Decentralised and open scientific publishing on blockchain - <AUTHOR> http://go.tilenkranjc.com/dejournal <comment><USER2> I want a similar platform with reproducibility built in: your paper gets in the blockchain, if and only if, its results can be reproduced by other members ("Proof Of Reproducibility").

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that's actually a great idea. I'll start a discussion on this topic on our slack channel - please join.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The page got swarmed with trolls, but the idea is interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. Just restored the original version, it's beautiful again =).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting idea, clearly explained use-cases, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> I love this idea.</comment>


iPad Air 2 Benchmark Points to A8X Chip with Triple-Core 1.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/21/ipad-air-2-a8x-triple-core-2gb-ram/

<comment><USER2> For reference, I'm using a 2.3 GHz i5 Mac Mini (MacMini5,1). The new iPad Air 2 looks pretty comparable:

                   Single Core     Multi Core
       iPad Air 2     1812            4477
       Mac Mini       1980            4254

Very impressive. A9 based MacBooks Airs?</comment>


Monetize your Gmail inbox with 21.co (get paid in Bitcoins) - <AUTHOR> https://news.21.co/monetize-your-gmail-inbox-with-21-co-ec1f9687956d <comment><AUTHOR> Would you give 21.co access to your email?</comment>


Social Media Needs a Travel Mode - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/2017/02/social_media_needs_a_travel_mode.htm <comment><USER4> To be effective, this would need to become a kind of norm for overseas travelers, the same way traveler's checks used to be. The idea would be that just as you don't carry a bag with your birth certificate, stock certificates, property titles, and jewelry with you, you also don't carry a 10 year archive of every email you've ever sent or a detailed list of every person you've ever spoken to.

In particular, it needs to be normal enough that _a significant fraction of all travelers do it_. The feature can't be marketed as a protection for at- risk travelers, but as a common-sense safety mechanism useful to all travelers.

I think it's crazy that people walk around with phones that have access to years of email communications, and that even in the happiest timeline we could have ended up on after 2016, features like this are long overdue.

<comment><USER5> >>In particular, it needs to be normal enough that a significant fraction of all travelers do it.

Yes, exactly.

Border agents are trained to look for anything out of the ordinary. Currently, using a feature like this would immediately raise a huge red flag and encourage more questioning, detention and possibly even deportation based on the person's country of origin and the mood of the border agent.

Incidentally, that's why I think there is virtually zero chance for these types of features to take off: the system strongly discourages early adopters from trying them.

<comment><USER6> Thankfully, as US citizens we are free to establish a norm of using features like this, with no fear of deportation.

<comment><USER7> If you are willing to do this, then why not just say "no" to the CBP and DHS? You must be allowed in if you are a citizen so the only risk is them keeping your phone for a few weeks while they try to hack it to get inside. I believe they are required to send it back to you once they are done by law or agency policy.

That's what I plan to do if I ever get asked - telling them to piss off. Worst they can do is confiscate my phone. I am choosing to remain silent. If they still persist on hassling me and end up taking my phone even temporarily, I will treat that device as now being compromised and will take the appropriate action.

Last year I was hassled (not at the border) on two occasions. Once in NYC in the Port Authority by the cops that patrol that facility and a second time in the suburbs of NJ. In NYC the cop didn't like that I was getting testy with a Port Authority employee for not letting me though to get to my bus. He intervened without cause and asked for my ID. I told him "nope". He tried making up some story to justify him asking me and I told him "I'm not giving you my ID. I'm leaving, bye." and then walked away.

In NJ I was detained for way too long under suspicion of several random things. This wasn't even a traffic stop. I parked the car and then they drove over and harassed me for a solid 45 minutes. First they claimed I was drunk. Then they said I was on this particular street to buy drugs. Then they said I could actually be dealing the drugs. They frisked me for "officer safety" and then tried to get me to walk the line and do a bunch of sobriety tests. I told them I wasn't doing any sobriety tests. They lied and said I could be arrested for mere refusal. I told them they were full of shit and that I can only be arrested for refusing the actual breathalyzer, not the voluntary tests. I then remained silent for rest of the encounter. Not a peep, just dirty looks back and forth. Eventually they had to let me go. Moral of the story is that cops do back down plenty of times but you have to have the will to test them. And it greatly helps if you know the law.

One last thing - if you are wondering why I didn't just take the sobriety tests if I'm sober, there's a damn good reason. Some years ago, my friend got arrested in that same town for blowing a 0.00. How you ask? Because first he did the voluntary tests which no one in the history of mankind has ever passed - at least not according to any police officer. Those tests are always used to compel something else like a search, breathalyzer, etc. It's an excuse to justify further harassment in many cases. So my friend did their tests and "failed". So they compel the breathalzyer and he gets a 0.00. He thinks he'll finally be free to go when they tell him that based on his failure on the voluntary tests he is clearly under the influence of something. And since it isn't alcohol, it must be drugs. So they arrest him, take him down to the station and draw blood. They charge him with intoxication and illegal drug use (because he said he doesn't take any medications for anything) before the blood results come back because those take 2 weeks or so. Even though they come back totally clean he has still been charged and is required to show up in court anyway. He had to spent $500 or so on a lawyer to represent him that day and get that bullshit dismissed. I am not sure if he got the arrest wiped from his record - I don't think he did. Which means he now has a record for no reason at all. Please take this story into consideration the next time you interact with law enforcement. I no longer cooperate with law enforcement for anything other than a minor traffic stop, maybe not even then. If a stop were to start going somewhere else (i.e. they are fishing for stuff or trying to screw me just because they feel like it) my attitude and strategy for dealing with them does a complete 180. The only reason I may comply for minor things is simply because it's the quickest way to be back on my way. 99% of the time their minds are already made up. Nothing you say will get you out of a ticket in most cases, so there's no reason to cooperate anyway. Playing nice is just for expediency, but as soon as that turns into something else, you need to switch gears immediately.

Sorry for the long post. My interactions with police last year are a sore spot for me (there were other interactions I left out).

<comment><USER4> Because you already know you will "win" the game of chicken between a citizen and CBP, but that win does nothing for non-citizens, for whom CBP has potent recourse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious about a couple of things:

1\. I far as I understand there is legal precedent establishing that electronic devices are basically the same as suitcases, and both can be searched at the border (i.e. in the same way that border agents can rummage through a backpack looking for drugs, they can rummage through a laptop's hard drive looking for evidence of drug dealing). The key idea is that objects brought across the border are fair game for search. However, wouldn't accessing social media accounts require fetching data over the internet from a data center somewhere? Maybe there is some info cached locally on the phone, but for them to, say, look through a traveler's post history they'd have to access data that is _not_ being brought across the border. How is this different from border agents finding a house key in a traveler's bag and then using that key to go to the traveler's house, open it, and search everything they find there?

2\. Searching the data on the device is one thing. Asking a traveler to provide passwords seems completely different. It seems like a pretty clear 5th amendment violation. There's a lot of precedent protecting people from being compelled to speak.

Just to be clear, I'm wondering about this for US citizens returning home. Obviously all bets are off for non-citizens.

<comment><USER9> > Obviously all bets are off for non-citizens.

Why shouldn't non-citizens be protected by The Constitution? Not a lawyer, but these came up pretty quick in a Google search.

"It is well established that, if an alien is a lawful permanent resident of the United States and remains physically present there, he is a person within the protection of the Fifth Amendment. He may not be deprived of his life, liberty or property without due process of law."

Kwong Hai Chew v. Colding

". . . The Bill of Rights is a futile authority for the alien seeking admission for the first time to these shores. But, once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country, he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders. Such rights include those protected by the First and the Fifth Amendments and by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. None of these provisions acknowledges any distinction between citizens and resident aliens. They extend their inalienable privileges to all 'persons,' and guard against any encroachment on those rights by federal or state authority."

Bridges v. Wixon

"The alien, to whom the United States has been traditionally hospitable, has been accorded a generous and ascending scale of rights as he increases his identity with our society. Mere lawful presence in the country creates an implied assurance of safe conduct and gives him certain rights; they become more extensive and secure when he makes preliminary declaration of intention to become a citizen, and they expand to those of full citizenship upon naturalization. During his probationary residence, this Court has steadily enlarged his right against Executive deportation except upon full and fair hearing. . . . And, at least since 1886, we have extended to the person and property of resident aliens important constitutional guaranties -- such as the due process of law of the Fourteenth Amendment."

Johnson v. Eisentrager

<comment><USER10> The difference is that non-citizens don't have a right to enter the US, so while they can't be _compelled_ to share their personal information, they can "voluntarily" choose whether to share it and enter the US, or go back.

<comment><USER11> > non-citizens don't have a right to enter the US... Here's where I take > issue, by obtaining a visa to enter the US for work/ travel you go through > security checks and you were deemed safe/ not a terrorist. So what changed > from when you were issued a visa to when you landed in the states?

For me, this feels like China all over again. If requesting passwords becomes prevalent in the US, then the same precautions that travelers take when entering China will become the norm from the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Delete your 'social media' accounts. I'm talking Facebook, LinkedIn, G+ and so on.

I did that and life goes on perfectly - I don't miss them a bit and I don't think anyone noticed.

My wife and daughter are right here at home, I use Skype, Whatsapp or Slack to talk to my friends and colleagues.

So there is _nothing_ that's missing.

Social networks are brainwashing farms (yes, advertising is a form of brainwashing) so stay away from them.

I don't want to sound too negative, but we all sense it: tough times are coming and these accounts will become a liability, even if you have 'nothing to hide'.

<comment><USER13> _tough times are coming and these accounts will become a liability, even if you have 'nothing to hide'_

That looks like a major chilling effect[1], and it makes life that much easier for those instigating the toughness.

It's not obvious to me, therefore, that opting out now is the right choice.

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

<comment><USER12> Respectfully, I disagree.

Social media is not the best nor the only place to share your opinions, political or not.

In fact this is the exact danger that these networks pose - people start thinking that it's the only place where we can express our right to free speech.

But this is not what social networks were designed for. They were designed to distribute advertising; all the rest of the features are just clever ways to disguise the real purpose of the SN. Even people who work at these companies are delusional about their company's real purpose.

The place to express our right to free speech is 'the Internet'.

Distributed, resilient, no central control.

Plenty of space for anyone to shout as loud as they like and 'share' it with their friends, without selling their soul.

<comment><USER14> I know my personal views about sexuality and proclivity, expressed on my _personal_ web site, cost me at least one possible job, and maybe a couple others as well, over the years. If my views on these issues were to be discovered on the internet, either on a personal site, or some social network, by someone in the HR department of the Fortune 150 I work for, I would probably be summarily dismissed. So, the "chilling effect" has already happened, and it's only working against one side of the ideological spectrum. Oh, sure, we still have "freedom of speech" in the US, but only if it's politically correct. Otherwise, you'll also be exercising your "freedom to be out of work."

<comment><USER15> It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too. I believe our right to free speech is the most important thing we have. However, if someone reads a post they don't like why should they HAVE to hire you?

As an employer if I read something that genuinely offended me (I have no idea if that's even possible) I wouldn't hire them. I hire people I think are going to make the team better and that I think we would want to work with.

So, yeah, if that hot take you wrote on the internet was a tad incendiary, why is it bad that people passed on you?

I'd like to think that I'm evolved enough that I could disagree with someone's opinion and work just fine with them- but if what they said struck a chord, I can't say that I wouldn't pass on them.

At the end of the day your freedom keeps you out of jail and my freedom gives me the ability to say no thanks. What you say in the public square isn't consequence free.

<comment><USER14> I believe I specifically said that I understand my free speech has a cost. Now, I don't know if you'll get this, since my original comment seems hidden or shadowbanned from the main discussion now, which just goes to prove the point brilliantly.

What I had originally written on my personal web site was standard, old- fashioned Christian teaching about homosexuality, based on the Bible. Hate the sin; love the sinner. That sort of thing. (No, it wasn't incendiary calls to violence against people.)

If I'm not allowed to say what I want to say, by being fired by my employer and blackballed from further employment, or by being downvoted to oblivion or filtered or shadowbanned by Ycombinator or Facebook or Reddit, or having my account cancelled at the web host provider I use, what good are my Constitutional rights of freedom of speech and religion? You may find this situation wonderful because you hate what I have to say, but I think everyone should find the trend alarming.

Maybe you really are arguing that freedom of speech and religion only grants someone the right to not being jailed when all they have left is to stand, homeless, on the street corner with a sign, shouting at passerby -- and then they'll be jailed for not having a permit, or something -- but I would have thought that the Constitution meant the First Amendment for more protection than that.

And, furthermore, if it's only Christians that are being affected by these discriminations, then hasn't the government declared a side? All this talk on the left about how the US government is prejudiced against anything other than Christianity, and, yet, I have no doubt that my company would LOVE foreign nationals to preach their religion to people in the work place, when I would be fired for it, if overheard.

I'm saying the consequences are one-sided.

<comment><USER16> You do realize that the 1st Amendment only applies to government restrictions of free speech and not restrictions by private entities?

<comment><USER14> I believe both of my comments make it evident that I'm perfectly clear on this. In fact, I don't see how it would be possible to argue what I WAS saying without understanding this. But, hey, I've been wrong before; I will be again.

<comment><USER16> Huh? Quoting your comment exactly:

> "If I'm not allowed to say what I want to say, by being fired by my employer > and blackballed from further employment, or by being downvoted to oblivion > or filtered or shadowbanned by Ycombinator or Facebook or Reddit, or having > my account cancelled at the web host provider I use, what good are my > Constitutional rights of freedom of speech and religion? You may find this > situation wonderful because you hate what I have to say, but I think > everyone should find the trend alarming."

If a private employer decides to fire you because of something you said, that's not a violation of your First Amendment rights. Or are you trying to argue that the First Amendment should encompass more than government restrictions on speech? If so that's not clear from what you wrote - it sounds like you believe it already should protect that.

> "Maybe you really are arguing that freedom of speech and religion only > grants someone the right to not being jailed when all they have left is to > stand, homeless, on the street corner with a sign, shouting at passerby -- > and then they'll be jailed for not having a permit, or something -- but I > would have thought that the Constitution meant the First Amendment for more > protection than that."

No one is argueing that. That's exactly what the First Amendment says (only pertains to government restrictions).

<comment><USER14> In the words in Inigo, "No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

By reason of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection clause, all manner of discrimination has been made illegal. All except discrimination against conservative or Christian speech. I fear for my job if I so much am overheard to speak on these issues in a way that would imply that I think someone else is morally wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> (Read on the screen)

"$Company noticed an intrusion by the US Federal Agents, Border Guards, and have marked this as a compromised account. Please have your designated friend, if set, to authenticate your account."

Its now out of the persons sphere to fix, even if coerced. And companies can defend this by fact of an Acceptable Use Agreement violation itself is breaking a federal law: CFAA.

That, and it seems the only way to stop these issues now is to jam it up in legal limbo by citizens.

<comment><USER18> And if you're a permanent resident with a green card or any other type of visa, you won't be allowed in at all. All these solutions assuming you're a citizen aren't all that helpful to every other person.

<comment><USER17> That's the difference. You complied, and the company is road-blocking you.

Frankly, denying everyone at the border is probably a good thing due to the brain-drain it causes. We're not going to get saner laws without some serious economic impairments to punish these 'lawmakers' (really, religious zealots WRT to a very narrow system).

In all honesty, I'm looking at other countries that have saner laws, and less overall problems. I'm looking at the Nordic countries right now, along with Australia... But no country is free from really nasty influences of xenophobia, racism, and hatred.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is no technical solution to this. If you want there to be no searches of your phone when crossing the border, speak to your representative in Congress and your Senator. If they don't listen, then vote for someone else or even better, run yourself.

The only way this is going to change is with a change in the law.

<comment><USER4> I appreciate the sentiment here and think that tech as an industry could do with a lot more humility about its intersection with public policy. I feel like I know the people involved in this proposal well enough to say that they agree with this as well.

The point of the travel-lock proposal is that it's actually common sense. Everyone should want this feature. It is actually weird that we walk around all the time with unfettered access to decades of personal correspondence and a detailed log of every person we've ever meet even fleetingly online. The default should be different: getting access to years-old emails or a photographic memory of every acquaintance you have should be extraordinary.

<comment><USER20> Yes, for that at least, I agree completely. I'm not sure how much the idea would do for border crossing, but just as a general mitigation of risk, it's extremely sensible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is completely naive.

Firstly, social media's only incentive is to make your data as widely available as possible (in the interests of ad revenue), and maintain a good relationship with the government in their jurisdiction. Every other existing "privacy" setting on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc is already obfuscated to the point of unusability, for this reason, and "travel mode" would be no different.

Secondly, lets imagine that FB did implement a watertight "travel mode" that hid your embarrassing data effectively while you were travelling. Third parties would just start capturing and storing posts while you have "travel mode" off, and sell that to CBP, or whoever else wants to pay for it.

<comment><USER22> People who care deeply about these issues work at Facebook and Google.

<comment><USER23> Please clarify: I take your answer as a (fair) response to the first objection, but what about the other ( _" third parties would just start capturing and storing posts while you have "travel mode" off, and sell that to CBP, or whoever else wants to pay for it"_)?

Does that possibility worry you? Wouldn't that also put you _in a position where you're lying at the border_?

edit: readability

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure I understand that objection. How will a third party collect non- public information from my Facebook account, or my email?

<comment><USER23> Maybe the surveillance economy can send a diff or two?

[https://boingboing.net/2016/11/13/the-surveillance- economy-h...](https://boingboing.net/2016/11/13/the-surveillance-economy- has-6.html)

I fell strange linking to your own warning...

<comment><USER22> The surveillance economy is not a magic thing that sees all, though. What's the specific way in which third parties end up with my email and private Facebook data?

<comment><USER23> Sorry, I don't use Facebook, and I applaud the initiative (as I understand it, it's about limiting the exposure).

I just think that the use of a such a travel mode could be likened to/misconstrued as the practice (perilous, as you indicate), of using a decoy account, given for example, some previous snapshots of any public/semipublic social media activity suddenly invisible for the border agents.

Just trying to get a clearer view of your proposition (I think I'm doing it, thanks for answering!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ok, firstly, I think it's great that so many people are engaging on issues of privacy and at least trying to help folks understand how to mitigate their risks in these situations. Something I think that is getting missed about all this is that a lot of people are being very US and techno-centric when they create these articles. Security when travelling is about more than just digital issues.

Doing something like this requires that you consider the risks of your phone seizure versus the risks you may face without your primary smart phone. If your an activist flying from London to D.C then fine. But what about if your an activist flying from D.C to the D.R.C and back - then your threat model changes from potential TSA problems to physical security threats.

For just one example of this, let's say you ask people to ditch their phones and take a burner because of a potential risk at the US border. Now you have removed one of the best devices for the person's physical security - <USER2> smartphone that can update people about security alerts, about local news, weather, disease risk, riots (e.g the stuff we put in the Umbrella App dashboard - shameless plug -> [https://www.secfirst.org](https://www.secfirst.org)), share data amongst groups of people on the ground, can send GPS alerts in a emergency, can help them navigate if there is a problem, has a flashlight on it in darkness, has access to emergency contact details, insurance information, medical data, nearest hospitals etc. Now, your relatively low likelihood/low impact potential digital security risk at a US border has overridden the low/medium likelihood but high impact physical security risks...

Ditto it's important to thing about basic tactical things like that people are lazy, data is expensive and they will often not bother to restore the most important contacts and information that they may need when they travel, which can be a problem in an emergency...

Again, it's great to see people engaging on security issues but please be aware of the threat model, context and consequences of what you are trading off.

<comment><USER25> > a smartphone that can update people about security alerts, about local news, > weather, disease risk, riots, share data amongst groups of people on the > ground, can send GPS alerts in a emergency, can help them navigate if there > is a problem, has a flashlight on it in darkness, has access to emergency > contact details, insurance information, medical data, nearest hospitals etc.

I'm confused about why you're implying a burner/temp travel phone can't do these things. You can get a cheap & fully capable android phone at best buy for $40

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think you could easily justify something like this as a "travel mode" not just for border security, but "in case your phone is lost/stolen while traveling". Make it so you have full or enhanced access to very recent stuff (photos, status updates, etc.) from the trip itself, and don't have access to as much from before the trip. Help defeat localization settings in the place where you're traveling, and get tourist/visitor-specific ads instead of local ads. Value for the user (usability and safety) as well as for the social media network and advertisers.

The other form of this which would make sense: worksafe mode or public mode. If you're logging into your facebook/twitter account from a public computer, perhaps it doesn't have as full and unlimited access, and doesn't have access to non-reversible account actions, and strongly logs out. If you're logging in from a place defined as "work", it doesn't have notifications, certain groups, etc. (the "giving a meeting presentation on your laptop when a racy notification from spouse pops up" problem).

</comment><comment><USER27> It's not like they couldn't make you turn travel mode off if they wanted to. How about pushing for a law closing this 4th amendment loophole at the borders, at least for citizens?

Not that it'd do much. If the border agents really want to see one's social media accounts, I have zero doubt they can get that data from other government agencies. In fact, they probably already have it. It sounds to me like they're just trying to assert their power and dominance over the people whose accounts they are demanding access to as a way to get off on intimidating others. Pretty typical behavior by law enforcement officers the world over.

<comment><USER4> The idea is that they cannot in fact make you turn travel mode off, because travel mode doesn't turn off. It's a time lock. The point is that while locked, Facebook and Google Mail are still usable; they just don't have your whole history available on them.

If we stipulate that your second paragraph is true, then travel mode is in fact _a complete countermeasure_ to that behavior. (I don't think it's true).

<comment><USER28> Why wouldn't they just detain you until the time runs out?

<comment><USER29> Ideally it would not be evident that the account is in travel mode.

<comment><USER30> How can it possible be non-evident?

<comment><USER4> A travel-locked Facebook account should just look like a quieter Facebook account.

<comment><USER30> So, pretty evident from the most casual analysis.

<comment><USER4> I don't think any part of the proposal depends on it not being possible to detect whether an account is travel-locked, but I'm curious about why you think it's so straightforward to tell if an account is locked?

Surely, if this became popular, CBP would simply start asking aliens seeking entry whether their accounts were travel locked. And the standard advice would be, "never lie to CBP".

But I'm still curious about why you think this would be so obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If they get your password can't they just turn of travle mode for you? Or wait until you do the same? I don't know that there is a technical answer here accept wiping your phone/laptop before you go through customes.

The real solution is a political one where we speak up and legeislate and litigate that the 4th amendment applies a the border.

<comment><USER20> Wiping your stuff does no good at all. As pointed out in the article, they know who is on the flight hours before you land. They'll know you have a Facebook profile. The difference between having a laptop already logged into Facebook and a wiped laptop with no data is quite literally the time it takes them to tell you to type in the password for them. Ignorance isn't an escape clause.

Which is, I think, the same problem Maciel's solution faces. Border patrol can possibly just see that you've enabled "trip mode" (by the anemic presence) and put you back on a plane. You're welcome to try again after your trip mode expires, but if they want to see your account, there is, as sure as mathematical logic, no possible "out". Anything you do to deny them that access can be grounds to refuse you entry (if you're a non-citizen).

You're right that the only real solution is a political one. Unfortunately, there are no political solutions to any problem anymore. Not in the US at least. The days when government was even interested in solving problems are gone and I doubt they're ever coming back.

<comment><USER4> If you're an at-risk traveler, you'd enable travel-lock pretty much as soon as you decide on your itinerary, potentially before you ever get on an airline manifest.

The thing I think I see a lot of people missing here is that travel-lock doesn't _wipe_ or _disable_ your accounts; it just restricts history and breadth. For a lot of people, I think these services will get _easier and more pleasant to use_ while travel-locked, so it's relatively painless to give yourself a generous margin before departing and after arriving.

<comment><USER32> I'd turn this feature on my phone _right now_ for gmail just for "lost phone" mitigation.

<comment><USER4> The problem with that is that CBP can (and surely soon will) compel travelers to log into their accounts from CBP's own equipment.

<comment><USER32> Sure. But a setting that said "always on mobile" and another one where they schedule it for me based on my airline emails makes uptake faster.

And I want that when I'm traveling _anywhere_.

[later] we want to _normalize_ the idea that access permission to our data is context aware based on what we are doing. To me this is true independent of border crossings. For instance there are things I want in the cloud for backup purposes that I don't want be able to access from anywhere but home normally.

<comment><USER4> Yes! Sorry, we were agreeing but I well-actuallied you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Instead of that, I'd like a way to clone everything on my phone and save it on a USB. Every app, logins, contacts, photos, settings, factory updates, wallpaper, lock screen password, everything, in an encrypted archive that I can put on a USB in my checked baggage, or mail ahead to my destination, upload to my personal server, whatever. Then I'll just do a factory reset, install some cover apps, and go. Then reinstall my backup when I get where I'm going.

The Android backup feature that comes with the phone backs up contacts and photos, but it's very incomplete. Settings, saved logins, and other stuff gets lost. You have to reinstall swype every time. It's too inconvenient to use the way I've described. Other phone cloning apps exist, but a cursory google search only finds ones that require two phones, rather than a phone and a PC.

<comment><USER34> On a rooted Android device, TitaniumBackup can be used this way (not factory updates, but those don't get wiped by factory reset anyway).

However, it doesn't solve your real problem, which is that you can be compelled to log into your social media accounts in the presence of the border control officers. You can do that from the browser on a wiped phone, or on their equipment.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, it's true. I guess it would be one part of a strategy. Mine also involves saying "pardon me?" a lot and telling them that I'm deaf. 98% of people in uniform don't have the patience to try to communicate with a deaf person, and just tell me to move along. Also, they probably won't believe that I don't have facebook or email, but I can avoid telling them about things like okcupid, instagram, and disqus logins at least long enough to delete those accounts if I do get searched. Like any security, it's more of a deterrence than an absolute block.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why not go further with the idea of a Travel Mode toggle and have it be tied to the device itself. This cuts out any possibility of any data being left on the device from being analyzed easily, social media or otherwise.

Google and/or Apple could add this as a new menu toggle similar to Airplane mode. Once switched on, while in an airport, prevents the device from being unlocked. Then by utilizing geofencing, once the device leaves the airport it unlocks and can be used again.

<comment><USER36> What if the border agent takes your phone outside? It would go something like:

> Tell me your password > OK, not sit here while I go out to unlock your > phone.

<comment><USER35> I doubt that border agents will want to walk every phone outside and then come back in. It is security through inconvenience.

But I guess there could be an option to extend the range of the original airport geofence.

<comment><USER37> <agent presses button that fires up their gps signal jammer and turns on some wifi networks impersonating the Starbucks at Grand Central Station>

(I suspect there's companies already trying to sell them that technology...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd been thinking about a similar thing: a "limited access for border guards" mode.

Basically, you can turn over the phone to border guards in a way which gives them access to what is on the phone, but which logs actions, and allows you to easily revert/revoke any changes they make. (This would also be a mode you'd turn over to an employer demanding access).

Potentially this mode might also block access to certain things (secret FB groups, archives over a certain age, some chat logs), but would otherwise be fully functional.

The benefit would mainly be that all actions taken would be logged and reportable, as a way to try to keep authorities from poking in places they shouldn't. It seems they are NOT mostly using forensic imaging tools, but logging in directly on the devices, at least right now, so there would be some value.

</comment><comment><USER38> One thing I wonder about is how quickly a travel mode would become grounds for denial of entry.

<comment><USER39> Or how quickly Facebook/Google/Twitter would comply with some classified FBI/NSA directive to provide the data anyway.

The first mistake is trusting these networks with your personal life in the first place. Nothing can erase that except your ability and willpower to keep your secrets to yourself.

<comment><USER40> Note that CBP does not have access to all the data NSA has gathered. If they did, we wouldn't be talking about this at all; they'd already have everything they wanted.

<comment><USER41> Relying on dysfunctional communication between portions of government doesn't seem like a sustainable strategy.

<comment><USER22> It's not dysfunctional communication, it's legally mandated boundaries enforced by an independent judiciary.

Don't cede the thing you're fighting for.

<comment><USER41> > It's not dysfunctional communication, it's legally mandated boundaries > enforced by an independent judiciary.

Do you really think that wouldn't dissolve in the face of "we already have the information, we're just improving communication between government organizations"? They shouldn't collect the information in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I feel that all technical modes will fail.

Why?

\- We first had PIN numbers. Easyily cracked/defeated.

\- We then had passwords. Provide them or go back home where you came from.

\- We might have travel mode. Defeated or made illegal. Go back home.

I think the only resolution to this is political. Make these searches go away - worldwide - as we near a very bad precedent.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady I feel it would be quite obvious looking at your device and it's lack of data that such a feature was in force and they would just deny you entry. Nice idea but the problems need fixed in law. IMO technical solutions are just temporary bandaids.

<comment><USER22> I agree that technical solutions are bandaids. However, US citizens can't be denied entry. They can be delayed for a few hours, not longer.

<comment><USER20> Your device can be confiscated for much longer, of course. You could take that time difference and hopefully permanently wipe account data before the lock expired, but that has the drawback that it's terribly inconvenient for you and causes the government no great concern at all, so it might simply become routine procedure.

<comment><USER22> You can imagine a scenario where you leave detention and then de-authorize impounded devices.

The point is not that this is a perfect solution. It's a better solution than the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> It is worth noting that while social media represents a significant threat to ordinary travelers, the potential for significant harm through indirect leaks exists through retained professionals as well.

In fact, this situation might even be worse for those passing through the Canadian border. Please see: [http://www.canada-usblog.com/2017/02/03/what- canadians-shoul...](http://www.canada-usblog.com/2017/02/03/what-canadians- should-know-about-solicitor-client-privilege-at-the-canada-us-border/)

& the linked: [http://www.lexsage.com/documents/Border%20Searches%20of%20El...](http://www.lexsage.com/documents/Border%20Searches%20of%20Electronic%20Devices- Aug%202009%20\(2885071\).pdf)

</comment><comment><USER44> I'd love to see travel modes take off. I was talking with some friends about how great it would be to be able to switch my login credentials to some sort of shared multiple person-required password for the duration of a flight. Like Shamir's Secret Sharing, but temporarily.

</comment><comment><USER45> Or we just give up social media.

What, exactly, has been gained from the days of just posting on anonymous message boards and using email?

Nothing but giving unimaginable power to creepy guys like Zuckerberg and the ability for governments and employers to track your entire life. I'll pass.

<comment><USER46> So instead of asking to see your social media account at the border they would be asking to see your email account. How is that better?

<comment><USER45> >How is that better?

My private email account can't be proven to exist, or submit to NSA requests either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> What if the phone can be put into "suck mode" that just makes it completely infuriating to get any information from for a while after you've flown a long distance in a plane?

Sure, you can open Facebook and stare at a loading icon until you give up. You can go to a profile page and see images that are failing to load. At some point you're going to stop wasting everyone's time.

The reason this is better than just a "trip mode" is that it's so banally realistic. Of note: because of the weirdness of connecting to cell networks after having moved thousands of miles in airplane mode, most phones I've owned _already do this_ to some extent.

<comment><USER22> I was going to say, this already exists on my phone.

Any countermeasure on the device will just result in you being asked to log in on a CBP laptop.

<comment><USER48> 2FA, for services that support it, with the second factor being a device that isn't with you when cross the border would be a solution that would be near absolute in prevention of logging in at the border, whether from your own device or a CBP-controlled device (of course, it wouldn't prevent you from any consequences CBP applies to _not_ logging in.)

Of course, there's a question of the risk to _that_ device, which somehow has to cross the border separate from you, which creates its own ream of problems (you could protect the access to _that_ device with 2FA that uses the device you _do_ keep with you, which mitigates the security risk of loss, but you still risk losing access to the services it protects if it is lost in transit; obviously, you want to make sure your 2FA has a recovery process and one that isn't usable from arbitrary locations or the device you carry across the border, but will be usable by you when you get home, at least.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Nice idea. But it's treating the symptom rather than the root problem.

<comment><USER50> The root problem is terrorists wanting to kill people.

<comment><USER51> That's not a good excuse for denying ordinary people of their basic rights. There will always be killers anytime, anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This isn't very different from refusing to provide login credentials. Sure, turning travel mode on and off could require keys, which are present only on primary devices, which are left at home. So there'd be no need to lie.

However, foreigners would likely be turned back. Because using travel mode is arguably evidence of hiding stuff. And citizens might still be detained. It seems unlikely that they'd send agents to homes, to turn off travel mode. But it's arguably not impossible.

</comment><comment><USER53> I've been thinking of this.

I don't want to take my digital possessions through customs if they can request access or deny me.

I don't want a burner that is subpar and I can't afford another phone with great camera etc.

So, I can see two options:

A virtualbox/dualboot where you run two OSes of your devices with full encryption - and one is a dumb/fake install with no personal data that you enable when traveling. It doesn't login to your mail or your facebook and doesn't have your real contacts, photos, passwords on it. You can do this trivially (still for the technically savvy) for a laptop, probably for an android it is not too hard with a custom bootloader. If you were more paranoid, you could create 'dumb' social media accounts, but that starts being time consuming.

Second option is you make an encrypted snapshot of your system before travel. Then you reset / wipe your system before traveling, and then reload the snapshot once you are through customs. This could be done more securely by not actually taking the snapshot on physical media across borders, but storing on a server and downloading once you are through customs. The downside of this is you need data access during travel.

As an aside, I am curious how they would react to someone like me who has no social media accounts. Do I need a fake one to make me look 'real'?

</comment><comment><USER54> This may be a hugely naive question but what could they do if I simply don't use social media?

Do they automatically suspect someone who denies using it and what would follow in that event?

<comment><USER4> If you legit don't have a Facebook account, you're fine. The problem is that most people do have them, and it's an extremely bad idea to try to sneak them past CBP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> An article with an interesting suggestion and a noble goal but I'm not the first one to say it:

Technology cannot solve the problem we currently face with erosion of privacy at the border! These clever tricks trying to get around the issue only kicks the problem downfield, and likely won't effectively work. If they found out you have travel mode enabled - you may be denied entry or worse (note the comment from @mholt) - they would just detain you until the time lock runs out.

<comment><USER22> They can't detain US citizens longer than a few hours.

<comment><USER55> What if I'm a US citizen traveling to Canada, and their border patrol is similarly vigilant? I could be denied entry to Canada.

Sadly this policy is being picked up in many other countries :(

<comment><USER56> Our border patrol isn't "similarly vigilant". That's a meme being spread by a very dedicated account on HN, probably to seed the grounds for a lot of "whataboutism".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> What is actually needed is a dead man's switch: a secondary password that, when entered, destroys the security enclave/TPM to render the device unreadable

<comment><USER36> Then the border guards send you home. What mission has been accomplished?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Social media doesn't need a travel mode. Non US citizen just stop travelling to the US whilst the country is violating human privacy rights at border control.

<comment><USER59> [http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11171475)

As a non-american looks like I'm fucked if I want to fly into my own country with my own electronics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How do you turn a travel mode off? Once border patrol knows this feature exists and how it works, the jig is up. Any expiration/timeout would just cause you to be detained for the duration the travel mode is enabled. A second password to turn it off would just cause that second password to be coerced out of you. Location-based deactivation can be spoofed.

<comment><USER22> US citizens can't be detained indefinitely at the border. The limit is a few hours.

<comment><USER60> That's fine for US citizens entering the US, but any 'travel mode' needs to work for the outbound trip too. If the country you're visiting has adopted a US-style border stance, then you're in no better a position than a non-US citizen visiting the US: the border forces of that other country can detain you until travel mode expires if they want. It seems like "They can't hold me for days while they wait for the mode to expire" only works for citizens returning to their own countries.

<comment><USER61> More likely they'd just send you home. Either way, denying people entry is bad for business and tourism. If enough people want to protect their accounts when they travel, countries will have to weigh the trade-offs.

<comment><USER62> Sure, it is bad for business. It will likely be used disproportionately on brown people and minorities, just like "random" screenings at the airport. Yes, bad for tourism, but only consistently bad for a minority of the population and most others just have to take of their shoes etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> > Border agents can find your profile online and make you log in on their own > machine.

What if you have a long password that you cannot remember? Same for email, etc.

I don't have fb on my phone. And I don't remember the password. They would have to make me do a password reset via email, which might work.

</comment><comment><USER64> Would basic geoblocking help? A setting that says this account cannot be accessed outside your home country? Has the plausible deniability of "security". VPNs can also be effectively blocked if the same lists Netflix etc subscribe to are used.

</comment><comment><USER65> Social Media needs a "delete everything older than X days" function.

<comment><USER22> Yes it does. Or at a minimum, the ability to set time horizons on things like Facebook groups.

The Women's March was organized mostly on Facebook. Why does that list of people have to be stored in perpetuity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how this is any different from refusing to provide your password. Border Patrol may just detain you regardless of whether the issue is you aren't providing your password or you decided to make your device less accessible before going on your trip. Both are forms of trying to prevent them access to your device, which they won't like. The real solution seems to be changing the laws that allow them to get away with what they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think social media and gmail are a complete lost cause wrt privacy. I already de-activated my facebook due to it being a time sink. But I think I'll go ahead and delete it now.

<comment><USER22> One thing about Facebook culture is that the employees there see themselves as fanatical guardians of privacy. It's a very strange belief system, but it's real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I love this idea, but it also needs to be discussed within the context of knowing that (since Snowden) the NSA already has all your social media data categorized and ready to go should it need.

So, in context, this is about stopping one branch of government - CBP - <USER3> being able to compile data that another branch of government already has.

I love the idea but worry it might be a form of security theater, given the three lettered elephant in the room.

</comment><comment><USER68> What if you changed your password to something really long and not memorable before you leave home? Print it out on a piece of paper and leave it in a safe. You can't be forced to produce a password you don't remember. When you get home, open the safe and change your password back to something you know.

<comment><USER68> Although I guess they could force you to go through the reset password flow, so you would have to cripple that as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Cell phones often have 4G connections but if they're on wifi or laptops on wifi, we could collect the IPs of all airports and present the travel mode by default.

Phones could use GPS to detect when their in/near airports and inject an X-Travel-Mode cookie into HTTP requests.

</comment><comment><USER70> Most Americans don't travel so this likely won't happen in the US; even less travel internationally.

[http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2016-O-001/index.html](http://travel.trade.gov/view/m-2016-O-001/index.html)

<comment><USER4> The overwhelming majority of people CBP actually deals with at the border are in fact citizens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> The simplest solution would be simply to not to travel to the US. I'm sure it wouldn't be long before the airlines & hotels were lobbying for a change in the law.

<comment><USER22> Some of us live here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Didn't Moxie come up with something like this a while back? It was a bit of a non-starter since you had to install a custom version of Android in order to get it work

</comment><comment><USER73> Is a more general application of this idea a 'vacation mode' \-- a way to enforce an intentional limited vacation from social media?

</comment><comment><USER74> _Airplane mode: from the end of the microwave peril to the era of alternative inspection, in under 10 years._

</comment><comment><USER23> Plus what you leave in and out of the "safe" profile makes for a very interesting info ;)

</comment><comment><USER75> Why is it a bad idea to have fake FB/Gmail/Twitter accounts?

<comment><USER76> They look you up before you arrive and find out what your real account it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> You would simply be forced to turn off travel mode. And don't lie to the border agent and say it's not on.

<comment><USER22> Please read the entire post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> > We need a 'trip mode' for social media sites that reduces our contact list > and history to a minimal subset of what the site normally offers. Not only > would such a feature protect people forced to give their passwords at the > border, but it would mitigate the many additional threats to privacy they > face when they use their social media accounts away from home.

Border security officer: I see you have trip mode on. Turn it off, and give us the phone, or you're not getting into the country.

Reminds me a little of this: [https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

<comment><USER22> Please read the entire post.

<comment><USER79> I understand, but their default response for "You've done something to hide information from us" isn't going to be "Oh well, we tried. On your way!"

<comment><USER78> Exactly. They'll just take you to a computer they control and make you login there. Or there'll be a law that requires an override authority.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Isn't the U.S. Better at Predicting Extreme Weather? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/magazine/why-isnt-the-us-better-at-predicting-extreme-weather.html <comment><USER2> We could get better at it. But it would require further investment in "politically correct environmental monitoring."</comment>


I see it, but I don't believe it - <AUTHOR> http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/i-see-it-but-i-dont-believe-it/ <comment><USER2> But wait, the first step in the picture guide says to push the south pole through the north pole. How can you do this without making a hole on the sphere?

<comment><USER3> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVVfs4zKrgk&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVVfs4zKrgk&feature=related)

The first minute establishes the conditions.</comment></comment>


Sun Microsystems PizzaTool (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 <comment><USER2> I had to look up NeWS because I was bewildered at how Sun was writing PostScript by hand to create a whole GUI. Wikipedia has a nice summary comparing it to Display PostScript used in the NeXT:

"Sun Microsystems took another approach, creating NeWS. Instead of DPS's concept of allowing PS to interact with C programs, NeWS instead extended PS into a language suitable for running the entire GUI of a computer. Sun added a number of new commands for timers, mouse control, interrupts and other systems needed for interactivity, and added data structures and language elements to allow it to be completely object oriented internally. A complete GUI, three in fact, were written in NeWS and provided for a time on their workstations. However, the ongoing efforts to standardize the X11 system led to its introduction and widespread use on Sun systems, and NeWS never became widely used."

I miss Sun. They were fun.

<comment><USER3> I would argue that the best NeWS interface toolkit wasn't even built by Sun - HyperNeWS|HyperLook:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20182294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20182294)

Edit: Writing PostScript by hand was actually rather good fun - it's actually quite a nice language.

<comment><USER4> > Edit: Writing PostScript by hand was actually rather good fun - it's > actually quite a nice language.

Part of the fun was that the most powerful computer in the office, for quite some time, was in the laser printer.

<comment><USER5> Ah, there was some C64 software which used the CPU (same as in the C64) in the diskette drive for something. :)

<comment><USER4> How many 1541a could you daisy chain to a C64? If sending problem data and getting results is faster than doing the calculations on the C64 itself, we can have some net gains.

I don't think Bitcoin mining is viable, but rendering fractals may be...

I remember one PostScript printer (AMD 29K-based) that rendered a Mandelbrot set much faster than my modest Mac LC 2 (or 3?)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The good ol' days, when UI designers put handles on windows corners, so that users weren't forced to find the right pixel to resize them.

<comment><USER7> UIs reached their peak with Motif and it's been downhill ever since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to have a Sun workstation back in the 90's. They were awesome. My workstation had 16MB of memory and ran SunOS, Sun's version of Unix based on BSD.

With 16MB of memory the system was a pleasure to use, and had an excellent UI (OpenLook, as seen in the screenshots of the PizzaTool.)

25 years later we have machines that are many times more powerful with many times more memory. But is the overall experience better? Not really. Windows 10 has a sucky UI, and despite more powerful machines, doesn't run much better than my 16MB Sun Workstation used to.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why don't people make native apps for everything today? Modern frontends use talk to web APIs for data and business logic anyway, Qt/WPF/Cocoa are better than web front-ends. I'd enjoy having desktop apps for instead of many of the websites I use - to order pizza, to buy stuff, to read/comment news or anything.

<comment><USER10> You'll need apps for each platform; testing is much more expensive; discoverability is a challenge; people (myself included) trust websites much more than native apps; you'll need a browser version anyway.

<comment><USER9> > You'll need apps for each platform

For many apps that's not hard. E.g. a pizza app like that is hardly going to take more than some hours to implement with whatever a toolkit. Almost every other app which is bloat-free and made to do just one job is going to be a similar case.

> people (myself included) trust websites much more than native apps

Because websites are sandboxed and updated. Right? Both things are already addressed in all the major OSes although there still is a huge lot of room for improvement.

> you'll need a browser version anyway.

Sure but as a user I can name quite a list of heavyweight websites which are pain to use and could fit a native app perfectly.

<comment><USER11> Fast to create but a long term drain on resources, bugs roll in, libraries need security updates, need to keep people around with the skill sets for all those platforms.

<comment><USER12> Everything you just said applies to mobile/webdev as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These kinds of tools were all over Sun when i was there in the late 90s. Sun really tried to make simple, focused tools for seemingly everything back then. They simply needed to work cleanly and be easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER14> Most importantly the pizza place is still around.

[http://www.tonyandalbaspizza.com/](http://www.tonyandalbaspizza.com/)

<comment><USER15> They long since closed in Mountain View (we used to eat there on Sundays after volleyball) and are now in better digs on Stevens Creek Blvd near Winchester.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I remember playing with this in the early 1990s - although I was pretty confident that the "Send Fax" button wouldn't do anything (the machines weren't connected to the Internet let alone being able to fax) I didn't want to run the risk of having to pay the delivery fees to get a pizza to Edinburgh. :-)

</comment><comment><USER16> Tony and Alba's in Silicon Valley is still around, too! The first time I read this I went with a couple of nerdy friends, and we kept asking their staff about their computer system. Eventually after confusing enough of the staff we spoke to a really nice guy who has been there for a long time and remembers the fax system. "Have a slice day!"

</comment><comment><USER7> " Cellular Pizza Fax (CPF), in which fax machines would be places inside roving pizza trucks to reduce the mean time between order and delivery."

They might get a chuckle at how accurate this turned out to be.

</comment><comment><USER17> This makes me wish I worked in software back in the 90s. Looks like they were having a blast!

<comment><USER18> I worked for Sun until the early 2000's. It was a nice place to work. I liked the openness internally, regardless of what team/country you were working in.

I don't know where you could work these days that has the same kind of atmosphere.

<comment><USER19> There were legendary stories of elaborate pranks, also:

[https://tech.gaeatimes.com/index.php/archive/april-fool- pran...](https://tech.gaeatimes.com/index.php/archive/april-fool-pranks-in- sun-microsystems-over-the-years/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This reminded me of Adobe's burrito ordering program ([http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marthag/postscript/burr...](http://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marthag/postscript/burritos)).

> _Tired of standing in line at La Costena? This file documents an automatic > facility for sending a fax to La Costena that orders 1 or more burritos, > quesadillas, tacos, and whatever. The command will compose the fax, and send > it to your favorite PostScript fax printer, for direct transmission to La > Costena, and no paper at this end will be generated. Then, when you get > there, your food will be waiting. No worries._

<comment><USER21> I love La Costeña! I posted these about it earlier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478422](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478422)

DonHopkins on Sept 12, 2016 | parent | favorite | on: Dynamic Programming: The Name (1984)

The story I heard was that Adobe's Type 1 font encoding [1] used obscure names like BlueValues, OtherBlues, FamilyBlues, FamilyOtherBlues, BlueScale, BlueShift, and BlueFuzz, so that Adobe employees could discuss their proprietary font hinting algorithms in public while they were in line for burritos at La Costeña [2]. That way nobody from Apple or Sun or SGI who was standing in line next to them could understand what they were talking about.

Yes THAT World Famous La Costeña: Guiness Record Holder for the World's Largest Burrito! [3] On May 3rd, 1997 La Costeña of Mountain View, California created the world's largest burrito. The burrito weighed in at 4,456.3 pounds and was measured at 3,578 feet long. It was created at Rengstorff Park in Mountain View.

[1] [https://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/T1_SPEC....](https://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/font/T1_SPEC.PDF)

[2] [http://www.costena.com](http://www.costena.com)

[3] [http://www.costena.com/famous.html](http://www.costena.com/famous.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20852875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20852875)

DonHopkins 7 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Amazon's "two-pizza teams": The ultimate divisiona...

How huge could a "One-Burrito" Team possibly be?

[http://www.costena.com/famous.html](http://www.costena.com/famous.html)

On May 3rd, 1997 La Costeña of Mountain View, California created the world's largest burrito. The burrito weighed in at 4,456.3 pounds and was measured at 3,578 feet long. It was created at Rengstorff Park in Mountain View.

(So big they had to photograph it from an airplane!)

[http://www.supersizedmeals.com/food/article.php/200604112036...](http://www.supersizedmeals.com/food/article.php/2006041120363213)

[https://twitter.com/xardox/status/997942006872764416](https://twitter.com/xardox/status/997942006872764416)

xardox @xardox

I finally found the whole story behind the World's Largest Burrito that La Costeña made in Rengstorff Park in 1997! 4453.3 pounds, 3578 feet long!!! Also set that day was the world record for largest number of porta-potties filled.

[http://supersizedmeals.com/food/article.php/2006041120363213](http://supersizedmeals.com/food/article.php/2006041120363213)

"Despite the hearty appetites of everyone involved, a substantial amount of food was left over. Soon people were filling enormous paper boxes with foot- long lengths destined for the freezer. A couple groups carried six-foot lengths like fire hoses to waiting pickup trucks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I worked at Sun in the late 90s. I Never used pizza tool, but I did order burritos with the command line burrito tool. It would fax your order to Burrito Real in Mountain View. By the time you arrived at Burrito Real, your burrito would be waiting and you could skip the line, get your burrito and pay.

</comment><comment><USER23> I hope the pizza arrived in a SPARCstation! ;)

<comment> em-bee i got a SPARCstation pizzabox, but when i opened it, there was no pizza inside :-(

it's actually sad that pizzabox style computer cases are very rare nowadays

<comment><USER15> I remember when my Sparcstation was replaced with the Sparcstation IPC. "How in the hell is my monitor going to fit on top of _that?_ "

<comment><USER21> At least it wasn't a Sparcstation SLC ("Silly Little Computer")!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if Don Hopkins could adapt the infamous z-machine interpreter written in PostScript to read v5 games.

<comment><USER21> Yikes! ;)

I wrote a terminal emulator in PostScript. Maybe somebody could port that so it runs in the laser printer, so you can record an emacs sessions running on a VT-100, send it to the printer, and print out an animated flip-book of it!

[https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tnterm.ps](https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tnterm.ps)

<comment><USER24> [https://rec.arts.int- fiction.narkive.com/SpMHXFdN/z-machine-...](https://rec.arts.int- fiction.narkive.com/SpMHXFdN/z-machine-in-postscript)

Not mine. It runs up to v3 games, thus, z3 extension. An old version of Curses (and of course Zork) will run fine.

[http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/interactive- fiction/games/zcode/](http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/interactive- fiction/games/zcode/)

Example:

gs -DNODISPLAY -- ./advent.z3

It works on GhostScript, but it may be adapted fast for any PostScript interpreter with a prompt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I remember playing with this at Adobe when it was in two buildings in Mountain View back in 1990 or so....

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks beautiful. I wish I could use an app like this to order a pizza now.

<comment><USER26> Not an app, but Domino's website has a pizza builder that shows the toppings being added onto a pizza as you select them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Too bad that NeWS was a proprietary system designed to replace X11.

<comment><USER21> NeWS wasn't designed to replace X11, which didn't exist yet when NeWS was designed. At the time NeWS was designed, it was called SunDew. X10 existed, which David Rosenthal worked on (one of the authors of NeWS, and later he wrote the X11 ICCCM window management protocol), and Gosling and Rosenthal also worked on CMU's Andrew window system (long before Andrew was ported to X11).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._H._Rosenthal)

I posted this earlier, which goes into lots of details, which I'll excerpt:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13783967](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13783967)

Here is one of Gosling's earlier papers about NeWS (originally called "SunDew"), published in 1985 at an Alvey Workshop, and the next year in an excellent Springer Verlag book called "Methodology of Window Management" that is now available online for free. [1]

[1] [http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...](http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/overview.htm)

Methodology of Window Management

F R A Hopgood, D A Duce, E V C Fielding, K Robinson, A S Williams

29 April 1985

This is the Proceedings of the Alvey Workshop at Cosener's House, Abingdon that took place from 29 April 1985 until 1 May 1985. It was input into the planning for the MMI part of the Alvey Programme.

The Proceedings were later published by Springer-Verlag in 1986.

Chapter 5: SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System, by James Gosling [2]

[http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...](http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p005.htm)

5\. SunDew - A Distributed and Extensible Window System

James Gosling

SunDew is a distributed, extensible window system that is currently being developed at SUN. It has arisen out of an effort to step back and examine various window system issues without the usual product development constraints. It should really be viewed as speculative research into the right way to build a window system. We started out by looking at a number of window systems and clients of window systems, and came up with a set of goals. From those goals, and a little bit of inspiration, we came up with a design.

GOALS

A clean programmer interface: simple things should be simple to do, and hard things, such as changing the shape of the cursor, should not require taking pliers to the internals of the beast. There should be a smooth slope from what is needed to do easy things, up to what is needed to do hard things. This implies a conceptual organization of coordinated, independent components that can be layered. This also enables being able to improve or replace various parts of the system with minimal impact on the other components or clients.

Similarly, the program interface probably should be procedural, rather than simply exposing a data structure that the client then interrogates or modifies. This is important for portability, as well as hiding implementation details, thereby making it easier for subsequent changes or enhancements not to render existing code incompatible. [...]

<comment><USER27> OK, sorry; "designed" was an inappropriate word choice. I should have said "meant" to replace X11, as that what it was meant to do, at least later when it was indeed competing with X11.

<comment><USER21> NeWS wasn't "meant" to replace X11 either, which as I mentioned didn't exist when it was designed. And it wasn't meant to replace X10 either, which hardly anyone used at the time.

It might be slightly more historically accurate to say that NeWS was "meant" to replace SunView or Andrew, but that wasn't its goal either.

From the horse's mouth, NeWS was "meant" to be viewed as "speculative research into the right way to build a window system", and its definition and goals didn't depend on its relationship to any version of X, but instead on PostScript as a Turing-complete extensible network protocol.

As the SunDew paper by Gosling and Rosenthal that I referred you to said, these were the goals of NeWS, an none of them had anything to do with replacing X10 or X11:

[http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/...](http://www.chilton- computing.org.uk/inf/literature/books/wm/p005.htm)

>GOALS

>A clean programmer interface: simple things should be simple to do, and hard things, such as changing the shape of the cursor, should not require taking pliers to the internals of the beast. There should be a smooth slope from what is needed to do easy things, up to what is needed to do hard things. This implies a conceptual organization of coordinated, independent components that can be layered. This also enables being able to improve or replace various parts of the system with minimal impact on the other components or clients.

>Similarly, the program interface probably should be procedural, rather than simply exposing a data structure that the client then interrogates or modifies. This is important for portability, as well as hiding implementation details, thereby making it easier for subsequent changes or enhancements not to render existing code incompatible.

>Retained windows: a clean programmer interface should completely hide window damage from the programmer. His model of a window should be just that it is a surface on which he can write, and that it persists. All overlap issues should be completely hidden from the client. I believe that the amount of extra storage required to maintain the hidden bitmaps on a black and white display is negligible - based on the observation that people generally do not stack windows very deeply. The situation is somewhat different with colour, but there are games to be played. Retained windows is one way of hiding window damage, but we do not want to commit to a particular solution to this problem at this time.

>Flexibility: users need to attach devices, change menu behaviours and generally modify almost all components of the system. For example, the menu package ought to be independent of the particular format or contents of the menu, thereby allowing the user to develop his own idioms without having to reimplement the entire system.

>Part of flexibility is device independence: SUN provides a spectrum of display devices to which clients need consistent and transparent interfaces. This leads directly to portability, which we also need to achieve.

>Users should be able to make various tradeoffs differently than in the standard system, because of either particular hardware or performance requirements. For example, if the system provides retained windows because we believe that the cost in terms of memory usage is worth the performance improvements, a user should be able to make this tradeoff differently, for example if he has less memory.

>This extreme flexibility might appear to be at odds with having a clean, simple, well-abstracted programmer interface, but we do not believe that it is.

>Remote access to windows: in the kind of distributed networked environment that SUN promotes, it is natural to want to be able to access windows on another machine as naturally as the NFS promises to support accessing remote files. We believe that this will fall out of any reasonably designed system.

>Powerful graphical primitives: the primitives that the Macintosh provides should be considered as a lower bound. Curves and colour need to be well integrated. Attention should also be paid to what CGI [30], GKS [28], CORE [24] and PHIGS [6] need. A consequence of an emphasis on power and flexibility is the ability to emulate other window systems, eg it would be very valuable to be able to provide an emulation of the Macintosh toolbox.

>Exploit the hardware: in particular, none of the systems mentioned above deal well with colour. In the future, colour is going to play an even larger part in display design. One can view black and white as a temporary technological stopgap, just as happened with television. Besides, SUN makes some pretty good colour displays, so the window system should exploit them. One implication of this is that the font file format must completely hide the details of the representation of characters, since we might eventually want to support antialiased text, and even illuminated monastic typefaces.

>Perform well: the performance of the current window system should be considered as the minimum acceptable level. Performance in the common cases is especially critical. The new system should perform faster than the current system on such common operations as repainting and scrolling of text.

And years later after that was written, X11/NeWS didn't try to replace X11 with NeWS -- just the opposite: Sun put a huge amount of effort into integrating them together and supporting them both. If Sun meant to replace X11 with NeWS, they would have kept on developing NeWS instead of making X11/NeWS.

NeWS was actually able to complement and improve X11 by implementing superior window management, by wrapping X11 client windows in NeWS window frames, which could be arbitrarily shaped, with tabs, pie menus, etc.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15327339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15327339)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19748582](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19748582)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22455722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22455722)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GoAccess – Visual Web Log Analyzer - <AUTHOR> https://goaccess.io/ <comment><USER2> Remind me of this cool project called netdata[0], also written in C.

[0] - [https://github.com/firehol/netdata](https://github.com/firehol/netdata)

<comment><USER3> I've used both. GoAccess tends to be more useful to me when I have a set of log files and want to track down something specific to the web server config. That's particularly handy when working on a server I'm not already familiar with, or when I have logs but no access to the server, since I don't have to run GoAccess on the server itself. It's also the only IIS log analyzer I bother using.

netdata is more useful for tracking live stats across live servers that I'm actively maintaining (especially multiple servers), and pulls a broader set of information from more sources, which is handier for tracking down intermittent networking issues.

They can both do a little bit of each other's job, which is nice. I tend to use GoAccess more often but think they're both pretty good tools for visualizing server data.

<comment><USER4> I am having the hardest time getting goaccess to work with the IIS 8.0 W3C logs. It keeps on complaining about the date / time format. What is your secret sauce?

<comment><USER5> Try uncommenting the relevant date/time/log formats from your goaccess.conf. Then run goaccess -f access.log -p /path/goaccess.conf

Or [https://gist.github.com/soheilpro/a34957550b1bd7d42be2](https://gist.github.com/soheilpro/a34957550b1bd7d42be2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks quite useful, and I think I'll be using it. I'm impressed by it being written in C... Especially because it can also run on the browser! Also, the default storage being Hash Tables. You don't see many modern projects like this! Actually feel like diving into the code.

<comment><USER7> I used it and I can tell you that it works exactly as advertised :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been using GoAccess for a year now as a traffic analysis tool on my blog. It's been great. Easy to use, and great for real-time analysis using the command-line interface.

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks fantastic. Any idea if it supports custom NGINX log formats?

        log_format main '<$host> $remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                          '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                          '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

<comment><USER10> Yes, it supports custom log formatting but you'll likely have to write a bit of parsing code in the config, see docs here: [https://goaccess.io/man#custom- log](https://goaccess.io/man#custom-log)

There are also a lot of log formatting q&a in the github issues (both closed & open) if you're using a popular format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does it similar query and search capabilities like Splunk or Kibana. Is it a full stack log system or just a UI?

<comment><USER12> It appears to specifically parse web server logs. Unique visitors, counts of 404 pages, etc.

Similar (in purpose) to "Awstats" or "Webalizer" that you find on almost every shared hosting account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can I use this to visualize custom data?

for example, can I push stock prices to this platform and visualize them in real time?

<comment><USER14> It's a web log analysis tool, not a general data viz platform. This may be more what you're looking for though: [http://www.cyclotron.io](http://www.cyclotron.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> just the other day - in lieu with AS ipblock info and 'rgxg cidr' \- helped me see at a single glance (3xx to 2xx relative count) some redirect deficiencies of a platforms http image fetchers. As you can pipe to it, it complements the other text utilities filtering logs very well.

</comment><comment><USER16> How is the performance when dealing with large log files? I get about 300 million pageviews a month

<comment><USER17> See #Performance in:

[https://goaccess.io/faq](https://goaccess.io/faq)

> A dataset of about 52M hits (12GB size) is parsed in 20 mins (in-memory), 60 > mins (on-disk storage).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Currently using this on one of our clients sites and I love it! More tools like this I say!

</comment><comment><USER19> Quite useful. Would be nice if it could be fed from piped input too.

<comment><USER14> It works just fine with piped input actually, I use it regularly with zcat.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, most of the GoAccess docs around pipes provide examples for using them to backfill missing expected features, like filtering by date range, file/MIME type, status code, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can I use this in Docker/Kubernetes?

<comment><USER21> Yes. Just mount the logs into the container.

<comment><USER20> Actually, the problem is that Docker logs to stdout rather than to logfile(s)

<comment><USER21> That's what Docker's logging drivers are for. It does so by default, but it doesn't have to.

[https://docs.docker.com/engine/admin/logging/overview/](https://docs.docker.com/engine/admin/logging/overview/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> angry-hacker Should I have log files if I host a static (very high traffic) site? Everything is static. I've turned off the logging, no idea what performance gain it has, if any, but is there a reason I should write then in file? I don't see any need.

<comment><USER22> Probably should. The logs have some pretty interesting details in them.

[http://attrition.org/postal/logs/2006/logs.001.html](http://attrition.org/postal/logs/2006/logs.001.html)

<comment><USER23> NSFW. Should've guessed due to it being attrition.org.</comment></comment></comment>


Picozu - web-based HTML5 image editor with PSD import - <AUTHOR> http://www.picozu.pw

<comment><USER2> 1) I dont see a way to import PSD. 2) I am not sure if this is the right tool for what I am looking for. My need is to be able to quickly slice out some layers from a PSD file as images. Does it have that capability ?</comment>


Ask HN: Health Insurance Plan Translation? - <AUTHOR> Is there any portal site that aggregates, normalizes and translates U.S. health insurance plan descriptions from the major providers into conversational English?<p>I would pay a subscription fee for such a service. <comment><USER2> Your plan usually has a data sheet that distills the most important things but if you can provide specifics I will be happy to help. You can also call their customer service, or your employer's broker, for help :)

The premium is what you pay every month for the plan subscription.

Your deductible is the amount you pay before insurance does anything. Some plans are 0 deductible, 500, 2000 etc.

Then after you fulfill the deductible, your insurance maybe covers 80% or 90% of expenses. So if you get a $1,000 medical bill, you only pay $100 or $200.

A co-pay is a separate fee you pay to see the doctor. You pay every time you see the doc.

Out of pocket max is the maximum amount you pay in a year. So if it is $12,000, and you get a huge $500,000 medical bill, you will only pay $12,000.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in standardized formatting across plans and providers, without having to deal with the wait queue.

Also, in/out of network costs, health care savings account details, and of other minutia.

I can't believe there isn't any demand for such a service, yet there is a strange dearth of products in the market for a purportedly capitalist economy.

<comment><USER2> I agree, it's definitely not a market with tons of competition. But I think the amount of information available to the consumer is adequate. It just takes skill to understand. Most people don't desire to understand it and will just call some hotline to find out what they owe. If you want to make money of that industry, you will be competing with the brokers who by law receive 4% of the premiums paid monthly in the bigger states

<comment><AUTHOR> > It just takes skill to understand.

Again, and maybe I'm missing something, but it sure seems like a business opportunity unmet here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Abel prize won by Oxford professor for Fermat's Last Theorem proof - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/15/british-mathematician-andrew-wiles-abel-prize-fermats-last-theorem-proof <comment><USER2> A good book about Fermat's Theorem. I am a fan of Simon Singh's other books as well.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem_\(book\))</comment>


Golang is considering to accept GitHub PRs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/golang/go/issues/18517 <comment><AUTHOR>
      I propose we start accepting pull requests by automatically converting them into Gerrit CLs
      ("change lists", same as a PR but different terminology). Reviews would still happen on
      Gerrit and the bot would update the PR of activity on Gerrit. Gerrit is still where we'd
      run trybots and push the "Merge" button. We would never merge on Github. Gerrit would
      remain the upstream source-of truth.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some examples of SaaS built around YouTube? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for examples of SaaS businesses (ideally subscription) selling to content creators on Youtube <comment><USER2> TubeBuddy is the 500 pound gorilla

[https://www.tubebuddy.com](https://www.tubebuddy.com)

On Twitch check out Streamlabs:

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


Website Can Find Your Exact Location With Your Phone Number - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/05/website-can-find-with-your-phone-number/ <comment><USER2> For Fox News, this article is pretty in-depth and factual. It makes me wonder if this isn't a press release in the guise of a news article.

>In the end, technology is agnostic, Enderle said, and a company that makes a new technology is rarely liable for how it is used.

I've never heard Fox News make this much sense. That being said, the technology does work, but is no more advanced than AGPS that we've had for years. I had a Motorola Q that had "GPS" in that it used cell towers to triangulate your location. There was even a web service I remember using (but can't remember the name) that would pay you money to drive around with AGPS running so it could find all the towers around you and better its location services.

<comment><USER3> These days people do the same (GSM bases / wifi tracking) for free (see wigle.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty straightforward, the local carrier I'm with (Vodacom SA) has been offering it for years under the 'Look4Me' brand-name.

Essentially it relies not on the phone itself but on the carrier's network infrastructure. In terms of GSM, with which I am more familiar than CDMA, a mobile phone 'registers' with any GSM tower and passes along certain parameters. Using that information, the carrier can combined the input from one or more towers to triangulate the location of the phone.

The process is opt-in and used via control codes. For instance typing in _120_ 888*phone number# sends a request for the location of that number. If they have not agreed to be tracked, they are sent an SMS showing them the phone number of whoever sent the request and asking them if they want to be tracked. If they ignore the SMS, nothing further happens.

However, tower triangulation is inherently inaccurate and in general accuracies are only within about 100 m at best and valid for the past 10 minutes. It's definitely nothing close to the kind of accuracy that solutions which use GPS, such as Apple's Find My Phone, can give you.

</comment><comment><USER5> Obviously the biggest abuse would be someone "borrowing" your phone and opting you in without your knowledge. That's actually more frightening than losing your phone because you would never know, and it adds another incentive to locking your phone. Like other "agnostic" technological advances that can be used for good or evil, I think it would be misguided and useless to fight this technology, but I hope equal advances are made to prevent unwitting "opt-ins".

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someone explain this to me? It nailed me, and i'm roaming far from home.

I'm rusty on my phone tracking technology... they send the phone an SMS, is that the mechanism? (e.g., premium sms processing gatway has geo?) Or do they tap into a telco celltower lookup?

I can think of a couple fun commercial applications.

<comment><USER2> I don't know all the details of it, but it doesn't use your phone for anything but a place to bounce the signal. It pings your phone, then measures the time it takes to receive a signal from the towers nearest to it (at least two, preferably three or more). This is all done on the end of the carrier. The text they send you just verifies this is the phone they are looking for and gains your permission.</comment></comment>