Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear a School-Issued RFID Tracker - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/11/student-suspension/ <comment><USER2> A judge has granted her a reprieve [1] based on freedom of speech and freedom of religion grounds. The student claimed it violated her religious beliefs. I don't begrudge anyone the right to practice their religion, but I do wish it had been based on her right to privacy.

[1] [http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/22/christian-student-wins- rep...](http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/22/christian-student-wins-reprieve-in- forced-tracking-chip-case/)

<comment><USER3> Privacy is not a legal right in general, beyond some particilar subclasses like searches and seizures.

<comment><USER4> The Row v. Wade decision inferred a constitutional right to privacy within the 14th amendment. If this right exists, then it makes no sense to limit it to specific subclasses.

<comment><USER5> > Row v. Wade

I believe that's what anglers fight over.

(It's Roe v. Wade, as in Richard Roe, John Doe's old friend, a classic fake name used by the courts for various purposes. In this case, it was used to protect the identity of the woman seeking the abortion.)

<comment><USER6> See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doe>

It's interesting to note that "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade revealed her identity just a few days after the trial ended. She later became a high-profile pro- life activist.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norma_McCorvey>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most important part of the article: _"What's happening now is going to spread across the country," Whitehead said. "If you can start early in life getting people accustomed to living in surveillance society then in future it'll be a lot easier to roll these things out to the larger populace."_

<comment><USER8> Sticking my foot out - Panopticons are not a bad thing. They're actually a really good thing, because they, theoretically, let you get a lot more security without losing a lot of liberty (instead, you lose privacy).

The problem people have - universally in my limited experience - is with the people and institutions behind the cameras, not the cameras themselves. If CCTV is Big Brother, isn't neighborhood watch something like Little Brother?

<comment><USER9> >Sticking my foot out - Panopticons are not a bad thing.

East Germany is a historic example of why surveillance states aren't a positive thing.

>If CCTV is Big Brother, isn't neighborhood watch something like Little Brother?

Neighbourhood watches aren't centralized and funded to the degree that state surveillance is.

<comment><USER10> > East Germany is a historic example of why surveillance states aren't a > positive thing.

Street CCTV is not the same as a microphone hidden in your light switch, without you knowing about it. Not nearly the same thing.

<comment><USER9> The ability to eavesdrop through cell phones, even where they're not making calls, is pretty similar (although probably more effective) to the capability of bugging light switches:

<http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029-6140191.html>

Street CCTV can augment traditionally eavesdropping intel, tracking movements and, from that, extrapolating relationships and activities.

<comment><USER10> I'm not even sure what this thread is about anymore, sorry. Passive CCTV is one thing. Massive spying on unrelated civilians is another. Bugging criminals' phones if you have a warrant is yet another. I don't believe any reasonable discussion can take place if you throw every possible reason and means of recording anything into one bucket.

There are different uses and different situations. People can have different opinions about them too. I believe for example that CCTV is exactly as legal as anyone taking a photos / movies of the police for example (and the other way around), while bugging phones by law enforcement needs to be very tightly regulated. But those scenarios should have very little in common.

<comment><USER9> >I'm not even sure what this thread is about anymore, sorry.

The thread started with someone positing that panopticons aren't a bad thing, hence the mention of East Germany (a low tech attempt at a state panopticon) and segued to discussion of the modern state's surveillance capabilities in comparison with East Germany.

>I believe for example that CCTV is exactly as legal as anyone taking a photos / movies of the police for example (and the other way around)

They both fall under similar laws, yes, but the big difference between ad-hoc amateur surveillance and centralized, automated surveillance is the capability of realtime analysis of location, association, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Students need the lanyard to use the library or cafeteria, vote in school elections,_

I graduated from high school nearly 10 years ago, we had ID cards with magnetic stripes. I graduated from college with some additional voluntary coursework four years ago. We had cards with magnetic stripes and QR codes. Both worked in the function of identifying the student, and swiping in the mess hall as currency. Quantity wasn't a problem even with a student body count of nearly 5500 in a high school, our student numbers started with 0000 and were (iirc) 18 digits long.

So here's my question: why was RFID aggressively pushed if tracking wasn't an explicit understated purpose, when there is tech perfectly capable of performing the duties outlined?

<comment><USER12> I would guess most of the vendors of these types of systems are going RFID. Magnetic stripes are fragile, as anyone who's had their visa de-magnatized can tell you. They are also perceived as "less secure", as anyone who knows anyone who's had their visa card "skimmed" can tell you.

For these reasons alone, RFID is where the puck is going to be. Then on top of that you add in you can sell institutions on tracking packages and analytics software and all that crap? I'm sure you can still buy mag-stripe versions of all this, but the people who do this are probably pushing RFID hard.

<comment><USER13> RFID chips are fragile in different ways (try holding three in front of a reader at once). When NFC enabled chip and pin cards first came out (and RFID enabled e-passports for that matter) came out, there were concerns that these cards could be skimmed from hundreds metres away as opposed to skimming requiring the card being placed in a modified payment terminal.

<comment><USER14> > there were concerns that these cards could be skimmed from hundreds [of] > metres away

Why is that no longer a concern?

I would certainly be concerned about it.

Even if the cards can't be cloned from a distance, couldn't they still be tracked from a distance? Could the school actually be helping stalkers follow students unobtrusively?

<comment><USER15> It is, and the cards still can be cloned. You just need a big enough antenna.

See: [http://hackaday.com/2012/05/27/reading-rfid-cards-from- afar-...](http://hackaday.com/2012/05/27/reading-rfid-cards-from-afar-easily/)

\+ I recall someone else building a big antenna that allowed to read cards from range of meters.

<comment><USER16> Reminds me of the "bluesniper", which was basically a Yagi antenna on a rifle stock, meant for sniffing Bluetooth devices from a distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I went to a high school with metal detectors, reinforced doors, armed guards, dogs, cameras, central electronic locking, road and pedestrian checkpoints, and, yes, ID badges. As a high school student in the late 1990s, I was more closely monitored than your average prisoner.

So my takeaway from the article is pretty specific: Bullshit. Carrying a school ID badge with an RFID chip on the school's campus is no great injustice. It's trivial compared to the routine degradations inflicted on a public school student.

Somehow, this makes it to court, while the routine problems are ignored. It's OK to treat students like prisoners, right up until new technology is involved. The RFIDs are the scary part, not the guards, weapons, bars, and locks.

<comment><USER18> As a counterpoint to you and someone that went to high school at the same time in the US. I experienced none of what you did.

<comment><USER17> My high school was in a wealthy area with ~4,000 students. Economies of scale apply.

When this becomes the "standard of care" at smaller schools, you'll just see other budgets slashed to provide these dubious "services."

<comment> brown9-2 Mine had 1600 students and probably a higher median income and none of those things. I would guess problems of crime have more to do with this than economic status or size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of this case where the school was spying on students with the camera of the laptops they loaned them. Seriously, what are these people thinking? That _1984_ was an instruction manual?

<comment><USER20> It brings to light once again what fucked up incentives/goals schools are pursuing, if it's not the safety/privacy of their pupils.

I remember when my high school installed surveillance cameras and a friend wrote an article, "Masses of Apathy", for the student newspaper about how it was so passively accepted. The principal of the school wrote a response scathing him for what amounted to disagreeing about students' privacy. Unsurprisingly, the cameras are there to this day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Although I'm not pushing religion on anyone I feel like it should be mentioned that the religious ground she mentions might have something to do with this part of the Bible:

"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead." Revelation 13:16

</comment><comment><USER15> > "Other non-believers think John was a bit too fond of funny mushrooms and > shouldn't be taken too seriously."

This kind of remark, regardless of author's beliefs, doesn't sound like a very good journalism style. (Also I guess it's a reference to Pantheocide from Salvation War series, <http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Salvation_War>)

<comment><USER22> So, the journalist maybe didn't say it respectfully, but there is a strong possibility in there.

John was originally proselytizing in Rome, but the Romans got pissed off at him, so he was exiled to the island of Patmos. Amanita Muscarias grew on that island! And if you read trip reports (or, trip yourself?) you'll find that Amanitas give very extreme religious imagery.

So if you compare the imagery from modern day Amanita trips with what was written in revelations... you realize that it's very possible that St. John was writing a trip report. And because of that day's lack of understanding about drugs and those experiences are produced, he would chaulk it up to a message from God.

## edit: more links <http://www.erowid.org/plants/amanitas/>

[http://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/pdf/amanita.muscaria.r...](http://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/pdf/amanita.muscaria.review.pdf)

However any references to amanitas or mushrooms are not in the wiki article for the Book of Revelations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are the school's administrators similarly tracked? Does the principal wear a badge around their neck?

Can students use a directory to see where in the building their friends are, or where to find a particular teacher?

I wonder if a surveillance society could work if everyone was allowed access to the information.

Opt-in systems seem to work better. Twitter, foursquare, facebook, etc. would be pretty terrible if they were government mandated.

<comment><USER24> _wonder if a surveillance society could work if everyone was allowed access to the information._

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk>

tl;dw -- it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the thing that annoys me the most about this, is the money. We constantly hear from politicians and their constituents that we should spend more on education, that our students don't compete well with the rest of the industrialized world and more money will solve that problem, despite the fact that we spend more per student than anyone else -- and then this is what they turn around and spend it on. And they are spending it on things like this without showing us any need for it. And will they ask for money to improve education in schools in the next elections? Yes they will.

</comment><comment><USER8> (Jumping ship from the other link to the same story)

Success metric _fail_.

Then again - What is the success metric for education? Attendance is (IMHO) pretty terrible, and standardized testing hasn't worked out the best - so what is it?

A classic answer (but still, probably not all that great of one) is jobs upon graduation - but that doesn't help in elementary school.

So, how would you go about turning such long-term metrics as "employment in ten years" into short term metrics, to figure out what to do next week?

<comment><USER26> Given that technology is supposed to increase efficiency (meaning fewer can do the work of more) I'm not sure that jobs are a great measure of educational success, or even the ideal goal of education.

We've seen the transition from almost all of society being involved in primary production to a small minority working in "big agriculture". Broad swathes of industry (construction, manufacturing, transport & logistics) being replaced by machines. Why do we assume there will even be a demand for labour which meets the needs of 90%+ of the population in 10 years time?

Often the counter-argument raised to this point is that "other jobs" will replace those which become defunct through new technology - instead of someone picking the crops by hand, they will maintain the harvesting machine. It seems to me there is a natural ceiling on the amount of productive work available before people simply end up rent-seeking/extracting value without creating anything in return - ie. trading futures on those crops, suing one another for selling dubious financial products which benefit no-one, and acting as social media liaison officers for the agro-business, financial services firm and law firm in question.

In my view optimising the education system to produce these outcomes (and then congratulating ourselves when everyone is gainfully "employed") misses the point by a fair margin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "...and it allows the school to track their every movement throughout the day." Seriously, is this necessary?

</comment><comment><USER28> If you work at any big company, or any company with a secured office building, you have to wear or carry some sort of RFID badge, sometimes two. If you drive across a toll bridge or down a toll road, you need an RFID sticker on your car. You carry RFID cards to use public transit or Zipcar. I don't know what my point is, except that this kind of thing seems like part of the modern world, and it's not that strange to see schools implement it.

</comment><comment><USER29> How do cameras prevent truancy better than taking attendance?

<comment><USER30> It's less about ensuring that students are at school, but ensuring that they are _counted_. The school district receives funding from the state dependent on attendance. That's what is meant in the article by "it's all about money". With the cameras and now RFID, they can record that the student is on the premises even if they are not in the homeroom for attendance taking. (There are legitimate reasons a student may miss roll call.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I graduated from that school last year and I totally agree with her decision about refusing to wear it not her justification. In case anyone is wondering John Jay only exists still due to a magnet school called John Jay Science and Engineering Academy. The magnet school boosts test scores and attendance to a acceptable level for the state. This RFID Tracker is one last attempt at saving the school from being shut down.

</comment><comment><USER32> Cameras connected to cops and it's being paid out of the educational budget?

<comment><USER33> The direct quote:

> The school has already installed over 200 CCTV cameras in an attempt to curb > truancy, some of which have a live link directly to the local police > department, Whitehead said.

I can't even begin to... this is... I have no words.

<comment><USER19> Personally, I like this one too (from [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/11/cctv-cameras- sch...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/11/cctv-cameras-school- changing-rooms)):

> More than 200 schools across Britain are using CCTV cameras in pupils' > toilets or changing rooms, according to figures obtained by anti- > surveillance campaigners, who warned that the research raised serious > questions about the privacy of schoolchildren.

> A total of 825 cameras were located in the toilets or changing rooms of 207 > schools across England, Scotland and Wales, according to data provided by > more than 2,000 schools.

[...]

> Responses from 2,107 secondary schools and academies showed they used 47,806 > cameras overall, including 26,887 inside school buildings.

That's an average of 22 cameras per school, so clearly there is progress to be made, but cameras in the lockers and bathrooms must be worth more points.

<comment><USER34> Pedo bear approves...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The privacy violation here is clearly of the second order. It is not the position of students which is private, but what can be inferred from their positions in aggregate. Your position data combined with data that you don't have can often say a lot about you.

Part of me is fascinated to see exactly _what_ you can infer from the data. Can you detect drug usage? Sexual activity? Perhaps even some psychological problems like anti-social behavior?

Should parents _want_ perfect information about what their kids do, even if just at school? Does the impersonal nature of this data's acquisition and inference erode the sense of connection and trust between a parent and child?

Although my own reaction to the news of the RFID policy was visceral and negative, I have to admit I sort of want to do the experiment and see what happens. I suspect that, as usual, the result will not be what anyone predicted.

<comment><USER36> At best I think you can infer who eats lunch in the cafeteria or who enjoys going to the library.... personal behaviors like drug use and sexual activity couldn't really be inferred without other sources of data.

<comment><USER3> Trigger the parking lot sensor == drugs. Bleachers == sex.

Proximity to known offenders, etc.

<comment><USER37> Where are they going to put the close proximity bleacher sensor? The parking lot sensor?

These things are not good with open spaces. I suppose they can re-design things to reduce the points of entry for these places but I doubt it. Especially considering that you can defeat it by removing your lanyard temporarily or giving it to your friend that is going to the library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would be somewhat more tolerant of "required to wear RFID badge" if it were done for safety purposes -- for instance, to maintain accountability over a group 5-6 year olds, or on a trip, or if someone was "special needs" (emotionally/mentally disabled) and prone to running off.

There are lots of advantages of RFID/NFC over magstripe or 2d barcode, even for simple applications like cafeteria payment -- faster reads, and the readers themselves are far more robust.

Issuing the cards with an RF shield envelope pretty much solves legitimate complaints. It turns it from a passive monitoring technology to something active, and it's maybe ok to require people to badge-in to get access to places with expensive or stealable assets -- badge into the computer lab, library, etc.

</comment><comment><USER39> The problem here is the way the school is funded. The reason that the school put forward is that the school's funding is based on the number of kids marked as in attendance in first period so they are using this system to increase those numbers by locating students already on campus but not in class.

So root cause here is the funding model. That's what needs to be changed. Funding should not be based on a variable number of students that happen to be at school on a given day. There are a number of fixed costs in running a school that the current funding model doesn't take into account.

So if you're pissed at this you should be more pissed at WHY they implemented it in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER40> Not wearing an RFID badge later in life will severely restrict this student's employment prospects, as they are very prevalent in many workplaces now. Would be interesting to know if her parents have to wear RFID badges where they work.

</comment><comment><USER41> The student refuses to wear the id even with the tag removed. Can someone explain to me what she is protesting against?

Why shouldn't schools know where the students are on campus and when students enter and leave campus? Attendance would be much better if parents could be called immediately when kids leave campus to skip. Kids could be kept safer since its harder to get away with violence with a log of everyone's location on campus.

<comment><USER42> The problem is that this system doesn't work. If a kid wants to skip school, she'll just give her friend the her tag to scan.

<comment><USER36> It's even simpler than that. All this card can offer is a system for tracking when and where it's scanned. Being a very short range technology, unless they make all doors/exits RFID only, they can still simply leave and noone would be the wiser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Related:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819877>

</comment><comment><USER44> Unreadable, prevents pinch/zoom.

Are there FF Addons to acccount for that level of (insert swearword)? I cannot even begin to imagine why anyone would think that this is a good idea. Wired, really?

Edit: To answer my own question: Yes, the addon 'Always zoom' fixes utterly broken and annoying sites. Like this.

</comment><comment><USER45> Related news on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819832> (94 comments) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819877> (12 comments)

</comment><comment><USER46> Wear it, but not before putting it in a microwave oven for a minute on high.

</comment><comment><USER47> _The Hernandez family, which is Christian, told InfoWars that the sophomore is declining to wear the badge because it signifies Satan, or the Mark of the Beast warning in Revelations 13: 16-18._

Not this shit again.

</comment><comment><USER48> this is not that different than the suspensions we'd receive for not wearing identification lanyards introduced my senior year in high school.

it seemed absurd even before the introduction of RFID. on one hand, this seems more absurd to me. on the other hand, this is a public school, where your privacy is limited anyway.

do the privacy cons really outweigh the security pros in this case? i do realize the general arguments presented in security vs privacy. but i wonder it's not _any_ different if we're talking about children in a public institution?

<comment> mkr-hn Imagine what will happen when bullies and other predators figure out how to track people with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The US government doesn't have a right to know where you are at all times, but the guardian of a child does have that right, or so I thought.

What's wrong with that?

</comment><comment><USER50> USA really needs to implement the EU's Data Protection Directive....

</comment><comment><USER51> They already track our mobile phones - what's the big deal?

</comment><comment><USER52> This would be so much more interesting and supportable as a privacy issue. Instead the first upholding of this policy will be in the face of religious superstition and will tarnish future attempts to resist or address this policy.

This is infuriating to me, as I fought the precursor to these policies when I was in highschool to the point that I had organized a protest with enough people that I was basically threatened until it dissipated. Now, more than ever, we treat our schoolchildren EVEN MORE like prisoners except that we still spend far more on prisoners than we do our education for our youth...

<comment><USER11> _"I feel it's an invasion of my religious beliefs," she told InfoWars. "I feel it's the implementation of the Mark of the Beast_. It's also an invasion of my privacy and my other rights."*

FTA. I get that it's popular to automatically dismiss something when you catch so much as a _whiff_ of religious overtones, but the student did in fact also mention privacy as an issue of why she refused to wear the badge.

<comment><USER52> My point was merely that complaining about the "Mark of the Beast" is a good way to get people to roll their eyes. I certainly think this policy is a horrible precedent but ultimately I think a secular redress involving something that could actually be upheld would be a better focal point.

This, "my religious belief is as good as anyone elses" is a can of worms, a dangerous discussion and will derail from the immediate problems with these policies. They turn places of education into centers of control and survelliance. There is so vastly much wrong with treating humans like this, let alone students, that I cringe that criticisms will be dismissed because of the particulars of an individual's religion.

(Aka, I agree with you, my fear is that this being a religious issue rather than a privacy issue will be over all detrimental to actually fixing these policies. Hope that explains things more.)

<comment><USER53> >something that could actually be upheld

Are you implying that the First Amendment (ie: religious freedom) is not something that can or has been upheld in court?

I understand the concern you voice, however in doing so you come across as so intolerant of religion that you're unwilling to even consider working with religious people when your goals coincide. Moreover, you seem to think that only one legal strategy is correct and only one legal strategy can be exercised at a time in order to challenge a rule or a law. I sincerely hope you represent the minority of HN and that most users are much more tolerant and inclusive.

<comment><USER54> A religious defense only helps religious people. Worse though, it perpetuates the idea that certain classes of opinions are more worthy than others.

Clearly secular solutions are more valuable because they help everyone. I'm very tolerant of religious people finding safety under my umbrella even though I find their belief odious.

<comment><USER55> >A religious defense only helps religious people.

Anyone can claim religious reasons, there is no religion police (yet). To me it reads like she objected for privacy reasons and the religious phrase given is just an argument they think might be accepted more easily. (I might be wrong, but it is a possible scenario.) - (Which is a sad thing in itself.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Why don't they just track the mobile phones?

I worry about the religious thing. Maybe she really is just that religious. On the other hand maybe claiming religious conflicts is much easier and likely to succeed than trying to argue rationally. And that would be a worrying trend.

<comment><USER57> A lot of schools don't allow mobile phones...</comment></comment>


Federal tech startup falls down on rules, procedures - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/02/22/report-federal-tech-start-up-falls-down-on-rules-procedures <comment><USER2> Well, at least the reporter managed to include quotes from the 18f side (I'll reserve judgement on whether those quotes were accurate), but he really should have left out the editorializing, such as _" But after reading this report, other agencies might want to look around for other consultants before doing business with 18F."_. It makes this piece look like a hatchet job.

Here is the key finding concerning the data breach[0]:

 _" 18F's use of both OAuth 2.0 and Slack is not in compliance with GSA's Information Technology Standards Profile, GSA Order CIO P 2160.1E. The order allows information technologies to be approved for use in the GSA IT environment if they comply with GSA's security, legal, and accessibility requirements. Currently, neither OAuth 2.0 nor Slack are approved for use in the GSA IT standards profile."_

And the recommendation:

 _" GSA should cease using Slack and OAuth 2.0 until and unless they are approved for use in the IT Standards Profile"_

OAuth, of course, isn't even software, but a protocol. I wonder where the authorizations to use HTTP, SSL, TLS, HTTPS, and so on is listed. OAuth is just a combination of these (presumably approved) technologies.

One of the key findings of the longer report[1]:

 _" Examples of software that were in use by 18F, but not approved by GSA IT, included Hackpad, used for taking collaborative notes and sharing data and files; CloudApp, a visual communication platform; Pingdom, a website monitoring tool; and Hootsuite, a social media marketing and management dashboard."_

Here are some relevant entries on Apps.Gov (Pingdom and CloudApp don't seem to be listed, unfortunately):

[https://apps.gov/products/hackpad/](https://apps.gov/products/hackpad/)

[https://apps.gov/products/hootsuite/](https://apps.gov/products/hootsuite/)

[https://apps.gov/products/Slack/](https://apps.gov/products/Slack/)

[0] [https://www.gsaig.gov/sites/default/files/ipa- reports/Alert%...](https://www.gsaig.gov/sites/default/files/ipa- reports/Alert%20Report-GSA%20Data%20Breach%205.12.16.pdf)

[1] [https://www.gsaig.gov/sites/default/files/ipa- reports/OIG%20...](https://www.gsaig.gov/sites/default/files/ipa- reports/OIG%20EVALUATION%20REPORT_Evaluation%20of%2018F%20IT%20Security%20Compliance_JEF17-002_February%2021%202017.pdf)</comment>


Accurate remake of Pac-Man in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://shaunew.github.com/Pac-Man/ <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431197>

Double standard, HN?

At least qxcv sees the light: "It's one thing to make a Pac-Man-like game. But this is being called the trademarked name Pac-Man, and you've copied the artwork straight from Pac-Man.

Seems certain this isn't an official licensed version. In which case, you should change all those items immediately. It's illegal and it's just not cool.

Here are the guys you are ripping off. Tōru Iwatani and his friends at Namco. Tōru is a very nice guy:

<http://pacmanmuseum.com/history/Toru-Iwatani.php> "

<comment><USER3> I enjoy seeing recreations of code like this. It's educational and fun, and this Pac-Man does not take anything away from the original.

It's unfortunate that IP law is so vague and intimidating. It can easily have a chilling effect on innovation and creativity -- you're afraid something might not be ok, but you don't really know, so you just don't try. For me, that's a red flag in a legal system. Competition, creativity, and education are all great things that deserve clarity and protection, both as an original creator, and as someone adding value with the basis of past work.

<comment><USER4> Agree, esp. regarding creative suppression and intimidation.

While one should respect the law, _I do wonder how the GP can so factually and confidently, conclude the project's legal status._

For example, only as recently as April 2012, did Namco Bandai choose to even register the trademark for "Pac-man" in Europe. In addition, Midway Games, who previously owned the distro rights in the USA, filed for Chapter 11 in 2009.

I certainly have no clue as to it's status, but I do know there is often a digression between what a person thinks is illegal, the actual law, intepretation of the law, case law (e.g. precedents), politics of the law, pragmatic issues etc. Hence the reason we have lawyers, that understand these issues better (and even then, they often disagree with each other). There are also degrees of legality (civil, criminal etc) from jay walking, copyright infringement, patents to mass murder and genocide.

Is Wikileaks _illegal_? Did Samsung _illegally_ create certain Android smartphones? etc.

 _Is <x> illegal?_, does not seem like a simple boolean, for a wide range of values.

The author of this project, is clearly a huge Pac-man fan, does not appear to be profiting financially (released the source on GH), and is generating interest in a product, that could be potentially be capitalized on by the rights holder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The remakes look really good -- good job! Does the original Pac-Man remake use the same AI behavior as the original arcade version? I ask because I tried using the "safe spot" trick (src: <http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Pac- Man/Tips#The_safe_spot> ) and the red ghost caught me every time.

<comment><USER6> It didn't seem to work. I'm not a Pac-Man expert, but the ghost behavior didn't feel the same to me here as it does on an emulated version of the original.

(I liked the speed though, Pac-Man is too slow.)

<comment><USER7> The hiding spot doesn't work, so there is definitely something amiss with the behavior. Still very fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent, I like it. Coincidentally I just read the Pac-Man dossier this morning[0]. An excellent resource on how the AI and overall game works. Might be a good way to get the AI a bit more accurate.

[0]<http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> Uncompiled source code is available here: <https://github.com/shaunew/Pac- Man/>

<comment><USER10> The term "source code" implies that no compilation has occurred /nit

<comment><USER9> I'll nitpick right back at you: since JavaScript is not compiled in the software sense, I could _only_ mean compile in the sense of "produce (something, esp. a list, report, or book) by assembling information collected from other sources: the local authority must compile a list of taxpayers."

;-)

<comment><USER11> Is it therefore accurate to say that the uncompiled source code is compiled in <https://github.com/shaunew/Pac-Man/>?

<comment><USER9> Touché. I guess so :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nicely done. I presume there is no sound? I have also seen this done in an Excel spreadsheet with very realistic game-play and sound.

</comment><comment><USER13> Thank you for making the controls work right. Most remakes I've seen won't register a turn if you press the button early, which makes it almost impossible to play at higher speeds.

</comment><comment><USER14> The creator of this remake gave a talk on it at the houston.js meetup this week. I was thoroughly impressed with how much effort and thought he's put into this project. He said that the Pac-Man dossier was his inspiration and seems to genuinely love the game.

For those of you who have criticisms about the game's accuracy, I suggest that you submit a new issue to his github repo: <https://github.com/shaunew/Pac- Man/issues>. That's what open source is all about, right?

<comment><USER15> No — open source is about you being able to take the code and do pretty much whatever you want with it.

Being able to report issues is entirely orthogonal to that. Lots of non-open source projects accept such reports, and releasing something as open source does not carry any implicit promise that the author will pay any attention to such reports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like how the learn mode lets you see the AI algorithms and the practice mode lets you rewind. It's like Braid for PacMan. Pretty fun. It'd be interesting to play as the ghosts and see if you can write simple algorithms for a ghost team to capture pacman.

</comment><comment><USER17> Looks very nice. My only complaint is that all the JavaScript code is in one file, which makes it a bit harder to casually peruse (I was curious how you implemented the ghosts' AI).

<comment><USER18> You can see the whole source here : <https://github.com/shaunew/Pac- Man/tree/gh-pages/src>

I wonder how he compiles these files into one though ? THis is the main drawback of javascript to me at the moment : having to write everything in one big file.

<comment><USER19> Looking at the code, I'm pretty sure the contents of each file is just dropped into an IIFE. A pretty simple Ruby script would take care of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What a marvelous piece of work done in explaining different aspects of the game, specially the level generation. And awesome remake :D

Also its really helpful for game programmers to learn from.

</comment><comment><USER21> Accurate enough to also include the level 256 bug?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man#Split-screen>

<comment><USER22> @anonova that's what i was thinking!!! i skimmed the code but couldnt tell if they included the infamous "kill screen" bug. i was never good enough to ever reach that level in the original arcade version, but my best friend's older brother was: Pac-Man's Kill Screen – Level 256 [video] <http://www.methodshop.com/2012/08/pacman-kill-screen.shtml>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm impressed with how well it works with touch input.

</comment><comment><USER24> Works on the iPad and works well

</comment><comment><USER25> Having recently watched King of Kong (<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0923752/>) I highly doubt the accuracy of these "remakes".

<comment><USER25> I probably phrased this incorrectly, hence the downvotes. These arcade machines have specific timers, odd hardware characteristics, hard memory limits, etc, that are likely impossible to replicate in software accurately - in addition to the software algorythms they use.

In king of kong, you will hear how a blob of solder in the right location will change the characteristics of the game to invalidate the entry for world record status.

Simply looking at the framerate counter at the bottom you can see that this isn't in any way "accurate". By looking at the github repo, you can even see the author has written about some of the inaccuracies - timing, collision detection, randomization, and bugs.

<comment><USER26> Hi, I'm the author. The framerate you see at the bottom right corner only indicates how often it is drawn. The game loop is actually sophisticated enough to keep the game updating at a solid 60Hz like the original, so the speeds are accurate because of that.

I feel like I hammered out the most of the critical inaccuracies, and I left out the original bugs because I found it preferable.

<comment><USER25> You've done a great job, and I am in no way intending to be critical. My only concern was the claim of accuracy. It is an outstanding simulation of the original, and I commend you for your work on it.

However, leaving out the bugs, for example, makes it not accurate. As for the timer, I don't see how you could guarantee the frequency in a javascript VM. It could be similar (by continually testing how inaccurate it is and adjusting the frequency of subsequent iterations), granted, but this is not accuracy (it is emulation). As for memory, etc, many of these older games had "death screens" where a buffer overflows and simple crashes the game, preventing you from continuing past a certain point - that too would be very difficult to accurately model in javascript. The list could go on and on. And this is in no way critical of you, or what you have done - it is simply statement of fact about accuracy!

As an aside, Billy Mitchell (the first person to ever get a perfect pacman score) was one of the stars in the movie The King of Kong.

Again, I think what you have done is AWESOME. But it is not accurate (and likely could not be).

Urghhh... I wish i'd never posted anything now :(

<comment><USER26> no, not a problem. i am agreeing with you now. curious, what should i call it instead? perhaps, faithful? or near-perfect?

<comment><USER25> I have no idea, im afraid. I like the thought of an "ambitious reproduction", but "awesome" works just as well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is awesome, but he should support WASD too.

</comment><comment><USER28> how abt porting it android? using trigger.io!! i guess it would be super cool.

<comment><USER26> The firefox beta on android runs the game really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Works nice on my Nexus7

</comment><comment><USER30> Very impressive!

</comment><comment><USER31> Menus broken on galaxy nexus of touch Browser. When I tap on a menu item, the tap registers twice, including whatever occupies the same position on the next menu. Example: Quit - No, which loops back to the game. Also, Credits.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the detailed bug report. I resolved the issue by adding a 200ms delay after a button press.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Speed it up please. The arcade version is much faster. This is plays really slow. I think the pac man should move at least 25% faster.

<comment><USER26> I've compared the speeds, and they're accurate. If you're talking about the fast mode in some arcade machines, you can try "play turbo" which emulates that.</comment></comment>


Survey: The physical security of human rights defenders - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1LRATeUm2hmzIBBYAg8LtMxcx6W6X4Fl1iYF-Lqe0FiM/viewform Security First is a mobile application that provides the user with the information on what to do in any given security situation and the tools to do it. The user-friendly guide is specific to the risks faced by human rights defenders, activists and journalists and will be adapted to a number of different cultural contexts. <comment><AUTHOR> Security First is a mobile application that provides the user with the information on what to do in any given security situation and the tools to do it. The user-friendly guide is specific to the risks faced by human rights defenders, activists and journalists and will be adapted to a number of different cultural contexts.

Thank you for taking our survey. All questions are on this page and it should usually take 10 minutes. We appreciate your time and it will help us provide the best tool for your security in future. At the end of the survey, there is a place to sign up for more information and exclusive access to our first alpha launch.

-The Security First Team

www.secfirst.org</comment>


Top 10 Ways To Be The Man Women Want - <AUTHOR> http://www.askmen.com/top_10/dating_150/186_dating_list.html

<comment><AUTHOR> it's not as shallow as you probably assumed.</comment>


Google blacklists Natural News (naturalnews.com) - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=natural+news&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 <comment><AUTHOR> The natural health website Natural News- notably anti-establishment and recently pro-Trump- has been blacklisted by Google, 140,000 indexes removed.

I have been visiting this site for over 5 years and have much appreciation for what they do. The Trump thing was interesting but raised many important questions.

Google gave a 'Violation of Webmasters Guidelines' for the blacklisting.</comment>


Neural Network in Glass Requires No Power Recognizes Numbers - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/neural-network-in-glass-requires-no-power-recognizes-numbers/ <comment><USER2> I recall work from the 1980s doing something similar. It turns out that a Fast Fourier Transform of an object can be used to recognize the object in an scene.

The result of convoluting the FFT of the "interesting object" and the scene is a "spot" that highlights all of the places the object of interest occupies in the scene.

I played with this, literally, in the last century.

Some day a bright-spot engineer at Google will re-invent it, patent it, and give it a spiffy name. Then everyone will have to be able to explain it during the Google whiteboard interview by just-graduated college students.

Sigh.</comment>


Indonesia forest fires spark blame game as smoke closes schools - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/12/indonesia-forest-fires-spark-blame-game-as-smoke-closes-hundreds-of-malaysia-schools <comment><AUTHOR> Same scenario played year after year. Everyone blames Indonesia. Indonesia says its not us. Nothing changes.

> Malaysian authorities distributed half a million face masks to residents on > Tuesday after large-scale forest fires in Indonesia spread smoke and thick > smog to neighboring countries. - > [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/11/asia/malaysia- > singapore-p...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/11/asia/malaysia-singapore- > pollution-intl-hnk/index.html)

> Indonesia Denies Responsibility for Haze Affecting Malaysia - > [https://jakartaglobe.id/context/indonesia-denies- > responsibil...](https://jakartaglobe.id/context/indonesia-denies- > responsibility-for-haze-affecting-malaysia)

This is from 2015 - [https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-34571356/south- east-a...](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-34571356/south-east-asia- haze-deadly-cost-of-indonesia-s-burning-land)</comment>


Google CEO Says Microblogging Coming to Google Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/05/08/08readwriteweb-google-ceo-says-microblogging-coming-to-goo-12208.html

<comment><USER2> Shouldn't they just buy Twitter?

<comment><USER3> Supposedly they tried to, but Twitter turned them down.</comment></comment>


Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/08/google_nexus_partner_friendly/ <comment><USER2> Since we've all been screwed by the mobile industry for the entirety of its existence, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel indignant towards Google for pissing off said industry. There are very few industries more arrogant and abusive than the telcos (at least in the US; I dunno about the UK), and if Google wants to take their place, I'm all for it. Instead of playing the consumer-screwing game better (like Apple did with the iPhone and its subsidized/locked-in model) Google is leaving those decisions up to the consumer and giving them a fair deal all around.

My impression is that Google looked at the existing phones and the way they were being sold (exclusive to specific carriers, and used to lock consumers in, just like all prior phones) and felt that it just wasn't doing the job the way they'd planned. Android had a reason for existing, and it was to break the logjam in the mobile industry so that Google could get on with the business of monetizing the hell out of mobile users. Since the old players decided to use Android to play by the old rules, Google simply reminded them of the way "open" is supposed to work. The play here is not for Google to become a traditional mobile device provider or to become a mobile service provider (though they'll touch on both). The play is to make the mobile web standard enough and good enough and pervasive enough to where Google can work their money-making magic there. Telcos are standing (aggressively) in the way of that, and the device makers remain willing partners in those plans.

<comment><USER3> Everyone complains about the mobile industry but if I listed the industries that have or are currently screwing me mobile isn't even in the top 10.

Health-care, Insurance, Oil, Headphones, Government, Credit cards, Banking, Financial, Video Games, Cable then maybe mobile.

My mobile plan is one of the lowest monthly bills that I have based on amount of usage. To my knowledge it is one of the least subsidized industries. Are there issues? Sure. Could coverage be better? Sure. Would it be nice to have true consumption $/Mb pricing? Sure. Are they too locked down, Definitely, but the iPhone showed them what unlocking the phones to 3rd party developers can do.

I am not sure what another unlocked phone is going to do. The life-cycle of phones is shorter than the term of a mobile contract. So it really doesn't help me. If the phone allowed me auto-switch between AT&T and Verizon based on the best coverage and I paid Google on a $/Mb. That would be a game changer and push the mobile industry farther.

<comment><USER4> I find it interesting when people trash the government. In the US atleast, you have some control over it. If you are getting screwed by the government, you have various outlets to mobilize change and if you don't act on them it's no ones fault but your, since the government answers to it's shareholders: you.

<comment><USER5> _I_ didn't vote this guy into office. But I did vote. And I knew going into it that either candidate would've screwed us over in his own way. Most of us have come to terms with the fact that all candidates are for bigger government, it's just whose pork barrels will be filled for the next 4-8 years.

<comment><USER4> _You_ can be a candidate too. That's the the whole premise of democracy. Choose the right guy, and if the right guy ain't there _you_ can step up.

Or you can keep whining and wait until someone else does it like the rest of us.

<comment><USER5> That'd be great, if America was a democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, I'm kind of torn here. We're watching Google ascend to a position where they can bend numerous markets to their whim, but they aren't _really_ cheating the consumers at all. If anything, they've been great to us. Beyond that, as a college kid with an interest in distributed systems/networks, I should probably be angling to try to work there someday. But still, I'm scared, because it's hard to trust a company that big to do no evil.

Am I just being paranoid? (Not a rhetorical question)

<comment><USER7> _they aren't really cheating the consumers at all. If anything, they've been great to us_

The thing is this: the relationship that exists between me and T-mobile is, I pay them money and they provide me with voice and data and BlackBerry services. Now I'm obviously just one individual, but I am fairly representative of a high-value subset of T-mobile's customer base and as a collective, T-mobile's interests are well aligned with our own. They aren't going to screw me because in doing so they'd screw _us_ (e.g. all BB owners) and we'd migrate en-masse to Vodafone.

The relationship that exists between me and Google is that they provide me with free services so long as I and those like me engage in behaviors that are beneficial to their advertisers. It's difficult as an end user to get support from Google because they don't really care; they'd care only if their quality of customer service could affect my purchasing decisions with their advertisers. If people who couldn't get tech support from Google for their phones switched to Bing for search maybe they'd care, but I doubt anyone does that...

<comment><USER8> Not exactly. The relationship you have with T-mobile is that they have signed you to a contract that locks you in to their service. At every turn T-mobile's goal is to lock you in, and once you're locked in they don't care about you.

By contrast Google sets things up so that you can switch at any time, and they _constantly_ have to keep you happy.

<comment><USER7> That's not really true, tho'. Come contract renewal time they are _very_ accomodating. Or call them up and get through to Customer Retention and again, they'll bend over backwards.

But my point stands. T-mobile is interested in keeping me happy, over the long term. Google is interested in keeping its advertisers happy. Given the choice between you or I and them, it will always choose them. That's why it wants all your data, even if they don't sell it directly, it is to monetize it.

<comment><USER9> Well sure. They'll seem like they'll do anything for you. But if you look at the cold, hard numbers you'll realize that the average phone contract sums out to maybe $1-2k over its life, with a pretty hefty profit margin. Of course they're going to "bend over backwards" for you at contract time.

The used car salesman does the same thing. The rubes fall for the shtick nearly every time and the salesman laughs all the way to the bank.

Keep in mind that these are the same folks who markup a service that costs practically nothing to run to rates 4x higher than the cost of transmitting data from the Hubble space telescope.

<comment><USER7> Well, sure. Profit isn't a dirty word. But it is a mutual relationship in most cases, cash in return for goods or services. My relationship with Google is far murkier. I can't look at my account and see what is the cash equivalent I've paid them for Gmail this month - and make no mistake, if we weren't providing Google with something of cash value in return, we wouldn't be getting all these "free" services. What am _I_ worth to Google as a "customer"? I've no idea. What level of service do they "owe" me? Well, none actually, there's no contract between us. That's a little disconcerting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can never tell how much of a given _Register_ article is prescient contrarianism and how much is straight trolling.

<comment><USER11> Orlowski's articles are often blatant trolls, this one is way out there claiming that the mobile operators who've had us over barrels for so long should be felt sorry for because they can't break the net. Nobody is stopping them making a video on demand service, people are stopping them from making a video on demand that has priority and blocks others. And calling all the civil society groups that fought for net neutrality Google sockpuppets is a bit much.

He's siding with all the other players to be a troll but we side with Google not because we love them but because we don't want the carriers to be anything more than ISPs. They are simply too stupid to manage it, look at SMS data transfer still costing four times more than data transfer to the Hubble telescope. Whereas you have Google pushing open jabber chat protocols and then building Wave on top of them. Who do you trust, a bunch of dying lock-in mongers with a track record of squeezing everything they can out of you and the troll-jester Orlowski or Google which has a decent track record open sourcing most of their stuff and adding value?

As someone who has suffered iPhone lock-in and incredibly poor customer service (3G on my 3G iphone has never worked from day one and the carrier and Apple refused to do anything about it - even suggesting I "turn off 3G to abate the problem" WTF) I can't wait for unlocked no-contract Linux phones to become the norm and just wipe them all out. And I don't think Google cares about "the mobile industry" either, they can burn bridges there because that industry doesn't work as a block (there is no honour among thieves) and they can always find one to make the hardware for them.

<comment><USER10> > we side with Google not because we love them but because we don't want the > carriers to be anything more than ISPs. They are simply too stupid to manage > it...

Amen! For now, I trust Google because they've positioned themselves in such a way that they benefit from doing the right thing. The balance of incentives favours openness, because Google is in the best position to exploit open platforms to deliver their services. The rest of us benefit more or less incidentally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The degree to which Google is "shaking up" the mobile industry has been _vastly_ overstated by the media. I think this is mostly due to the crazy rumors that were flying before the launch (e.g. it was going to use SIP for calls, or that it would be massively subsidized/free even without a plan).

What Google actually offered with the N1 is not very revolutionary. Selling unlocked phones online isn't new. Nor is having phones that run on your choice of US carriers (hello, Blackberry).

Really, the only innovation here is at T-Mobile, which has calling plans that are a little bit cheaper each month if you bring your own phone instead of having them subsidize one.

</comment><comment><USER13> How much the consumers have gotten screwed on the phones is peanuts compared to how much the consumers have gotten screwed on voice charges. Really, there is no such thing as circuit switched networks anymore, so there is no technical reason to charge people by the minute. Google, get Skype/Google Talk/whatever on there, let us buy flat fee data plans, and put the bastards out of business already.

</comment><comment><USER14> Awww. Do the poor wittle cellphone manufacturers have their poor wittle feelings hurt? Here, have a blankie.

Really, I'm having trouble seeing what the complaint is behind all the bombast. The author doesn't claim that Google is selling the phones at a loss or doing anything else that would raise an antitrust issue. Carriers can offer the Nexus alongside other manufacturers' Android phones and, for that matter, the ten thousand other cellphone models that clog the market. Most consumers will choose among those models based on prices and features, not brand name. (Microsoft sells keyboards and mice under its own brand name, but they've hardly put the other keyboard and mouse manufacturers out of business.)

So where's the problem? That competition might reduce the profit margins of cellphone manufacturers? From my side of the salesman's counter, that's anything but a problem.

<comment><USER15> My first thoughts as well. It's about time someone with actual clout gave the mobile phone cartel the shaft. Yes, it's a cartel, when you pay $.50 a text message off your plan with all carriers there's gotta be some price fixing behind the scenes.

<comment><USER7> Yes but who really does that? Except when roaming. Even a basic plan will have like a thousand texts a month.

<comment><USER16> I pay for texts on a per-message basis. Single texts are a quarter or so and the smallest minimum text plan is about $5/mo. I don't send 20 texts in a month so I just forego the service altogether.

I still send and receive the occasional text but I don't care enough to pay for the package. It helps that I have a 5GB smartphone data plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The mobile providers are being pushed in to being dumb pipes essentially like ISPs and I'm supposed to feel sorry for them? How is this anything but good for consumers, and fair for the mobile industry?

</comment><comment><USER18> I wouldn't even consider a third Google Android handset in the future. HTC (and others) are burning too many bridges not getting updates out the door fast enough. I can't even run most of Google's new Android first party apps on my phone because I'm stuck with Android 1.5 and Sprint/HTC won't commit to any time table on an update. "2010" is as specific as they want to get. Android 3.x may be out before I even get 2.x. Good work guys. Great end user experience. Maybe Google did some shady stuff here but the third party handset makers screwed themselves too.

<comment><USER19> I suspect that the motivation for an official 'Google Phone' is to provide at least one model that's guaranteed to get firmware updates in a timely fashion. With luck, it will pressure the other handset manufacturers to provide the same service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So Apple gets attacked for not allowing their OS to run on non-Apple hw and Google gets attacked for allowing their OS to run on non-Google hardware? (I realize they're actually being criticized for now having their own device here, but just another perspective). I guess you could just not have your own hardware, since that's working so well for WinMo.

</comment><comment><USER21> All another company needs to do is build a better phone and they'll have all the press again. Without Google's (free, by the way) OS, Motorola would be just about dead by now. And I don't think Sony Ericson or LG had some great mobile OS in the works either. Google may have single-handedly saved a half dozen companies from being eaten alive by Apple later this year when the AT&T exclusivity runs out and all we every hear is how Google is screwing over it's partners by having the gall to have an HTC phone Google branded and sold online.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone really believe the companies that were supposedly shafted were surprised when Google released their own phone? I knew the Google phone was in the works long before any of the other phones came out and I don't have connections at Google or telcos. I'd bet money the device manufacturers and the the telcos were well aware of the Google phone when they agreed to work with Android.

</comment><comment><USER23> This guy doesn't understand the industry he's writing about.

Telcos benefit by not having the overhead of advertising and supporting phones. They make their money selling services not phones (hence the heavy subsidies.)

Manufacturers benefit by the popularity of the Android platform. It's easy to get people to switch to your hardware if they already know how the OS works and can use all their existing apps.

<comment><USER24> Well, there's two side to that. The fragmentation of the mobile industry is the problem that Android was built to solve. However, Google getting directly into the business of making and selling handsets means the playing field is no longer level. That was the author's point, at least before he went off the rails and started off-handedly claiming that global warming is a hoax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Other Android phones are to Nexus One as Firefox is to Chrome.

If Google does the same thing as you do it doesn't mean it doesn't love you anymore. It still will cooperate with you and it still will pay you. It just wants to try out some things but they don't want to force you to try it for them.

</comment><comment><USER26> It would be interesting to see a decent unsubsidized $100 Android device hit the market. This would be inexpensive enough where a consumer could buy the phone outright and choose a telco without a long-term contract.

</comment><comment><USER27> What a ridiculous article with antagonistic points. Terrible writing too.

</comment><comment><USER28> You have to take this article with a large grain of salt as Google's obvious target was not non-US mobile telecoms but US telecoms

And obviously caught in the middle is OEMs who attempted to do Mobile Telecoms bidding..

The other obvious target is China Mobile to derail their Ophone initiative</comment>


Hobbes - The philosophy behind governments... - <AUTHOR> http://www.philosophybro.com/2010/12/hobbes-leviathan-books-i-and-ii-summary.html

<comment><USER2> I disagree. We keep having disagreements on the "nature of man" brutish v. noble savages. Maybe there is no single type.

Maybe its our population that has two natures and a static percentage of us are brutish (37%) and short and the rest are noble (63% or vice versa). I think the nature of man has probably been ill-defined since it was conceived so long before statistics and psychology. Surveys and statistics are already attacking the concept of us as rational humans. Can't we just test for range of altruism v. jerkiness in the general population?

So I'm getting philosophical on Hacker News... whatever.

<comment><USER3> Sure. The above post summarizes Hobbes's approach.

There are a lot of disagreements I think - I don't know of many governments that embrace Hobbes' ideas wholly. But in a way, it's the "Dictator For Life" approach taken for Python and the Linux kernel. No?</comment></comment>


Visual Studio Code – September 2019 (version 1.39) update - <AUTHOR> https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_39 <comment><USER2> Microsoft is putting an enormous amount of work in the development of VS Code. More than 70k closed issues and almost 6000 PRs is massive. Good to see it getting better and better without slowing down or getting bloated (so far). My favorite recent addition is the official Remote extension.

<comment><USER3> Very interesting extension. For others, link: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms- vscod...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode- remote.vscode-remote-extensionpack).

The main value-add I could never get set up was the deploy/run with hotkeys. I guess I will try it again.</comment></comment>


IoT Trends for Business: 2018 and Beyond - mobi-dev https://mobidev.biz/blog/iot-trends-for-business-2018-and-beyond <comment> mobi-dev The future of IoT for business: read about 5 major IoT trends to be on the rise in 2018: consumer and industrial Internet of Things cases and predictions driving innovation to business owners.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do async communication channels become more synchronous over time? - <AUTHOR> The classic example would be email where expectations around response have rapidly shortened. Is it something that can be fixed with tooling or is it more of a cultural issue? <comment><USER2> I think it's entirely a product of the culture using it.

First, the importance of, for example, email has steadily increased over the decades, and thus email has become something we expect to be faster and faster.

Second, as consumerism demands more and more faster and faster, the American culture (and many others) has faithfully obeyed, speeding up everything it possibly can.

It's easy to imagine that if a culture were completely free of consumerism, many none face-to-face communications would be very slow, very async.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree that consumers have tended to demand faster and faster services. Do you think importance is always linked to speed?

<comment><USER2> In any culture that worships consumerism, yes, importance will always be linked to speed. But in a culture that is deeply connected to agrarianism, for example, it would be easier for people to see that many important things must be done slowly.</comment></comment></comment>


Clojure Inventor Rich Hickey Doesn't Know Types - <AUTHOR> https://jezenthomas.com/rich-hickey-doesnt-know-types/ <comment><USER2> He's quoting Hickey out of context to try and make it look like Hickey is either ignorant or dishonest about what a type spec like "a -> a" means. In context, Hickey is using hyperbole to emphasize how little information is actually conveyed by a type spec, and explain why he decided to leave types out of Clojure. Thomas' rant is grossly unfair to Hickey, and does a great disservice to the programming community, especially considering the explorations Hickey is currently doing with regards to Clojure spec.

</comment><comment><USER3> Calling out fallacies while commiting more is, well, funny.

> Encoding invariants in a type system is far cheaper than writing tests.

You may need to back that claim up with something or you're going to be anecdotal as well.

> Rejecting an entire field of study (like types!) is not only anti- > intellectual, but also does nothing to move the state of our industry > forward.

Who says type theory is needed to move our industry forward? Even if you think that why would every language need to use it? This is slippery slope.

> I'd say that's especially harmful now in a time where software errors can > bring down a couple of Boeing 787 Max airplanes and kill hundreds of people.

Was the crash the result of a bug that a type system would have solved? Otherwise this is quite the straw man too.</comment>


Inner Life of the Cell (with commentary)[video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixgFEMWd8Ps <comment><AUTHOR> A short version with music: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ukPD4G5eSw></comment>


Should you get Google Voice? Reviews from beta users - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/national/2009/06/22/should-you-sign-up-for-google-voice-xconomy-readers-share-their-beta-experiences/

<comment><USER2> I've been using GV ever since its early GrandCentral days. I should highlight that the biggest hurdle was to pass the new number on to my contacts. Even then, when you call your contacts without going through GV's web-site, your contact sees your old/carrier number. The end result is a lot of confusion.

On the other hand, I am now able to simultaneously forward calls (and now sms) to my VOIP (SIP) softphone and cellphone. The current exploitative state of the US cell phone market has made me hack my way through it using GV. So yes, "power users" _can_ indeed get a big break from GV. However, GV may be moderately infinitesimal for people who blindly pay their phone bill without cursing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really understand. Vonage has had many of these features for years. I've been a customer since 2002, and I love it. I've had the same phone numbers for 6 moves in 3 different cities. And, I was able to get an 800 number so I don't have to worry about area code changes when I move.

I can also use Vonage with a regular land line handset, which seems impossible with Google Voice.

Besides, I'm starting to get a little paranoid about how much of my personal life resides on Google servers. I'm feeling the need to diversify a bit.

</comment><comment><USER4> My main complaint is that callers to my GV number keep getting picked up by my ATT voicemail.

I've followed all the setup directions, and things work fine 75% of the time - but that other 25% of the time I get confused messages from callers who dialed my business only to hear my personal voicemail greeting.

<comment><USER5> This problem could be on AT&Ts end, or some communication provider in the middle. I have a similar configuration set up for my work extension (not related to Grandcentral/GV). The GC/GV system basically works as a man in the middle, and it relies on ISDN or SS7 (I believe) signalling to indicate that the call wasn't completed in a message right before VM picks up. Incoming callers can hear the first second of my personal VM before my work VM takes back over.

If the connection signalling is being stripped by some intermediate link or network misconfiguration GV can probably fix it, or trouble ticket their providers to do so. When you submit your info, make sure you tell them:

1) The cell # affected, including if it's a "blue" (refers to Pre-AT&T, pre- Cingular, AT&T Wireless) number or "orange" (Cingular) number if you know.

2) The local area of that #

3) If the number was ported and from where (eg. from Sprint or T-Mobile)

4) Where you are (in course terms physically, and whatever detail you can provide network-wise) when the failures occur

5) Whether the transfer to VM occurred because your phone was busy (you were calling out at that moment), unavailable (off, underground), directed to VM (you pressed END while it was ringing), or it rang the 30 seconds away and then timed out.

This should be enough to give them a fighting chance at a test case or correlating it to another ticket (e.g. Los Angeles AT&T customers ported from Sprint) and getting it fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm unclear on who google voice is for....is this service useful for someone with a single phone line who doesn't talk on the phone much? can I use it to circumvent cell phone charges?

</comment><comment><USER7> The "power user" angle described in this review are worth paying attention to -- this may scare away many people who aren't that savvy at configuration and setup.

<comment><USER8> Google Voice is extremely simple to setup and use.

Even if you want to dive into the "Settings" which is probably the most "complex" part of the app, each little settings item has a tiny question-mark that you can click and a bubble explains what you're turning on/off etc. I'd say GV is easier than GMail but I'm sure the subject is probably newer to most people (phone routing vs. email)

Other than that, there's not really much to set or configure. You pick a number, choose what number you want to forward it to and you're ready to go. I sat around for an hour thinking up 7-digit vanity numbers and managed to score one, so I'm sticking with it instead of going for number portability. With that in mind, Google really needs to give us a way to dial out with our GV# as the caller ID (from our phones).

<comment><USER9> This already exists - if you call your own GV # from one of the lines registered in it and require a PIN to login, you can place calls via a touchtone interface.

I hear there's an Android app that streamlines the process.</comment></comment></comment>


What do you listen to when you´re not programming? - <AUTHOR>

What do you listen to when you´re not programming?
There are some threads about what you listen to when you´re programming, so I thought that it might be fun to find out what you like when your not programming, or when your programming. :-)
I love all kind of music but lately Ive been really into German music.
My favorite band at the moment is Tetragon http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/tetragon The record Nature is awesome, and the first track Fugue is epic.
Hendrik Schaper (mainly organ and piano) and Rolf Rettberg(bass) where in a band together before Tetragon named Trikolon that released a live session from 1969 named Cluster where they play an early version of Fugue without guitar. Also good stuff.
Other German music I also like is Kraftwerk. If you really listen to the music and think about what year the old stuff was recorded in, its pretty cool. Don't forget Tone Float from when they were named Organisation. Florian Schneider plays some cool flute. :-)
Some other good German stuff
Can: http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/trikolon#/search?searchterm=Can&searchtype=a
Ton Steine Scherben:  http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/ton_steine_scherben
I have begun looking into Jazz lately and mainly from 59 :-) From that year i like;
Charles Mingus - Ah Um : http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/charles_mingus/mingus_ah_um/
Ornette Coleman - A Shape Of Jazz To Come : http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/ornette_coleman/the_shape_of_jazz_to_come/
Dave Brubeck Quartet - Time Out : http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/dave_brubeck_quartet/time_out/
Basically just look at top albums for 1959 and you get some real cool stuff. http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&type=album&year=1959&genre_include=1&genres=&include=both&origin_countries=&limit=none&countries=
I'm looking for more, how should i put it, esoteric jazz, so if you know some please share!
"Crazy"-Genre music I would recommend is
Venetian Snares (Winter in the Belly of a Snake and Hospitality are really nice!) : http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/venetian_snares
Hans Appelqvist (Swedish guy who makes, hmm, avante garde pop): http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/hans_appelqvist
Mit Nye Band: http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/mit_nye_band
Wyo Stars: http://www.myspace.com/badband69 (if you talk to the record store Rundgång, firstname.lastname@example.com, I bet they can send you a copy of their record, its really good :-D)
Oh I could go on all night, haha. <comment><USER3> I usually drift between the Soma.fm offerings. Secret Agent and Groove Salad are my favorites, with some Covers and Lush thrown in. Also, when I can't find anything, I resort to David Byrne's radio - that always surprises me - <USER2> Luxuria Music (where there's always something weird)</comment>


Silicon Valley Bank says no to Bitcoin businesses - <AUTHOR> https://bitcorati.com/2013/10/30/silicon-valley-says-no-to-bitcoin-businesses/

<comment><USER2> The pretension in the bitcoin community is starting to really wear on me. Maybe it's just me, but I can hardly read through a lot of these articles, it comes off like propaganda. Possibly the greatest innovation of our time? I suppose time might make me look the fool, but really?? And then the Gandhi quote...

Just accept the fact that a bank has decided bitcoin isn't worth the risk yet. Don't act like they spit in the face of social justice and all that is right in this world.

<comment><USER3> I thought it ironic that the author was talking about 'bitcoin being the greatest innovation of our time'...

... over the internet.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about you, but the Internet was innovated long before my time. So Bitcoin actually has a better claim to that pretension than the Internet because it was invented well after I was born.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps if you didn't have such a selfish definition of 'our'?

Also, are you less than 15 years old? Because most of the social changes brought about by the internet have happened in the last 20 years or so. The first web browser has only just hit 20.

<comment><USER4> > Perhaps if you didn't have such a selfish definition of 'our'?

I believe the rather selfish definition of 'times' was rather the issue I was pointing out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah, used those guys when I was starting BitMover, very quickly moved away from them. They act like they help startups, my experience was they provided nothing over any random bank and they charged more.

That was ~15 years ago, maybe they are better now, I have no idea.

<comment><USER6> My experience exactly. I left them years ago when they jacked up basic banking fees to ridiculous levels.

When I was a client them they did organize "meetups with VCs/lawyers", but for the most part those events were mostly designed to pander to the guests' egos and I presume make them feel valued enough to drive their companies towards SVBank for higher-ticket services, like large credit lines.

<comment><USER5> Yeah. Back then we could have used a credit line of about $2M. That would have helped. They were telling me how grateful I should be for a $50K credit line. At the same time I was consulting at a $8K/day rate doing perf work for web sites. Thanks for the "help" SVB. Bank of America, for all their crap, was actually more reasonable. No love for BofA but SVB was useless in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why does this site have its own scroll handler? It looks very strange and floaty and doesn't play with touchpad gestures in Chrome for OSX.

<comment><USER8> Can't 2-finger swipe back. Super annoying and unnecessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> tldr; Banking regulations are complex, and (for very good reasons) slow to adopt innovation. Bitcoin doesn't fit in yet, and someone is annoyed.

(And honestly, considering that Bitcoin transactions approximate anonymous cash transactions, companies with bitcoin assets will scare the hell out of the US banking regulators and make it difficult to do wire fraud detection and proper auditing)

</comment><comment><USER10> The "first they ignore you..." quote is often attributed to Gandhi, but he likely never said it: [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#Disputed](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#Disputed)

Also, somebody should start a Bank of Bitcoin. There's no reason why the benefits of banking couldn't be applied to bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember these guys once turned me down when I was starting an affiliate network. I got the impression they thought affiliate marketing was some kind of scam...

<comment><USER12> In their defense, it very often is. The reputation is well earned.

I used to work in a major affiliate marketing ad network, and they have these events where the most successful affiliates are taken on a vacation. One time, this took place at the company headquarters, so I spent a little bit of time getting to know them.

Not hating, but what a bunch of unscrupulous rogues they were! To say they were a pack of untrustworthy hooligans would be politely understating the point, which is exactly what I will do.

<comment><USER13> Yep. A while (10 years I think) ago I made a lot of money by 'accident' by replacing my ads with affiliate offers on a very busy site I had. I had no clue what affiliate marketing was or how it worked; I read a spam email by a company doing it and it sounded like it was worth a try. It worked; it converted like mad and my income from this side project rocketed. The company invited me to one of these vacation things on a ship; the people I met there... I like the affiliate concept but indeed a lot of companies and people involved are just borderline criminals. I also noticed that most of them just know nothing; they accidentally rolled into this and it worked for them, but they don't know business (the money tap is just on or off; most of them don't do bookkeeping or pay tax) or anything outside 'Must Make Money Easily'. Not sure if the latter changed as I never went again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article is semantically interesting. It's a negative title, but it has a kinda positive message for "the rest of us" (apple circa 1985). You see, the FBI now has 3.5% of the whole currency(not the float, of the WHOLE shebang) --ref the silk road shutdown. So there's a need to keep the appetite of the crowd that can buy this vision wet. I say we all cash out real fast; just for kicks.

<comment><USER15> 3.5%? By my last count they had less than 2% of currently issued coins and less than 1% of the eventual 21 million?

<comment><USER14> My bad, a At the moment they have about 1.5% for a total of 30+M USD. Source:[http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/10/25/fbi- say...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/10/25/fbi-says-its- seized-20-million-in-bitcoins-from-ross-ulbricht-alleged-owner-of-silk-road/)</comment></comment></comment>


Escaping the Mentality of a Coder - <AUTHOR> http://mindstudies.psy.soton.ac.uk/dmitri/blog/index.php/archives/141

<comment><USER2> It sounds like this guy has a problem with his current/former employer(s) more than anything.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, especially since the compensation for programmers is still pretty high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As the comments on the article point out, this article makes many sweeping generalisations without much substantiation. It's not really worth replying in more detail other than saying that I believe he's dead wrong on most of his points.

</comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps the author should not abandon his critique so early by opting to be a "manager" (as if that will be more fulfilling or unique!)

His mediocre job has a direct correlation to the business model, practices and market with in which the companies he is working for operate. The mentality that needs to be escaped is that of being just an employee. You need to start directing your mental energy towards refactoring the economy itself. Entirely new structures need to be developed, so get cracking.</comment>


Gracefully Scaling to 10k PostgreSQL Connections for $35/mo, Part Two - <AUTHOR> https://articles.fti.bi/postgres-10k-connections-factom-bitcoin-raffle <comment><USER2> Connection management in Postgres is definitely one of its sore spots. Each connection even an idle one consumes roughly 10 MB of overhead and introduces additional coordination overhead on queries. If you're running at any large scale production you want pgbouncer in place which can help manage the idle connections so they're not a hit to your system. Hopefully one day this improves directly in core.

<comment><USER3> pgbouncer or pgpool (of the extensions I searched) do this. Which ones are more of a challenge? I mean I have read on some forum that PGPOOL -II would just shutdown and stop or misbehave. Any such experiences or gotchas with pgbouncer?

<comment><USER4> We have experimented with both at scale and found PgBouncer to be a lot more stable and reliable. We haven't seen gotcha failures, or any failures really, in the last few years. It's also refreshingly simple to automate and scale, although there are shortcomings in the configuration design that ends up requiring some cleverness.

<comment><USER3> "although there are shortcomings in the configuration design that ends up requiring some cleverness."

Like?

<comment><USER4> Namely, it doesn't support configuration via CLI or env vars, which means you have no option but to generate a file to be loaded in. To be fair, that's kind of a newer pattern. Also, multi-DB PgBouncer is a little more insecure than it leads on to be by default, along with a few other things you learn quickly as you handle larger and more complex use cases. It's not bad, just not as good as it could be in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad that pretty much the whole thing is 'use pgbouncer.'

This was my exact situation at a previous position. We needed up to 20k connections to a single pgsql master. Even the most monster postgres server falls over around ~600 connections (up to 1k depending on usage).

Using a pgbouncer-per-webserver we easily got to 20k.

I will say this was with 9.3 though, things may have changed on that front. Nowadays I use pgsql primarily for analytics, so there's only ever 20-30 connections tops, albeit doing quite heavy querying.

<comment><USER3> Correct me if I am wrong in understanding this "Using a pgbouncer-per- webserver we easily got to 20k.", but does this mean say you have 5 web- servers, each web-server has an instance of pgbouncer installed? or you have 5 web-servers with 5 separate pgbouncer servers (1:1 mapping between webserver and pgbouncer) while all pgbouncer server transact with a powerful, single master Postgres.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Postgres connection pooling is pretty much necessary in almost all cases, except when doing pretty low level connection management yourself.

Besides the old stalwart pgBouncer, Yandex recently released Odessey as well [https://github.com/yandex/odyssey](https://github.com/yandex/odyssey)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing..

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Part 1 in case anyone missed out on it (like me)

[https://medium.com/futuretech-industries/ten-thousand- high-a...](https://medium.com/futuretech-industries/ten-thousand-high- availability-postgresql-connections-for-35-mo-part-one-4b7a2d61c51e)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great! Have run up some very expensive bills trying to scale postgres. Eager to try this out.</comment>


A Story of Why Devs Should Think Twice about Developing for the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.icombatgame.com/2009/10/19/a-story-of-why-devs-should-think-twice-about-developing-for-the-iphone/

<comment><USER2> This was the state of the AppStore over a year ago and I've continued to hear the same story from various sources month over month. It's not really a surprise anymore, so it begs the question of whether or not they did research. They should complete this blog post and make it a _Top 10 Reasons Why Not To Develop for the AppStore_. The four bullet points are scratching the surface of many issues that compound into a one big frustration.

The thing is, there is also a list of the _Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Develop for the AppStore_. That list forces you to swallow the crap you have to put up with well, because Apple has cured so many of the much bigger headaches.

<comment><USER3> Number one reason to use the App store is that it is very easy to make large piles of money.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any data to back this up?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords. It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.

<comment><USER6> It looks like Apple did the right thing here. They stopped the app from using a term copyrighted by Nintendo. They also communicated the rejection reason to the developer clearly.

Ultimately, this is probably going to be a win-win for both sides. Apple does the right thing. The app description and keywords don't mislead users (and as a result of the blog post complaining about Apple, the app also gets a lot of free publicity)

<comment><USER3> I sort of agree with you, but just because a name is trademarked (you can't copyright a name), doesn't mean you can NEVER EVER use it. For example, Wii. There you go.

<comment><USER7> It does mean that there are limitations on using it in the advertising of a competing product, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apple rejected the app because the developer sought to use another company's product name and game title to bolster their own sales.

Seems reasonable to me- at least as far as App Store rejections go.

<comment><USER9> If that's all you got out of it, you seriously need to read the article again. These flippant non-responses to Apple related problems are useless and displace actual useful contributions. As someone who enjoys useful contributions... I disapprove!

<comment><USER8> Granted- apple made thier usual poor developer-relations moves that they normally do- but a rejection is still justified in this case.

I'm surpirsed that the developers feel justified in making a public complaint out of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The sheer arbitrariness of many Apple rejections makes it pretty clear what's going on: applications are put into a queue, a group of approval guys pop the queue, review, and either approve or reject. But they aren't given clear standards for approval, so your results vary based on the whim of whichever reviewer you get.

Which suggests an interesting hack: when you get a rejection, just re-submit instantly with no changes. You probably won't get the same reviewer next time and it may pass.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to substantive issues. But even there, you could re-submit immediately, then start working on the changes; who knows, you might get an approval back while you're still making the fixes.

</comment><comment><USER11> We have also had a submission rejected because of content in the application description. Even though the binary submission was not altered, we were forced to re-upload the binary and wait an additional >2 weeks for the next round of review feedback for removing ONE sentence from the description.

There should be a separate review queue for application description, the current system is incredibly inefficient.

<comment><USER12> _Even though the binary submission was not altered, we were forced to re- upload the binary and wait an additional >2 weeks for the next round of review feedback for removing ONE sentence from the description._

This smacks of the sort of bureaucratic mediocrity which Steve Jobs should hate and have hunted down, quickly and without mercy. It's exactly the sort of big company rot that slows a big company down.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately, like google, apple has never been big on customer service, of which this is a sort.

<comment><USER14> Really? Never been big on customer service?

Every time that I (or anyone else that I know) has ever had a problem with an Apple product, they've taken swift care of the issue. They've given me a brand new iPod on the spot when an old one broke before. Apple's customer service is one of the main reasons that people buy Apple products.

Not that the app queue doesn't suck, don't get me wrong.

<comment><USER15> For consumers sure, but for bigger players their customer service is as bad as Google's.

The App Store's unfriendliness is not new -- it's just the awful iTMS experience with a larger audience. Institutional hardware customers have been getting fucked on a regular basis ever since the return of Jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sorry to hear about that..

The point was not that he used Wii as a keyword..

The point is that Apple runs its software approval process like the Soviet Union ran its government.

Unfortunately game dev has to be native but I for one will never develop for the iPhone natively again.. Safari is powerful enough to handle a lot of apps which could have gone that route instead, i.e. Google Voice..

Best of luck

</comment><comment><USER17> You should submit 10 apps, with minor A/B differences of one app, with minor branded editions (like pokemon pearl & pokemon diamond, a few color schemes, a few different pokemon, not much else). Statistically at least one will get through, and apple does not reject on minor variations like that (just look at iMob 100 respect points). App store reviews are like 10 pregnant women, if you start all at once, you'll get all your baby's at once. Also arguing how something is better from a user's point of view can help through minor things. For example, if they reject your craiglist app because it has craiglist as a keyword, you can argue that it would make it harder for users to search for a relevant functionality.

If you really don't want to "spam" the itunes store, you can "remove from sale" all the other apps that get through and just keep the best one. Or you can leave them there, see which one does best as a testing mechanism and keep that one.

<comment><USER18> you mean like this? <http://jimy.posterous.com/seriously-313>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Does it make sense when iCombat Lite, having been live for 3 months with 100k installs and no complaints, suffers a 40+ day delay because it is being forced to the back of the line over and over again to wait amongst what is new crapware?"

I never understand why iPhone developers seem to always think that the apps _they_ write are so money yet apps that everyone else writes are "crapware" and are thus clogging up the app store. I agree with this author's point that you should not have to go back to the start of the queue, but that should be for all apps, and if you want a freer app store (which I do) you're going to have to put up with more "crapware" not less.

</comment><comment><USER20> From the article:

 _Sure Apple has its reasons, namely pushing its 85k or 100k or 250k apps commercials to prove it has the most evolved app ecosystem versus its peers. But if Apple doesn't fix these problems soon, those numbers will begin to mean less and less, and at some point the number of apps in the App store will be about as meaningful as the number of videos uploaded to YouTube._

That doesn't really make sense to me. Apple has strict quality control for the exact reason that they don't want their store to turn into YouTube. Turning down apps is how they maintain quality.

<comment><USER21> Turning down apps to maintain quality, I'll give you that (even though there's a lot of room to argue the specifics).

Turning down bug fixes for stupid reasons, though? How does that maintain quality, if it takes over a month to push a fix to an app? Eventually devs get sick of it (especially if their apps are closer to the hobby end of the spectrum) and stop maintaining them. Can't blame them.

<comment><USER20> I agree with you on that. It doesn't make sense to turn down an App for "stupid reasons." Its just that Apples concept of a valid reason for turning down an app is obviously much broader than most people like.

However, I have to wonder if it was perhaps the other way around whether we would have people complaining about how trashy the app store was and how their decent app was buried under loads of other spammy/trashy apps.

I personally think Apple is a little bit too strict, but I don't want too much lenience either.

<comment><USER21> _However, I have to wonder if it was perhaps the other way around whether we would have people complaining about how trashy the app store was and how their decent app was buried under loads of other spammy/trashy apps._

Yup - that would be Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Although Apple now encourages developers to create applications for the iPhone, the company still doesn't let any outside application access background processes. That means you have to run a program actively to take advantage of it. If you switch to a different program, all activity on the first program will stop. Apple may support third party background applications in the future."

<http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/iphone.htm/printable>

</comment><comment><USER18> My personal favorite reason for rejection is "Your big icon doesn't match the little icon". I've gotten that twice so far.

<comment><USER3> I have had that too, but it is not unreasonable.

The worst I have had is because I used a SIMILAR font and style to a well known tv show, in a quiz about that tv show.

<comment><USER23> Wow, that's probably the worst one I've seen so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> With Google Adwords I can bid on "Apple", "Wii", "Star Wars", "Microsoft", "Salesforce"...etc.. Whatever I want as long as it's relevant..

It's a keyword right? Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER24> and to add on to the dev hurdle, you must code in obj-c and have a mac. I am sure there are ways around the mac part, but limiting the target language already discourages many devs from building apps for the iphone. i myself am slowly becoming an android fan (ASE - <http://code.google.com/p/android- scripting/wiki/FAQ>)

<comment><USER25> Ain't Android limiting you to Java only, while for iPhone you can develop in any language which can be compliled into ARM ELF object file and linked by ld ? Beside the UI part of course.

I hate developing for iPhone too cause Obj-C is not a language, it is a piece of messy crap! It makes code look like spaghetti. I receive a great pleasure developing for Android, yet Java is far from the language of my choice though it's far better than Obj-C.

PS. What disappoints me about Android is that a simple "hello world" app consumes at least 12MB of RAM because of a running copy of Java/Dalvik VM. Google has to do something about it.

<comment><USER3> No, you can program in almost any language for Android, a change that was added about 3 months ago.

Objective-c is great, much better than java or c# if you ask me.

Are you sure you actually program for Android, you seem to be missing quite a bit of knowledge.

<comment><USER25> I know what JNI/NDK is, and believe me its applicability is very limited. Yes I do develop for Android and I already ported my VoIP (Jingle Audio) library to this platform and I also ported Speex codec using JNI and currently working on UI part of the project I'm involved in. I did this same for iPhone and believe from the deep of my heart that Obj-C is very crappy language comparing even to Java. The only reason why developers use it is because Steve Jobs personally made them to!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Now that Verizon will have a serious marketing launch of a phone designed for Android in November, things could get interesting.

<comment><USER27> It's already happening, turn on your TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Could you port it to Cappuccino / Atlas - then its online.</comment>