Intel Proposes to Use USB Type-C Digital Audio Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/10273/intel-proposes-to-use-usb-typec-cables-to-connect-headsets-to-mobile-devices <comment><USER3> It's recently occurred to me that the prolificness of the 3.5mm audio connector is something to revere. Wikipedia tells that it's been around since _1964_ , with its fame really coming with the Walkman in 1979. So, a connector introduced _over fifty years ago_ is still in wide use today. How is that even possible? RJ11 phone jacks I think were introduced around the same time, but they seem archaic and old-fashioned in a way the 3.5mm audio jack doesn't. It just astonishes me that the audio connector has been a solved problem for this long, and with all the other advances in tech we've seen.... audio connectors didn't need any improvements.

It makes me very skeptical of any replacements. If a fifty year old connector has been essentially flawless all this time, it's gonna be a tough sell to convince me that something else is really needed now.

<comment><USER4> I think it needs to die and be replaced by a _standard_ wireless audio technology of some sort, more efficient than bluetooth. I honestly don't know how people can go about their daily commutes with cables dangling from their ears. To me, that is very uncomfortable. Bluetooth has served me well over the years but I think we need something better and way more _energy_ efficient.

<comment><USER5> And I honestly can't figure out how people can tolerate connection flakiness, quality issues, and battery drain for a set of headphones. I have tried many BT audio solutions and this is not wanna-be-audiophile pickiness, but the experience is universally substandard as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER6> Watching a video on my mac, and listening over bluetooth, the audio lags the video by at least 0.5 second, it's unwatchable if there's any sort of dialogue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From everyone who has invested heavily in high-quality audio equipment over the years and understands the dangerous path to DRMed digital, I say "Fuck you Intel!". We don't want your USB-C. We'll happily stick to 3.5mm stereo analog outputs.

<comment><USER8> The proposal includes stereo analog output.

<comment><USER9> For now. Think DVI-A.

<comment><USER8> Great example. VGA and DVI-I are still supported by lots of new video cards and laptops even though analog video has been dead for quite a long time.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it's a great example, because VGA _is_ broken by the newer standards because of HDCP. As others in this thread have mentioned, HDCP is included in this new USB spec.

There has been a lot of effort over the years to close the so-called "analog hole" at the end of the DRM chain of trust. The stereo output exists only to distract people during the transition period. The analog out hardware may exist in the future, but the _software_ will refuse to send it any data. This is not theoretical; we already see this with Blu-ray software, where you get an error message if you use a VGA monitor without HDCP.

Bonus: with Win 10 forcing updates, once the hardware is common, you won';t get a choice about the update that disables the "analog hole".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As others have pointed out, this may be a means to foist DRM on the audio output of phones, tablets, and possibly desktops/laptops. But the assumption following that is that DRM is being implemented in an attempt to prevent piracy. That is, in my opinion, not the case. DRM's primary purpose with respect to the video/audio industry is market control. Let's start at the top of the market, the content producers (Warner, Fox, etc). They make a movie/TV show/etc, and publish it to disc. But that disc has encryption on it. So a company like Sony wants to make a device that plays the disc. To do so legally they have to sign a bunch of agreements with the owners of the encryption license. Part of those agreements requires the use of HDCP. Okay, so now the disc is playing, and outputting an encrypted video signal. So a company like LG makes a TV, but the video signal is encrypted. So, they have to sign an agreement with the holders of the HDCP license. But the holders of that license, and the license of disc encryption, are all held, ultimately, by the same media industry oligarchy that holds the rights to the content that started this chain of DRM in the first place.

The end result is that the content owners get to use DRM as a means to force all the companies along the food chain to sign agreements with them, and thus they can exercise power over the entire market. Not a single legit Blu-ray player gets manufactured without signing agreements with these companies. Not a single TV, cable box, repeater, receiver, projector, etc. DRM is not a padlock, it's a parasite. The icing on the cake is that it also nets them a tidy profit. HDCP requires both a yearly licensing fee, and a per-device royalty. It ain't cheap. And there are more aggressive requirements if you plan to implement HDCP yourself, rather than using a pre-made device. So you can either use a pre-made device, which is conveniently manufactured by the same oligarchy and is rather pricey, or make your own and suffer further agreements and expenses.

Intel is the guy that the media industry hired to create HDCP, and who currently manages it. It wasn't long ago that Intel was gung-ho about pushing video DRM on PC's along with Microsoft. Luckily that mostly died, but here we are again, same story, different day.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't it still be possible to record the non-DRM analog signal with a USB-C to 3.5 mm adapter? The change would put the amp and DAC inside the headphones. Take it apart and connect directly to the "last leg" going to the analog speakers. If anything, it should be a better quality signal because of the shorter analog transmission distance.

<comment><USER10> An adapter like that will have the exact same problems as DVI->VGA adapters: HDCP. The software will refuse to send the data to the port without an HDCP negotiation. And just like the VGA adapters, I'm sure it will be possible to make a "striper" that fakes the HDCP handshake, with all the associated legal problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is USB-C basically the trojan horse for DRM audio? Likely yes, right? HDCP on HDMI out, equivalent on USB-C out?

<comment><USER14> _" Usage of digital audio means that headsets should gain their own amplifiers, DACs and various other logic, which is currently located inside smartphones. Intel proposes to install special multi-function processing units (MPUs) ... The MPUs will also support HDCP technology, hence, it will not be possible to make digital copies of records using USB-C digital headset outputs."_

<comment><USER15> Yet another form of irritating DRM which won't actually prevent piracy.

Take apart any device which supports the copy protection, connect to output of DAC, bypassed.

/facepalm

<comment><USER16> And just like Apple TV[1], enjoy getting HDCP errors requiring restarting playback several times.

1: Might have been the Toshiba screen it was connected to.

<comment><USER17> Dunno why you're being downvoted, that's exactly the type of frustrating experience that exemplifies HDCP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Judging by all of the comments complaining about DRM and having to buy new audio equipment, it seems like few people are actually reading the whole article. USB-C can support analog audio output via audio adapter accessory mode[1].

In the near future you'll be able to buy passive USB-C→3.5mm cables for cheaper than normal USB-C→USB-C cables. You will be able to use them like any other aux cable.

Personally, I still prefer the 3.5mm jack so that I don't need a passive adapter for using my earbuds. Requiring a passive adapter that gives you a perpendicular 3.5mm jack, no matter how small, would be ugly and obtrusive.

Fortunately, at least for over-the-ear headphones with a 3.5mm jack, this will at least be much less of a hassle. Passive USB-C→3.5mm cables can just be your new aux cable.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/y6xCS9u.png](https://i.imgur.com/y6xCS9u.png)

<comment><USER19> IMO the 3.5 mm jack is better because it can rotate 360 degrees. The USB connector is rigidly fixed, which puts stresses on the cord and connector. I've rarely seen a 3.5 mm fail to make proper connections or wear out the port with use, whereas both are really common with USB.

<comment><USER20> Generally I agree with you, but my macbook's headphone connector won't hold the cable in anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They cannot be serious. Replacing what works great with all kinds of cheap or expensive and easy to repair equipment with what? Another device on the Universal Serial Bus. I see the point of attaching storage devices, sound cards and anything else that is not simple and needs a controller and logic to USB, but audio output? I do sometimes use a USB headset because it has its own soundcard built-in, but I actually prefer a simple headset with a 3.5mm mic- in/head-out connection. Why? Well, it works always, it doesn't load another driver, and it doesn't rely on the USB bus. USB is nice but occasionally hiccups and resets itself, which is not something you'll see happen with your mic and headphones because they are not overcomplicated. To be totally honest, I'm also one of those who prefers keyboards attached via PS/2 because I've had USB keyboards reset when I attached another USB device to the shared bus. That PS/2 has real interrupts is an added bonus for something as crucial as keyboard input. With all that being said, as long as this happens in the phone and tablet space, I guess I can live with it, but having to carry around an adapter from USB to 3.5mm audio will be a PITA.

This is just another, let's change it to make money with adapters and sell new implementations due to bugs in the old controllers and drivers, scheme.

Next year, USB power cords, and you'll have to rewire your house.

<comment><USER22> > _but I actually prefer a simple headset with a 3.5mm mic-in /head-out > connection. Why? Well, it works always_

I can say with certainty that it does not always work. If I plug a pair of Apple earbuds into my Android device, the audio up/down do not work. This functionality isn't consistent even within the Android device world. Having a consistent headphone jack that provides consistency here would be a pretty big win. (Even bigger if Apple gets on board, which it won't.)

> _I guess I can live with it, but having to carry around an adapter from USB > to 3.5mm audio will be a PITA_

Pretty sure the endgame here is that your headphones have a USB C connection on them instead of a 3.5mm audio jack.

> _Next year, USB power cords, and you 'll have to rewire your house._

You can already buy outlets with USB ports. They're increasingly common, but thankfully the transformer is in the outlet so you're not running low-voltage wire all over.

<comment><USER23> I think this is a false comparison for two reasons

1) adding the microphone and volume function to the headjack is a different cable than a normal TRS 3.5mm aux cable, which is the cable we all love. I would rather get rid of the 4 wired microphone enabled 3.5mm than lose the 3.52mm altogether.

2) all of the problems you mentioned that revolve around software - <USER2> cables not working on android, etc - are only going to get word by introducing USB into this. The idea is to remove proprietary things from analog audio, that's the whole reason the standard survived.

It also goes without saying that there is an inherit loss of utility caused by this switch, since so many of the products I already own use 3.5mm.

<comment><USER22> I'm not attached sentimentally to any cables. I'd love for audio, volume, skip, and microphone functionality to work with all my devices and all my headphones. Would it be annoying to lose compatibility (or require a converter) for all my existing speakers and headphones? Of course. I'd still take that penalty if it meant the overall experience was better and eventually more consistent.

Frankly I'm not sure 3.5mm is going to survive in the mainstream anyway. Bluetooth might eventually replace it for mainstream use cases.

<comment><USER24> >Bluetooth might eventually replace it for mainstream use cases.

As somewho who uses Bluetooth audio I strongly disagree. I think Bluetooth audio is going to remain niche until batteries get better. Who wants to have to charge their headphones or Bluetooth (often battery powered) speakers every few days?

<comment><USER21> I may be spoiled but whether I use bluetooth or old-school RF headsets, it's always less reliable and lower quality than wired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _Industry signaling a strong desire to move from analog to digital_

Which industry would that be, I wonder? The audio hardware industry, or the content creation industry?

<comment><USER26> This is ironic. It used to be the analog medium that had a sort natural copy protection built in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> >Industry signaling a strong desire..

Is this the same industry that gave us the HDMI "blessing" ?

"The headphones, audio cables and the jack adapters are too cheap.. We can solve that !"

<comment><USER28> HDMI does have nice features, like ARC and CEC.

(I'd rather use DisplayPort though)

<comment><USER29> Neither of which require DRM, I'm sure.

HDMI causes a lot of problems (and price increases) because of HDCP.

<comment><USER30> > HDMI causes a lot of problems (and price increases) because of HDCP.

And the way around it (in the specific case of HDCP) is often to buy cheap, probably non-standards compliant equipment, which isn't a good situation for anyone. I recall reading that the VitaTV had HDCP, yet I hadn't encountered that issue. Turns out the HDMI switcher I was using (the cheapest one I could find on Amazon with two outputs) was just stripping it off.

<comment><USER29> Then you got lucky. If that practice was pervasive, 1) honest people wouldn't face as many issues with HDMI; and 2) the Hollywood DRM-lobby would go crazy on manufacturers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I imagine as a mobile device manufacturer you would be pretty excited to get to cut the total number of ports on your device in half _and_ sell high margin cables/adapters/hubs as accessories.

Let the dongle wars begin...

</comment><comment><USER32> So now instead of buying a single DAC in my phone, I have to buy a DAC for every set of speakers and headphones I ever want to plug in to it?

<comment><USER33> Coming from the reverse perspective: now my expensive wireless bluetooth headphones will make use of their own good DAC all the time, instead of relying on my phone's crappy DAC whenever I plug them in directly.

<comment><USER34> You can already use your own DAC with smartphones.

<comment><USER32> How does that work?

<comment><USER35> On Android phones that support USB-OTG (most of the better/more modern ones) you can literally just plug a standard USB DAC into the onboard USB port. Honestly, it shouldn't be that hard to just include a decent onboard DAC and headphone amp these days though - Sandisk's MP3 players and Allwinner's range of ARM SoCs have even managed to integrate both on the same die as the main CPU no problem.

<comment><USER36> Apple devices have generally excellent DACs as well - to the point where it's basically a waste of money to buy an external DAC. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there are Android devices with good onboard DACs, but I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that such devices are at the high end of their manufacturers' ranges and come at a premium price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > A good thing about USB Type-C headsets with MPUs is that they are going to > be software upgradeable and could gain functionality over their lifespan.

yeah, unless it never happens, like it typically doesn't :(

<comment><USER10> > > software upgradeable and could gain functionality over their lifespan.

That usually means "now we get to ship it broken".

<comment><USER34> I just can't wait to have bugs in my HEADPHONES of all things.

Or for them to be connected to the IoT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Why the hell does a digital serial bus interface have an analog audio "mode"?

I mean, USB-C is already supposed to do daisy chaining, some 100w power bidirectional power transfer, and support video channels over it according to displayport spec. Oh, and its also thunderbolt.

Seriously, is this port supposed to cost more than its weight in gold to manufacture, and be such an extreme nightmare to program for we should expect exploits every other Tuesday? I am totally on board with a high bandwidth even parallel standard port for digital data exchange with good power delivery metrics, but all this specificity over how it performs with what data while supporting analog modes is... feature creep, by definition, in my book.

<comment><USER18> You just hook up your existing DAC to the USB-C port instead of a 3.5mm jack, and the rest is just software. It's not like they need to use special circuitry that isn't already in your phone. All phones in existence already have a DAC (or you couldn't make phone calls using the built-in speaker).

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This reminds me of the Game Boy Advance SP and how it removed the 3.5mm jack for seemingly no reason other than to have me buy an adapter.

I won't buy a phone without a 3.5mm jack. It just works. I don't need digital audio. My (medium-price-range) headphones sound utterly glorious, there is no utility here.

To be honest, I'm not sure whether I'll ever upgrade my 2013 Moto G. It'll probably break eventually.

When did I become a luddite? It's like, at some point, things stopped getting substantially better, and just became sidegrades with annoying tweaks for the sake of it.

I want my toaster to take... bread. Not tomatoes. Bread is what I eat for breakfast, not toasted tomatoes. :P

</comment><comment><USER40> Initial steps toward DRM on the audio path?

<comment><USER41> From the article:

> The MPUs will also support HDCP technology, hence, it will not be possible > to make digital copies of records using USB-C digital headset outputs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's bizarre. Why would we push the <5mm^2 that an audio amplifier requires in a smartphone into the headphones, where it then inevitably requires local decoupling, a circuit board, power management, something to decode the USB (or can USB-C do analog?) and all the other hassle?

Makes absolutely zero sense.

<comment><USER43> The amplifier in the headphones can be designed specifically for those headphones. It may well be that a transducer with a bizarre frequency response and an amp/EQ that compensates is a better solution in the end. Where we are now, headphones need to have reasonably flat response (or be called Beats :-) in order to be acceptable. Or perhaps a wildly different impedance makes a better cost performance argument, can't go there now, but with active headphones you can.

It may be a bit like the powered speaker market for PA gear. You can get light weight powered speakers for not a lot of money that perform quite well. The amplifiers do exactly what they need to for the exact speaker, they don't have to be able to handle whatever mystery load you plug into them. They can build in the crossovers and EQ compensation when the signal is small rather than in the speaker cabinets.

Also, noise canceling ear buds become possible when you have power coming to them.

Of course, the heap of Apple Earbuds I have whose clickers no longer work doesn't really inspire me about my new active headphone future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm betting on next year's Retina Macbook to nix the audio jack for a second USB-C. Likely held off because they don't want to detract from a big wireless earbud launch with the iPhone 7 this fall…

<comment><USER45> Maybe 2016 will be Apple's year of USB-C. A single USB-C on the iPhone 7, two on the MacBook, and USB-C earphones?

It could happen.

<comment><USER46> They just released the refreshed MacBook, they'll probably wait for 2017 OR they'll do that on the new Pros that will be announced at WWDC.

<comment><USER45> Oh yeah, I know about the 2016 MacBook, but I'm guessing they could lay the groundwork for the 2017 MacBook with their other products this year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> "Industry Signaling a strong desire to move from analog to digital"... which "industry"?

"New digital audio needs to offer significant value at higher end" ... Intel market segmentation at its finest.

Long rein analog.

Looks like they missed a few groups in the job cuts.

<comment><USER48> Apparently Apple and a Chinese company is the whole industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Welp.

Here is to hoping for AMD's zen.

USB audio is nice but it's also nice to not have to buy a new headset or new DAC for my new box.

Edit: spec says analog audio over usb so, there's that.

<comment><USER18> USB-C has an analog audio output mode (audio adapter accessory mode which uses the device's internal DAC), so you won't have to do that.

There will eventually be passive USB-C→3.5mm cables for use with analog-only headphones.

<comment><USER32> Do you have a link for this? I've never heard of it but it sounds cool.

<comment><USER18> Here's a screenshot of part of the relevant section from the USB-C spec: [https://i.imgur.com/y6xCS9u.png](https://i.imgur.com/y6xCS9u.png)

<comment><USER50> > The headset shall not use a USB Type-C plug to replace the 3,5mm plug.

So, the only sane way to connect an analog headset to a mobile phone is forbidden by the spec... Assuming I _had_ a phone with a Analog-Audio-USB- Type-C capable, I'd like to have a headset that directly plugs in, and for which I don't have to purchase, carry, and loose a separate adapter.

<comment><USER51> So attach the adapter and then pretend it's part of the wire for the lifetime of the device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> "Industry signalling a strong desire to move from analogue to digital"

Industry can sod off. This is about DRM not any consumer benefit. The decent quality is all in the hifi market that's quite happy with jack plugs.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why would I want a digital headphone jack? Headphones are analog devices, so you're just going to have to cram a DAC into the headphones anyway, making them heavier, more expensive, and DRM-encumbered.

</comment><comment><USER54> I think this is a sign that technology is stalling. They are grasping at straws trying to get us excited about technology that adds little value for the consumer but drives another upgrade cycle and even removes features that they can sell back to us. First we get the locked down no dd-wrt routers and now this.

</comment><comment><USER55> Seeing how gaming keyboards and mice have gone these days. I wonder if we'll need manufacturer specific software and an account and to access our future audio settings and features.

</comment><comment><USER56> USB seems a lot more flimsy than 3.5mm.

<comment><USER57> IIRC, USB-C is supposed to be the most resilient USB to date (in terms of average plug/unplug cycles before failure). Too early to say if that's actually true, or how that compares to 3.5mm in any case, but it's not impossible that it's comparable--especially since USB-C finally eliminates the "try to jam it in the wrong way 'round" problem.

<comment><USER29> > the most resilient USB

At the cost of the devices it's supposed to connect together[0]. When you have to think about having to add cryptographic signatures and verification to cables[1], I cannot see the connectivity standard you built as safe.

0: [https://www.amazon.com/review/R2XDBFUD9CTN2R/ref=cm_cr_rdp_p...](https://www.amazon.com/review/R2XDBFUD9CTN2R/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm)

1: [http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2016/04/13/usb- type-c-...](http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2016/04/13/usb-type-c- auth/1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> yet another form of DRM, for which consumers will pay and corporate will make money, and yet it fails to solve the piracy problem. high fidelity analogue Audio recorders are easily available.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's a shame that apple to be going with a similar but incompatible strategy: [http://www.cultofmac.com/401014/apple-now-sells-lightning- he...](http://www.cultofmac.com/401014/apple-now-sells-lightning-headphones- that-are-super-expensive/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Remember when 2.5mm was a thing for phones that could play MP3s?

That sucked.

<comment><USER21> I never knew what that port was for, thanks for clarifying, really, I'm not kidding.

<comment><USER60> Some were just for one earphone (mono) and a mic. Some were effectively the same as the iPhone (stereo+mic). Some had weird adapters for other ports if they just had the earphone+mic version. I think I had one of each at different times, all pre-2007.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> We already have strong and widely adopted digital audio standard, its called I2S. HDMI audio is four I2S channels in parallel. Provision pins for raw I2S, or simple usb endpoint decoding into four I2S, but not another effing DRM shit.

</comment><comment><USER62> I thought Bluetooth was supposed to eliminate the need for the 3.5mm jack...

</comment><comment><USER48> if phones don't get two type-C connectors there is no point to this..

<comment><USER63> The future will be one port on everything breakout dongles everywhere.

<comment><USER48> Well it is gonna suck not being able to charge your phone while listening to music

<comment><USER64> Instead of metal weights[1], headphones will contain batteries so first you'll charge your headphones and then your phone will charge off the headphones.

[1] [https://blog.bolt.io/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by- dre-154aa...](https://blog.bolt.io/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by- dre-154aae384b36)

<comment><USER29> /s ?

<comment><USER64> Personally I think this is a terrible idea (I already have too many things that need charging and charging a battery from another battery is inefficient) but I predict that it will happen.

(BTW, does anyone know what happens when you plug two battery-powered USB-PD devices together? How do they decide which direction power should flow?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> What is the purpose of making the audio cables digital? We don't need more audio resolution, we are already beyond the limits of human hearing. It's like making phones with 2000 ppi resolution for no practical benefit other than bragging rights.

It'd rather prefer we had better wireless audio. Bluetooth is too weak for streaming around the house and has slow connection time, is unstable and generally discourages wireless audio.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm torn on this one. I know it's a move to push DRM further out the stack, and that annoys. But, I also want higher quality recording and playback from my small devices. The audio circuitry of one of my tablets and my phone is abysmal; my Nexus 7 (second generation) is nice but I don't have a good recording option. Presumably this audio will be two ways, so if I want to stick an ADC in that port I'll be able to record at very high quality, and if I want to stick a DAC in that port, I'll be able to play back at very high quality.

DRM is stupid, of course, and it's just pushing the copying out one more step in the chain (they can't stop you from converting it to analog at _some point_ , because it's gotta be analog to get into your ear holes). And, of course, DRM is made to be broken.

Anyway, the 3.5mm jacks on my devices are about 50/50 unusably bad (either they aren't grounded/filtered properly and end up with a variety of noise, or they aren't loud enough, or they distort at modest volume, etc.), so on the whole, I won't mourn the passing of the 3.5mm jack.

<comment> TD-Linux You can already do digital audio on Android, either over OTG USB and normal USB Audio, or via the Android Accessory protocol. Presumably this would work just as well over a USB C connector. Adding DRM is a pure downgrade from this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I posted this on a thread about this that should be linked somehow:

A true advance, a Jobs and Ives worthy advance, would be to superseed it. Use the 3 prongs of a jack with mic for ground tx,rx,and keep it backward compatible with analog only devices. reply

</comment><comment><USER68> not a shred of reality displayed here. the analog audio jack they seek to replace is the final analog output of a digital to analog converter or DAC. one cannot speak of a digital speaker, and a digital amplifier does not usually refer to using the loading of the speaker driver to smooth-out the pulse-chain like some motors on a PWM line... not in any high fidelity audio anyway... where is the DAC or audio codec to be located? are we not just pushing it out to the device and pretending it went away? why the assumption for headphones or consumer audio? what about USBs derived clock and jitter? why on

</comment><comment><USER69> What do they mean by going "digital"? At the end the signal that reaches the speaker driver will have to be analog. What are they suggesting to happen instead?

</comment><comment><USER9> How about the mechanical loads headphone plugs are subjected while the phone is in a pocket and we are walking?

I am very sure a USB-C is nowhere near as robust as a mini P2.

</comment><comment><USER70> No.

</comment><comment><USER71> You can put _analog_ audio over USB-C, too. From the article:

> In fact, USB-C can be used to transfer analog audio in accordance with the > specification of the connector. It all comes down as to how that audio is > transmitted.

</comment><comment><USER72> Somehow, I prefer "plain" USB for headsets: it's one connector instead of two, and feels (looks) more modern (plus, requires less force to (un)plug).

No sympathy for clunky DRM-"enhanced" hw, of course :)</comment>


The Hunt for 3ve [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/3ve_google_whiteops_whitepaper_final_nov_2018.pdf <comment><USER2> Pretty impressive stuff. The fraudsters are very sophisticated. I never would have thought BGP hijacking would be used for ad fraud</comment>


Why I will be using RISC-V in my next chip - <AUTHOR> http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/why-i-will-be-using-the-risc-v-in-my-next-chip <comment><USER2> Good that they're getting on the bandwagon as they're already popular with maker types. I also like the serendipity where this post led me to an equally exciting one:

[http://www.adapteva.com/announcements/an-open- source-8gbps-l...](http://www.adapteva.com/announcements/an-open-source-8gbps- low-latency-chip-to-chip-interface/)

Love that they developed and open-sourced a 8Gbps, 1us, I/O interface. That might come in handy. :)

<comment><USER3> Agree! I love adapteva for a lot of reasons, and this makes me want to keep on piling the love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's awesome! RISC-V seems like a well defined ISA that allows for lots of extensions. Seems like a perfect fit for a board like the parallella.

</comment><comment><USER5> How does RISC-V get around the issue of patent mine fields? For example we've seen its really difficult to make a competitive codec without infringing and even when it's accomplished there is lingering doubt until it's challenged. I hope this situation is somehow much different.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sure the RISC-V core team has a much better answer. Their mission statement is a good start.

[https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-1...](https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-146.pdf)

The good news is that RISC has been around since the early 80's so any killer hardware patent will likely have expired by now. Note that the RISC-V ISA is separate from any hardware implementations. If you get fancy with your micro- architecture you can definitely trample on one of the 1000's of micro- architecture patents filed across the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised to see a lot of RISC proponents still around, because I think it's quite clear that things didn't quite work out the way they thought it would --- the vision of cheap, simple, high-performance CPUs just didn't happen. Thus I'm not of the opinion that another "MIPS, but free" architecture is such a good idea.

 _Benchmarks are controversial but by most measures the RISC-V performance should be "good enough" for most use cases_

In my experience, statements like this really mean "it's actually really bad, but we don't want to say that"... after all, who would call benchmarks "controversial" if they were winning? There do tend to be few comparative benchmarks, but here's one that shows how ARM and x86 are competitive, but MIPS is behind in energy efficiency:

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa- show...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-showdown-is- arm-x86-or-mips-intrinsically-more-power-efficient)

Even modern ARM cores, an architecture that started out being very RISC, use microinstruction-based translation in their front end and probably have more in common with Intel's microarchitectures than MIPS and the like.

I think a "CISC-V" could be more interesting - something x86-like (AFAIK the remaining patents are only on the Pentium and above instruction set extensions, and those may expire soon, so 486 and below are now public-domain ISAs) with a small dense instruction set, but extended in a different direction. "x86, but free". ("ARM, but free" would likely not work for legal reasons.)

<comment><USER7> Market success != technical merit. However, if you're willing to consider ARM a RISC (well, almost) then there's your market success. Alpha completely _dominated_ the performance segment for years, but they fell behind for reasons that has nothing to do with CISC vs. RISC. At the time, x86 compatibility mattered more than it does today.

For people designing their own cores for whatever reason (there can be many, research and commercial), RISC-V is very attractive because of all the reasons already given, but it's obviously not the only option.

RISC-V is carefully designed compromise; it scales down to extremely cheap cores and up to superscalar. Like Alpha before it, extreme attention has been paid to avoid features/choices that would be bad for OoOE implementations. Some examples:

\- rs1, rs2, rd fields are _always_ in the same location and _all_ register sources and destinations are explicit (makes decoding faster and you can start fetching/renaming without having decoded)

\- there are no branch delay slots

\- instructions produce at most a single result

\- no condition codes etc (dependencies are explicit)

\- the sign-bit for all immediate fields is in a fixed location (cheaper sign- extension)

and so forth.

I'm also a big fan of the conditional branch instruction which unlike the Alpha can compare two registers.

<comment><USER6> _However, if you 're willing to consider ARM a RISC (well, almost) then there's your market success._

ARM wasn't really a pure RISC from the beginning (e.g. multicycle instructions like LDM/STM, pre/post-increment addressing modes, built-in shifts), and I'd say the market success, especially more recently, is attributable to the fact that ARM cores are becoming more x86-like.

On the other hand, MIPS is the quintessential RISC, and hit as enjoyed some success, but was never really known much for amazing performance or efficiency. I suspect RISC-V will be similar, and all the cheap Chinese tablets/phones/etc. that are currently using MIPS may switch to RISC-V instead, although many are unlicensed clones so cost may not be a factor to them.

 _Alpha completely dominated the performance segment for years, but they fell behind for reasons that has nothing to do with CISC vs. RISC._

Alphas relied primarily on clock frequency to achieve their performance, and were very power-hungry as a result. This is absolutely the RISC philosophy of performance via simpler designs and increasing clock frequency, which stopped being viable long ago. A 200MHz 21064 can do 0.675DMIPS/MHz and consumes 30W, or 0.0225DMIPS/MHz/W; a Pentium (P5) 100MHz has 1.88DMIPS/MHz and consumes 10W, for 0.188DMIPS/MHz/W.

<comment><USER7> This is getting off-topic, but ARMs success had nothing to do with RISC vs. CISC. It was that _Alpha_ engineers took their skill to the ARM ISA (which at the time had only very weak implementations). They created StrongARM which made people sit up and take notice. Intel ironically inherited the technology and continued developing it under the XScale name. So, yes, Intel in part created their own ARM problem.

I feel I have to repeat again that none of this had to do with RISC vs. CISC. It had to do with implementation and market muscle.

"Alphas relied primarily on clock frequency to achieve their performance, and were very power-hungry as a result"

So was the P4 and it failed, but Intel had enough capital to take a power efficiency clue from Transmeta and turn the ship 180 degrees.

What killed the Alpha was three things: delays in getting the new models out, the cost of staying in this game, and of course, the arrival of Itanic.

EDIT: An aside: the 64-bit extension of ARM is a completely new and different ISA called AArch64 which incidentally is a lot more RISC-like than the original ARM. IOW, it looks like the ARM designers disagree with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just one question, is it pronounced "risk five" or "risk vee?"

<comment><USER9> Five.

</comment></comment><comment> browser-bob Can RISC-V be implemented in the on-board Xilinx Zynq 7020 FPGA of the A101040 (Epiphany III) Parallella?

<comment><USER10> Yes, definitely. Berkeley's open-source Rocket[1] core can already be programmed onto the Zedboard and ZC706[2], which also use Zynq 7000 series FPGAs. Getting it to work on the Parallela should just be a matter of changing the clock constraints and pin settings and finding a configuration that will fit on the FPGA.

[1] [https://github.com/ucb-bar/rocket-chip](https://github.com/ucb- bar/rocket-chip) [2] [https://github.com/ucb-bar/fpga- zynq](https://github.com/ucb-bar/fpga-zynq)

<comment><USER3> not to mention the smaller implementations like picorv32 and zscale/vscale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Site seems slow and might go down: mirror

[http://i.imgur.com/0FmTYcH.png](http://i.imgur.com/0FmTYcH.png)

(Fullpage screenshot as Google cache lacked styling)

<comment> browser-bob [https://archive.is/iEfhg](https://archive.is/iEfhg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm still not sure whether RISC-V will be one of main stream microprocessor in the industry field.

1\. Still the core is not yet solid.

2\. Not much powerful debugging tools exist.

3\. Chisel itself. Every engineer who is willing to use RISC-V should understand output of chisel source code in order to do ECO or some other low level jobs.

4\. BSD itself. It is strong and also weakness. There's no way to merge revision into main repository. It will not be quite trouble if RISC-V remains as it is. But will be a big problem if RISC-V evolves by its own development team.

I hoped this RISC-V becomes mainstream processor since I attended the lecture from Mr.Yunsup Lee 4 years ago. I really want to say "I was wrong at that moment" after all.

<comment><USER10> There's a distinction between the RISC-V ISA and our open source processor implementations. The ISA is an open standard that anyone can make an implementation of. There are many RISC-V implementations out there. Most of them are not based on our RocketChip codebase and use Verilog, not Chisel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's no way any of this will remain "free" though. Established players won't allow it, you'll have to license their patent portfolios to make anything at all.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Does anybody have a cached version of this? It keeps returning db errors.

<comment><USER14> Google Cache Link: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.adapteva.com%2Fandreas- blog%2Fwhy-i-will-be-using-the-risc-v-in-my-next-chip)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could you also please make an open FPGA, based on this design?

[https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-4...](https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-43.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Ranjit Manohar of Cornell a few years ago. He was the founder of Achronix, an FPGA startup. He said:

-only 2% of the standard FPGA fabric does useful work..

&

-the really expensive part to develop is the IO (too many standards)

Having an open FPGA is a a good start, but it will only be truly useful if the IO and the optimization is brought up to date with modern fpgas. Today's fpgas are really structured asics.

Very much for an open fpga, but let's not underestimate the investments made by fpga companies to get to the current state of the art. Building platforms is very expensive [ref mythical man month]

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> SIMD and VLIW are the future of microprocessors, and unfortunately it doesn't seem like this ISA will be able to support them.

<comment><USER17> RISC-V has a vector mode that can be used for SIMD applications.

VLIW has been the future since the 80s, and we're still waiting for the magic wonder compilers that can actually spit out efficient VLIW code. Even GPUs have abandoned VLIW (AMD TeraScale) in favour of RISC (Nvidia, AMD GCN).

<comment><USER18> VLIW DSPs are in every phone. VLIW CPUs are almost certainly a bad idea and as to GPUs, AFAIK VLIW needs to coexist with barrel threading there which might create problems. But VLIW certainly has its place.

<comment><USER19> I suspect the DSP makers just use VLIW because of interia. They probably don't have the money or incentive to revisit their old decisions.

Also wouldn't you say that most of the stuff that used to be implemented on DSPs is now moving into ASICs? I wouldn't be so sure that VLIWs are going to be around forever.

<comment><USER20> VLIW is many times cheaper (in terms of power and area) than OoO. It is not going anywhere from the low budget range.

<comment><USER19> But VLIW and OoO aren't the only two design points. The renewed interest in traditional inorder vector processors. In any case, I do think the point of DSPs was to be area/power efficient for certain specialized algorithms, and a lot of these are just becoming ASICs/specialized accelerators today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think my biggest concern is big blue, I'm sure they will have an eagle eye on this and make sure that as soon as someone accidentally adds support that falls close to one of their patients it will stifle the energy and progress of the community. The further they slide into the abyss the more desperation will drive moves like this... But only time will tell.</comment>


Show HN: smooth-scrollbar – customize scrollbars with smooth scrolling - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/idiotWu/smooth-scrollbar <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, customizable scrollbar again - it's annoying! However I was asked to build a custom scrollbar in a SPA project, I tried almost all the scrollbar plugins in the Github and I just couldn't find a perfect one. So I wrote this one, and I think it's time to bring it to the world after half a year's development. Feedback on the code is more than welcome!</comment>


Japanese Nuclear Cover-ups: Fukushima featured prominently in probe - <AUTHOR> http://cnic.jp/english/newsletter/nit92/nit92articles/nit92coverup.html

<comment><USER2> _Citizens' Nuclear Information Center is an anti-nuclear public interest organization dedicated to securing a safe, nuclear-free world. The Center was formed to provide reliable information and public education on all aspects of nuclear power to ultimately realize this goal._

Oh. Okay.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2335677></comment>


So What Does 5G Actually Do? And Is It Worth What the Carriers Are Demanding? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/so-what-the-heck-does-5g-actually-do-and-is-it-worth-what-the-carriers-are-demanding/ <comment><USER2> This is very US centric way to look at things. US mobile carrier markets are not very competitive, so 5G brings little benefits to the consumers.

The biggest difference in 5G parts that are extensions to existing LTE infrastructure is energy efficiency (80% of the energy is used in base stations) and cost of deploying massive capacity boost. It enables radically reduced total cost of ownership in urban areas and remote areas. Of course, if the mobile business is not competitive in your country, those benefits are not distributed to consumers as soon as in other countries.

> Nothing about 5G changes the basic problem that the return on investment in > rural areas is lousy because it has lower population

Energy efficiency and sleeping base stations and solar panels powered stations. They definitely change the ROI for rural areas. More efficient and less dense macro sites in rural area will increase the coverage.</comment>


Python tutorial for beginners - <AUTHOR> Which Python tutorial is can help to learn Python from elementary to advanced level in simple and easy steps? <comment><USER2> [http://blog.danwin.com/free-python-guides/](http://blog.danwin.com/free- python-guides/)

[http://ftp.ntua.gr/mirror/python/topics/learn/non- prog.html](http://ftp.ntua.gr/mirror/python/topics/learn/non-prog.html)

[https://github.com/vhf/free-programming- books/blob/master/fr...](https://github.com/vhf/free-programming- books/blob/master/free-programming-books.md#python)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.techbeamers.com/python-tutorial-step-by- step/](https://www.techbeamers.com/python-tutorial-step-by-step/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This one is good to get started: [https://codecasts.teachable.com/p/python- crash-course](https://codecasts.teachable.com/p/python-crash-course)

</comment><comment><USER4> The official docs were great when I learnt Python more than a decade ago. They still are. After that, maybe pick up Fluent Python to understand the internals in detail.</comment>


Games in less than 13kB of JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://blog.github.com/2018-10-05-js13kgames-highlights-2018/ <comment><USER2> I've participated in a couple of js31kgames jams, including the very first one. I didn't do it this year, but it's certainly a fun little challenge. My favorite creation was a color matching game; I actually wrote a small post on the Intel Developer Zone blog about all the stuff I learned about color matching, color formats, and perception over the course of making this (it was just beginner knowledge, but much of it was things I hadn't even considered before).

<comment><USER3> That sounds really cool. Do you have a link to that blog post?

<comment><USER2> Yup, here it is: [https://software.intel.com/en- us/html5/hub/blogs/exploring-c...](https://software.intel.com/en- us/html5/hub/blogs/exploring-color-matching-in-javascript)

(I want to reiterate that this is really just the very basics which I had learned over the course of the project; turns out I was completely clueless about color!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After spending a few minutes on each of these, Re-wire really strikes me as being the most unlike anything I've ever played before. Really cool little puzzle mechanic.

<comment><USER5> I agree. this would make a nice mobile game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not JavaScript, but there was actually a 4kb version of Minecraft for a contest: [https://archive.org/details/Minecraft4K](https://archive.org/details/Minecraft4K)

<comment><USER3> Do you know which contest?

<comment><USER7> That was for Java4k 2009. Notch was a regular participant in the competition, winning several years with 4k demakes of other popular games (though in that specific year I won :-)). He was experimenting with hand-writing JVM byte code assembly-style and wrote the core engine of a Minecraft-style game in just over 2000 bytes, then got bored with the project and wrote something else.

Due to the way Java4k works (your entry is measured by compressed jar size), every byte can fit a little more than the previous one, so 2000 bytes is actually less than half the allotted space.

<comment><USER8> Demakes are an interesting concept. For example, how little could you get away with doing for a demake of the first level of the original Crash Bandicoot? By that I mean, how little time could you get away with spending on code and graphics and still have it be recognizable by someone that had played said game in the past? How little and still have them identify it as _a version of Crash_ rather than just being _reminiscient of Crash_? How little and still be visually pleasing? How little and still be enjoyable to play?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This feels like highly relevant training for making responsive multiplayer games

</comment><comment><USER10> The 1024-moves is very addictive.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think when you see a post is from Medium? - <AUTHOR> Does seeing that a HN post is from Medium make you more or less likely to click it? Do you expect a certain type of post (rant, musing, personal story)?<p>My personal reaction is that if something on Medium has made it to the front page of HN, then it's probably at least somewhat relevant to my work/life, and is probably decently-written. When I find Medium stuff through other channels (Pocket, FB, etc.), I am much less likely to click. <comment><USER2> I don't really have a preconceived notion as to anything. Each individual author is the one who maintains their content. So each article really needs to be taken mostly on its' own merit.

</comment><comment><USER3> My thought? Most likely an ill-informed rant by a millennial.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree. What if the title doesn't sound rant-y or millenial-y? Like "An Analysis of Yelp's Sorting Algorithm", or something else that is data-driven and not emotional-sounding? I'm interested to know how the common underlying reaction that you describe could be different depending on what the article sounds like.

That is, does seeing "medium.com" after reading a post only serve to amplify a pre-existing suspicion (based on title) that the article sounds rant-y, or does it actually decrease your likelihood of clicking _regardless_ of what the title was and how you felt about it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > My personal reaction is that if something on Medium has made it to the front > page of HN, then it's probably at least somewhat relevant to my work/life

You're hitting a selection bias. If _anything_ gets to the front page of HN, it is likely relevant, even moreso with Medium posts that are penalized and require extra effort for placement.

If you browse /new, the Medium posts are 90% useless thought-pieces.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually find that Medium pieces on the front page are more likely to be relevant to my work/life than other front-page posts. This is perhaps because I am less technical than many here, so the intricacies of hardware articles or specific coding languages do not resonate with me. The Medium-hosted pieces tend to be "lighter", and perhaps for this reason they have a (somewhat) higher hit rate for me.

I completely agree that most Medium posts on /newest are junk. Part of the reason I posted the Ask was because I'm curious what happens when I post something I've written (on Medium). How are people's first reactions affected by that? Is it like when people see a Business Insider article and then automatically ignore the post?

Also, I'd be interested to know more about Medium posts being penalized. Details?</comment></comment>


Hook.io - A full featured i/o framework for node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/marak/hook.io

<comment><USER2> hook.io is very interesting to me. The idea of being able to easily have a lot of nodes communicating to each other over any device seems like where node.js should be going.

I've been watching the progress of this project for a while now. The codebase and Hook APIs are a bit immature ( and still in flux ), but I have high hopes for this project's future and the Evented Web in general.</comment>


Why I don't take vacation - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2012/news/economy/1205/gallery.unused-vacation/?source=cnn_bin

<comment><AUTHOR> I find this article kind of sad. When they look back on their lives, will they regret sacrificing so much for work? Will they even remember or be remembered for the extra work they put in? Or would they rather have remembered traveling?</comment>


I Googled My Mother's Maiden Name and Found My Family's Violent Secret - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/i-googled-my-mothers-maiden-name-and-found-my-familys-violent-secret-296 <comment><USER2> We all descended from rapists, killers, child molesters and slave owners, if you go back far enough.

<comment><USER3> There was inevitable inbreeding between ancestors too.

<comment><USER4> The way you phrased that shows some bias toward contemporary European family structures.

Inbreeding was standard accepted practice pretty much everywhere until 1500 years ago, and still is in many parts of the world. (In many Arab countries, for example, marriages between first cousins make up 15+% of all marriages, and marriages between first or second cousins make up 30+% of all marriages.)

It's especially in Western Europe where cousin marriages out to 2nd, 3rd, or further cousins were taboo, and universal "outbreeding" was/is the enforced norm. (Primarily because the Catholic church wanted to break the political power of extended families, and divert more inheritances to the church instead of to people's kin. In similar vein they discouraged/disallowed divorce, adoptions, marriage of widows, etc.) I did a google search to look for quick sources just now. This page has a summary: [http://www.collective- action.info/_DEB_MAP_RelationMarriageP...](http://www.collective- action.info/_DEB_MAP_RelationMarriagePatternsExchangeInheritance)

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry for the confusion. I just thought when the human population was still small long ago, when there wasn't even a concept of 'incest', inbreeding between ancestors was more common and expected. So we all descended from incestors in today's context. Is that right?

<comment><USER4> Yep. If you go back 10–20 generations in anyone's family tree, you'll find we're all the product of sexual relationships between first cousins, siblings, parents and their children, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a common thing to say that we Australians are descendants of criminals (Australia was originally populated by British prisoners). It's interesting to see that it is now one of the friendliest countries in the world, coming from a country filled with criminals 200 years ago.

In the end, we have all descended from a criminal in one form or the other :)

<comment><USER6> We shouldn't let them get away with it though: it's still as ignorant of history as saying Americans are descended from puritans.

There was no Melbourne (4.5M people) prison - John Batman sailed up a river, decided 'it was a good place for a city'. There's been waves of farmers, waves of gold miners, waves of British and mediterranean emigrees and waves of refugees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are probably a large number of the 6 billion alive that were the result of rape in their lineage, even within the past 8-10 generations. I think we want to have a connection to those in our past, but the reality is that we have more in common with any random name on the census than those whose DNA eventually trickled down to us.

<comment><USER8> > the reality is that we have more in common with any random name on the > census than those whose DNA eventually trickled down to us.

Really?

DNA will give you a whole lot of things. What if the theoretical rapist had a predisposition to Alzheimer's? MS? Parkinson's? Huntingdon's? etc.

<comment><USER9> Well, actually, after 8 generations, each allele has 8 chances to not get inherited. So if the rapist had, say, one copy of the Huntington's allele (an autosomal dominant mutation according to Wiki), then you would have a 1/256 chance of having inherited the disease from that ancestor. Two copies of the allele from the rapist would give you a 1/128 chance. I'd have to say GP's point stands here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Leave it to a vice.com article to reference how relevant material is avoided (twice) because of the cost for a paywall.

If the guy really wanted to find out what was going on, he'd at least pay the $20 to find out.

<comment><USER11> Christine Estima is the author.

<comment><USER10> Poor reading comprehension on my part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I sit here, armed with this knowledge, and I think to myself quite > shamefully, You can take the man out of Syria but you can't take Syria out > of the man.

The author can be damn shamed about that reasoning. I hope she only take it for granted for herself and not every Syrian on earth.

> I suppose, when you come from a family that is named after a gun, you will, > in all likelihood, die by that gun.

Well, no. I seem to recall from reading the article 5 minutes ago that her great-grandfather was actually a nice guy.

</comment><comment><USER12> As a non-native English speaker, I couldn't understand the title until I realized his great-grandfather Michael Zarbatany is his mother's grandfather, instead of his father's grandfather. Why doesn't English distinguish between paternal grandparents and maternal grandparents?

<comment> anton-107 Is it really important to distinguish?

<comment><USER13> It's a cultural thing I guess. I know some people who think of their maternal lineage as if it were less of a family than the paternal one. Their excuse borders religion and superstitions.

I'm interested though which languages distinguish maternal and paternal grandparents. Just like in English, in Polish you simply qualify[1] if things like these matter.

[1] paternal: po mieczu (sword lineage); maternal: po kądzieli (distaff lineage)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess there will be more and more of that as paper archives are scanned and indexed. I find the family history interesting but have had to use non google methods of research.

</comment><comment><USER15> So it's interesting and all, but why is this in HN?

<comment><USER16> Why am I seeing so many of these comments lately? It's on HN because it was voted to the front page. Not every thread has to be about a VC, startup, or argument about a database engine.

<comment><USER17> > Why am I seeing so many of these comments lately?

I'm pretty sure I read before that PG started HN back before reddit had subreddits because he wanted a community about a specific set of topics. Lots of people then formed an idea of what HN was about and started visiting regularly for more of the same. If something seems out of place and on the front page it's perfectly natural to expect comments questioning why something got upvoted.

<comment><USER16> This is the very first paragraph of the Guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes > more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the > answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I've seen lots of non-technology topics since I started reading, and to me this post didn't seem out of place at all. The "why is this here" posts seem to be happening more frequently in the last couple of months, but I guess it's possible that I just wasn't noticing them before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The notion that "blood carries" anything other than oxygen and nutrients seem archaic, intellectually offensive and as dangerous as racism.

<comment><USER14> Carries some DNA too.

<comment><USER19> To be completely pedantic, red blood cells lack nuclei, so aside from maybe mitochondria or something they actually don't carry DNA.

<comment><USER20> There are cells in the blood from one's mother and for mothers, from their children.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why we buy into ideas: how to convince others of our thoughts - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bufferapp.com/why-we-buy-into-ideas-how-to-convince-others-of-our-thoughts

<comment><USER2> This article is more about communication. To convince others, make the idea their own.

On communication: The best way I have found to communicate to mixed groups effectively is by giving the straight shooter response immediately followed by imagery based elaboration, which ultimately gets more airplay/screenplay. Some successful speakers flip the order, but that is more dependent on the audience. Notice this the next keynote or quarterly conference call you listen to.

Maybe it is because I have both arts talent and logical thinking, but balancing the two has never been a problem for me. Make each one as concise as can be while still accurate/full picture.

<comment><USER3> While I understand the basic idea of "make the idea their own", is there any way you could either maybe expand on that a bit, or point me to an existing blog post or something?

Regarding the communication bit, I definitely agree with the order. While not doing it on purpose, looking back I did notice differences in the responses of people based on how I'd pitch an idea/project at meetups.

<comment><USER2> There are probably many ways of doing it. It is very context and person dependent.

-infectious enthusiasm

-team emphasis

-rationally addressing all of their concerns

-leading them up to the idea so they 'come up with it'

-giving people a detail that they can change

-make sure one of their value added ideas is implemented within it

-putting someone in charge of a section of it

-reward/punishment

-scratching each others back

Essentially, making the other person have skin in the game.

A chef I used to work with would yell and rile up one worker when he saw we were going to get busy. One day the worker exclaimed, 'I hate this. why don't you yell at Bob?'. The chef replied, 'Bob works like shit when he is angry, you work like shit if you are not'.

Each person has their own trigger. Knowing that trigger is a huge part of managing people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The biggest discovery I made in my studies to become a hypnotist was in being able to discern other people's metaphors and use them in communicating (rather than my own).

Personal metaphors are jam packed with information and emotion.

For example, when someone talks about being part of a "club", it seems like an innocent word doesn't it, but to them the club metaphor may mean the inclusion or ostracization of a social group.

Of course, some metaphors are universally understood (especially archetypes) and can be the transport system for new instructions to the subconscious mind. I used the Warrior metaphor for my eyes-open self hypnosis: <http://summonthewarrior.com> and people seem to respond really well to it, myself included!

</comment><comment><USER5> I heard this idea or visual vs auditive persons before, in the early nineties. Also a third group, kinesthetics, that I was placed in. Has anybody a reference for this in books or articles, persuasion oriented?

<comment><USER6> She's providing a very smoothed-over introduction to neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) [1]. The part about talking and listening is a take on Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People[2].

I'm no fan of NLP - it was intended as a personal development aid to deal with phobias and disorders, so was intended to be internally-focused. However, in my experience, many use it as a manipulative tool (externally-focused), which I dislike intensely. Makes me feel I'm being played, so recognising that is the value I derive from understanding it.

Dale Carnegie's book, however, is (my opinion) _the_ best and most useful personal development book I've ever read.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming>

[2] <http://www.amazon.co/dp/0749307846>

<comment><USER7> > I'm no fan of NLP - it was intended as a personal > development aid to deal > with phobias and disorders, so was > intended to be internally-focused. > However, in my experience, > many use it as a manipulative tool (externally- > focused), > which I dislike intensely.

That's not a problem of the tool itself, but a problem with the handlers of the tool.

Usually people learn NPL to fix weird behavior within themselves. Once that happens, they usually ignore the meme "with great power comes great responsibility", and go their way messing with other people's ideas, or even feelings.

If you learn it as it was intended, and refrain yourself of exploiting it for profit, you're on the good side.

I always wanted to learn NPL, but I've never tried because I figured I wasn't ready yet. But after this, I think the time might be perfect to pick it up and weed out some weird behaviors of my own.

<comment><USER6> Lol, I dislike how it's used, not what it is. Also, bear in mind that NLP requires a LOT of effort to pull off (reading it and using the techniques for a month or two will not yield much).

<comment><USER7> Who said I'd put that little effort in learning something that is actually helpful? But hey, thanks anyway for your concern. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a very poignant picture, worth 1000 words.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't buy it.</comment>


Microsoft discloses security breach of customer support database - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-discloses-security-breach-of-customer-support-database/ <comment><USER2> Blamed on misconfig of azure security...not surprised</comment>


You Don't Need JQuery - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/oneuijs/You-Dont-Need-jQuery <comment><USER2> While I agree that jQuery is often overused and not needed for basic DOM manipulation, what this document succeeds at most is reminding me just how useful the library actually is.

        [].slice.call(document.querySelectorAll(selector) || []);

is not exactly intuitive and an awful lot of typing. That goes for quite a few of the examples given. Anybody who needs to do those things frequently ends up writing wrapper functions and basically reimplementing jQuery.

Then there is the convenience and power of the monad syntax. Also that jQuery allows you to manipulate all elements matching a selector in a single statement, just as if it was a single element. And last, but certainly not least, the fact that it abstracts away quite a few incompatibilities and implementation details (classList is not always available, textContent behaves differently, etc.

No, you don't _need_ jQuery, but it does make life an awful lot easier.</comment>


What is 1e100.net? - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/174717?hl=en <comment><USER2> Google should run a server on 1e100.net and redirect it to this answer. Some click tracking domains do this, and it helps non-technical people feel less worried when they punch the domain into their web browser and it goes somewhere with an explanation.

<comment><USER3> For some ISPs, if you go to [https://as12345.net](https://as12345.net) (where the 12345 is their globally unique AS number), you'll get a looking glass tool. Or a page with a link to their looking glass, contacts for NOC and abuse for use in NOC-to-NOC communications, etc. I don't think Google would do that, though.

<comment><USER4> Google has [https://peering.google.com/](https://peering.google.com/) for that purpose. My understanding is that it provides similar tooling for ASNs that have a relationship (peering, etc.) with Google ASNs.

<comment><USER3> Yes, Google is pretty easy to peer with. At major public IXes they will bring up their V4 and v6 sessions on their side before yours, and leave them in an enabled state, since they use a suite of automation tools to manage traffic flows to regional peers. This makes it easy to bring up the session on your side and immediately see routes and live bgp prefix exchanges going both directions without having to interact with their noc.

Given the number of peers that they have around the world, it would be very labor intensive to hand craft a bgp session config and leave it in a down state until mutual noc contact was made to bring it live.

They obviously have a great interest in getting traffic like YouTube videos to the residential/commercial downstream eyeball ISP end users as efficiently as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After reading their explanation, I don't understand the purpose of 1e100.net. Maybe someone who is more technical than I am can explain how it is used to identify Google's servers and why that's useful.

On that note, I should answer their question: Was this article helpful? with No.

<comment><USER6> Servers need a name that's different from the product(s) they're serving.

For example, when I look up google.com and then reverse-lookup the IP address, I get sfo07s13-in-f14.1e100.net (you'd get something different depending where you are). The name sfo07s13-in-f14 could tell someone where to look if that machine is misbehaving.

If they'd named it sfo07s13-in-f14.google.com, then browsing to that URL sends google cookies. If it's some server from a recent acquisition that may not be up to Google's level of security, that's dangerous.

Even fairly small companies are well-advised to have a domain name for their brand and a separate domain name for their infrastructure.

<comment><USER5> So, for example, the domain google.com points to the domain sfo07s13-in-f14.1e100.net (depending on where you're browsing) which then points to an IP address of the server that's serving you the content.

        google.com -> subdomain.1e100.net -> server IP address

Then when you run a reverse DNS on the IP address, you get sfo07s13-in-f14.1e100.net.

        rDNS: server IP address -> subdomain.1e100.net

So, like you said, if something is wrong with the server, you can run a reverse DNS on the IP address to get the subdomain sfo07s13-in-f14.1e100.net.

Is this the correct understanding?

But don't you already have the IP address of the misbehaving machine?

<comment><USER7> Lots of people look at IP addresses. Most of the people who find the "1e100.net" records in their network logs would have no easy way of knowing that 220.127.116.11 (or whatever) was a Google IP. The reverse lookup allows you to easily find out what domain it belongs to (1e100.net, which a Google search shows is a Google address).

You can also embed other information in the reverse name, such as the region, datacenter, floor, switch, rack, or unit number of the machine. It can be incredibly easy to locate the machine by just looking at its reverse name. "Oh, 188.8.131.52 is in us-east-1, on floor 3, in rack 27, unit 5. Let me go check the network cable."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FYI, Android phones are always sending pings to 1e100 even if Google Apps are not installed. This is a system feature that detects 'captive portals'. If you want to observe your phone doing this, download the app 'Net Monitor' (also on F-droid).

More info and how to disable this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/LineageOS/comments/7m8tsq/mysteriou...](https://www.reddit.com/r/LineageOS/comments/7m8tsq/mysterious_system_connections_to_1e100net/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I also discovered while doing some whois checks that Google's domain registrar (Google Domains) is owned by a Google subsidiary called "Charleston Road Registry". [http://charlestonroadregistry.com](http://charlestonroadregistry.com)

This is the street that goes through the Google campus in Mountain View, CA.

</comment><comment><USER10> I remember experimenting with traceroute and reverse DNS back in school and wondering what kind of mystery company even google was renting its servers from...

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that they group the machines by IATA airport codes. I guess that's the nearest airport for that datacenter.

<comment><USER12> From my understanding it's more of a "what's the most well known airport". Google LA is in Venice, so it's closest airport should be SMO, it's still referred to in corp speak and machine naming as LAX.

<comment><USER13> The point of naming convention isnt to be painfully pedantically correct, like this comment. It's to provide a useful guidepost to humans, who know LAX but don't know about SMO.

Why didn't you mention ICAO codes, they'd be more universally correct anyways, right? KSMO, KLAX?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You will often see the 1e100.net in reverse domain lookups, such as those produced by traceroute and ping.

Try a traceroute to google.com and you should see at least one if not several 1e100.net hops.

</comment><comment><USER15> Heh, I never realized doubles can fit a googol. I knew they work up to 1e300-ish, but never made this explicit connection.

<comment><USER16> Well, only approximately: as a double it is actually 10000000000000000159028911097599180468360808563945281389781327557747838772170381060813469985856815104

<comment><USER17> It still 'fits'. The box is just very weird and sometimes the object that comes out is slightly different in size, but at least it's predictable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> See also : atdn.net ; tfbnw.net ; cloudfront.net

In today's world of CDNs and IP anycast, I'm not sure how accurate it is to talk about these IPs corresponding to "a server". Obviously packets go to some NIC somewhere, but probably not the same one for each of us and likely not the same hour-to-hour.

Seems that Facebook, Yahoo/AOL don't seem to go along with the convention that endpoint IPs reverse resolve to a different domain -- elsewhere in this thread mentioned as a cookie-payload-leak countermeasure. Google and Amazon do.

<comment><USER13> I don't think people appreciate how much effort Google does to minimizing cookie leakage. It's good security and privacy hygiene, and it also speeds requests - transmitting sizable cookies isn't free, and takes up time, especially when you're paying by the millisecond.

This is why there are various different domains for static content, domains for user content (googleusercontent.com), domains for certain cloud services, etc. Protections against XSS and cookie leakage is taken very seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting nomenclature but with google this makes sense.

1e100 = googol, which is 1 followed by 100 zeroes. And a googlgolplex is 1 followed by a googol zeroes.

</comment><comment><USER20> So is all Google Cloud infrastructure routed through 1e100.net as well?

<comment><USER21> Domain names aren't routed. I assume every public ip maps to a name on this TLD, if that's what you're asking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Be sure to hit "YES" under the "Was this article helpful?" prompt.

<comment><USER23> Unless, of course, the article wasn't helpful. Then hit "NO" under the same prompt. Because, you know, YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 1e100=1, not googol (which is 10e100). They should fix the name.

<comment><USER25> In scientific notation, "e" means "×10^", not "^". "1e100" thus means "1×10¹⁰⁰", which is correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> yes, this is the standard way to do the cookie syncing business.

<comment><USER27> Cookies will only use this domain if it's used in hostnames, but I think google only uses 1e100.net for reverse lookups (PTR results).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A googol is a 1 with 100 zeroes after it.

1.0 x 10^100

</comment><comment><USER29> Scientific notation for the number one google. I'm sure no one else knew that so I won't scroll down and check before answering.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why not use a google.com subdomain? The first time I saw 1e100.net in the output of netstat, it confused the heck out of me.

<comment><USER31> I recommend reading some of the other comments under this post - they dig into concepts like cookie leakage, reverse DNS separation, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The real reason they opted to do this, is make mobile firewalling more of a pain. If each application talked to the specific (types of) google services they needed, firewalling would be easier.

Instead, users cannot have a global rule to block _.1e100.net across their devices, due to this choice. In my case, this results in having literally dozens of rules - really one per application, in order to ensure that applications that are granted upstream internet access, are not granted_.1e100.net access unless I explicitly feel that they need access to Google Services.

<comment><USER33> So, it's basically domain fronting.

It's okay for them, when they do it to shroud their individual services and keep you from blocking one. If I want to pass Mail and block Adsense, no dice for me.

But if I want to domain front, because I need to pass through a third party censor, tough darts for me.

<comment><USER32> Exactly this, exactly my issue.

<comment><USER34> Why do you even try to block using the rDNS name? It's literally backwards.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


In Bitcoin's Orbit: Rival Virtual Currencies Vie for Acceptance - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/in-bitcoins-orbit-rival-virtual-currencies-vie-for-acceptance/?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Is Ripple seriously in the running to be the next Bitcoin? So many articles I read, news reports I watch, talk as if it is.

The company that started it holds half of them. Who (outsite of Ripple Labs) can honestly say that sounds like a good idea?

<comment><USER3> Not really, it appears Ripple is just hiring PR firms and lobbyists (like one of the women at the Senate hearings: [https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/402918026968039425](https://twitter.com/jerrybrito/status/402918026968039425))</comment></comment>


Bug 1321066 – (CVE-2016-9079) Reported Firefox SVG 0-day (SMIL) - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1321066 <comment><AUTHOR> The fun thing is how simple the test case is. All you need to do is to call pauseAnimations at the right time. I was able to do a more real world test case pretty quickly.</comment>


Ask HN:Best Crowdfunding options for Hardware? - <AUTHOR>

My sense is the jury's still out on which platform hardware companies are using for crowdfunding - kickstarter, indiegogo, selfstarter, etc.
Is this the case?  What are the decision factors hardware entrepreneurs are <i>actually</i> factoring into their decision? <comment><USER2> do you have a patent?</comment>


7 Decades, 7 Musical Evolutions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.echonest.com/post/70299217721/7-decades-7-musical-evolutions

<comment><USER2> So by get getting louder they mean there's less dynamic range (range from softest to loudest) with the narrowing favoring a louder new-average. This however makes sense, at least to me, if we look at how music is being consumed these days. A great deal of music is now consumed during noisy activities -- working out, taking the train to work, driving -- compared to the '50's though early '90's (before Walkman's become true commodity goods) when the majority of listening was done in relatively quite environments -- at home in your living room, at concerts.

Portable music listening, in louder environments, necessitates the increased 'loudness' in order for songs to be heard by the average person. Most people aren't buying $100-500 IEHP/OEHP to listen to their music, so it becomes pointless to add in quieter and more subtle bits to pop songs since they are lost to the environment for many people. Additionally, radio broadcasts lose dynamic range during to transmission and most cars lack the audio horsepower (so to speak) to properly replicate tracks from local-media sources let alone from a radio broadcast.</comment>


The Different Sizes of Infinity - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-different-sizes-of-infinity-2013-11

<comment><USER2> [2013]

Doesn't deliver on its promise - it only gives us one extra infinity. And why is this particular article "better" than any of the dozens out there that have been submitted to HN in the past?

<comment><AUTHOR> Take it easy dude. It doesn't have to be worse or better; some might find it interesting and some might not.

I wasn't introduced to the topic before and it looked nice to me. It's just a <simple proof> as the title inside the articles implies.

<comment><USER2>
      > Take it easy dude.

You probably didn't mean it like this, and it's probably a cultural thing, but I've done a quick straw poll around the office here and the consensus is that the quoted text above is patronising, bordering on offensive. It's likely that my comment is equally being mis-interpreted, or carrying baggage that was not intended.

So I suggest that we might be talking past each other, but I thought you might like to know how your comment has been perceived outside of your immediate circle.

Moving on, you say:

      > I wasn't introduced to the topic
      > before and it looked nice to me.

There are many discussions here on HN about this, and many many article out in the web that are more interesting, and cover more of the details. If you like this, there's lots to go and explore, including things like:

* Is there an infinity between the ones mentioned in the article?

* How many infinities are there?

* What are some of the counter-intuitive things this implies?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Convert .NET formatted JSON response dates to human readable  - <AUTHOR> http://jsondate.net

<comment><AUTHOR> Just something I tossed together to deal with being asked what /Date(1346997005000)/ means in human redable format -- this is the format .net/ WebAPI puts dates in by default... (it's just a timestamp--but this just makes it more transaparent....)</comment>


Teaching My Computer to Write Its Own Music (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/how-i-taught-my-computer-to-write-its-own-music <comment><USER2> I've heard a lot of ML experiments in making music and I haven't not enjoyed any of them, until this one. Most sound repetitive, bland, unemotional, cold, unoriginal, tedious.

This one is different, to my ears.

<comment><USER3> Because it's not a ML experiment, but a Max/Msp sketch which semi-randomly fires off carefully (by a human) prepared samples.</comment></comment>


Amazon adds UI for building CloudFormation templates - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-cloudformation-designer-support-for-more-services/ <comment><AUTHOR> it's cool, I guess, but I don't really get the point. You still have to edit properties in JSON. Not a big deal, but if anything it's less flexible than using something like Troposphere. I was hoping there would be an actual UI to make it more obvious what property combo's should be used in conjunction, etc... without having to pour through the documentation.

It also took about 2 minutes to load up a giant existing template, and the visualization was basically un-usable.</comment>


NSA-proof your e-mail in 2 hours (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-hours/ <comment><USER2> NSA-proof this is certainly not. It might complicate reading your messages in transit, just a bit, but that's about it.

E-mail messages leak metadata all over the place. Though according to the author 1/3 of their email volume is to parties that support TLS, that still leaves 2/3rds up for grabs. If you happen to send a message to two people, one who's e-mail provider supports TLS and one who doesn't you're toast too.

There is no mention of encrypting your messages using GPG or any other tool.

Though they do seem to use EncFS for the email database, then there's the RAM to worry about, CryptKeeper could be interesting (or OpenBSD's encrypted virtual memory), your CPU and a bajillion other components both hardware and software.

Then there's passages like this:

> For security reasons, I'm not going to disclose the measures that I take to > avoid others gaining root on my system.

If that's your security model...

There are still myriads of exploits that would allow you to gain access to a machine, and as a consequence read the data, which really shouldn't be beyond the capabilities of the NSA if they really wanted to.

<comment><USER3> I agree, this essentially cancels out the entire premise:

> _For security reasons, I'm not going to disclose the measures that I take to > avoid others gaining root on my system. A good start might be changing your > root password, or keeping your mail server under your pillow at night._

<comment><USER4> Lets not forget the context of this. This was posted one month after the initial Snowden revelations and the problem it was trying to fix was that all the major email providers had known backdoors to the the Five Eyes. 'NSA- Proofing' in this context meant running your own email server which was not known to be backdoored.

Granted, its title is hyperbolic, but providing a way to get rid of a known vulnerability in the email chain in a reasonable amount of time (definitely not two hours though) was (and perhaps remains) a reasonable security measure.

Original HN discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6045194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6045194)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "NSA proof".

Running your non-backdoored AMD or Intel processor, on your non backdoored operating system, with non-backdoored OpenSSL, non-backdoored pseudorandom generator, on a non-tampered Internet, non-backdoored network equipment... :)

<comment><USER6> Also the biggest problem is that almost everyone else one sends an unencrypted email to is not "NSA-proof."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone up for turning this into a Docker image or the like? I remember this being very useful for simplifying the install of the machine learning software required for running Deep Dream.

<comment><USER8> [https://mailinabox.email/](https://mailinabox.email/) does pretty much everything listed and more (and is being reviewed by more people so it might be better and more secure), automated, so doesn't take 2 hours but rather 20 minutes. They have a docker branch in github but atm there's no work on it anymore. It does work very well though. In a nutshell: if anyone is up for working on secure email in docker, please continue the work done on MIB already and contribute.

<comment><USER9> I'd quite like to run this on a Raspberry Pi (3), but from what I gather, there is no support at present.

<comment><USER4> From experience, this guide works fine on a Pi 2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Prepare to spend a whole day if you want a setup like this. And if you want web mail, you are only half done ... Then you would also want to make a script to reproduce it, in case you had to reinstall your server. I'm thinking there's a business opportunity here, to provide a maintained container, for e-mail in particular. But also to make linux "apps"/servers more modular.

I would also like to thank everyone who write tutorials like this for free.

<comment><USER11> Off the top of my head, that sounds just like Mailpile[0]. There's obviously many other less recognizable solutions. [https://github.com/tonioo/modoboa](https://github.com/tonioo/modoboa) sounds pretty similar.

Lots of players in the modular Linux "apps" and server space. For developers, there are Docker images, OVF virtual appliances, things of that sort. From more of a user perspective, there's sandstorm.io. I believe Mailpile was even on the Sandstorm app list at some point, not sure if it still is.

[0]: [https://www.mailpile.is/](https://www.mailpile.is/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Running a mail server is much more than its first time daemons configuration, but it is interesting anyway as a tutorial.

<comment><USER13> Not ending in the recipient's spam folder can be difficult when your IP is not clean enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As long as one end of the email chain isn't secure this whole exercise is kinda pointless.

<comment><USER15> For that one chain at least. You don't want to be the end that causes all of your chains to be insecure.

Related: if you use your own server you can setup as many aliases as you need. You can use a unique one for each company you do business with, for example. Doing so increases the probability that you will detect when your email address (and possibly other info) has been shared or leaked at the other end. It isn't guaranteed to happen, but what often happens is the compromised email address is used to send you spam. If the email address is properly unique (not easily guessed or dictionary attacked) you'll immediately know which company might have leaked it and you can investigate. You can quickly change that one email alias and registration, without affecting your other accounts.

<comment><USER14> Not really, or well really not.

To have email working you need to own a DNS record which means that your details are on record some where (domain privacy settings don't really work against an adversary like the NSA or anyone with a decent enough legal team).

To pay for the server you need to pay for hosting which leaves another paper trail, you can't host mail servers in your home as your ISP will block SMTP traffic in most cases to combat spam from botnets, if you still want to do it you have to use your ISP's SMTP relay which isn't "NSA proof" and also quite likely puts every email you send on a list easily accessible by law enforcement.

When you run your own server you inherit all the security risks associated with every piece of software which runs on that server, most people aren't really good at dealing, zero-days are also usually patched prior to disclosure by the big players (e.g. Heartbleed) and even when not companies like Google will have a plethora of mitigating controls that reduce the impact of any potential non-disclosed vulnerability.

As far as the aliases go if you run your own server aliases mean nothing even if you buy a separate domain for each alias the MX records will still be the same which means that all email addresses can be traced to you, if you only want aliased for disposable mails/spam control then any current mail provider usually offers unlimited aliases also.

As far as controlling the chain you aren't really, you have little control over how the mails are being relayed, you might be forced to use an email relay (some ISP's actually do transparent mail relays), your target might be behind a mail relay, and even when not you don't know if the guy you are sending it too doesn't use gmail or any other provider to manage their mailboxes using POP3.

And the last part and what people usually dislike being brought up is that actively trying to avoid the NSA puts you on their radar, the NSA has different levels of wide range and targeted surveillance the more "interesting" you seem the more likely you are to be tagged by one of their more targeted programs.

Now this isn't an argument that results in saying "you shouldn't encrypt anything and send stuff in the clear" but it is an argument that if you actually care about operation security then not standing out is a critical part of your opsec. People often point out and say that "security trough obscurity" is a fallacy, but that on it's own is even a bigger fallacy, obscurity is a critical part of real world security (whether it's technical or operational) the important thing to remember is that one must not rely only on obscurity to ensure security but one that ignores it completely just exposes them selves to unnecessary risks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Probably worth noting that DSPAM is no longer in the Debian repos.

See [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754810](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754810)

</comment><comment><USER17> Waste of time considering 50-60% of your e-mail goes to or comes from Gmail.

<comment><USER18> Gmail, and webapps in general, should support efficient client-side encryption and signing.

<comment><USER19> Web platform is not suited for client side cryptography, because server can serve a customized scripts to you and there's no practical way to find that.

<comment><USER14> That's not quite true you can validate the scripts the server is sending you, various hashing algorithms are sufficient and although not prevalent today you can always use the "archive" attribute[0] in your script tags to provide an archive with digital signatures (this was a feature in Netscape and even early IE) it was used in the mid to late 90's when SSL wasn't that prevalent.

But this isn't that relevant today mainly because of SSL, and while it's true that the server can serve you a modified script even over SSL but it can only do that in such cases when the server has been compromised (excluding any attacks that break/MITM SSL) in which case if you can't trust the content that is served by the server you can't trust the content stored on it either.

But lets say that it's still not enough then well a client side encryption in the browser either natively or via an addon can provide the required functionality to make web apps work properly even without providing all the functionality over the wire. There are quite a few hybrid webapps for Chrome that do not work without an addon or those for which the addon adds allot of functionality that could not be efficiently offered by current web only standards.

[0][https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms970704.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms970704.aspx)

<comment><USER19> I'll give you an example. There's a software that was audited: Truecrypt. I know hash of the executable that was audited, so I can download that executable, verify it's hash signature and use it for my purposes.

But if I use crypto in browser, it's like I'm downloading Truecrypt every time from the website. And there's no easy way to determine that I downloaded exactly that binary that was audited and used by everyone else. So if FBI (or narco cartel) reached authors of that software and they want to attack me, they have a perfect attack vector: identify me and serve me a modified code.

There could be an addon providing that functionality, but I'm not aware of any. And installing additional addon isn't much easier than just installing a separate software. Web apps are only good because they are easy to launch.

<comment><USER14> When you use crypto in the browser it will be either natively provided by the browser or via javascript.

In both cases you can always ensure the integrity of the crypto if you trust the initial integrity check.

You can verify the hash for every javascript you download it's even integrally supported by the browser (but not used as SSL solves this issue more easily).

The only thing you need to so is to have a hash of the javascript code that you know has been audited which you considered to be trusted beyond that if you download it once or a million times it doesn't matter.

To make it a bit more cleared the TrueCrypts bootloader is not encrypted and there is little to no integrity checks as it doesn't support TPM or CPU specific security features in this case you have no ability to validate that the TC instance that you boot is the actual instance that you have installed and that it wasn't compromised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is pretty weak, IMHO. You should at least use on-the-fly PGP encryption like Mike Cardwell detailed: [https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...](https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email). You basically just add the public keys to the exim account and it uses a transport filter to look them up and encrypt automatically. With a properly configured client, you'll never have decrypted data on disk.

</comment><comment><USER21> >For security reasons, I'm not going to disclose the measures that I take to avoid others gaining root on my system.

Security by obscurity is certainly not NSA-proof.

</comment><comment><USER22> Email was not designed to be secure, it was designed to be convenient. Trying to make something that is insecure by design secure is never going to be secure.

Having said that taking some steps to better protect yourself is a good idea. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you are secure from a body such as the NSA.

<comment><USER11> Isn't that what we have crypto protocols for? To secure something that is insecure by design? The Internet was not designed to be secure either, which is why we use HTTPS. If you need the contents of your email to be signed and confidential, you use public key encryption. Or maybe that was the point of your comment?

<comment><USER22> Yeah that was the point :) You can wrap up the contents but everything else is open.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does it matter? Every person you will communicate with is open to having their messages read. As far is information gathering goes, you are not making anything harder to access.

</comment><comment><USER24> Potentially useful for 1) paranoid people or 2) people whose threat models warrant this level of hassle.

<comment><USER25> Or people who knows that email stored on a third party's server for longer that 180 days is legally considered abandoned. Abandoned property enjoys no legal protection.

<comment><USER26> That's incorrect. After 180 days, only a subpoena is needed, rather than a warrant.

<comment><USER25> You are right, I made an overstatement about a deviously complex situation. An administrative subpoena, which doesn't come from a judge - just the investigating federal agency, is required for old mail. They send out tens of thousands every year, so I don't think it is a stretch to describe the barrier as essentially a form letter on federal stationery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A better way to NSA proof your mail would be just using Freenet's mail or something else like that.</comment>