Blockchains: Past, Present and Future [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl1U0Mu0qEU <comment><USER2>
        because it [the blockchain] has legal implications, you
        have to look at it from a legal perspective as well,
        because its a transaction validation mechanism without
        anybody in the middle. So when these transactions are
        actually validated, they hold, they are true, and they are
        respected - and that is the legal aspect of it.

That man is a "special advisor" to the Ethereum Foundation. (BTW, this was filmed on July 6 2016. Maybe he should have mentioned the DAO.) He then goes on to say that banks, not wanting the legal and business model innovations blockchains propose to affect the _status quo_ , only see/use it as a technological innovation - implying this is bad.

        The blockchain is only one ledger. Once you write a line
        on the ledger, its just like any accounting ledger: you
        cannot erase the line above it. You just write a new line,
        and then you have a chain of history, and everything is
        recorded, and nothing can be erased.

Absolutely clueless in his vision. Just another rich guy evangelizing the blockchain. His explanations are absolutely trivial, he should be going into the details, he's on the Google campus.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm very skeptical of the value of blockchains. It seems that people proposing them don't have any idea about when/why you'd use them over a more centralized system, and in many cases (e.g. financial applications) there are existing regulations that make it difficult for a decentralized system to work (e.g. know your customer laws and centralized counterparty systems).

<comment><USER4> _> It seems that people proposing them don't have any idea about when/why you'd use them over a more centralized system_

I think that this diagram is a good starting point...

[https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAA...](https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAQTAAAAJGRmZjY1MWU2LWI5NTQtNGY1Ny04YWY5LWFlZmU4YzM2MTcyNQ.png)

<comment><USER5> According to this diagram, IPFS should use (or be) a blockchain.

<comment><USER6> This diagram is to answer the private blockchain hype. It's not meant to address _any_ piece of technology- just qualify when a blockchain doesn't provide clear value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This guy understands blockchains like Deepak Chopra understands quantum physics. As pitched by William, there's no difference between a blockchain and a message passing system. (Which begs the question of why this matters)

<comment><USER8> There's a high degree of bullshit and opportunism around blockchains.

Some people want to believe blockchains are a solution for everything because they are not technical. Like the guy in the video, when all you have is a hammer...

If you understand the tech, it's just another data structure + consensus algorithm. Not everything needs to be decentralised, or to operate in a trustless network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Like the other commenting on this video, I felt the topic is addressed with a bit of superficiality. The guy talks about blockchains as if they were some kind of novel technology which is able to solve pretty much any problem.

Still, I'd like to get deeper into understanding blockchains (I live in Switzerland and financial institutions around here are all excited around blockchains). The best technical resource I have found so far is this series of posts about understanding blockchains from a development perspective.

[http://www.davidederosa.com/basic-blockchain- programming/](http://www.davidederosa.com/basic-blockchain-programming/)

Do you know any other developer-related resource worth looking at?

</comment><comment><USER10> This guy has no clue about how it works. Only aware of all the hype around it and presenting the hype as facts.

Does he understand about the blockchain size and the need to replicate it in every singe node? Does he understand why a blockchain can't be a database? or even an app platform?

</comment><comment><USER11> Great talk. I'm building blockchain mobile projects for ThoughtWorks, and I see the top value within areas of high-stakes security, for secure distributed ledgers that maintain consistency even if a party is unknowingly compromised.

<comment><USER12> Could you give more details about the kind of blockchain projects are you involved in? Are you using public or private blockchains?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> tldr?

</comment><comment><USER14> Url changed from [http://avc.com/2016/07/video-of-the-week-william-talking- blo...](http://avc.com/2016/07/video-of-the-week-william-talking-blockchains- at-google/), which points to this.</comment>


Ask HN: How bad do you think the Covid-19 pandemic will get? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> At present, the most likely situation is that as the temperature rises and summer is approaching, the virus's ability to spread begins to decline. At the same time, the strengthening of people's isolation measures makes the spread of the virus continuously decrease. Then, whether the infected person has cured or died, the virus is slowly disappearing from the human community. However, the premise of all this is: (1)the government attaches sufficient importance and has the ability to segregate his people and persist until the summer comes. (2)The virus does not mutate.

<comment><USER3> As it stands, scientists do not know how temperature changes will influence the behavior of SARS-CoV-2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What we've already seen to date in affected areas is that the medical system gets slammed, and any non-emergency medical care goes out the window. Elective surgeries, or any surgery that can be put off at all will be put off. So, death rate of other things goes up.

People with co-morbidities will die at higher rates. Diabetes, heart disease, etc each add 5% or so. Up to 30% death rate for 60 years plus age range.

On the political side, more of what we're already seeing with a lot of finger pointing and yelling, and not enough adults in the room willing to put aside differences and work together.</comment>


Facebook "Want" Button Released First by AddShoppers - <AUTHOR> http://www.addshoppers.com/facebook-want-own-button/

<comment><USER3> "AddShoppers is the first social sharing platform to be fully integrated with Facebook's new Open Graph actions and Timeline (backstory here)." - That is a very misleading headline. They are NOT the first by any means. Anyone can do this with the Open Graph actions now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I changed it to read like this: "AddShoppers is the first social sharing platform to be fully integrated with Facebook's new Want / Own actions for their Open Graph Timeline."

Yes, anyone can do it after they're approved but we are indeed the first.

<comment><USER4> If you are approved, why is there a stackoverflow question asking if this is ok? [http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/9364501/released...](http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/9364501/released- a-want-button-for-facebook-open-graph-cant-find-usage-guidlines-for-t)

<comment><AUTHOR> Because after this original comment, I want to make 100% sure. The question is about the button design, not our integration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me a bit of a 2010 post written by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame re: his visions of a "Facebook Killer": <http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/facebook_killer/>

Basically a place where you can specify your future wants/plans as opposed to something that simply logs your past (i.e. current day Facebook).

</comment><comment><USER6> I cant wait until someone integrates this with their dating site.

Though for clarity we may need a HAD button as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Afaik you can create any actions you want using Open Graph actions. Is this really something new?

<comment><AUTHOR> We were first to get approved for Want / Own and then integrate the buttons into our social sharing platform. It's new. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Facebook is not implementing this feature, but a third party developer via a facebook app.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's through Facebook's Timeline-approved "Want" and "Own" action. :)

<comment><USER9> This sounds like its designed to compete with pininterest. I wonder if they'll build "walls" of "wants"?

<comment><USER10> Seems logical, or they will use it like a wish list

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It'd be a shame to see such a beautifully simple feature that is the iconic 'Like' watered down by a stab-in-the-dark revenue model.

</comment><comment><USER12> Actually, Payvment released "want" and "own" buttons back on 1/19/2012. <http://www.payvment.com/blog/?p=1355>

<comment><AUTHOR> Within Facebook stores. This is for websites outside of Facebook.

<comment><USER12> Eh, you said you were the first, period. A Facebook app tab is just an iframe so its not like they are doing anything special. So technically they were the first to use the "want" and "own" buttons.

<comment><AUTHOR> "These are the first buttons of their kind for use on public websites, not shops on Facebook."

I appreciate everyone's help in clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would be awesome if advertisers can tap into this information. Show ads / discounts to people for products they actually want and haven't already purchased.

<comment><USER14> I think that would be the primary use case: Try to steal away someone purchasing one item for another similar or related. I'm doubting the stickiness on the benefit to those who are the ones who collect the 'wants' though. Sure, it might advertise their site for a bit (if Facebook chooses to include it in any users' feeds that is...) though otherwise Facebook will want to monetize that free exposure by putting paid-for-by-competitor ads (but really I don't think those 'Wants' will even show very often.

I also see Facebook feeds becoming something familiar with Idiocracy - <USER2> has no appeal to me.

<comment><USER13> Makes sense. I was thinking more so from the side of a marketer being able to target people who specifically state they want your product and excluding people who already own it. This way you're not spending ad dollars on people who already have converted. Really interesting how much you can do with this data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Want, got, had is a part of the concept of Mistash, my startup. <http://www.mistash.com>

<comment><USER16> It looks like Pinterest with relabeled buttons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this is a feature to increase views and conversions. Great work ;D

</comment><comment><USER10> Glad to see Facebook is rolling this out now.

<comment><USER4> That's not actually what's happening. Just a 3rd party dev thing implemented using open graph actions. In face it's not even clear (contrary to what they say on their blog post) that they cleared this with Facebook. See [http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/9364501/released...](http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/9364501/released- a-want-button-for-facebook-open-graph-cant-find-usage-guidlines-for-t)

<comment><AUTHOR> The actions have been cleared with Facebook. The debate was using their icon which we've removed.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow.. This is waiting for a C&D from Facebook. To me, this is a blatant abuse of their trademark.

<http://www.facebook.com/brandpermissions/logos.php>

<comment><USER10> Read up on open graph

<comment><USER19> Yeah, but look at the design - I mean I don't have a position on this, but in my opinion it LOOKS like a Facebook button... I'm sure they didn't intend opengraph to be a landgrab of sorts.

<comment><AUTHOR> They didn't publish any button guidelines so it's a modified Subscribe button. I would think they'd be more for it as they're getting more eCommerce data. The post states this: Just to be clear, we were approved by Facebook to use these Open Graph actions but this is not a "partnership" with Facebook.

Unfortunately it's a bit difficult to get in contact with FB.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, look, best of luck to you and we're in a similar space. I'm all for social commerce, I just think possibly the boundaries of whats within their intended scope are being pushed here.

I don't want to get into it too much because we'll ultimately see, but I'm sure if I made a "Don't like" button - they'd kick my ass. I get the feeling OpenGraph was intended for a service based business, i.e. Geoff just watched [x] on Netflix.

Best of luck tho.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's a little different because "Own" is an actual approved action while "Don't like" isn't. Can you shoot me an email (just use our contact form)? Would love to learn more.

Thanks Geoff!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Alexa Dangerous? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/alexa-how-will-you-change-us/570844/ <comment><USER2> I was a beta tester for the Amazon Echo and had one a year before they were generally available. I decided to get rid of it when another person's device thought it overhead something it didn't like. Alexa called the police who showed up and shot and killed the owner's dog.

That was it for me.</comment>


Live California election results - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.latimes.com/la-na-pol-2016-election-results-california/ <comment><AUTHOR> One thing I'll say: I've observed the election results on many sites and the work web guys put into having us understand all this complex data: amazing. I couldn't vote in California, but this page at least gives me super clear understanding of whats going on, very quickly.</comment>


The 53,651 meme - <AUTHOR> http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/05/53651.html <comment><USER2> The web is evolving very fast these days. It seems to me that because of our connections and web browsing habits, people reading this are often disconnected from how "normal" people view the web. Let me assure you, this web 2.0 craze we are seeing is no bubble. What will happen? well, in a sense, web 2.0 is really interactive web 1.0. The future leaders of the social web will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of today's leaders: Google, Facebook, Myspace, Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, and Craigslist. (technology increases exponentially: never forget this)

When a website incorporates all the positives of these types of websites into 1 all encompassing tool for organizing the unlimited information of the Internet, then we will see something great. We will see an evolution of these tools and it will not only be something people can use to get more efficiency out of life, it will actually improve people's lives and societies (globally).

If you think the effects social networks and human/computer interaction are amazing, wait until you see the children of these sites. It is *absolutely* not a coincidence that the founders of Reddit played WoW. They realize that power of a website is directly correlated to the amount of user input into a website. The dilemma we entrepreneurs are faced with today is creating systems that encourage maximum participation.

How does this tie into the 53,000 theory? None of the big winners, and I am talking the big ones, facebook, myspace, google, msnpages, orkut, (these are the sites that lead the world in user participation) succeeded because of blog recommendations. They succeeded because they were better ways of experiencing the Internet, not because some "expert" on techcrunch told the geeks it was a cool product.

Well, there are many amazing "web 2.0" websites out there that will never be used by the masses until their friends, not techcrunch, invites them.

On the Internet, the best solution always win. Humans are economical; they do what is best for themselves. When we create a search/browsing tool that is at the same time more rewarding and fun than myspace/wikipedia/delicious/digg we will see the whole world adopt this method, the same way the world has adopted the Google search, the same way all the "cool" people are on myspace. This website will not only be as "cool" and as fun, it will actually enhance people's lives.

This is the future of the web. It is also no coincidence that VC's like the one whom this post is referring to, have seen a lot of "like delicious but XXX" or "Digg killers" This is not just hype, one day it will happen. One day there will be a delicapedieddit that will emerge as the new Internet powerhouse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another way of looking at this is to realize that beta testers are hard to come by, and one could leverage from the already existing pool of beta testers (53,651). Most startups want to improve their pre-money valuation before going to the VC, the most important ingredient for achieving that is a stable system that is a result of successive relevant iterations of the features. This could as well be part of any Web 2.0 company's road map for the first few months upon going live. It is needless to say that for a VC to be convinced, it is important to have the right kind of users. If there is even a little bit of overlap between the 53,651 web savvy users and the ideal end-user, it is safe to assume that viral marketing will take care of itself. An example that glares in the face is Google. Their systems are the way they are, thanks to their #1 beta testers, their employees. And one could argue that there are other beta testers at various levels, namely the actual end users. This statistic seems to do more good than harm, if regarded positively. The eventual end users of the system could just be an extension of the 53,651 initial users. Go Techcrunch!!!

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it's reasonable to design for the 53,651. What they use, others will later. The Apple II was designed for the 53,651.

<comment><USER5> As long as the 53,651 are actually interested in using it, not just having a look or thinking about the startup behind it. I imagine thats the problem with traffic from places like techcrunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> TechCrunch has 351k feed subscribers not 53,651. I remember when Mashable covered mainstream startups but, in face of competition, positioned itself towards a smaller niche (covering social networks). Today Mashable has close to 80k subscribers.

There is nothing wrong with aiming small.

<comment><USER7> They had 53K at the time of writing ;) That article is from nearly a year ago..

I think that that is part of the key to understanding why the 53K are targetted- Because anything they're talking about now has a good chance of making it big later on.

It's a risk, and it doesn't always (seldom?) pays out, but if I were to infer into the minds ofany dozens of developers, I'd think they're looking at the Techcrunch readers as the type of Early Adopters that they want/need to get them started- The type of people who are going to get excited about a product, to tell their friends.

These are the people who will spend a day trying new technologies, whereas most "normal" people only try it once a friend recommends it. Those targeting the TC-crowd want to find that friend.

-Colin

<comment><USER8> Yes, they had 53K a year ago, and now they have over 300K

Doesn't that prove the post wrong? Clearly those 53K were a very powerful group...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd say there're two kinds of startups which are unknown to mainstream America. One is the kinds the general public have actually used, but just may not realize that is a service provided by a startup company. This includes the likes of Slide or Meebo, which many more people have put their widgets on their blogs/Myspace than going on to their proprietary website. These startups are fine; they may just need more PR to the mainstream media.

The startups that are really hard to reach mainstreams are those me-too startups, which are those "social network for XX" or "youtube cross wikipedia" kind of thing that users could not tell a slight difference from the sites that they have been using.

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out this graph in an old post by Seth Godin: <http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/12/squid_soup_part_2.html> His point is that in order for a new idea or product to catch on, it first needs to be adopted by the "innovators" -- the "geeks". Then, and only then, can it spread to the broader population. If you try to skip the geeks and go straight to the mass market, you will fail.

I'm not sure I buy that as a hard and fast rule, but I think the concept is generally solid. If a company makes it on TC, it will subsequently and consequently grow beyond TC.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is an interesting problem that I've wondered about myself. We all talk about Web 2.0 not being a bubble but maybe that's just because the 'average joe' doesn't know anything about what's going on. Other than a few stories about MySpace and YouTube most people never hear about any Internet startups. How do you cross that divide without spending alot of money on TV commercials? During the first bubble they were great at getting people's attention but bad at software, it seems like now things are exactly the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the main point in this posting is not how bad it is to start off with the first adopters, but instead to think how they will be alot different than mainstream users, and what you learn from them (click through, advertising, new users, etc...) might not be exactly how things will work with the mainstream crowd.

</comment><comment><USER6> All business start off as micro-niche. Friendster's demographic was considered a niche just four years ago. Now it is considered "mainstream".

The one thing startups do risk for aiming small is VC investment. Venture Capitalists are reluctant to write a 7 figure check to a startup aiming for the 53,651 audience.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think it's a good idea to target the early adopters. If you don't, you risk basing your product on old technology.</comment>


No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion? (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://m.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html <comment><USER3> I had no idea about the situation in Germany, but it's a well-known fact that the current power of the Swiss chemical and pharmaceutical industry comes from the lack of patents law in Switzerland during the late 19th century[1]: a few French chemists moved to Switzerland to circumvent the French patents.

A well-known example is Alexander Clavel who, in 1859, founded Ciba AG, a silk-dyeing business using a French patent with no license. Ciba later became Ciba-Geigy, which later became Novartis. One of the biggest pharma corp in the world today.

Source: Swiss National Museum, Zurich.

[1] : Patents were only introduced in the Swiss law in 1907.

<comment><USER4> The same is true of China, the US, and Germany. The idea that developing countries can get rich through free trade is a myth [1]. Developing countries that embraced free trade (see Africa, South America) largely remain poor today while countries that embraced protectionism (see Asia) are much wealthier. The basic fact here is that industrial societies need to be bootstrapped by a strong, active government (who can defend native industries and provide financing in the form of fiat currency) and rampant copying by those native industries (who have no legacy investments and can jump straight to best-of- breed practices and the latest technologies). None of this is a new idea: it was all laid out by Friedrich List almost 200 years ago. Unfortunately the basic idea, despite the mountains of empirical evidence, fell to the onslaught of "free trade" propaganda.

What's interesting is that the same basic dynamic likely applies to even highly developed economics. The tariffs are likely just the beginning. We will see even Western countries abandon "free trade" and strong, active states taking firm control of the economy in order to drive growth. The key words that will define the economic future will be "political economy."

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/magazine/the-rise-of- chin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/magazine/the-rise-of-china-and- the-fall-of-the-free-trade-myth.html)

<comment><USER5> >Developing countries that embraced free trade (see Africa, South America) largely remain poor today while countries that embraced protectionism (see Asia) are much wealthier

The assumption that South America and Africa are pro free trade is not true. Indeed, most of the countries with the highest tariffs are in Africa.

[https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/which-countries- have-...](https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/which-countries-have-the- lowest-import-tariffs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software. The free nature of it would seem to stifle creation of top quality open source software, but the reverse seems to be true. The open source business is thriving.

<comment><USER7> _> Curiously, we see a similar situation today with open source software_

I strongly disagree. Here are four notable counter-examples:

1\. Desktop Linux. I'm a religious Linux desktop user, but MacOS is definitely a better operating system.

2\. Office suites. Libreoffice/OpenOffice/whatever-we're-supposed-to-call-it- these-days is stuck in the 1990s.

3\. Videogames.

4\. Large web services (Google Search, GMail, Facebook).

Notice that four these examples, where closed-source software outshines OSS in quality, cover 90+% of most people's computer time...

Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type.

<comment><USER8> How is LibreOffice being stuck in the 1990s a problem? MS Office was essentially feature-complete by Office 95, and LibreOffice does everything Office 95 does. It seems all the major changes since then (Clippy, Adaptive Menus, Ribbon Menus) have no value to experienced users.

<comment><USER9> LibreOffice is a pain if you want to do anything that looks remotely attractive. MS Office, unfortunately, wins hands down at that (and at general usability and power).

Being unable to use MS Office was one of my big regrets of working on Linux for a long time. When I finally learnt LaTeX, that at least removed the need for Word ;-) (Although I still miss PowerPoint, LO Impress really doesn't impress me very much at all.)

<comment><USER10> I find that remarkjs ([https://github.com/gnab/remark](https://github.com/gnab/remark)) has removed a big class of situations where I previously needed PowerPoint.

<comment><USER11> And has the advantage that videos actually work reliably.

<comment><USER10> This is an important point and a really big advantage as I've painfully found out over the years when videos have not worked as intended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The debate around copyright today is just so weird I think;

"I should be able to prevent anyone from producing anything too similar throughout my entire life, and my heirs should be able to stop them for another lifetime after I'm gone."

"Why?"

"Because the money they make is money I could've made."

"So, make another work that you can monetize?"

"But why would I work if I have to work?"

I can understand copyright to a degree, but the lengths we've agreed to in the West is absolutely ridiculous and ripe for abuse by companies that are built on aggregating IP.

<comment><USER13> Agreed, and I also think this investment/lottery/entitlement mindset is toxic because it devalues the actual work.

Human progress, our progress, comes from the work being done, not the money that can be made from it.

While money also end up funding other work, it's blindingly clear through the distribution of money and the proliferation of various speculation markets, that actually doing work to earn money is almost seen as 'earning' it in a roundabout way.

All you really need to do if you have real money, is to do nothing at all. Because while you can earn even more by doing something, even absolutely safe positions will get you a higher lifetime income increase than the average worker can expect over their lifetime.

It's simple math that shows _how_ extremely we've devalued work, and I believe it has a negative effect on lots of things, some that might even too obvious to be visible at all.

<comment><USER14> see also the financialization of the economy, where money chasing money is far far more valuble than building actual real things, in the real world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang's book "Kicking Away the Ladder" describes how loose IP regulation has been at the center of the economic development of many countries. Sadly, once countries have developed to a certain level they tend to implement stronger IP to protect their position against other countries.

[http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm](http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm)

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't it the same case for the United States in the 19th century? There were copyright laws protecting the states, but these didn't extend internationally, so books and other material could be brought stateside and be disseminated or published without punishment.

<comment><USER17> International works were not protected by copyright in the US, but it didn't really matter because of how long it took for copiers to get their copies on the market.

The vast majority of books made most of their sales shortly after publication. By the time the copier could get a copy of the published book, typeset their edition, and go into production almost everyone who wanted the book had bought a copy from the original publisher.

Stephen Breyer, back when he was a law professor at Harvard rather than a Supreme Court Justice, wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review called "The Uneasy Case for Copyright" exploring the idea that because of the limitations of copying technology much of earlier copyright law really didn't do much.

It's an interesting argument, but technological advances in copying have made it largely inapplicable for the present day.

<comment><USER18> Charles Dickens did disagree with this view: [https://creativelawcenter.com/dickens-american- copyright/](https://creativelawcenter.com/dickens-american-copyright/)

But there are of course two sides to this story. Pirated editions back then as today increase the popularity of the artists, often more than their agency could do.

Unsurprisingly, even in the 19th century they came to a similar solution like our current music industry (minus the unsuccessful DRM part). You can't pirate live performances: "When he returned in 1867, he had mastered a way to generate alternative income streams based on his celebrity status. He performed readings of his work to packed houses and collected the receipts from the door."

<comment><USER9> > Pirated editions back then as today increase the popularity of the artists, > often more than their agency could do.

Could work the other way too, though. Alexander von Humboldt had troubles with one of his books because a pirated translation into English was completed before the authorised version. Unfortunately, the pirated translation was so shoddy the book got really bad reviews in England...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The historian claims that the missing copyright is "the real reason" for industrial expansion. I think it's "only" a contributing factor. Germany was divided in many smaller states and every state had their own universities. Many of these states were competing with each other about talent. So instead of centralising everything they had a distributed scholary culture. That's probably why there was a culture of "thinkers and readers". EDIT: Hence why a copyright law was not really enforcable. So the root cause was the division and competition, the missing law just a symptom of it IMHO.

Plus: lot's of iron and coal easily accessible and many big commercially usable rivers for transportation.

</comment><comment><USER20> Suppose we even abolished all patents. Would it even make a difference in the software world? The selfish already got their new tool - online services. Not only you never have to release any source code, the user doesn't even run the compiled version himself. All he gets is output. The code running his computations may or may not be patented, he'll never know. I don't think licences like Aferro GPL can realistically be enforced.

<comment><USER21> I think patents are relevant when you do chemistry or biology research.

If you burn money for years designing a molecule, you could say you "own" the molecule, so you patent it.

The problem with the patent system is that it's necessary in a world where you need money to do any simple thing, because states cannot fund every research project, since it's impossible to know the outcome of every research.

But obviously you cannot patent everything, and that's where the patent system is failing. There is no good legal definition of a worthwhile invention.

Software is not patent-able because it never really is an invention that requires to burn a lot of money, unlike other domains of research. Anybody can write any kind of software.

But patents are still relevant where research requires expensive resources.

<comment><USER22> The original idea with patents was that they should make it worthwhile to invest in innovation and otherwise expire as fast as possible so that eventually all profit. Our current patent system has forgotten that second part and morphed to "expire as late as possible", which only serves greed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The fashion industry is another example of an area that has thrived because of a lack of copyrights, as argued is this TED talk :

 _" Copyright law's grip on film, music and software barely touches the fashion industry ... and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales, says Johanna Blakley. In her talk, she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion's free culture.."_

[https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashi...](https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture)

</comment><comment><USER24> To me copyright has a lot of similarity to GDPR. I posted about that now actually: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17330914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17330914)

<comment><USER25> In an abstract sense, you may be right.

In practice, authors sign away the ownership to a publisher in a profit sharing deal and it ends up protecting the publishers profit.

Makes me wonder of there is a business model for protecting user data, by managing any user-business data relation/permission and hunting down any company who is inappropriately using data from any member and collecting the fines. That would be the first protection racket that I'd like...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > The German proliferation of knowledge created a curious situation that > hardly anyone is likely to have noticed at the time. Sigismund Hermbstädt, > for example, a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long > since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for > his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author > Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous > today.

In the absence of copyrights, and with plagiarism being rampant (as the article claims) how could authors command favorable royalty agreements? Could a rival publisher not just print the same book, sans royalty agreement, and undercut the original publisher?

<comment><USER27> The printers would have been able to sell fresh material, and perhaps the payments to the authors were insignificant if the volume was high enough. Competitors would also have had to replicate the work of typesetting and printing, which would take a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I remember reading that the strength of manufacturing in China is also that everything gets copied and innovation spreads quickly.

<comment><USER29> Process innovation and best practices is not generally something that gets IP protection.

AS for the article: The richest countries have strong IP protections, generally, that might indicate something.

Certainly creative trademarks, brands etc. - I don't like Disney but I think they have the right to protect Mickey Mouse so long as they are a viable entity/business.

Drugs ... this is one place where innovation might come to a halt of things could not be protected. I'm aware Unis do a lot of key research, but bringing something to market is _hugely_ expensive.

Also remember a lot of patents are defensive in nature - their only purposes is to prevent trolls. So that's a sad artifact of it all.

No doubt the system needs an overhaul.

<comment><USER30> "The richest countries have strong IP protections, generally, that might indicate something."

The assumption here seems to be that their riches come from IP protections. It could be argued that the IP protections are a result of lobbying from rich companies.

I am not arguing that the causation is wrong, but the implied claim does not follow from the observation.

<comment><USER31> Or it could be the causation is correct, but for a rather unsavory reason, the wealth came from economic rents due to IP protections. The argument that IP defenders need to make is that these innovations _could not have happened_ without strong IP protections, and I've never seen a compelling argument for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Case in point - US aviation being backwater until Rights patent expired while the rest of the world saw explosive innovation in aviation.

Patents were necessary only when public disclosure had value. In the world where the same things get developed almost simultaneously by different people at different places and anything can be quickly reverse engineered the public gets no value in return for granting monopoly through a patent.

</comment><comment><USER33> What I really liked about it is how it forces publishing companies to truly make knowledge available for everyone. It's the direction music is going in this country, where individual listens are essentially a free public resource for anyone who pays a minuscule subscription fee.

Books and movies seem to be retaining pricing power for some reason. I feel like the ultimate reason behind this is that books and movies take a lot more time and attention to consume.

I know for me, I would be _far_ more inclined to read and watch more of them if it were easier to break them up into chunks. Give me a specialized movie player that lets me pause and start movies by scene, make _individual_ books and movies super cheap, sure, I don't mind paying cable-like fees for something actually _useful_ and I'd watch movies a scene at a time by the dozen. Give me a feed reader that mixes in book chapters, in order, with my normal news feed.

Essentially, I don't want to waste time on crappy platforms. Just give me the damn content in a way that makes sense for me to use it. I may get to the point where my appetite for information is so voracious, I'll just mass pirate stuff and upload it all into a personal database so I can chunk it myself.

<comment><USER34> > What I really liked about it is how it forces publishing companies to truly > make knowledge available for everyone.

I haven't read the article yet, but wow will that interact with: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eus-copyright- proposal...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/eus-copyright-proposal- extremely-bad-news-everyone-even-especially-wikipedia) [0]

[0] [https://act1.openmedia.org/savethelink](https://act1.openmedia.org/savethelink)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting point about publishers producing a cheap and a "classy" version of their books already way back then. I seem to remember reading somewhere else that when paperbacks first came up, they were a huge success, yet were criticized by the more snobbish educated elite as a virtual blasphemy...

<comment><USER35> Tolkien at least had that attitude towards LOTR being printed in paperback in USA in the 60s (never mind that the publisher did so on questionable legal grounds).

<comment><USER36> This was to compete with the pirated editions - its mentioned in the forward of my UK edition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If there's one argument against copyright I would bring up it's patent trolls. If you can propose an IP law to me that makes sure creative individuals are not bullied and stifled by unscrupulous people hungry for a quick buck I would be more inclined to support copyright laws.

</comment><comment><USER36> And the unification, industrial revolutions, Bismark and all those wars had nothing to do with it - seems a very narrow view of 19th century German history

<comment><USER9> I see the article more as pointing out one aspect that is often ignored - <USER2> as invalidating all those other aspects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wonder what kinds of software we have now if we didn't have Copyright Law for source code too?

</comment><comment><USER38> There is no justification for copyrights and patents any more than there is for any other monopoly.

However if we get rid of them there is a need to socialise creative production so that artists of all shapes and hues in all creative fields can still afford to live simply doing what they love to do.

It's a fair trade. Producers can copy and extend whatever any human has created but in return they have to produce enough to look after them.

<comment><USER39> >Producers can copy and extend whatever any human has created but in return they have to produce enough to look after them.

Which is just a royalty with extra steps.

The problem with most attempts to subvert a capitalist/market economy is that they all only manage to obfuscate the usage of money and ownership and replace a lot of it with centralized control.

Your idea still requires ownership of IP and compensation for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Rentier activity, as usual, inhibits growth.

</comment><comment><USER41> What means no copyright law? Of course we have laws about it.

<comment><USER42> > Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to > an absence of copyright law?

That's the very first sentence...

<comment><USER41> Ah and 2010 is in the 19th century? I guess I was never good in math.

<comment><USER43> That is the standard way to write that the article was published in 2010.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > Authors are only motivated to write, runs the conventional belief, if they > know their rights will be protected.

This is absurd. How stupid does one have to be to think this? Copyright serves only one purpose: to make profits for the author and, more importantly, to make profits for the publisher and distributor by exploiting the author's work. These days it almost exclusively does the latter. Copyright is not about contributing to or advancing society. It has nothing to do with that regardless of the original intentions behind it. Copyright is about making money for a few individuals or groups at the expense of the wider society. The sooner the idiotic conventional thinking quoted above is replaced by a proper analysis, the closer we are to fixing this atrocious system that's holding us back.

<comment><USER45> "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." \--Samuel Johnson

[http://www.samueljohnson.com/writing.html](http://www.samueljohnson.com/writing.html)</comment></comment>


Dissecting objc_msgSend on ARM64 - <AUTHOR> https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2017-06-30-dissecting-objc_msgsend-on-arm64.html <comment><USER2> > objc_msgSend is written in assembly. There are two reasons for this: one is > that it's not possible to write a function which preserves unknown arguments > and jumps to an arbitrary function pointer in C.

Wow... this is a bit off topic but can anyone expand on this side note and explain why?

(Every Objective-C implementation _requires_ assembly code?)

<comment><USER3> A C implementation of objc_msgSend would look like:

        ... objc_msgSend(id self, SEL _cmd, ...) {
            fptr = ...lookup code...
            return fptr(self, _cmd, args...)
        }

There's no way to express that args... argument when calling the function pointer, and no way to express forwarding an arbitrary return value.

However, Objective-C does not require objc_msgSend. With objc_msgSend, a method call site generates code that's essentially equivalent to (for a method that takes one object parameter and returns void):

        ((void (*)(id, SEL, id))objc_msgSend)(object, selector, parameter);

In other words, take objc_msgSend, cast it to a function pointer of the correct type, and call it.

Instead of objc_msgSend, the runtime can provide a function which looks up the method implementation and returns it to the caller. The caller can then invoke that implementation itself. This is how the GNU runtime does it, since it needs to be more portable. Their lookup function is called objc_msg_lookup. The generated code would look like this:

        void (*imp)(id, SEL, id) = (void (*)(id, SEL, id))objc_msgLookup(object, selector);
        imp(object, selector, parameter);

However, each call now suffers the overhead of two function calls, so it's a bit slower. Apple prefers to put in the extra effort of writing assembly code to avoid this, since it's so critical to their platform.

<comment><USER4> > There's no way to express that args... argument when calling the function > pointer

Yes there is: va_list.

> no way to express forwarding an arbitrary return value

Of course there is, and lots and lots of language runtimes implemented in C use those ways. Usually it boils down to having a base type called Object or Value and passing around pointers to that. In fact, from your example it looks like the "id" type is meant to play this role.

This is not syntax checked, but the code above would be something like:

        Object *objc_msgSend(id self, SEL cmd, ...) {
            fptr = ...lookup code...
            va_list args;
            va_start(cmd, args);
            Object *result = fptr(self, cmd, args);
            va_end(args);
            return result;
        }

Yes, this can be faster in assembly, but it's not true that there is no way to express this. (Unless I'm misunderstanding something.)

<comment><USER3> These are ways to simulate it. Of course you can simulate it; the language is Turing-complete, after all. But it does not actually _do_ it. You can write something similar to objc_msgSend in C, but you cannot write objc_msgSend in C.

Using varargs and passing va_list into the method would mean that your method is no longer a plain C function with the declared parameters plus two hidden parameters. It's now a different sort of beast, and has to use va_ calls to extract the values. This would require a lot more work in the method, and hurt performance.

Returning everything as an object would mean boxing and unboxing primitive values at every call, which would be horrendously inefficient.

And if you don't care about extracting every last bit of performance, it's much easier to do the lookup approach I discussed than it is to faff around with varargs and wrapping return values.

<comment><USER5> va_* is not a simulation. It compiles down to the exact same stack accesses. There is no list. It is a plain C function. It is the same calling convention. No boxing.

This is plain false.

<comment><USER6> It depends on the platforms C ABI, but no, the argument marshaling for va_args is not necessarily (or even usually) the same as normal args. In the case of iOS you can look here[1], the relevant bit being: "The iOS ABI for functions that take a variable number of arguments is entirely different from the generic version."

This actually manifests in errors if you directly call objc_msgSend, which is why in order to guarantee direct codeine you need to cast objc_msgSend to the actual prototype you want[2]:

"An exception to the casting rule described above is when you are calling the objc_msgSend function or any other similar functions in the Objective-C runtime that send messages. Although the prototype for the message functions has a variadic form, the method function that is called by the Objective-C runtime does not share the same prototype. The Objective-C runtime directly dispatches to the function that implements the method, so the calling conventions are mismatched, as described previously. Therefore you must cast the objc_msgSend function to a prototype that matches the method function being called."

1: [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Xc...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Xcode/Conceptual/iPhoneOSABIReference/Articles/ARM64FunctionCallingConventions.html) 2: [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Xc...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Xcode/Conceptual/iPhoneOSABIReference/Articles/ARM64FunctionCallingConventions.html)

<comment><USER5> This is C, I'm talking C calling convention (and x64, which is the same). Caller cleans up the stack, so va_list is a zero cost abstraction.

Citing the bastard architecture of iOS isn't really making the case for "usually".

<comment><USER3> Requiring the caller to put all arguments on the stack isn't "zero cost." For a non-variadic call on ARM64, the first eight parameters (or more, if some are floats) will be passed in registers without ever touching the stack.

On x86-64, the caller also has to set %al to the number of vector registers used for the call, and the compilers I've seen always check %al and conditionally save those registers as part of the function prologue. Cheap, but not "zero cost."

<comment><USER5> va_ doesn't change the calling convention. Parameters passed as registers continue to be passed as registers.

We could probably argue this some more but I suggest you simply try it with a compiler..

<comment><USER3> Good idea!

[https://gist.github.com/mikeash/ce38d3a77b88734a9e0e9dc3f352...](https://gist.github.com/mikeash/ce38d3a77b88734a9e0e9dc3f352fbc7)

You'll notice how `normal` takes all of its arguments out of registers `x0` through `x7` and places them on the stack for the call to `printf`. And you'll notice how `vararg` plays a bunch of games with the stack and never touches registers `x1` through `x7`. (It still uses `x0` because the first argument is not variadic.)

On the caller side, observe how `call_normal` places its values into `x0` through `x7` sequentially and then invokes the target function, while `call_vararg` places one value into `x0` and places everything else on the stack.

So, no, it looks to me like varargs _very much_ change the calling convention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a bit sceptical about the mandatory PIC (method cache) as hash. Usually you put the most common classes into a small array upfront and search and extend just that. The hash lookup would come in the slow part then. With assembly it's easy the create the self modifying PIC, from eg. 0-3.

</comment><comment><USER8> Even the method cache seems expensive -- compared to an indirect function call (using a virtual method table). Can clang replace msgSend with direct calls when the destination class is known at compilation time? (perhaps with a guard to verify that the object class is as expected)

<comment><USER9> You have that option in performance-critical situations. The ObjC runtime does allow you to lookup a method's underlying function pointer ahead of time in order to bypass obj_msgSend.

The compiler can't do that automatically because the any method and any class can be replaced at any time. Key-value observing is a common feature that replaces method implementations on the fly at runtime.

<comment><USER10> KVO creates a new subclass and changes your object to that subclass rather than replacing methods on the original class, so checking the isa pointer would be sufficient for that case. Method swizzling would break, but I suspect that most obj-c code could be compiled without support for swizzling without breaking anything.

<comment><USER11> Swizzling is not the only thing that would break. You'd break categories in dynamically loaded frameworks or bundles, and yes, you'd still break KVO because it replaces -dealloc and -class on the newly-created classes.

You'd also break dynamically adding methods to classes.

<comment><USER12> What is a typical use case for dynamically adding methods to a class?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great to see this series started again, to see articles with such an in-depth take is rare.</comment>


FBI blasts Apple, Google for locking police out of phones - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/fbi-blasts-apple-google-for-locking-police-out-of-phones/2014/09/25/68c4e08e-4344-11e4-9a15-137aa0153527_story.html <comment><USER3> > "market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the > law."

One thing the FBI does not realize, or does not care, is that _THEY ARE NOT THE ONLY ONES THE BACKDOORS WORK FOR._

A backdoor is a backdoor. Period. When so much private information is on a single device it's not just about being beyond the law (which is a great reason in and of itself because law enforcement is itself beyond the law). It's about being safe.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. The FBI's argument is basically:

"Leave your front door unlocked. Just in case we want to search you for drugs/obscene material/weapons/etc."

I don't know about you, but I don't want to leave my house unlocked 24/7 "just in case" the FBI wants to serve me with a warrant.

<comment><USER5> Except it isn't. When the FBI has a warrant they are legally entitled to break into your house even if you don't want them to.

Edit: downvote all you like, but this is a simple factual statement.

<comment><USER6> Except that we still expect them to _break_ in, not simply waltz through the front door after unlocking with their skeleton key.

<comment><USER5> Er...no. In the real world they don't always arrive with a SWAT team. Many warrants are served peacefully, and they have even been known to use locksmiths. I don't agree with stereotyping encryption users as if they were criminals, nor do I agree with stereotyping law enforcement as if they were shock troops.

<comment><USER7> If I used a locksmith to get in to your house without your permission, it would be "breaking in" in colloquial language.

Your reply is overly pedantic, when taken in the best light.

<comment><USER5> 'Many warrants are served peacefully...'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This story was likely published because the companies themselves told them to take a hike, and they are now trying to garner public sympathy. I don't think they are going to get it. Unauthorized intruders, whether or not they have a piece of paper signed by a guy that wears a robe to work, are not welcome in my phone.

I hope Apple & Google take a hard line on this, at least until the US government passes a law making it illegal to engineer things in a manner that makes it impossible for companies to comply with search warrants. I'm sure that will come, but hopefully it will take a while.

<comment><USER9> Step 1: Have the stenographers at the Washington Post publish your scary press release as "news" full of emotionally charged hyperbole like "Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile".

Step 2: After the next telegenic kidnapping / bombing / school shooting, claim "I told you so" as the perpetrator would have been stopped if not for a secure phone / encrypted chat / requirement to get a warrant.

Step 3: 95% of the public demands mandatory backdoors, criminalizing strong encryption, and warrantless dragnet surveillance.

<comment><USER10> This is terrifyingly realistic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The quote that plants this firmly in pretending-to-be-serious land: "The average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, I've got to get an Apple phone."

<comment><USER12> Let's be honest, improved encryption is going to restrain the government's ability to enforce the law. Beyond pedophiles, there are definitely going to be cases where innocent people get hurt as a result.

I'm okay with that. The whole idea of our government and society is that the mass of law-abiding and decent people are stronger than the criminal and malicious minority. People are by and large responsible, which is why they can and should govern themselves. Limiting the government's ability to snoop and intrude on citizens is a crucial check on the very real (if long-term) threat of government over-reach.

But let's not kid ourselves that our privacy, and its constraints on the government, is without consequences.

<comment><USER13> People that are OK with innocent people getting hurt never seen to realize that this usually guarantees that criminals get away with their crimes by the wrong person being convicted. Is that also something you are OK with?

<comment><USER14> It's a hard step in logic to go from criminals getting off due to insufficient evidence from encrypted iPhones, to the _wrong person being convicted_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hey FBI, if you want the data on the phone get a Warrant that requires the person who owns the phone to unlock it for you - or go to jail for not complying. You don't go to a next-door neighbor who has the key to a house and serve him the Warrant to get into your their neighbors house. Don't go to Apple or Google and make them unlock the phone. 4th Amendment, unlawful search and seizure and all that jazz.

<comment><USER16> Previously apple would only provide data in response to a warrant. Now they don't provide data at all.

<comment><USER17> Where did you read that, out of curiosity?

<comment><USER16> The was a WaPo article[0] posted on HN a while back:

>If I understand how it works, the only time the new design matters is when the government has a search warrant, signed by a judge, based on a finding of probable cause. Under the old operating system, Apple could execute a lawful warrant and give law enforcement the data on the phone. Under the new operating system, that warrant is a nullity. It's just a nice piece of paper with a judge's signature. Because Apple demands a warrant to decrypt a phone when it is capable of doing so, the only time Apple's inability to do that makes a difference is when the government has a valid warrant. The policy switch doesn't stop hackers, trespassers, or rogue agents. It only stops lawful investigations with lawful warrants.

0:[http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2014...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2014/09/19/apples-dangerous-game/)

<comment><USER18> > Under the old operating system, Apple could execute a lawful warrant and > give law enforcement the data on the phone. [...] The policy switch doesn't > stop hackers, trespassers, or rogue agents. It only stops lawful > investigations with lawful warrants.

Incorrect: under the old operating system _a human at Apple_ could give _anyone_ the data on the phone. Apple had procedural safeguards that aimed to ensure that no one at Apple would do that without proper approval, but as anyone who pays attention to the news should be aware, procedural safeguards of data do not always prevent humans who are motivated to violate those safeguards. (Including, _inter alia_ , "hackers, trespassers, and rogue agents" \-- as certainly the US government is aware; its hardly as if the NSA didn't have procedural safeguards that applied to the data that Edward Snowden released.)

The change (which is a technical change, not a policy change) means no human at Apple can do this, and the phone user is protected from humans who might violate Apple's policies, including "hackers, trespassers, and rogue agents." It incidentally means that any warrant for data on the phone will have to be served on the only person who has access to that data, the phone owner.

It doesn't "stop lawful investigations with lawful warrants", it reduces the number of people who can access a phone, and therefore the set of people on whom a lawful warrant can be served. But law enforcement has no inherent right to expect that some third party will have access to my private property (whether physical or virtual) that enables law enforcement to serve a warrant on a third person, and that third person having access is _always_ a compromise of _my_ security that makes me more vulnerable to rogue actors. It is not simply a convenience for "lawful investigations with lawful warrants" that provides no risk to me outside of such investigations.

<comment><USER17> > and that third person having access is always a compromise of my security > that makes me more vulnerable to rogue actors.

You distill it well, a broken security solution is not a good security solution. Foreign intelligence services, "hackers", etc... they all want our trade secrets. We need real security systems to defend against them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." — Mike Vargas, from Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil"

</comment><comment><USER20> > He said he could not understand why companies would "market something > expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law."

That's certainly rich.

<comment><USER15> Indeed, the FBI routinely likes to forget about the Constitution and place themselves beyond it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Funny: "That led investigators to a Facebook post, made two days after the homicide, in which another man posed in a cell phone selfie with the same gun."

You'd think a selfie would be enough to find someone the traditional way, but they seem to think they needed to locate the phone that took the picture.

<comment><USER22> Exactly, that was a nice dramatic story for this piece, but really they had the evidence already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I thought the US government could already run arbitrary code on a running device via means of the baseband OS/modem? e.g.

PDF(!) [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot12/woot12...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot12/woot12-final24.pdf)

So is this whole thing REALLY about the US Government losing access or more about them not wanting to expose their over-the-air code execution techniques?

Since presumably if they capture an already running device, they can just get the warrant, and ask the cellular network to send their specially crafted packet (which can unlock the phone, SMS the encryption key, or similar).

Sorry but if the Intelligence Services cannot unlock an encrypted device STILL RUNNING then I'll eat my hat.

<comment><USER24> > So is this whole thing REALLY about the US Government losing access or more > about them not wanting to expose their over-the-air code execution > techniques?

Obviously, the latter.

More to the point, the type of regular police who would push for this probably aren't even aware that such code execution techniques might exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> _He said he could not understand why companies would "market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law."_ \- I guess the FBI and the NSA don't talk much?

</comment><comment><USER26> Hey if the FBI were obeying the law, then I might have some concern for them. But they aren't. They're going out there, organizing groups of people, setting them up with terrorist plots, providing them with material and financial support, and then busting them. Whether that's entrapment or not, I don't care--- it is a violation of anti-terrorism conspiracy laws.

Not to mention the NSA, and I believe FBI, conducting illegal spying operations.

Government has proven it cannot be trusted, now complains when companies stop trusting it?

Plus the iPhone is sold globally.

<comment><USER27> Stop pulling BS out of your ass and provide a source for your first claim, please?

<comment><USER28> [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/471/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/471/the-convert)

[http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/terror- prosecution-m...](http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/terror-prosecution- muslim-americans)

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi- entrapment-...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment- fake-terror-plots)

[http://www.salon.com/2013/07/10/only_1_percent_of_terrorists...](http://www.salon.com/2013/07/10/only_1_percent_of_terrorists_caught_by_fbi_are_real_partner/)

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist- in...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Fortunately as yet there is no way for the USG to grant a monopoly on the manufacture of mobile devices in exchange for access to the contents. An alternate route they can take is through the monopolies granted on various radio frequencies. FCC approval in the future may require backdooring.

<comment><USER30> Would that prevent the end user from adding another layer of security onto the device? Kind of how you can log on to my machine, but that doesn't make it any easier to decrypt my Truecrypt partition (I think...).

<comment><USER13> If it communicates over the network though, all of your traffic would still be recorded and decryptable. You'd have to exclusively use end-to-end encrypted services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Julian Sanchez wrote a relevant response to Orin Kerr going over the history of the crypto wars and why this is all wrong:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8369963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8369963)

<comment><USER32> Very food link which deserves more attention. It's a non issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is pretty funny. It will be interesting to watch the narrative, and it is surprising how _overtly_ partisan it is. I just wish I had a big PR budget I could use to place articles in the right places to adjust the narrative.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Locking police out of" assumes that they have a right to be there in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Well if they have a well-formed wallet they actually do have that right. The constitution contemplates the issuance of warrants precisely because there are circumstances where seizure is entirely appropriate.

<comment><USER35> You are confusing a right with a power, granted by consent of the governed, that can be withdrawn and can't rewrite the rules of mathematics. _People_ have rights, and under constitutions written the way the US constitution is written, those rights are not enumerated or limited.

You have a right to use strong encryption because you have not consented to give away that right. The government has no actual rights at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Dear Bureau, Please blame the NSA for bringing this upon yourself.

<comment><USER37> Not just the NSA. The regular ol' police gives off the appearance of being at war with the citizens it's supposed to protect sometimes. They are extremely militarized, very technologically advanced, but not always fair and even- keeled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The FBI is more than talented enough to get into phones, or areas, they just need to invest more time if something's locked. Which honestly, is a good thing. It means they'll have to actually choose on a targeted basis who is worth surveilling, which is more conductive to democracy than just saying, "Give us all your keys". An easy system to crack is an easy system to crack, period.

</comment><comment><USER38> Giving the FBI your encryption keys to fight terrorism would be like giving a serial burglar your house keys because you left your oven on.

Edit: -because you think you might have left your oven on.

<comment><USER39> Because they told you they think you might have left your oven on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The word is out, the people no longer trust their governments. Big surprise when the governments don't trust their people. The road goes both ways.

</comment><comment><USER41> "I've been an investigator for almost 27 years," Collins said, "It's concerning that we're beginning to go backwards with this technology."

It's concerning that a veteran police investigator considers consumer privacy "backwards."

<comment><USER13> Well, to be fair to him, in his entire 27 years of police work he has never busted a single criminal except through cell phone contents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> When I made a point about Orrin Kerr shilling for the law enforcement agencies [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8349006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8349006) one or two people didn't agree. I guess it is now obvious what that piece was about.

The disingeneous dimension to this issue is that smart phones are basically powerful hand held personal computers which make calls and take photos on the side. Less than 1% of their capability is used for for making calls. Orrin Kerr pretends not to understand this. He wouldn't insist that Microsoft, Apple and Linux developers weaken the encryption on regular laptops, desktops or servers for law enforcement to have access to data.

Why should he insist on it for smart phones which these days are just as powerful as PCs, the only difference being that people carry them around, make calls and store contact details on them?

Steve Job and Apple's desire to have complete control and have access to users information brought this situation about, and in doing so made themselves virtually accessories to whatever crimes people stored on their phones. Now they realize that it made them appear as agents and collaborators with the investigative agencies, they have decided to extricate themselves from that situation leaving them close to being labelled 'pedophile and terrorist facilitators'.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's nice to see the media digest and swallow this bull from the FBI & co without bothering to even chew it a little first. "Oh the FBI said something, IT MUST be true!".

All it requires is for someone to find that backdoor & its mechanism and that's it, they can exploit the backdoor designed for someone else for their own purposes. And if that someone doesn't have legitimate intentions, what then? Am I supposed to accept making my device that much less secure because the FBI or another state actor may one day decide I'm trouble? The chance of that backdoor being exploited by someone other than the FBI is considerably higher than the FBI ever using it themselves, and the FBI seem to be in lalaland on this.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think that under this noise both OS is stuffed with bookmarks heavier than any time before.

Ouch, those Apple and Google guys so bad that they following forth amendment, poor and evil FBI and NSA they can't do anything with american companies. They soo-o-o angry about their OS security that you definitely could trust it.

And don't, and again, don't use this bad bad TOR and other security stuff of bad hackers full of trashware: [http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/apple-ios- iphone-ipad-ipod/32...](http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/apple-ios-iphone-ipad- ipod/321803-fake-tor-browser-app-for-ios-full-of-adware-spyware) that are suprisingly sticking at the top of your application store.

</comment><comment><USER45> Here is a related note titled "Are Google and Apple On Your Side?" by Bill Blunden - [http://cryptome.org/2014/09/google-apple- crypto.pdf](http://cryptome.org/2014/09/google-apple-crypto.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER46> Wrong, FBI: this is a human rights issue, pure and simple. Our devices augment our minds, and you want to _read our minds_. And we don't want you to.

It is disingenuous to imply (let alone assert, as in this case) that you can't investigate criminal activity without the ability to access our phones/read our minds. Somehow you managed for many decades prior to the iPhone. To claim you _need_ this access now is rather silly.

I would suggest that you allow people their private, augmented minds, enjoy the better society that will (hopefully) give us all, and pursue other investigatory avenues, of which there is no shortage and which should occur to your thought.

</comment><comment><USER47> >He said he could not understand why companies would "market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law."

Perhaps he's entirely unaware of any history where "the law" was used to oppress. Perhaps he's also unaware that something being "the law" does not make it just. For instance, in Washington, where I live, just two years ago it was illegal to own marijuana. Now it's legal. Does this now mean that the moral status of owning and smoking marijuana has changed, or does it merely show that the law is inconstant and often at odds with justice? Much is taken for granted in his rhetorical question.

</comment><comment><USER48> Well, at least we know it is probably effective, or they wouldn't make such a fuss.

<comment><USER49> Or else they're making such a fuss specifically to help sell the supposed effectiveness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I can't wait to see the FBI point the finger at the NSA and say something to the fact of "The FBI is trying to protect you, we aren't the NSA violating your right."

That would be golden

<comment><USER44> Yeah, the politics is about giving a good show )

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> So here's what I don't get: This is just standard, off-the-shelf encryption, right? Like the kind I've been using on my desktop since forever? How is this such a big deal?

I realize that from a PR perspective, Apple would like to appear to be privacy conscious. And perhaps Apple was asking for legal fallout by flouting that particular aspect of correctly implemented encryption. It just seems a little too ironic that this is just standard off-the-shelf encryption we're talking about.

</comment><comment><USER52> The technology has been there for a while, it's just finally gotten the point where people's mistrust for the government is something tech companies can market to. -

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be an awful lot easier for police to catch criminals if they were permitted to simply kick in random doors and raid houses just to poke around and look for evidence of crimes, too. Police do not have an absolute right to easily-gathered evidence. Especially given the malleability of digital content, they should be relying on actual physical evidence more than ever anyway.

</comment><comment><USER53> What do the watchers think we should do when we can't even have an open rational discussion about constitutional rights especially regarding new technology and information. I am willing to discuss and debate. My data was yours with a warrant. The tools to go beyond that weren't mainstream. By refusing to communicate the internet is working around you. Rightfully so.

</comment><comment><USER54> where is my self destruct code? Something that gives them all the appearance of unlocking but just corrupts/erases data.

<comment><USER55> "Willful destruction of evidence." comes to mind.

<comment><USER56> They'd need to prove there was evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> > "market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the > law."

Why isn't he complaining about Starbucks? Conspirators can meet in a Starbucks and discuss illegal things over coffee. If Starbucks cared about people, they'd bug all of the tables.

</comment><comment><USER58> Maybe they should have thought about the backlash _before_ they engaged in mass surveillance?

</comment><comment><USER59> The funniest part is that as a customer, I still have very little guarantee that the company can't access the phone's content at will; it's still promises to me.

</comment><comment><USER60> > "Our ability to act on data that does exist . . . is critical to our > success," Hosko said. He suggested that it would take a major event, such as > a terrorist attack, to cause the pendulum to swing back toward giving > authorities access to a broad range of digital information. - <USER2> > article ( > [http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/2014/09/17...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/2014/09/17/2612af58-3ed2-11e4-b03f-de718edeb92f_story.html) > )

USA, get ready for a " _foreign_ terrorist attack" in the next few days (;

</comment><comment><USER61>
        "There will come a day when..."

The prefix to every fantasy.

</comment><comment><USER62> That old saying comes to mind: as you make your bed, so you must lie in it.

</comment><comment><USER63> Is anyone falling for this?

<comment><USER64> I'm actually quite on the fence. It does seem to me to be conceivable that the FBI would pretend to be outraged when they are not.

I really don't have enough information and I don't trust anyone.

<comment><USER65> Of course they're outraged, in the same way that a serial burglar is outraged when they discover that someone's backdoor, which has been wide open for years, is suddenly locked. What's their outrage got to do with anything?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Either security works, or forensics works. You can't have both.

</comment><comment><USER66> Shouldn't we be valuing privacy over throwing people in jail?</comment>


Study Tied to Food Industry Tries to Discredit Sugar Guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/well/eat/a-food-industry-study-tries-to-discredit-advice-about-sugar.html <comment><USER2> ridiculous</comment>


Function poisoning in C++ with gcc - <AUTHOR> https://www.fluentcpp.com/2018/09/04/function-poisoning-in-cpp/ <comment><USER2> Why not just use the deprecated keyword or a #define?</comment>


Twitter has blocked URLs from Direct Messages - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/twitter-may-be-banning-links-in-dms/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry but I find really stupid to see this message:

"This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can't complete this action right now. Please try again later."

And find there's no way to prove I'm a human. Is that hard to add a captcha?

</comment><comment><USER2> You also can't reply to a DM with a URL in the message.

I thought only followers can send DMs to each other, so I am not certain this is much of an anti-spam technique.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's probably worth noting this is from October so not related to the sending DMs without permission issue making the rounds this weekend.</comment>


Open Source Email Templates - <AUTHOR> https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates <comment><USER2> sendwithus cofounder; we've had a template gallery internally in the product since launch, but we felt that these templates were something that everyone should be able to use.

We didn't want to launch "just another template gallery", like many others, so we've made these open source. Contribute a pull request on github[0], we'll merge it, run it through Litmus and make sure it's still responsive. You can read about it on the 'about' page[1]

[0] [https://github.com/sendwithus/templates](https://github.com/sendwithus/templates)

[1] [https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about](https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about)

<comment><USER3> Awesome, I think you just became the Bootstrap of email by default!

<comment><USER4> See Zurb Ink, which is also open sourced, but might be a bit closer to Bootstrap as it also has a framework.

[http://zurb.com/ink/](http://zurb.com/ink/)

<comment><USER5> That looks pretty good, thanks for the share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You know what's funny? Often the highest converting and best user experience emails are... just text and links.

Yep, all the branded shenanigans and responsive mumbojumbo doesn't necessarily beat just sending an email in its native form.

As it turns out, most of the logos and branding are self serving and nobody cares. Many of the most profitable email lists on the internet have no style at all, are long form text, have plain blue links, and they make millions of dollars in sales.

This is a cool project, but don't forget to treat email in its native form.

<comment><USER2> We always encourage people to A/B test plain text versus HTML, and from the results seen it's entirely dependent on the audience.

If you're emailing developers, keep it clean/plain. Many consumers appreciate if an email "looks/feels like the website".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you build emails based on these, please make sure you send them multipart/alternative with a text/plain version as well. And in particular, make sure that text/plain version isn't just "go read the HTML", or worse a copy of the HTML complete with tags.

<comment><USER8> Great suggestion. You would think this would be built into the templates.

<comment><USER9> They are open source, so...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is amazing, although I can't help but feel skeptical every time I read the word _responsive_ next to the word _e-mail_ considering only Thunderbird and Apple Mail speak responsive.

Sadly, email design is like travelling to a twisted dimension.

The most effective markup for layouts are the dreaded tables, the most effective way to style your markup is with inline styles, and the most used email client (Microsoft Outlook 2007~13) has an engine exponentially worse than Trident from Internet Explorer 6[1].

And don't get me started with Android/Gmail because Google seems devoted in beating Microsoft with the worst experience for email design.

[1] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa338201(v=office.12...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/aa338201\(v=office.12\).aspx#Word2007MailHTMLandCSS_Introduction)

<comment><USER11> Actually, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish in email these days. While there are still problem email clients when it comes to responsive (Gmail, the Gmail mobile app, some Android clients, and a few iOS clients like Mailbox), you can build responsive emails fairly easily.

While it's true that you need to rely on tables, some HTML attributes, and a lot of inline styles - we routinely use classes, media queries, and CSS3 in our emails at Litmus. We've even pulled off HTML5 video backgrounds and some cool stuff with CSS3 animations. All in email.

Outlook definitely has issues, more recently with rendering in Outlook.com, but they are known issues—most with quick fixes.

More importantly, there are a ton of great resources out there. At Litmus, we actually started a community around email design to help people learn and troubleshoot ([https://litmus.com/community](https://litmus.com/community)). If anyone's interested, here are some good email design resources:

Responsive Email Patterns - [http://briangraves.github.io/ResponsiveEmailPatterns/](http://briangraves.github.io/ResponsiveEmailPatterns/) Responsive Email Resources - [http://responsiveemailresources.com/](http://responsiveemailresources.com/) Action Rocket Labs blog - [http://labs.actionrocket.co/](http://labs.actionrocket.co/) Campaign Monitor CSS Support Guide - [https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/](https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/) MailChimp Email Design Reference - [http://templates.mailchimp.com/](http://templates.mailchimp.com/)

Hell, I even wrote a book on responsive email design ([http://modernhtmlemail.com](http://modernhtmlemail.com)).

Email is definitely its own, weird world - but it's a world that is improving and growing every day. More importantly, it's a world filled with dedicated and clever people that are refining techniques, building tools, and sharing knowledge to make working with email easier than ever.

<comment><USER10> Actually I'm surprised at what can be accomplished in email these days, but in a negative way (sorry to be too pessimistic).

In the browser I already got my peace of mind back when it comes to cross- browser compatibility, because I can design a website in the browser of my choice, and when I test in other browsers, most of times there are no issues, or the issues are too minimal to get upset by having to fix them.

It's cool to have a place with an active community where someone can find tools, resources, workarounds, etc., but that is just a way to alleviate the problem.

An e-mail standard proposal[1] already exists, but providers (especially Google) doesn't seem too motivated to adhere to that standard :/...

[1] [http://www.email-standards.org/](http://www.email-standards.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't tell you how many times I've wanted something like this. The pain of writing and testing html email is pretty huge, and the only people doing an even halfway decent job with them seem to be the proprietary email campaign companies, and until now they don't seem interested in making them as accessible as this.

Plus, these templates look pretty slick.

<comment><USER13> Glad that you appreciate them! Feel free to use them or contribute to them to your hearts content :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They are much less fully fleshed out, but Zurb Ink has some sample templates along with a whole system for responsive email design: [http://zurb.com/ink/templates.php](http://zurb.com/ink/templates.php)

<comment><USER2> The Zurb Ink templates are great! We use them as a base for some of our templates as well.

The process of going from the Zurb template to something you might want to actually use often means people break the responsive elements of the template -- something we're hoping to avoid with this template gallery.

<comment><USER14> Yup definitely agree with that. I think Ink might be the future of email design, bUt it's still pretty rough in real world use today.

I'll take a closer look at these templates. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is great. Thanks a lot for sharing. We're working on html emails for our own project and it's shocking how arcane and backwards this entire thing is. Hopefully these templates will save us a lot of time.

</comment><comment><USER16> These are great. I'm a week off shipping a product that is primarily delivered via email, to C-suite'ers. Most of these people check all email on their phone, so these are an amazing help in shipping the MVP.

<comment><USER2> Glad we could help out!

<comment><USER16> Also I'm sure you'd track this, but from an audience-of-one I can say this is great content marketing! I've used SendGrid previously on a few side projects, and will now definitely be checking out your service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Excellent job. For those interested in just seeing (no source) really well designed emails can alwasy check out: [http://reallygoodemails.com/](http://reallygoodemails.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome responsive email templates. More info here: [https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about](https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/templates/about)

</comment><comment><USER8> In my endless fight with Microsoft's worse than useless spam filters (my how I hate hotmail and her ugly sisters), how does using a common template like this affect the false positive junk mail rate?

On this topic does anyone have any trick suggestion beyond the obvious (spf, dkim, etc) to keep emails away from Microsoft's junk mail filter?

<comment><USER19> Anecdotal, but I have had better luck sending through an email provider to Hotmail (and Outlook.com and friends) rather than setting up my own outbound SMTP. I've used both Mailgun and Mandrill – of course, make sure you set up SPF and DKIM with the provider, too.

<comment><USER8> Yes I already do this - still doesn't solve the hotmail junk filter hell.

The emails I send are not newsletter, just invoices and the like. They go through fine to gmail, yahoo, etc, but for no known reason Microsoft's useless filters marks them as spam. Of course the average hotmail user never thinks to look in their junk mail folder no matter how many times they are told :(

<comment><USER20> Interesting, I had no issues with GMail and Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com but with Yahoo. A handful of Yahoo user that mark their own registration email as junk is enough that Yahoo add the domain to their junk filter. It doesn't help that Yahoo has a very prominent "Spam" button in their UI (in GMail & Outlook it's on a drop-down menu).

<comment><USER8> I have issues on occasion with yahoo, but it is only for a week or so at a time. Microsoft consistently gives me issues. Of course all my test emails to my hotmail test accounts go through without any issue. From what I have been able to determine the filter only appears to be trigged on a certain percentage of email accounts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very nice! Just a shame most of these will not work with gmail since it blocks internal style sheets.

<comment><USER2> That's why all the CSS is inlined for you as well :)

<comment><USER21> Nice, i missed that while glancing at it on git. I've starred the repo and appreciate the contributions everyone has made to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I saw "open source mail templates" I thought it'd be things like ways of insulting people who report bugs or provide patches, or calling everyone idiots for not wrapping their plain-text emails at 72 columns, or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER23> very misleading title for a commercial solution.

<comment><USER24> It's under the Apache license and all; what more do you want?</comment></comment>