard data on it to establish the correlation. Guessing anecdotally that if I stay in a hotel my chances of catching a cold are at least double and possibly triple my chance of catching a cold in a private AirBnB.

The other part of your comment that I can identify with is the "save the environment" signs you see at hotels. It's completely disingenuous and it's one of the rare small things that irrationally infuriates me. Every time I read one of those signs I think something along the lines of "if this didn't save you money you wouldn't care". I inevitably end up pondering the decisions that the hotel could make that would help save the environment many times more than a few wash cycles. Decisions that the hotel obviously wouldn't take because it would cost the hotel money instead of saving them money. Perhaps my disaffection is mostly because the signs are a perfect example of corporate bullshit; the exact sort of facade you would expect from a faceless corporation that will say anything to get your money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Had a six month rental (not Airbnb) in Amsterdam and the effect of Airbnb in rental market terms was palpable. Less properties available and higher prices. This was during a time of falling property price for purchase, and yet a shortage of proper rental homes.. that's pretty unhinged.

I rented below a worker in tenancy management who told me he dealt quite often with protected tenancy holders subletting illegally. Ultimately the Dutch tax authorities and Amsterdam City council cooperated on a response to undeclared income with Airbnb and I think have pushed back on what is abuse of community value. If you are told by your "host" to act like it's not Airbnb, isn't that a bit of a signal about its legality? Or acceptance by neighbours?

It's a pretty destructive model, even if at the individual level is proffers benefits to the home owner (many who sublet, are doing it illegally or off contract)

Many body corporates are aware of short term letting in their communal property and can do nothing about it. Apart from Airbnb you also have to contend with illegal casinos and brothels)

The effects of short stay rental are not just about iconic western cities like Barca. There is a problem in Bali I am told.

</comment><comment><USER12> The way cities go about targeting airbnb only exacerbates the problem -- they make it harder for tenants to host guests to offset their rental cost -- and thus incentivize property owners to take rental units off the market in favor of the more lucrative option of making them short-term airbnb units instead.

Cities should be allowing people to host in their primary residences, whether owned property or as rental tenants, if anyone is allowed to host short term paying guests at all.

If airbnb made it harder for property owners to list units on airbnb that weren't their primary residence, while on the other hand allowing renters to offset high rental costs by hosting guests at their primary residence on occasion, i see it as a win-win.

The protections major cities give landlords who wish to prevent their rental tenants from hosting on airbnb seem unreasonable until you realize that hoteliers and landlords have more impact on city policies on these things.

<comment><USER13> Just want to point out that in high-demand urban areas, this proposal would still be expected to cause rents to increase. The amount you can charge for rent is fundamentally limited by the income of your potential renters, but now it becomes income of potential renters _plus_ the amount they could expect to earn by sharing the property out on Airbnb.

It's similar to what happened with low interest rates before the housing boom and bust. You'd expect low interest rates would make housing cheaper for buyers, but it also had the effect of causing house prices to rise because now there were more people who could afford to bid on the same housing stock.

<comment><USER12> Completely agree. My pet idea is a tax for every bedroom in a residence over the headcount of primary residents. This becomes hairy when deciding what qualifies as a bedroom etc, but it will disincentivize renting properties with spare bedrooms dedicated to Airbnb hosting. This way Airbnb units will primarily be rooms left empty by primary residents traveling.

The idea of the sharing economy was supposed to be sharing what you normally use, when you happen to not be using it, with financial incentives to offset your property "rent". Not setting aside resources exclusively for "sharing" in order to profit. That's just subcontracting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > In Barcelona, it used to cost €250 (£221) for a short-term rental permit. > Now that such permits are no longer being issued, they change hands for up > to €80,000.

So, this is the same thing as the taxi market: with an inelastic supply, the price of a medallion in some cities was worth more than a house. And if you're familiar with taxis pre-Uber, you can bet the permit holders will start neglecting the properties to the point that noone wants to use the service anymore.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was in Toronto this summer, and it seemed like the entire condo was inhabited by Airbnb-ers. We were told in the instructions not to talk to the concierge or neighbors and when asked just say we are friends of the airbnber.

The funny thing is that everyone we saw was doing Airbnb. A bunch of people were entering the condo with luggage every time we were in the lobby, and when we left there were 8 other people were leaving at the same time.

It might or might not be legal in Toronto but it's a poorly kept secret. I'm curious what an economic downturn would do because you can't walk away from mortgage debt in Canada the same way you can in most states of the US.

<comment><USER14> Wow, how can I walk away from mortgage debt? Did I miss something?

<comment><USER16> Mortgages are non-recourse in 11 states. The expression "jingle mail" might also be worth googling.

In Canada, and the rest of the US, if your mortgage is underwater it's a problem for you. In those 11 states, it's a problem for the bank.

<comment><USER15> During the housing bust, no one was held liable for foreclosures. Their credit rating was busted but that's it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have some sympathy for people being kept up late at night be noise, although it seems like there are other, more direct ways to deal with that (i.e. cracking down on the people being too loud).

The rest of it seems like another form of NIMBYism though.

<comment><USER18> But you can't crack down on the people being too loud. In two days they'll be gone, replaced by brand new loud people.

I don't think this is NIMBYism at all. People have a reasonable expectation that the residential area they live in will be treated as a residential area and not a business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Airbnb is freaking amazing for travelers. I think it cometely changed the game for world exchanges. It's one of the few companies that I truly believe made the world a better place.

<comment><USER20> Not if your "neighbor" (in reality an company renting out dozens of apartment) put their apartment on Airbnb and you get a new bunch of drunk and noisy tourists every week. You can call the cops all you want, they don't really care because they are in holiday, and next week it will start again with a new bunch of tourists.

<comment><USER21> Nor if you're trying to find accommodation in an already lacking city, and AirBnB further exacerbates the problem because people can make more money over a summer of short term rentals than a full year of long-term tenants. Or they avoid paying taxes because AirBnB leaves it up to them, and they never report it... AirBnB has basically made some aspects of travelling better, but overall it's made the locales much worse off.

<comment><USER19> Tourism and short term acocmmodation is as important as long term accomodation imo.

<comment><USER21> Both are important, but I'd say long term is more important. These are the people who are going to be living there for years, sending their kids to schools there, using the resources there daily, etc. Honestly, they shouldn't be screwed over simply because owners can't get more money from AirBnB. They provide much more over a longer period of time than tourists ever will, or can.

Not saying tourists aren't important, but long term residents should be the priority.

<comment><USER19> Long term: make the world a more connected place. The multiple guests travelling to this place is more important than one neighbor's bad experience.

<comment><USER21> You assume they actually interact with the locals to make the world a more connected place. That doesn't happen by tourists just showing up and doing touristy things. In fact, the _reverse_ can happen as locals get priced out because of tourists and they start to actively _blame_ the tourists for the issue. Then, those who stay blame them for their behavior, which certainly doesn't lend itself to a residential neighborhood, which just makes those people dislike tourists as well. Definitely the opposite of being 'more connected'.

> The multiple guests travelling to this place is more important than one > neighbor's bad experience.

You're assuming that only _one_ neighbor has a bad experience. What if it's _all_ of them, except the short-term residents? I also disagree that the experience of the guests is more important.

<comment><USER19> You ignore the fact that tourists bring money to all the commerces around

<comment><USER21> Except there won't be any businesses around if tourists price them all out of the city.

<comment><USER19> I fail to see how tourists decrease the number of commerces. Your rethoric has pretty much been debunked by any touristic areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Airbnb is a parasitic monster that squats over cities and hoovers up vast > sums of money through its slimy proboscis.

I wonder whether the author would still have a problem if AirBnB were a nonprofit (e.g. took 0% of the cut). That would reveal whether his real argument is against AirBnB's profits, or that having an open short-term market is harmful ipso facto (but when who play the colorful part of the monster? probably the landlord-traveller duo?).

<comment><USER23> BTW, "nonprofit" doesn't mean "no profit"/"0% of the cut". There are many ways to make money as a non-profit organization, including some which can be interpreted as 'parasitic.'

Consider a non-profit charter school which licenses teaching material from a for-profit company and pays a for-profit company for the building lease - <USER2> where the owner of the non-profit is also the owner of the other two companies. Examples at [https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2018/08/13/how- to-p...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2018/08/13/how-to-profit- from-your-non-profit-charter-school/) .

Non-profits can also take a part of the cut, as we find out with charity organizations where, say, 85% of the donations goes to running the organization. Examples at [https://www.thestreet.com/story/12878005/1/you- wont-believe-...](https://www.thestreet.com/story/12878005/1/you-wont-believe- the-overhead-costs-at-these-10-nonprofits.html) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ultimately the question is whether the market is constrained by supply or price. If the constrait is price, then hotels should be able to adjust and stop charging ridiculous default rates in urban areas. If the market is constrained by supply eventually it will be economically viable to build new units.

That's not to say that Airbnb should not be regulated similarly to hotels. Imo if you provide a nearly identical service you should follow the same regulations

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe I'm dense, but I'm failing to see any real problem here. Certainly none that would warrant government infringing on private property rights.

<comment><USER26> Me neither. If you own a property, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. The argument, that it's bringing up prices is false - AirBnB, same as Uber, exist because the prices were already high. If the prices were normal (especially here in Australia), these types of services would not profit. Think about a scenario when young couple with kids is paying so much for mortgage/rent so if they need to go overseas for a few months, they don't really have any other choice than list it on AirBnB to cover portion of the cost.

<comment><USER18> > If you own a property, you should be able to do whatever you want with it

That just isn't true though. You can't even alter a property without first getting a permit in many cases. The things you do to stuff that you own can impact the greater community, so the needs of the community need to be considered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seeing what Airbnb has done to Nashville, its only going to get worse.

<comment><USER28> Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Another aspect of Airbnb is that it makes everywhere the same as far as interior decor goes. Traditional rent seeking landlords spend $0.00 on things like paint, carpets and fixtures, preserving places in some rotten state of decay as long term tenants are not going to be spending their money on such things even if they are living there for many years. There is no reason for them to do so and with landlords extorting as much from their properties as possible the tenants do not have surplus income to improve their dwellings even if they should want to do so.

Airbnb transformed that, the rent seeking class can now get income on their properties without having to put up with long term tenants. However they do have to spend money on the property fixtures, which can be paid for with debt, debt that is 'secured' by the property.

As a consequence there is a particular Airbnb style, it is a global style influenced by upmarket hotels and the faceless luxury decor you get with them. This might work out nicely for the rent seeker and the guest, however it means character is lost. The property becomes bland Airbnb which can't be transformed back to vernacular.

When the rent seeker eventually sells up and a new buyer is sought then the house does go on the market. It has its price and sells fine with its identikit Airbnb fixtures. However some people don't want to live in one of these ex-Airbnb places, they might have wanted mid-century modern or Victorian or whatever else the property should have, i.e. actual character befitting the area and not the internet.

<comment><USER30> Could you show some examples of the particular Airbnb style?

<comment><USER31> > Could you show some examples of the particular Airbnb style?

There is a great long form written in 2016 by the verge about it :

[https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb- aesthetic-...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic- global-minimalism-startup-gentrification)</comment></comment></comment>


Djangy gets background jobs and more - <AUTHOR> http://blog.djangy.com/2010/12/17/background-jobs-and-more/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if they're considering Postgres? I bet that's a hotly requested feature.

<comment><USER3> According to a tweet on Dec. 9 it should be coming "very soon"

<http://twitter.com/djangy/status/12951890044125184>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone explain to me what pony powered is? Is it just a way to say you are running django or is it something more?

<comment><USER5> It comes from Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk&fmt=22#t=55m1...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk&fmt=22#t=55m10s)

He jokingly said Django needed a mascot and that he could take a framework seriously if it had a mascot with magical powers.

<comment><USER6> And then, to answer the criticism, the community came up with the pony:

<http://djangopony.com/>

And then to complete the cycle, the pony showed up to conferences, where it was much loved:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/ubernostrum/3919450494/in/pool-...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/ubernostrum/3919450494/in/pool-857858@N20/)

Lately it's retired a bit since the joke has run its course. Not sure what the next one will be.

<comment><USER7> The novelty has and will continue to wear off, but the Pony won't be going away. Once an unofficial mascot, always an unofficial mascot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope that Santa will bring me a djangy invite for Xmas :)

<comment><USER9> I've got a few spare if you want one.

<comment><USER8> Definitely! Awesome it's jvasquez11 (at) gmail thanks.

<comment><USER9> That should be on it's way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The name makes me immediately think janky, not something I'd want to trust :)

Is the name some kind of reference I don't get (beyond Django, obviously)?

<comment><USER7> I don't think confusing k with g like that is very common.

When I heard the word "ghee" I didn't notice that if I pronounced it oddly it could sound like "key".</comment></comment>