EU parliaments website in violation of GDPR - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matthias-gliwka/eu-parliament-websites-violates-gdpr-200eb2c00e8f <comment><USER3> How is this news? Everyone is scrambling to be GDPR-compliant before the due date. Probably the people behind this site also.

<comment><USER4> Well, if the intent behind the legislation was to protect personal data, presumably they would have modified their own behavior before regulating.

But they haven't. Makes things clear.

They also control the enforcement mechanism. Let's see if they will modify it to save face or if they'll just ignore it. Or do you think they'll fine the parliament (not that they haven't exempted themselves, of course) ?

<comment><USER5> You're making the incorrect assumption - deliberately, I presume - that the people writing the legislation have anything to do with how the website operates. You're wrong, of course. The EU(P) is a very large and very complex organization, just like many multinationals.

Should they eat their own dog food? Probably. But pretending there's some kind of hypocrisy going on is stretching it.

<comment><USER4> Well my opinion is that the EU shouldn't exist. A non-democratic state controlling democratic states seems to me to be a spectacularly bad idea. But I'm a consultant and I've worked and work for these people, mostly indirectly.

Let me assure you: there is absolutely no shortage of hypocrisy. You don't need anything more than to walk around their offices and ask what all those weird marking on public and private spaces mean. You'll be disgusted, and cured of any notion that the EU intends to do anything for anyone but themselves.

But outside of that, there are clear personal status cult being upheld everywhere around the European organisations, with the biggest distinction between the "fonctionnaires" and everybody else (although as an employee of the commission you're still several rungs above "les gens de la rue" (which does not mean homeless, like in France, it just means normal people of Brussels). And may God help you if you're working for ISS or any of the cleaning companies. At that point your status is so low that people routinely throw things at you just to cool their frustration. This is accepted and normal behavior, despite how incredibly immoral it is.

(The "European quarter" of Brussels has a ton of public and private spaces, from "public" parks to a small shopping center (with mostly cafes), and the highly coveted parkings and parking spaces that are reserved, by law, for European officials' use only. So does Woluwe, even if they're a lot better hidden there. To say that these people have no intention to use their power to improve people's lives is absurd when you walk around their offices)

<comment><USER6> > A non-democratic state controlling democratic states seems to me to be a > spectacularly bad idea. But I'm a consultant and I've worked and work for > these people, mostly indirectly.

The EU isn't a state it's a union of states and there is EU elections happening.

<comment><USER4> EU elections aren't selecing the people who make laws. That's the commission and the EU council.

By that standard the Soviet Union, China and Saudi Arabia are/were democratic too. They all have/had elections. Elections that do not determine who has legislative and executive power are not elections.

The reason why is of course simple. People in member states do not care about the EU. They care about local politics 99% of the time. On top of that member states electorates do not agree on the issues. Not on what the issues are in the first place and certainly not on what is to be done about them. There is no way for politicians to campaign across the EU, it's all done locally. Therefore the assessment of most fonctionnaires in Brussels is probably correct: there is no way to have an effective democratic EU. They also asses that they don't want to do that, as it would not be a unifying force.

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

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reading the GDPR text shows there is a bunch of exceptions for which storing of example IP-addresses can be done without anonymizing or consent, with one of the more clear cut being security. If the processing is done exclusively for security purpose then the site can argue in court that they are in compliance.

Compliance with the law is always about context. What is gathered, why and how is it used, and last is there additional factors to consider. Google Analytics in itself is interesting because it is not clear if Google themselves then process the data and for what use, especially for the enterprise version.

<comment><USER8> Google Analytics is not a security tool. You can't even see what an specific IP has been doing.

<comment><USER9> The issue isn't that _you_ can't see what a specific IP is doing, but Google certainly can, and it's more than that.

The GDPR really spells out that you can't ask for consent / basis to do one thing and then flip around and do more with it.

Aka, if you consent to signing up for a newsletter they can't turn around and sell your email to another list, take that list to their next startup that's unrelated, etc.

For Google this gets tricky, you're consent to using them for analytics (most everyone on the free, non enterprise, version). Are they also using that to feed their search engine? Tweak display ads? Check for fraud? Build profiles of people across sites/browser sessions, and devices?

And while this is about analytics, the same can be said for Maps, Docs, Domains, Fonts, etc. all of which have a primary use and (for Google) a stack of juicy secondary uses they can make money off of. Most of it doesn't even strike me as nefarious (it seems reasonable that they'd index pages that come up in Google analytics), but it's not disclosed so nobody is exactly sure what's being done.

Even this anonymize IP business is tricky b/c:

1\. They still get the IP as surely as you browsing to www.google.com 2\. They may be tracking in other ways (fingerprinting, cookies, etc.) that unique identify you, so does it matter?

<comment><USER4> > The GDPR really spells out that you can't ask for consent / basis to do one > thing and then flip around and do more with it.

That's not how reality works. Laws, despite god knows how many attempts, don't change that. If you have the information, you can use it.

> Aka, if you consent to signing up for a newsletter they can't turn around > and sell your email to another list, take that list to their next startup > that's unrelated, etc.

Ok. When the spam problem stops, I'll believe this. Until then, I reserve judgement.

> For Google this gets tricky, you're consent to

Sure, but with a chunk of their operating expenses ($9 billion a year) spent on lawyers ... tricky is not a problem. For everyone else, it is.

It gives them a legal way to destroy any company they don't like, it's a land- grab for both their own jurisdiction (as opposed to member nations' jurisdictions), it's land-grab for global jurisdiction, it's a (partial) denial of private contracting rights and it's explicitly designed for selective enforcement.

What more could one want in a big new law ?

<comment><USER10> Your points made me think that this law is likely just going to solidify market monopolies and ensure competition can't exist legally, similar to large banks in the US

<comment><USER4> Well, yes. However, we should look at illegally: it's going to make it much easier for sites to exist in areas where there won't be any enforcement. So it's going to kill European sites, not anything else.

Effectively European companies below a certain size can't allow for forums anymore.

Obviously this will impact things like newspaper forums, tech support, webfora on specific topics, ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have the text in front of me but I'm pretty sure there is an exception for member states government agencies (if they choose to have the exception). I wouldn't be surprised if this covers EU agencies and institutions as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> They're excluded from the fines, but not from the regulation itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought IPs are not considered personal identifiable information.

<comment><USER13> Yes it is - it's in the FAQ:

[https://www.eugdpr.org/gdpr-faqs.html](https://www.eugdpr.org/gdpr-faqs.html)

What constitutes personal data?

Any information related to a natural person or 'Data Subject', that can be used to directly or indirectly identify the person. It can be anything from a name, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information, or a computer IP address.

<comment><USER14> I like this definiton better. IANAL Warning.

Personal Data:

      - PII is Personal Data.

      - If a user has PII, then all of the userdata is Personal Data.

So HN posts would not be Personal Data for the users that have email field empty. And even email (and any other user-entered data) can be made non-PII if ToU explicitly required to be so.

My advice would be to legally and technically isolate PII and other_userdata. GDPR/etc compliance become quite easier this way.

<comment><USER15> ToU don't change what PII is or isn't under the GDPR.

The GDPR also states that consent alone isn't a legal reason to collect or process PII and "advises" against relying and structuring terms of service to collect PII.

Basically you can't build a service ask people for their data and then relying on their consent for the legal reasoning of having that data. You need an actual legal basis e.g. a regulatory requirement or a business requirement to collect that data, and in all cases the requirements unless stated in law must be evaluated against the best interests of those you collect data from.

<comment><USER14> > ToU don't change what PII is or isn't under the GDPR.

ToU can by prohibiting user from entering any PII. In case of email, ToU would say that only non-identifying email can be used.

For the rest of your comment, I dont see any relevance here. There is no need for consent for non-PII userdata. All PII userdata is behind legal and technical wall and cannot be accessed by the processor/controller of non-PII userdata.

<comment><USER15> There is no such thing as a "non-identifiable" email. You cannot use ToU to bypass GDPR.

<comment><USER14> Ok here is my email: firstname.lastname@example.com. Identify me! Know that I wont used the email elsewhere.

> You cannot use ToU to bypass GDPR.

Just to clarify this is not buried in ToU but laid out clearly.

So the website says dont give PII. User still does. And GDPR would penalize the website ? Citation please.

<comment><USER15> Are you serious? the fact that your email isn't email@example.com doesn't make it any less identifiable. My IP address is 192.168.1.1 identify me... It also doesn't matter if you think the information is identifiable or not what matters is how the GDPR defines it.

The GDPR defines PII and there isn't anything you can do about it you can't ask users to make a throwaway email account and hope that you can pass GDPR by claiming that it's not PII this isn't how regulation works.

What matters isn't that the email address reveals your name is that someone can use it to identify additional information about you such as if you are subscribed to a specific service or not.

>So the website says dont give PII. User still does. And GDPR would penalize the website ? Citation please.

If the website asks for an email address that is PII under the GDPR.

<comment><USER14> IP is not a user-entered data and cannot be freely selected, unlike email addresses.

> the fact that your email isn't firstname.lastname@example.com doesn't make it any > less identifiable.

The only official guidelines about email I could find are in here [1]. It does not say all email addresses are PII. It just says "email@example.com" type addresses are PII and "firstname.lastname@example.com" type addresses are NOT PII. So even "email@example.com" may be non-PII.

> someone can use it to identify additional information about you such as if > you are subscribed to a specific service or not.

Thats not enough. The service need to have PII. That is, if none of the services has PII, the email address is not PII.

> you can't ask users to make a throwaway email account

Throwaway is not needed. At best an individual need 2 email accounts. One address for the services where he is identified (eg bank website) and one address for where he is not (eg random forum).

So this is not an onerous condition at all. If thats the case you are making.

> If the website asks for an email address that is PII under the GDPR.

This is not a (official) citation.

[1] [https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data- protection/refo...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data- protection/reform/what-personal-data_en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They'll use legitimate interest as a reason.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a reasonable observation but I doubt anyone will care. Moreover it misses the point of GDPR.

The goal is not to improve people's privacy. It's too vague to achieve that. Obviously the EU doesn't care as even its own websites aren't in compliance - assuming this guy's definition of compliance is the same as theirs. How likely is it the rest of the EU's operations are? Zero likelyhood of that.

But that's OK. GDPR doesn't even have a concrete notion of what privacy or personal information actually are. The goal is not to improve privacy, that's just a fig leaf. The goal is to grant the EU large new powers over the private sector and in particular over American tech firms, who will repeatedly be fined and treated as, effectively, a new source of tax income. GDPR is so vague and open ended that there's no way they can ever be compliant, meaning the EU has a new source of cash for years to come. Very useful at a time when they are asking for budget _increases_ despite years of austerity, and facing a budget hole due to Brexit, _and_ member states are getting upset at their financial demands.

GDPR enforcement will be very similar to EU anti-trust policy - <USER2> political and immediately controversial. It is best understood not as a law but as a political move, sort of like how China uses laws against pornography to justify blocking foreign search engines, or how it uses a law against 'spreading rumours' to censor domestic social media.

<comment><USER18> This is stupid, if they wanted to give the finger to American tech firms they could have wrote the GDPR as affecting only foreign firms using EU citizen data without requiring the same level of control over the EU-based tech firms, far easier.

<comment><USER10> Are there any EU based tech firms? As an American I honestly can't think of any besides Nokia and that's more manufacturing

<comment><USER19> Makes sense, as Americans tend to live in a bubble :)

Some of them from the top of my head, that you might or might not recognize: Asos, JustEat, Skyscanner, SoundCloud, LastFM, DailyMotion, Raspberry PI (foundation more than company though), Shazam, Mojang, Skype, King, Spotify, Klarna, Trivago, Xing and BlaBlaCar. I'm pretty sure some of these are quite popular in even the US.

(maybe some of them are not having their HQ in EU anymore, but they certainly had at one point)

<comment><USER17> You probably shouldn't insult Americans and then make statements you already know to be erroneous.

As you are apparently well aware, Skype is owned by Microsoft. It's an American product now (from the perspective of who pays any fines). Mojang sold to Microsoft. It and Minecraft are owned by the Americans now.

Asos is an online fashion and beauty retailer. Having a website doesn't make you a tech firm. Ditto for JustEat.

Raspberry Pi - as you note - isn't even a firm at all, let alone a tech firm.

Shazam is in the process of being bought by Apple, although the EU appear to be trying to block it.

You tried to name tech firms that are based inside the EU and mostly ended up listing firms that either aren't tech firms by any conventional definition, or are now owned by US companies. I think that proves the original point.

<comment><USER19> The companies started out being non-american, then they ended up being bought up by US companies. I don't think that says "there is no EU based tech firms" but rather "There are EU based tech firms! But some of them get bought up by US companies and some stay, but at one point they were all EU based". So doesn't at all prove the original point.

<comment><USER17> In context it is equivalent. This thread is about why the EU wouldn't write a law that only affects US based tech firms, if that was the intention. Someone answered that there's no need because there are no EU based tech firms worth anything (no significant employment or tax revenue).

That point was correct. The responses all ended up naming either firms that are tiny, or which aren't any longer based in the EU (so there's no need to protect them from the effects of bad laws that primarily affect tech firms). Where they _started_ is irrelevant to the discussion because what matters is _who pays fines today_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I Bought a Book About the Internet from 1994 and None of the Links Worked - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/paabgg/i-bought-a-book-about-the-internet-from-1994-and-none-of-the-links-worked <comment><USER2> I've had a similar problem. In updating my portfolio site recently, I noticed a vast majority of links were dead. Not just live projects published maybe 3 years or more ago (I expect those to die). But also links to articles and mentions from barely one year ago, or links to award sites, and the like. With a site listing projects going back ~15 years, one can imagine how bad things were.

I had to end up creating a link component that would automatically link to an archive.org version of the link on every URL if I marked as "dead". It was so prevalent it had to be automated like that.

Another reason why I've been contributing $100/year to the Internet Archive for the past 3 years and will continue to do so. They're doing some often unsung but important work.

<comment><USER3> beware: robots.txt can retroactively clear archive.org data

<comment><USER4> another reason to use archive.is

<comment><USER5> Considering the topic of discussion, how sure can you be that archive.is will still be around in a year? Three years? Ten?

As much as I tried, all I could find about it is that it's run by one guy in Czech Republic who's paying $2000/month out of pocket for hosting, and apparently dislikes Finland.

<comment><USER6> It's actually worse - [http://blog.archive.is/post/151510917631/how-do-you- guys-kee...](http://blog.archive.is/post/151510917631/how-do-you-guys-keep- the-lights-on-i-gave-the) says it's $4k/mo.

[http://archive.is/robots.txt](http://archive.is/robots.txt) doesn't seem too bad, it looks like you could slowly inhale everything... _in theory_. There are no sitemaps (they're there, but empty placeholders); you have to know the site name to be able to get a workable list.

The author hasn't ruled out/blocked archiving the snapshots, but apparently it's... big. [http://blog.archive.is/post/154930531126/if-someone-was- will...](http://blog.archive.is/post/154930531126/if-someone-was-willing-to- make-a)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I miss the optimism of the early web, when you could create a simple web page, join a web ring and going online was an event. It's richer and deeper now, but the rawness and simpleness of it all was enjoyable and novel.

<comment><USER8> Is it richer and deeper now?

Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook.

When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about. Today it's basically Wikipedia at the top, with results from the same list of about 3-4 sites depending on the topic of what I searched for.

<comment><USER9> I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage.

I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or data extraction operations. Just pages put there by people that want to share knowledge and ideas. I mostly find it on pages that lack ads and often are pure HTML - no CSS and no JS. At least in areas that interest me.

Maybe there is a place for a search engine that would index only pages like that? It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing whole of the attention-whoring Internet.

<comment><USER10> [https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/)

<comment><USER11> Awesome, filtered top 10^6, removed sites with ads and e-commerce, typed in "enigma machine" and got some great gems:

[http://ciphermachines.com/index.html](http://ciphermachines.com/index.html) [http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk/howitworks.html](http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk/howitworks.html)

<comment><USER12> If you're interested in Enigma machines and find yourself in Maryland, you can play with one at the NSA museum next to Ft. Meade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Related to this, I had trouble finding examples of pre 1996 web design. The internet archive has a lot from 1997 onwards. The oldest live examples of sites from that era, that I know of are:

[http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/T...](http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html)

[http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html](http://oreilly.com/gnn/gnnhome.html)

[http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html](http://www.trincoll.edu/zines/tj/tj12.02.93/tjcontents.html)

The BBC also donated its Networking Club to the Internet Archive: [https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301](https://archive.org/details/bbcnc.org.uk-19950301)

<comment><USER14> [https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm](https://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm) ;)

<comment><USER15> There's even a Twitter account (created in 2013) that checks if it's still up, every 3 hours.

[https://twitter.com/SpaceJamCheck](https://twitter.com/SpaceJamCheck)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a very important reason why books, in general, contain better information that websites. On websites, people care a lot less about the correctness of the information. You can just update stuff later (of course, this doesn't always happen).

Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore.

<comment><USER17> > Also, sites are a very volatile medium. I often bookmark pages with > interesting information to read later, and it inevitably happens once in a > while that a site went down and I just can't find the information anymore.

I had the same experience and that's why I made a browser extension that archives pages when you bookmark them. ([https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror](https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror))

<comment><USER18> Maybe something that archives to IPFS would be interesting. As things are marked as interesting, they are both archived and distributed based on interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Linkrot is a real problem. Especially for those sites that disappear before the archive can get to them.

On another note, the more dynamic the web becomes the harder it will be to archive so if you think that the 1994 content is a problem wait until you live in 2040 and you want to read some pages from 2017.

<comment><USER20> Turns out the solution to every stack overflow post will be

"JavaScript is required"

<comment><USER17> Content from Stack Overflow has higher odds to survive than this, they've uploaded a data dump of all user-contributed data to archive.org: [https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange). It's all plaintext. This is really generous of Stack Exchange and shows they care for the long-term.

<comment><USER21> I assume the anonymisation is just on votes? It doesn't seem 100% clear at first glance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Solution: [https://ipfs.io](https://ipfs.io)

> The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days. Remember GeoCities? The web > doesn't anymore. It's not good enough for the primary medium of our era to > be so fragile.

> IPFS provides historic versioning (like git) and makes it simple to set up > resilient networks for mirroring of data.

<comment><USER23> IPFS is good and useful, but it only retains what people choose to retain.

If geocities.com/aoeu isn't popular, then IPFS won't store it unless someone bothered to pin it. And as soon as they stop, it'll disappear.

You need a dedicated host (like archive.org) to retain it, or volunteers willing to coordinate and commit their resources. Otherwise it's just more resilient (a good thing), but not permanent.

<comment><USER24> > Otherwise it's just more resilient (a good thing), but not permanent.

It's not "just" more resilient, It's also much more elegant and convenient: with the current web you need to go find some archive version of the dead link you found, while with IPFS the link can simply work, even after the creator stops hosting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A similarly really annoying thing is when you find old technet articles, stack overflow questions, or blog posts that seem potentially really useful, but that have broken images, broken links, etc... so the content (possibly extremely useful at the time) is completely useless now.

It really stresses the importance of directly quoting / paraphrasing the content you want in your plain text, and not relying on external resources for posterity.

<comment><USER26> The one I hate is when I find old forum posts explaining how to do something in the physical world and all the embedded photos are broken. Not because the image host went out of business or the user deleted them, but just because they didn't log in for a year and the host deactivated their account. This is why whenever I link a photo I upload it to my own server and I never change the URL.

<comment><USER27> I apologize in advance as there's no non-morbid way to ask this but... what happens to the images on your server if you die tomorrow? It would be exactly the same situation, right? They would exist until your bill is due in a couple years then your account will be deactivated and your images will linkrot.

<comment><USER26> I have the server paid up for 10 years and the domain for 15. But it's true, eventually all things must end. I do have credentials for all the things written into my will so I guess it ultimately depends on how much my children care about preserving my helpful forum posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> See also: Best of the Web '94 Awards. Presented at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web, Geneva, Switzerland, May 1994.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International_Conference...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_International_Conference_on_the_World- Wide_Web#Best_of_the_Web_Awards)

What's cool isn't how fast some of these technologies become obsolete, such as various Java applets and cgi-bin connected webcams. It's the static content that can survive until the end of time.

Like Nicolas Pioch's Web Museum. Bienvenue!

[http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/)

<comment><USER29> I must say the swiss-prot links from then still work. You are redirected to the uniprot.org website but the links work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > [The Rolling Stones] actually streamed a concert on the platform in November > of that year, using an online provider named MBone for some reason..

The MBone was not a "provider", it was an IP multicast network. This was the only way to efficiently stream video content to thousands of simultaneous clients before the advent of CDNs. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbone)

<comment><USER31> MBone lost its reason to exist when the internet backbone turned out to be much easier to upgrade than the edges. There's not much need to implement a complicated proxy system to save bandwidth on the backbone when almost everybody is constrained by their last mile link.

For years I thought TV stations might connect to the MBone to do simulcasts for people on the Internet once broadband became widespread, but the world moved on before it could become a reality. Part of me still thinks this is a missed opportunity but it's too late to cry over it now.

<comment><USER32> My internship, in 2006, involved working on an IPTV prototype for Philips. I remember working on a multicast server and the set-top-box client -- the server had a DVB-T card, and rebroadcast all the BBC channels over the LAN. Since the stream was always there, changing channel was extremely fast. DVB broadcasts information packets regularly, containing the TV schedule and so on. These were also forwarded over IP, and then cached by the STB.

It was neat, but presumably most of the multicast stuff was abandoned not long after I left.

Someone else worked on a system to help the user schedule their TV around the broadcast times.

<comment><USER33> The problem with using multicast for content delivery is more down to the subscriber end and how ISPs manage their networks. I worked on a (recent) project that uses multicast in the broadcast context at the mezzanine level. When you've got full control of the network, end to end, it works a lot better.

<comment><USER31> The subscriber end...and the goddamn Internet backbone. You can't route multicast across the core, which is a huge impediment to its adoption.

There was a vicious circle where the core didn't do multicast so the big iron routers didn't put multicast support in hardware, which made it impossible to support multicast on the core...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've got a book about javascript from 1995. It mentions closure once and says something like "... but you'll never need to use that feature of the language."

How I laughed.

<comment><USER35> Never say "Never" or "Always".

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Somewhat Unrelated.

I noticed that the wayback machine no longer lists historical sites if the latest/last revision of robots.txt denies access. Has anyone else experienced this?

In the late-90's I helped build one of the first fortune-500 e-commerce web sites. The website was shutdown years ago, but it view viewable on the wayback machine as recently as a year ago. The company in question put a deny-all robots.txt on the domain, and now none of the history is viewable.

It's a shame -- used to use that website (and an easteregg with my name on it) as proof of experience.

<comment><USER37> Applying denials retroactively makes no sense whatsoever -- it defeats the whole point of archiving.

Do you know if archive.org still has a copy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I read an internet article from 2017 and none of the stuff worked without access to all sorts of third party scripts and crap.

<comment><USER39> Yip, the irony is that the article about this does not even load on my tablet. Perhaps because of ad blocking at dns level, perhaps not, it does paint a picture though.

edit: also doesn't load on a desktop here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I Bought a Book of Restaurant Recommendations from 1957 and None of them would Serve Me Dinner Any More

<comment><USER41> I bought a telephone book from 1942 and none of the phone numbers work

<comment><USER27> The phone numbers accompanying the phat 90s slang scrawled across my 1996 yearbook no longer are a way of contacting my old classmates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> My uncle Pat wrote this book (and multiple others in the same series). I'm amazed Vice is talking about it over twenty years later and I'm sure he will be too once I show him the link!

I had lots of fun reading them as an Internet-addicted kid -- but several of the links were dead even before it was officially published.

</comment><comment><USER43> "It was possible to get on a text-based version of the internet for free in many areas, using only a modem and a phone line. An entire section of Free $tuff From the Internet offers up a lengthy list of free-nets, grassroots phone systems that essentially allowed for free access to text-based online resources."

Makes me want to try to read a Markdown-only Internet browser, which treats native Markdown documents as the only kind of Web page.

<comment><USER44> You would have to give up all the dynamic convienience we take for granted. Menus would be just links. Basically you would have HN like sites for the small ones and the big ones would have images. That's it.

On second thought that wouldn't be so bad considering the bloat we have to deal with nowadays. (1 MB per page for just news from sites like CNN ugh.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I owned (and still do own) this book! I would spend many hours as a teenager going through the links and accessing all the cool stuff in the book. This really brings back memories!

And yes, the way I got on the internet in those days was to dial into a public Sprintlink number, then telnet to a card catalog terminal in the Stanford library, and then send the telnet "Break" command at exactly the right time to break out of the card catalog program and have unfettered internet access. Good times.

<comment><USER46> I was lucky. A public library had a dial-in account with lynx as the shell and the card catalog an inter-library loan systems served as web pages. I just had to hit 'g' and type in any URL, including Gopher, WAIS, Archie, or telnet ones. This left me no great way by itself to get things downloaded locally, but I could telnet into a shell elsewhere, download things to there, and feed them back via zmodem through the telnet and the dialup.

That was before I had a local PPP provider, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Did you try looking them up at archive.org? I expect that many of them will work there.

The web is ephemeral unless somebody archives it. Many companies offer an archive service for your sites for a fee, and archive.org does it to provide a historical record,

</comment><comment><USER48> Yup. Recently promised a colleague a pdf. I knew what I was looking for, who wrote it and and which site it was on (regional site of my employer). It even featured highly on google (showed up on related searches).

Zilch. Nada...couldn't find it anymore. Gone. Something I had easily chanced upon before I know couldn't find with directed searching. They must have restructured their site.

</comment><comment><USER49> The article indicates that the "free" stuff on the internet was hidden away in weird places - ftp servers and the like. No google to find it for you, the only way was by word of mouth, or I guess via published book.

Answers a question I always had about "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. The main character, Hiro Protagonist (I still giggle at that name), sometimes did work as a kind of data wrangler - "gathering intel and selling it to the CIC, the for-profit organization that evolved from the CIA's merger with the Library of Congress" (Wikipedia).

I always wondered what made that feasible as a sort of profit model, and I guess now I know - that was the state of the internet in 1992, when the book was published. Seems like a way cooler time period for Cyberpunk stuff, I'm almost sad I missed it :(

<comment><USER50> We did have search engines, just not as fast or encompassing as Google. Archie came online in 1990 ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine) ). Jughead and Veronica followed ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jughead_(search_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jughead_\(search_engine\)) , [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_\(search_engine\)) ). More often than not a search started with a Usenet newsgroup FAQ.

<comment><USER46> Don't forget we had Gopher and WAIS before the Web, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Well if you purchase a yellow book from 1994 I doubt you will find many businesses listed there to still exist and show correct phone numbers...

<comment><USER52> ??? Huh ???

You think most businesses are less than 24 years old? Or do you think businesses change phone numbers every few years?

<comment><USER53> Most businesses fail within the first few years. 24 years later much would have changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Man, I really miss FTP. I remember when you would just FTP to the site you were using and grab a binary from their /pub/. Mirrors were plentiful, and FXP could distribute files without needing a shell on a file server.

<comment><USER55> I remember when you could just mount \\\ftp.microsoft.com\pub as a drive on your PC. Raw, unauthenticated, unencrypted SMB over the public Internet. At least it was read-only share. Good times.

<comment><USER27> I remember Geocities pages would always be trying to read from my floppy drive. People would not realize you had to upload your pictures before other people could see them and just would put D:\pictures\goatse.jpg as the src of the img tag because they didn't really understand the web (not that I blame them.) Of course, the browser had no problem trying to load local images from untrusted code on a remote host, security policies were, uh, _extremely_ permissive at the time.

(Of course, there would be plenty of attempting to read from the C:\ drive too, but that didn't make a loud, unexpected sound like reading from the floppy drive did)

Simple times.

<comment><USER54> Yeah, you had to remember to change all the links in the html because FrontPage Express kept saving the local full path so you could keep working on and previewing your site on a browser. HTTP server software (on Windows anyway) was so obscure that you had no idea how to get a free one running on your desktop unless you had access to Windows NT with IIS. All that changed when I installed Mandrake for the first time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I mean, this isn't all that surprising. Not unlike buying a twenty-year-old visitor's guide to a city and finding that a number of the shops and restaurants have closed, the stadiums have different names, etc.

<comment><USER19> I don't know about that.

People tend to think that our society is very well documented but if you look at what is left of old societies it is usually whatever was engraved in stone or if you're lucky what remained on paper. With the internet replacing most or even all of the paper storage in the short term it is true (besides our present day paper not being acid free to last long enough anyway), we are better documented than ever. But in the longer term it may be a huge gaping hole in history.

And that's different than cities changing at their regular pace and books becoming less dated. It's like the visitor guide _itself_ is no longer readable and therefore you won't even know what was there in the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. For one, the 80/20 rule applied back then just as it does today, so most of what's lost is crap to begin with. It's no different than in the real world: surely nobody's lamenting that you can't pick up a copy of Fordyce's _Sermons_ anymore (and I presume that it'd be long forgotten if not for Austen). While some valuable resources were undoubtedly lost, most live on re-posted elsewhere, like memes, but in a "good" way.

Secondly, the book is more analogous to a map or dictionary, and it ought to be a descriptive source, not a prescriptive one. Some language purists may disagree, but I could care less :-). And similar to an old, outdated, map, you'd expect that the details may have changed, but the landmarks are most likely still accurate. NASA's still nasa.gov, MIT's still mit.edu -- well, IIRC www.mit.edu used to point to their library's portal, and web.mit.edu their main page; I see that's changed -- and CompuServ still...exists.

</comment><comment><USER58> This reminds me of the Final Fantasy IX strategy guide. It integrated with Square Enix's Play Online service but now that FFIX was removed from Play Online, none of the links work any more and the guide is pretty much useless. I'm sure we'll start to see more of this in the coming years. It's not really sustainable to keep a website running forever.

<comment><USER31> If the service is still running then the added cost of hosting legacy content is near zero. Assuming the site wasn't full of bandwidth hogging live video or anything like that the cost of storage and hosting are almost zero.

Keeping a whole server running however does get a bit more expensive, but you could also rehost it on a cloud provider for a very modest cost per month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Thank god for Archive.org

This was my first professional website (19yrs ago!) for the largest Banking Agency and holding company at the time:

DOREMUS [https://web.archive.org/web/19980204230930/http://www.doremu...](https://web.archive.org/web/19980204230930/http://www.doremus.com:80/wsn/)

DAS [https://web.archive.org/web/19981203013454/http://www.dasglo...](https://web.archive.org/web/19981203013454/http://www.dasglobal.com:80/main.html)

Sadly my 1st Print Interactive Award for best Shockwave site requires a plugin: [https://web.archive.org/web/19990429113419/http://www.eyebal...](https://web.archive.org/web/19990429113419/http://www.eyeballonthefloor.com:80/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Can't see the article with NoScript. :-)

<comment><USER44> They should make sites incompatible with NoScript illegal. Back in my days (lol its just 10+ years) they used plain text for Web pages and used javascript like custom animation in presentations. Now only javascript is there with some html sprinkled in between.

P.S the rest of it was in Flash though. So no back button for you.

<comment><USER61> That's just silly. The dynamic nature of javascript is what caused the explosion of websites around 2007, due to the advent of jQuery. Saying we should all go back to plain text is just being an old grump. Should it be overused? No. Just like GIFs shouldn't have been overused on Geocities.

<comment><USER62> I generally agree with you but...

> The dynamic nature of javascript is what caused the explosion of websites > around 2007, due to the advent of jQuery.

I'm not convinced that was a good thing. Pretty much all of that content is terrible. Quality > Quantity

<comment><USER61> That doesn't really mean anything though in the context of things.

<comment><USER62> Sure it does. The grandparent is saying that we should have a higher quality web, and you are saying that we should have a more dynamic web.

<comment><USER61> I'm not saying we should have a more dynamic one. But JS fundamentally changed how we interact with websites, and it's here to stay. The majority of big players in the last decaded wouldn't have existed without the dynamic interaction. Saying we should go back to static only, is nonsense.

<comment><USER62> I completely disagree. The majority of big players has poisoned the waterhole. They've made the web _less_ usable because of how they've made things dynamic. I think going back to static would have some negative impact, but it would make things better for everyone overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Just yesterday I was helping an uncle changing the Flash-based menu of his site about classic race cars to a newer one so it would actually show on phones. It was all .htm files that included the Flash menu every time, apparently he worked with some kind of 15-year old copy of Dreamweaver that would add it to the top of every page he created like a template.

I could have switched it to a PHP include but that would either break all existing links, take a bit of work to make .htm files execute PHP or to make them forward permanently to their PHP versions. Or I simply could do the only sane thing: loading menu.php on every page within an IFRAME and changing his 15 years old Dreamweaver template.

The internet has been saved! A bit at least!

<comment><USER64> Any chance you can point us to the site? Sounds fun.

<comment><USER63> Well alright:

[http://www.cupecitas.com.ar](http://www.cupecitas.com.ar)

It hasn't been updated yet though!

<comment><USER64> Fun throwback. Thanks.

<comment><USER63> Well throwback....it's updated weekly!

<comment><USER64> Oh sure, the updates are current, but the feel of the site itself and the fun vehicles depicted are quite retro! (And satisfyingly so, I should add.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I have used the Firefox ScrapBook extension for over 10 years. It saves a static dump of the DOM of the page you are looking at (and all images) so it does not depend on anything external to show the page and you can save pages that required a login or was generated by any amount of complex javascripts. Also saves a link to the original site and comes with features to edit pages and join them (those annoying articles spread out over multiple pages to show more ads) and more. There is a clone of it for Chrome as well that I have not tried.

</comment><comment> vhost- I've been an arch linux user for a very long time. I very much praise the documentation and it always gets me 90% of the way there when trying to solve a problem or configure something. But when I need that extra 10% I can usually find someone on the forums with a similar issue and the solution is usually a huge rabbit hole of links and some are broken, which gets really frustrating because I have to hope that it was cached by archive.org.

</comment><comment><USER66> > The Rolling Stones [...] actually streamed a concert on the platform in > November of that year, using an online provider named MBone for some reason

"For some reason"! That's the flipping multicast backbone you're talking about there! One of the great lost dreams of the internet!

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

</comment><comment><USER67> This problem has concerned me for some time. One solution would be for websites to declare their license (Creative Commons, proprietary, public domain, etc.) and then web pages can embed the content of pages linked to when the license allows it.

A web with content-based addressing and versioning built into the protocol could also deal with this situation more gracefully, but again there are copyright issues.

</comment><comment><USER68> Well yeah, it sucks. I think the problem here is, that an URL was supposed to be a stable, unique identifier for a ressource (like a UUID). But at the same time humans have to enter them and therefore they have to be nice, shiny and up to date with the latest trends, which causes them to change constantly...

Maybe we should built a DHT containing UUIDs for all pages als alternative, stable URIs :D

</comment><comment><USER69> The reason the book didn't mention spam all that much is that it was from 1994 and probably mostly (or entirely) written before April 12, 1994, which is when the infamous "immigration lawyer spam" hit every newsgroup. It wasn't the first spam, obviously, but it did seem to mark a line where spam (USENET and email) became more and more prevalent.

</comment><comment><USER70> I have been wanting to find or build a tool that checked if a link was dead before redirecting my browser. If the link turned out dead, just redirect to the appropriate internet archive[0] link. Problem somewhat solved as long as the archive doesn't go bust.

[https://archive.org/](https://archive.org/)

</comment><comment> a-dub [https://web.archive.org/web/19961220034419/http://www.ncsa.u...](https://web.archive.org/web/19961220034419/http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html)

</comment><comment><USER71> For millions of years 'people' did or made cool things.

There must be billions+ of artistic objects and acts lost from the past.

Does it matter if they ALL don't make it? (I wish a lot more did, but ALL?)

In fact their loss adds value in many ways, if Woodstock was exactly the same year in year out would it have been as special to those who went.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm working on [https://www.pagedash.com](https://www.pagedash.com), sort of a personal web archive. Hope it helps people like journalists or authors to keep links alive with their original content, even if the original website goes down.

<comment><USER73> Sounds like pinboard.io

<comment><USER72> Difference is that PageDash can archive pages that require authentication because it uses a browser extension to retrieve page assets (it doesn't just delegate the work to a server to do the crawling). It also can grab stuff within iframes. Basically the main feature is "archive the page exactly as you saw it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Where did you live in 1994? Who lives there now? Is the building still standing?

I'm sure I'd get mixed answers to that and that's still the physical world, not the virtual one where "buildings" can come and go at the press of a button.

</comment><comment><USER75> This is why projects to do with Internet archiving such as [https://archain.org/](https://archain.org/) interest me, as imagine all of the dead links and data lost 23 years from now!

</comment><comment><USER76> The solution to link rot (and to privacy invasion) is to download the internet.

<comment><USER77> Could you please clarify?

<comment><USER76> 1\. Download the internets. 2\. git the diffs.

Privacy comes because if everyone has the internet in their local cache (lol), then external servers can't say what _YOU_ are _REALLY_ looking at.

<comment><USER44> Best of luck trying to scale git. Microsoft took 3 years and they didn't add Office and Windows to it. And they nearly rewrote their own version of git.

<comment><USER23> IPFS seems to work effectively for storing versions of files. The downside is, as I mentioned in another post, that it's not permanent. Someone has to pin it or it'll disappear. But it doesn't require anything as complicated to use _today_ as trying to modify git to do something it wasn't meant for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Lycos and Yahoo are still around. The book really does not have them?

<comment><USER79> Those were both founded in 1994, and the book spent relatively little time discussing the web (much of which still works, according to the article, despite the headline)

<comment><USER78> Mea culpa. I just read the heading and remembered the old times when they told us that Lycos finds everything. The author only briefly mentions Usenet. That was great fun at the time though.

<comment><USER80> I have an internet guide from 1995 which describes Usenet and its varying focuses and levels of seriousness in great detail, including an extended section on trolling which concludes memorably by explaining that people that do this "probably have a very small penis (especially the girls)", which could just as easily have been written about Twitter yesterday.

Every time I read something about how social media is changing everything, I remember that it pre-dated the web by a decade...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> I have tons of books from 1990-2002. I have to recover those CDs that came with magazines, those CDs have mirrored websites, almost entirely.

<comment><USER82> Just in case there is an interesting resource here:

[http://cd.textfiles.com/](http://cd.textfiles.com/)

they are essentially "shareware" CD's of the early '90's, but some are more or less "snapshots" of what was available on the web, check this one as an example:

The Internet Info CDROM

From Walnut Creek (July 1994)

[http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo](http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo)

[http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo/index.txt](http://cd.textfiles.com/internetinfo/index.txt)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I run into this a lot and use diigo.com to cache the sites I visit to ensure anything I found useful enough to bookmark continues to exist in my life.

</comment><comment><USER84> [https://archive.org/web/](https://archive.org/web/)

</comment><comment><USER85> Much of the appeal of software and the internet is that they can change quickly. We would also like them to never change.

</comment><comment><USER86> I think it should be considered best practice to not only provide links but host a copy of what you are linking to.

</comment><comment><USER87> I know this is sort of side-stepping the issue but isn't this what the Wayback Machine is for?

</comment><comment><USER88> Whatever happened to Project Xanadu? Wasn't that 'apposed to address these?

</comment><comment><USER89> Yeah I'm afraid to try this with my book which came out around the same time XD

</comment><comment><USER90> I can't even find _my own_ tweets sometimes. We're so screwed.

</comment><comment><USER91> The AOL disk in the back of the book doesn't work either.

</comment><comment><USER92> LOL the link to Vice didn't even work for me.

</comment><comment><USER93> archive.org</comment>


The Benefits of High-Tech Job Growth Don't Trickle Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/08/technology-employment-multiplier-effect-inequality-research/595291/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how the equation would change in the absence of zoning restrictions.

The way it's supposed to work is that when a new high-tech industry comes to town, their highly-paid workers move in; there's a construction boom to provide new housing for them; new restaurants, supermarkets, and other local services go up to support the higher population; new workers are hired at these establishments; there's a construction boom for them; and so on, until the population equilibrates to account for the increased number of dollars flowing into the region.

The way it actually works is that a new tech company moves in with its flood of high-tech workers; all new construction is held up indefinitely in permitting; the high-tech workers bid up rents and housing prices to what they can afford, displacing all of the existing residents; teachers, waiters, firemen, construction workers, etc. can no longer afford to live in the town where they grew up; they move out; there's nobody to perform the essential local service work; wages and prices get bid up because of the dearth of supply and lots of excess demands; and basically all the value gets captured by the owners of the company, landlords and homeowners who sell and move out. The new tech workers become the old middle-class workers who were displaced; the old middle-class workers face severe disruption in their lives; and basically nobody is better off.

<comment><USER3> It's any interesting idea actually that would effectively mandate new jobs. In the US forcing people to live in an area because of the job they get likely wouldn't fly. But you could mandate that the company must be located in a particular area or that they get some tax incentives to be in a particular area that needs improvement and thus lots of construction jobs are needed. To some degree it might depress property values in an area though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This makes sense: a software company does not need to build a factory, has less physical suppliers than a manufacturer, requires less office space, and requires less people to produce equivalent value. Any trickle down effect that software provides is insignificant to other efficiencies and gains.

</comment><comment><USER5> They're measuring jobs created in the same commuting area as high-tech jobs. This seems like a poor metric: operations like Google put the high-tech jobs in a few places and the low-tech jobs in other places. There's no reason to co-locate them, so they can each be where the labor with the right skills is available.

They don't specify whether gig jobs (like Uber drivers) are included. At any rate, these are rarely colocated with the high-tech jobs so they wouldn't count for much in their methodology anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there's a vague hope that when there are a bunch of people who get paid 200k in your city that it means there will be more people who get paid 50-100k... the reality is more like there is a big increase in the amount of people who get paid like 20-50k.. people who do house cleaning, drive cars, child care, work at restaurants, coffee shops, etc.. and to a lesser degree some more teachers get raises and more teachers get hired.. people that get paid a lot in a built up city aren't going to be effectively paying out of their salary more than a certain percentage of it to contractors and luxuries.. if you get paid 200k per year you can likely only afford to spend like 50k per year for things like buying a car or boat or upgrading your house. So if you have 20k amazon employees it means maybe you have around 5-10k people who benefit from them tremendously, and maybe 30k who benefit from them slightly.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nope. I have 25 years experience and just got an offer to interview at Apple for $55/hour in the bay area. I made $75/hour back in 2001.

<comment><USER7> Apple must be paying at least $100/hour to your staffing company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The landlord of the apartment I live in, disagrees with this statement.

</comment><comment><USER9> is the actual study paywalled?</comment>


Samsung Phones: Every app has full memory access - <AUTHOR> http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2048511 Any app has full memory access via /dev/exynos-mem<p>Largest security hole ever? <comment><USER2> I currently have an S3 and this isn't the first serious exploit I've come across for it.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a serious secure phone? I don't need all the bells and whistles and don't install many apps. Mostly just email, text, and web browsing.

<comment><USER3> This is only a serious exploit if you install an app that exploits it. If you only use email, SMS/text and web browsing and don't install any apps you should be fine.

If you want a more secure Android phone get Google's (currently Nexus 4). It won't have all the BS that 3rd parties add, like this.

<comment><USER4> It's a break from the sandbox so any vulnerability in an app (eg outdated WebKit, the norm on non-google devices) now compromised your whole device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4928277>

</comment><comment><USER6> Now all I can think of is #droidrage

<comment><USER7> Oh yeah, Microsoft's vitriolic campaign against Android. But this is not about Android per se, but about Samsung's drivers for the camera, and giving camera full access to root, because they were lazy.

<comment><USER8> I'm conflicted. On one hand, this is definitely Samsung's fault, not Android in general. On the other hand, an OS with more rigorous requirements for OEMs could have prevented this.

<comment><USER9> I'm curious what requirement you think would prevent this.

<comment><USER10> Apple's approach(no OEMs at all, known hardware) would mitigate the problem somewhat. But that doesn't stop lazy idiots from screwing up at Apple, and it doesn't work for anyone that's providing a general-purpose OS.

That's really about it. This is a kernel-level driver issue, caused by a lazy Samsung coder. Unfortunately, the drivers need that level of access, since they're used by Android to actually work. I'd say normal *nix kernel security practices should apply here, but that still doesn't stop lazy idiots...

<comment><USER9> So the "more rigorous requirements for OEMs" is "no OEMs at all"? Seems a little like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Besides, part of the point of Android is having an OS which allows for companies like Samsung to build their own variants.

Also, the problem isn't unknown hardware (as you would suggest by saying they should use "known hardware"). If it was an issue where they unknowingly left the hardware in some strange debugging state so that userland could query the it for restricted information, then it would be an issue with unknown hardware. In this case they directly and intentionally provided unprotected access to all of memory. That's just bad engineering.

<comment><USER10> >Also, the problem isn't unknown hardware (as you would suggest by saying they should use "known hardware").

No, the failure point here is, essentially, unknown hardware from Google's perspective. Android is not coded to work specifically with Samsung's configurations or hardware, so Samsung needs to provide drivers. As for "more rigorous" requirements, I don't think it's too hard to have the requirement that all drivers follow standard *nix security practices. That would have stopped this completely.

So the solution is to either not allow custom OEM builds(which, as I noted, isn't possible for Android).

<comment><USER9> > No, the failure point here is, essentially, unknown hardware from Google's > perspective. Android is not coded to work specifically with Samsung's > configurations or hardware, so Samsung needs to provide drivers. As for > "more rigorous" requirements, I don't think it's too hard to have the > requirement that all drivers follow standard * nix security practices. That > would have stopped this completely.

This is obviously a boneheaded mistake, but how do you verify that all drivers follow "* nix security practices" (and I'm still not entirely clear _exactly_ what those are nor how they differ from generic security practices) short of an in-depth security audit for each new piece of hardware. It isn't enough to _have_ requirements, you have to have to be able to validate them.

>So the solution is to either not allow custom OEM builds(which, as I noted, isn't possible for Android).

Is there a second part to this "either"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With so many Samsung Android phones ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Android_devices#S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Android_devices#Samsung)) flooding out to stay competitive and get a quick win over the iOS as well as other manufacturer's Android devices, it's obvious that some of their stuffs will eventually fall through the crack as result of poor QA. I will not be too surprised to see other brand Android phones have similar security issues.

I can almost see that Android is quickly becoming the next Windows 95.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like on Samsung devices, every app has full r/w memory acess via /dev/exynos-mem

I wonder two things:

1) if this is Samsung only or if its an Android issue.

2) If and how this can bee used to become root. TFA says "The good news is we can easily obtain root on these devices" but doesnt say how.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is anyone else finding that thread full of Google adverts for Samsung phones? It's rather funny.

</comment><comment><USER13> How was this even posted? It's the exact same link as yesterday in addition to the other link about this yesterday.

Ah, I see the original has an anchor in the URL: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4928277>

<comment><USER14> The title on this post is clearer. I have heard of Samsung phones (and Android), but I didn't know what Exynos was so I skipped over the initial link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As an Android newbie -- how easy is it to get out kernel patches to [all these millions of users'] phones?

(No, I'm not a black hat -- I don't have a hat of _any_ colour.)

<comment><USER16> Not easy. Most carriers delay updates, sometimes by years, because of all the custom crap they layer on top, or for no reason at all.</comment></comment>


Guys, stop sexualizing women in your mockups - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wells.ee/guys-stop-sexualizing-women-in-your-mockups <comment><USER2> > I recommend Facebox or UIfaces for those times you need real-looking people > in your mockups.

So am I now restricted not to use any woman in bikini? Or a woman wearing tan top? Are you saying by choosing a female in tan top is bad?

I don't see why we can't use those photos. I don't think people are sexualizing women. Sexualizing sounds like we are making a woman sexy. I am on Tumblr daily and I see a bunch of bloggers using sexy photos to attract followers so maybe we should stop doing that. I see instagram full of sexy photos and I guess we should stop doing that as well.

The iOS example seems off and I would agree with OP that that photo is questionable. the other two are fine. The second one doesn't really sexualize women. Just because the designer found a bunch of women avatars doesn't mean they are sexualizing women; maybe they haven't found a good looking guy avatar. Maybe those are friends of the designer.

The third app is also fine. To be fair, make a poll and ask how many women like seeing a beautiful woman picture than a man's picture.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gals, stop sexualizing men in your mockups

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: 2 days ago, 37 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6727836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6727836)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm sorry you're uncomfortable with male nudity.

</comment><comment><USER6> This article might have some truth somewhere, however Vogue magazine which is run by a woman does far more sexualizing that any Silicon Valley designer ever has. The funny thing is that it's typically only American women that try to turn this alleged 'sexualization' into an issue while in Europe this article would be laughed at. Not everything is a conspiracy against women. Would showing images of a handsome man be met with an equal response? Probably not. The hyper-vigilance against imagined 'serious' issues kind of borders on ridiculous. How about focusing on why there's a lack of female designers in the Valley? .. and it isn't because of bikini pics in a mockup.

<comment><USER7> it's called internalising misogyny, women can behave in a way that reflects the misogynist, sexist culture they live within too. It's no more helpful to themselves than it is when men do it; but it s a great get out clause for people to just point and say 'not my problem'.

If you don't think this would be remarked about over the water in Europe (hello from the EU by the way), then you're not reading in the right places.

Sorry, but this kind of behaviour needs challenging. People will frequently not realise they're complicit. They aren't necessarily being malicious, but they are taking part. If it makes people uncomfortable that's tough, people are having some of their basic assumptions kicked out from under them, this is hard.</comment></comment>


The Tiger Mother Controversy: A False Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/the_tiger_mother_controversy_a.html

<comment><USER2> Disgusting and racist.</comment>


Smartspender – designing a stylish app for tracking your spending habits - <AUTHOR> http://www.infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/articles/smartspender-designing-a-stylish-app-for-tracking-your-spending-habits

<comment><USER2> Someone designed (ie didn't even make) an expenses tracking app. It's barely novel. Maybe it looks a little better, but the thing only has about 3 screens to it.

It strikes me that the part that makes expenses tracking hard isn't how pretty your app is, but forcing users to regularly and consistently enter expenses. I know that I've never managed to track expenses for more than a month before starting to slip and eventually giving up. What you need is a zero-effort workflow.

I think perhaps the ideal expenses tracking app would link into your bank details (via Yodlee or similar), perhaps use your location history to identify shops you went to, and then try and do as much heavy lifting as possible to give the user a very easy daily task of aportioning the cash they withdrew recently to the shops they visited.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's about the tools? I could never bother myself tracking my expenses in any application I tried until I started using plain old ledger (actually hledger) from the command line. Only then it started to feel almost effortless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A master's student posts an Upworthy headline to HackerNews, you won't believe what happened next...

</comment><comment><USER5> Not trying to sell the whole platform (although I love it), but for me, the YNAB mobile app is the gold standard for functionality. I can track my spending in the time it takes the cashier to print my receipt. It automatically learns how to categorize each payee, and geo-locates each transaction to find or suggest the right payee. What they've done should be the bare minimum.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not sure what I expected, but maybe someone could point out to me what's so outstanding about this? I mean, it looks good, it's KISS, principles on how to create a solution to a problem/a software were followed... Genuine interest here.

</comment><comment><USER7> A guy took a dump on a toilet for his master's thesis. The details is not visual identity but makes the design. Got it?

</comment><comment><USER8> So Mint? You can do nothing but manual expenses with Mint if you want...

</comment><comment><USER9> "Slick looking"

That's debatable.

</comment><comment><USER10> so a master's thesis in graphic design is just.. a quick project?

</comment><comment><USER11> Didn't try it. Quite satisfied with 'Saved' for iOS and Android: [http://lentor.io/saved/](http://lentor.io/saved/)

<comment><USER12> Can you even try it? I mean, I didn't see any download link to any app store. I think he just "designed" it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "A guy" <\- I don't know why his gender is important. Headline could easily have read "Someone designed ..."

<comment><USER14> Because he's male? The title might as well be "Something happened", going by your logic.

<comment><USER13> Don't be obtuse. My point is his gender isn't important to the story.

<comment><USER15> Then why did you bring it up?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


China's Silicon Valley Threatens to Swallow Up Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-28/bridge-to-china-s-silicon-valley-may-swallow-up-hong-kong <comment><USER2> This is a good article, but I wish it went a bit further into the complexities facing Hong Kong as it seeks its place in a 21st century where access to Chinese investments is no longer throttled by access to Hong Kong. I first lived in Hong Kong as a student in 2006 and I remember thinking that the tech push starting in Shenzhen would be dwarfed by tech growth in HK given its already prominent status in the international community and density of top notch universities.

When I visited in January, though, it felt like the opposite has happened; Tencent has grown into an international behemoth and HK has failed to really choose to invest in tech growth. I have friends at SUSTC, so I'm glad that Shenzhen is making big things happen, but it is disappointing to see HK still focused on running/growing the economy according to a 1980s playbook. Even the cyberport really ended up feeling more like just a ploy to be able to build more housing rather than an actual tech community.

Still time to make big things happen in HK, but, in my opinion, it's going to take leaders in the business community to push for it and make investments. It will also take strong collaboration with the outstanding academic community in HK to make that happen.

I'd love to hear from people currently in HK about how then view the tech sector and what their plans are.</comment>


Expectations for an introductory programming book - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@baijum/expectations-for-an-introductory-programming-book-1007b184eb52 <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I posted this here with the exception of getting more feedback on the topic. Thanks!</comment>


Autodesk to lay off 925 in transition to cloud-based tools - <AUTHOR> http://gamasutra.com/view/news/265114/Autodesk_to_lay_off_925_in_transition_to_cloudbased_tools.php <comment><AUTHOR> I really wish all the various companies that use 3D modeling and animations software would fund blender (or some other open source 3D app)

Maya and 3dsmax are great and arguably better than blender but it seems like if they pooled their resources they could change that and everyone would be better off for it.</comment>


The RSS Apocalypse - <AUTHOR> http://macsparky.com/blog/2013/3/the-rss-apocalypse <comment><USER2> "Free is so often bad..."

Very interesting point. I think free is good when it comes to code, apps, etc... things that can be copied and distributed. It creates a good shared base of stuff on which to build.

But when it comes to services, totally free can _sometimes_ be bad. That's because there's no such thing as a service that's free to run, so the money has to come from somewhere. Either the service is being monetized through some backdoor method -- usually something involving privacy intrusion or data mining -- or it's what economists call "dumping."

Dumping is when you flood a market with free or below-cost goods to kill competitors, and then jack up the price or even kill the market when the competitors are gone. The best example in software is Internet Explorer, which (prematurely) killed the market for browsers and led to the horrible age of total IE dominance of the web.

Google Reader may well have been -- whether intentionally or not -- dumping. If it was intentional, it might be an effort to kill RSS entirely. The big players -- Google, Facebook, etc. (are there more?) -- all have a vested interest in killing independent less centralized ways of aggregating knowledge in order to steer all traffic to them.

I still use a Mac reader called NewsFire. It hasn't been updated in a long time though. I don't even remember if I paid for it, but if it's free I would certainly be willing to pay. Maybe the authors of such apps can capitalize on this.

<comment><USER3> if not there already, we should put up quick poll of top x Google Reader alternatives that everyone can vote on (put it on Google Docs to add a bit of irony) w/ a light column for use case (which OS, browsers, etc).

every blog publisher then points to the poll as addendum to each post going fwds, informing readers to choose one in order to keep reading via rss.

can include some directions on exporting GR feeds for any of the GR subs that don't already help the reader do so.

granted requires some work, and we still will lose some users, but overall isn't something like this (or a better idea?) required to ensure blogs/rss ecosystem don't lose readers that don't know there are good alternatives and won't necessarily seek alternatives on their own?

<comment> mkr-hn Already done: <http://www.replacereader.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe OT:

When RSS gained popularity I got myself a decent RSS reader and subscribed to a lot of feeds. What happened was that after a short period of time I had +1000 unread posts. At this point I stopped using RSS for a while because it was just too much noise. A few months back I discovered RSS again for myself but this time I did not subscribe to every site I found interesting. There are a lot of news sites which I visit often and they also have a feed in most cases. I do not subscribe to them because I visit them anyway and they are most of the time high volume feeds. Instead I only subscribe to sites (almost always interesting blogs from fellow developers) who write a new post maybe three times a year or so and I only subscribe to blogs from developers/people who only post if they have something very important to say. This made RSS useful to me again because I would never every remember to visit all those sites twice a year… If I see a unread item in my RSS reader I know that I have to read this post soon because it will blow my mind again.

Who of you is doing it in a similar way?

<comment><USER5> FWIW, an acquaintance of mine worked on one of the early RSS readers (Bloglines, I think). He mentioned that they had run some analytics on their users and found that the typical user would join, add a bunch of feeds, then slowly add more feeds over time until they had a ton of feeds and then would either delete a bunch of feeds or quit using the reader entirely.

I found that kind of funny. They were clearly deriving value from the reader, or they wouldn't've joined or kept adding feeds in the first place; but if they were feeling burdened or oppressed by their reader, why didn't they just stop adding feeds? Or if they had to keep finding new feeds, prune back the old feeds a bit. Why load up on feeds until you need to do a burst of spring cleaning or quit entirely?

<comment><USER6> There's probably a lesson in ensuring that high-value items show up, and "noisy" feeds have lower visibility, or similar work to make it feel like the user is not obligated to read everything (i.e., make it feel like work).

Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has that).

<comment><USER5> > Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has > that).

I dunno about Bloglines then or now (whoever bought it threw out all the old code and started over), but at least in Google Reader, there is an option to, in the sidebar, omit feeds with no updates. I checked that option. It saves a lot of space for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny how when unsustainable startups threaten old line industries - newspapers, taxis, hotels, music - with free or rock bottom pricing it's innovation. But when internet companies do this _to one another_ it's the end of the world (literally described as "the apocalypse").

How about we be consistent and say to the developers of paid RSS aggregators -- who built their products on free content in the first place -- that if they don't like innovation or hopeful investments driving prices to zero, they are in the wrong business. Somehow I think if Google had offered any one of them a ton of money to buy their reader and make it free they'd have jumped at the chance. Instead Google built an excellent offering of their own and people are whining.

<comment><USER8> He's saying that non-techies don't realise that Google Reader != RSS. So won't seek an alternative rss product, hence blogs losing lots of readers. The apocolypse refers to that. I suspect that won't happen as plenty of 'alternative to google reader' articles popping up.

<comment><USER7> He outright says Google ruined the market:

"I remember back when RSS was amazing and something you paid for. I also remember when Google Reader showed up and very quickly started taking over. It was free. It was Google (back before we were all scared of Google) and it wrecked the market for all of the paid RSS services."

His last sentence:

"This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad."

I see what you're saying, that he thinks users are part of the mechanism, but the bottom line is he thinks this apocalypse can be traced back to Google Reader being free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the evolution of "embrace, extend, and extinguish," a successful tactic used by Microsoft for many years.[1]

I'm calling it "embrace, give away, and extinguish."

(For most non-techies, RSS is now history.)

\--

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish>

\--

Edit: added "(For most non-techies..."

<comment><USER10> RSS was dead for non-techies before this too, which is why the audience for Google Reader was so small: it was only techies. Non-techies have simply been using Facebook and Twitter all this time, and now they will just continue to use Facebook and Twitter.

Techies on the other hand will migrate to other products, and RSS will keep chugging along as a techie-only protocol.

<comment><USER11> RSS and Google Reader itself has an awareness problem. These are just anecdotes, but I introduced Google Reader to multiple profoundly nontechnical friends and family members over the years. Literally every single one of them immediately fell in love with it, and never stopped using it. My mother, who completely lacks understanding of the idea that she can save a file to her computer and get it back later, for whom the web IS the computer, uses Google Reader daily to follow dozens of blogs.

It's not that Reader or RSS have no potential value to anyone who isn't "good with computers." It's that Google never bothered to tell anyone it existed! And why should they? Modern Google doesn't give a shit about the open web or decentralized culture, they want to "own social" and keep everything contained within their cancerous Facebook clone.

<comment><USER12> People I know who ask me why this mattered and why I used it seem to understand it when I explain it this way: Imagine being able to know when your favorite websites are updated, what that update is, follow the blogs or articles of your favorite writers, and not be limited to what some strangers decided they thought was kewl and up or downvoted.

A lot of people just didn't know you could have a service like Google Reader.

Following any more than a couple sites without this type of service, where you have to bookmark and visit the sites daily or periodically, makes it feel like you're changing channels on a TV without a TV guide view. Which is one reason why sites like this and reddit are so prominent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> RSS is having it's "Internet Explorer 6" moment.

A free product enters the paid marketspace, kills all 3rd party competition, then became the defacto standard.

Then it languished for years, but in RSS's case, the product with overwhelming market share gets killed rather than having 3rd parties slowly catch up.

Fortunately RSS aggregation is simpler to replace than an entire browser...

<comment><USER14> If the web had been as unpopular as RSS readers, things might have been different. In a health market, if the leader fails to innovate, competitors come in and steal share.

In an unhealthy market that's not growing any more (like RSS), things get a lot more stagnant because folks aren't actively making product choices any more and there's not a lot of incentive for new entrants.

I'm betting there's not a ton of innovation in the Gopher market, either.

<comment><USER15> An "application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet." RSS? No. That's a description of Gopher, from Wikipedia.

I just realized something... _RSS is the new Gopher._

<comment><USER14> That description also describes HTTP, SPDY, and a bunch of other protocols. Relatively speaking, RSS never achieved the kind of popularity. Back in about 1993, there were more Gopher sites than HTTP sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > This whole mess is just another example of why free is so often bad.

No, it's not. Paid services are cancelled all the time.

<comment><USER17> I think his argument is that "paid" beats "free" because paid can support, whereas free is _by definition_ relying on other revenue (advertising, other paid products) to support it.

When a paid product dies, it's (often) because the product wasn't doing well in the market. When a free product dies, it's because the company couldn't support it through their secondary revenue streams. The product may be the Best Thing EVARRR, but it's a casualty of failures elsewhere. The "bad" comment is likely because it's a lot easier to measure direct risks (i.e., risks associated with your product) than indirect ones (risks associated with your secondary business model, which likely isn't your area of expertise; if it was, you should be in business there).

Whether this applies to Google, I'm on the fence.

<comment><USER5> My problem with the countless thousands of people who are taking this opportunity to gloat using that argument is that they basically are assuming their conclusion, since their argument goes something like this: "Paid services are less likely to shut down. Google Reader was not paid, therefore Reader was not less likely to shut down. Google Reader shut down, providing more evidence for this claim. We-told-you-so!"

But where does the original claim get its support? _Are_ paid services less likely to shut down? We read on HN all the time about post-mortems of, yes, paid services. If we don't know that, then it's just a misleading post hoc argument (and in the counterfactual universe where Reader was a paid service, all the naysayers are now chorusing 'It's a Google service! You can't trust Google! We-told-you-so!').

<comment><USER18> Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down? I think the reason people intuitively believe this is because a free service has to do two things to be successful: provide a good quality, useful service to people, and provide a way to make money tied to that user base. A paid service really just has to provide a good quality, useful service - since that is what the people are paying for.

<comment><USER5> > Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and > were shut down?

I find that hard, because I'm not a business person nor do I usually make the money-for-time tradeoff; hence I mostly only use free services and am mostly affected by free service shutdowns - in other words, selection bias makes my personal experiences unrepresentative. (Is this similar to other techies - like Hacker News users? I think it is.)

However, we can make the general observation that services only sometimes survive the business running them, and businesses shut down all the time. To give two personal examples of paid services I used that have stopped or will be stopping in the near future: Intrade has halted all trading during an investigation, and probably will wind up shutting down; Zeo Inc is shutting down as it looks for buyers of its assets, and while the web interface I've always used to export my data is not yet down, I don't give very high odds for it staying up for more than the next year.

In both cases, I paid good money to use them; it didn't save them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When I was building the source list for jkl.io noticed at lot of sites no longer offering RSS and even sites like Wordpress seem to be not offering it frequently (is this authors not turning it on, turning it off, or am I missing something?).

Hand scraping all these sites would be an exercise in insanity so now building an intelligent crawler is already something I have to do much earlier than I wanted. RSS really matters for the open web.

<comment><USER20> Most sites still have a feed even if the UI doesn't surface it. Pull up the source or Inspector and search for feed, atom, or rss. It's usually in the <head>

<comment><USER21> And even if the rss meta elemnets are missing wordpress will still generate rss at /feed/. For example: <http://danieru.com/feed/>

This same method works for category specific feeds: <http://danieru.com/category/life/feed/>

<comment><USER22> You can even get a specific flavor of feed, in some cases.

/feed gets you an RSS feed on WordPress.

/feed/atom gets you the Atom feed on WordPress.

/feeds/posts/default gets you the Atom feed on BlogSpot blogs (no RSS there, AFAIK).

/rss gets RSS on Tumblr (no Atom there, AFAIK).

Edit: trying to fix broken formatting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> An alternative Narrative might be that RSS has a renaissance. People who used to think Reader was a magic way to read websites may now be forced to think about RSS as the way that happened. The standard may get some press again as a result. Already _is_ getting some press in fact.

</comment><comment><USER24> > It would have been better for the Internet if Reader had never been at all.

If not for the Google Reader, I wouldn't use RSS at all.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can someone explain me, why Google shutting down their reader is such a big deal? I use Thunderbird as my RSS reader, and after two days of everyone panicking I feel like I missed something about RSS/Google Reader.

<comment><USER26> One of the biggest impacts are on those of us who use multiple devices to read feeds, Google Reader synchronized the read/unread status of all the elements so if you saw something on your phone you wouldn't see it again on your desktop (unless you starred it which is like +1 but just for yourself).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> RSS as a content discovery tool is very valuable, especially on mobile devices where sifting through bookmarks and downloading entire pages is nearly impossible. The Google Reader app for Android works so well that it earned a spot on my phones home screen (one of the few apps besides email and messaging). I hope the next iteration of readers really focuses on mobile, where the greatest opportunity/need exists for RSS.

</comment><comment><USER28> > There are thousands of RSS subscribers. How many will bother to sort out a > new RSS system and subscribe again?

The ones whom really read your RSS? Or maybe you will gain 10000 twitter followers on July 2? On maybe double your daily visitors?

Visitors who care will still be there. And it's the visitors who matters.

<comment><USER29> That's a bit silly IMO. If you've removed the way that those viewers like to view your content, even if they like you, they might not find a suitable replacement in their eyes to the tool they previously used. I have over 200 feeds in my RSS reader that I "consume". If that reader went away (which it is), then I'd probably pay attention to 10ish. Does that mean that I only "care" about those 10? Of course not. I like to monitor the others for headlines or keywords. Just because I don't read every one every day does not mean I don't care. And, when my reader goes away, I won't be back all b/c the medium I use will have changed.

<comment><USER28> It depends. If you use GReader to read 10 RSS, you can move to FB/Twitter/Mail newsletter.

If, like you or me, use GReader to read 200 feeds, you will find an alternative that suits your needs. Or code it, be it a full RSS parser, or just a greasemonkey addon to change feedly appearance.

Because you care about reading your news, one way or another.

Edit: one thing is special in this case: GReader users are more "power users" than usual. So we are not talking about TMZ site going down. That's why I think that people who really care will try to find an alternative.

<comment><USER30> I suspect any real competitor in the rss space will provide an instant import via the zip of bookmarks / feeds / etc soon anyway.

I'm just worried about an Android app that can fill Readers roll. I use it for reading webcomics since I can swipe left or right to move through my subscriptions, which is much more efficient than any other means to browse them on mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I never found a Reader I liked until I began using KDE's <b>Akregator</b> (works fine in Mint XFCE as well) a few months ago. Very easy to use and add feeds to (nerdship not needed). I follow three-dozen podcasts and blogs daily ... impossible without it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Well I hope RSS does not become the Lexis Nexis service where only the privileged users with resources ($$) could access the information with ease.</comment>


Voat.co: "We have begun discussions with more than one venture capitalist firm" - <AUTHOR> https://voat.co/

<comment><USER2> Voat is as close to a Reddit clone as any website I have seen. The format as worked very well for Reddit for these years now but I'm curious to see if Voat will be able to pull it off.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised there aren't more reddit clones making waves. Is there a reason voat.co has been growing so fast ?

<comment><USER4> Reddit has been going through drama after banning one of its largest hate subreddits and sacking a public facing employee. This has spurred a large number of users to look for other sites.

<comment><USER5> A big factor in Digg's demise was that Reddit was a smaller, scalable competitor that was able to accommodate the influx of users.

This time Voat is there but it still isn't a viable alternative; given that it isn't able to scale its technology. If they focus on fixing this, then it's just a matter of time before everyone an incident occurs that decides the grass is greener over there.

I'm surprised that community happiness isn't taken more seriously at Reddit. It's their biggest asset, and the whole Digg experience shows that it can be lost so easily.

<comment><USER6> As an early evacuee from Digg to Reddit, Reddit wasn't scalable at the time. It was constantly down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Oh hi Mr. VC, could I interest you in funding a website that specializes in hating fat people?"

<comment><USER6> Historically it's been very difficult to make social media sites profitable. Did Digg ever make a profit? To my knowledge Reddit is still in the red.

There has also been a large rhythmic trend of migrations especially in social. So it's very possible people are ready to move on to Voat, the question is will Voat find a way to make a profit?

They've mentioned exploring some interesting profit models, such as paid subscriptions and content sharing. I'd really like to see them make a big push with a reddit gold similar component but in a better way.

Essentially patronage for social media or content curation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> i hope the priority of Any new interest will be to change the name. Several times now i've thought, "what the heck was that Reddit competitor called?"

<comment><USER9> they just changed names this year from whoaverse.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Your job Removes your access to new.ycombinator.com, but not YCombinator.com? - <AUTHOR>

I have been going to this site that my company found out and they removed my access to news.ycombinator.com, but not ycombinator.com.<p>Is there any way to get around this? <comment><USER2> Don't you think that if they find out you got around it they would not be too happy about it?

I usually just quickly peek at the RSS at work and visit the site at lunch break or at home, much safer this way (and I get less distracted).

</comment><comment><USER3> A proxy?

Build your own ssh or ssl tunnel through another box you control?

The possibilities are endless.

</comment><comment><USER4> My job's web proxy also just started blocking news.ycombinator.com. My guess is the "hacker" news got added to the filter software we use. I plan to appeal the block with IT. The blocking page tells me who to call to do this. I develop software for them, so the site is relevant to my work.

<comment><AUTHOR> you wouldn't happen to work for NG?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> SSH Tunnel is your best bet - you're a hacker, use your initiative.

</comment><comment><USER6> Stop going to work.

</comment><comment><USER7> have u tried tor / torify instead of socks5 ssh tunnel?

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://gaza.freehost123.co.cc/glipe/></comment>