What happens when it's all glass? - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2588-what-happens-when-its-all-glass <comment><USER2> A few points:

\- Apple is pushing the boundaries of minimalism with their industrial design (to absurd levels in cases like the control-free iPod Shuffle). This is not necessarily better design, but it is the currently fashionable design. I would argue that the single button interface on the iPhone/iPad is an example of moving too far towards minimalism (from a purely functional perspective). The same button now performs different functions depending on how many times you press it and where you are when you press it, yet there is plenty of room for a second button.

\- In my opinion, Apple's software is a mixed bag. I love the user experience in iOS, and OSX is my favorite desktop operating system, but I think iTunes is among the worst commonly used desktop applications available.

\- All of these devices will be judged on categories beyond hardware/software in the future. For example, I expect a phone's ability to connect with important services to become increasingly scrutinized. It seems like it will only be a matter of time before we're all using something like Google Voice to manage our phone numbers. A device's ability to interface with these types of critical services could very easily become the killer app.

\- A small point, but I think the comparison between a MacBook Pro an a Lenovo is a bit odd. ThinkPads are not far off from Apple in terms of build quality and are certainly more durable.

<comment><USER3> _\- A small point, but I think the comparison between a MacBook Pro an a Lenovo is a bit odd. ThinkPads are not far off from Apple in terms of build quality and are certainly more durable._

You're going to have to justify that. A case made out of a solid piece of aluminum is about as durable as I can think of in consumer-level products. I beat the crap out of my MBP and it doesn't have so much as a scratch on it.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but the Thinkpads are even stronger. You can dump a glass of water on the keyboard and it keeps working, because all the liquid is routed through special drainage holes. You can drive a car over the screen because they put reinforcements (magnesium, I believe) in just the right places. 100% Al is limiting -- you can't use a stronger-but-heavier material _anywhere_.

They're also hard to take apart. Changing a dead hard drive is a 1 minute operation with a Thinkpad. With a Macbook... well, you can't even change the battery anymore...

<comment><USER5> A bunch of screws, but not overly difficult: [http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-17-Inch- Unibody-T...](http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-17-Inch-Unibody- Teardown/618/1)

<comment><USER6> The newer laptops are a lot easier, and they reflect it by labeling the HD as user-serviceable without voiding the warranty.

Meanwhile, I have this: [http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing- MacBook-Pro-15...](http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-MacBook- Pro-15-Inch-Core-2-Duo-Models-A1226-and-A1260-Hard-Drive-Replacement/670/1)

Which _definitely_ qualifies as a PITA. Easy enough for me, though, as I've had _far_ nastier, also from Apple (12" Powerbook): [http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing- PowerBook-G4-A...](http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing- PowerBook-G4-Aluminum-12-Inch-867-MHz-Upper-Case/203/1) (they don't have a HD guide, but that's all the screws). And _all those screws are different sizes_ (or close enough).

<comment><USER7> Old Thinkpads used to be awful as well though. Changing the keyboard on a 380D required burrowing in from the back :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think Steve Jobs gets this.

 _"One of our biggest insights [years ago] was that we didn't want to get into any business where we didn't own or control the primary technology because you'll get your head handed to you._

 _"We realized that almost all - maybe all - of future consumer electronics, the primary technology was going to be software. And we were pretty good at software. We could do the operating system software. We could write applications on the Mac or even PC, like iTunes. We could write the software in the device, like you might put in an iPod or an iPhone or something. And we could write the back-end software that runs on a cloud, like iTunes._

(ca. March 2008 via [http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/gallery.job...](http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/gallery.jobsqna.fortune/13.html) )

</comment><comment><USER9> _Everything is turning into a screen, from edge to edge. Once it's all about glass, it's all about software._

This is assuming that once it's all about glass there isn't anywhere to go. Apple has become a leader in UI design and glass happens to be the current popular choice for devices. 10 years before the iPhone few people would have predicted a phone with no buttons and a glass screen would become popular, and a few years after its release everyone in the industry is imitating...same goes for the iPod in relation to CD's or even cassette tapes. I would venture a guess that few people now know types of devices that will become commonplace in a few years.

As long as Apple is able to stay ahead of the curve and continue to stay a leader in making new things that people want to use I don't think will have a problem staying relevant. So to answer the question is that once it's all glass Apple will probably be on to new and better things.

<comment><USER10> _This is assuming that once it's all about glass there isn't anywhere to go..._

Agreed. Apple has a patent on multi-touch in three dimensions already[1] so maybe the next i-device will move away from the screen and towards a more touchy-feely :-) approach.

[1] - [http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=FUOxAAAAEBAJ&dq=m...](http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=FUOxAAAAEBAJ&dq=multi- touch+skins+spanning+three+dimensions)

<comment><USER11> _maybe the next i-device will move away from the screen and towards a more touchy-feely :-) approach_

Once things get to the point where ubiquitous mobile haptics are just around the corner, will Apple's "no porn" policy start to be a big disadvantage?

<comment><USER12> I think the "no porn" thing is mostly in the US. One of the more popular apps where I live is a list of 70 sex positions. I haven't bought it myself, so maybe it's all text or cartoons or something but that wouldn't explain why it's so popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Android is solid, WebOS is solid, and Blackberry's new OS/UI looks great too. Nothing I've played with is better than Apple's iOS, but a lot of the alternatives are approaching "plenty damn good" status._

That's Apple's edge. No one in their right mind can call the technology that RIM, Palm, or Google come out with as anything but outstanding...yet Apple still has that edge and their products are always "great" while the others will always be "plenty damn good".

Perhaps it's because they control all the process (sans manufacturing). Maybe it's a different philosophy. But it really seems that no one cares about every minute tiny detail like Apple does.

Apple has always cared about the small things. That's why I don't see their perceived reputation going anywhere. As long as they keep doing that, they'll still be different.

<comment><USER14> The beauty in Android is that it doesn't have to be the best ... it just has to be good enough + shipped on cheaper phones ... just like Windows did.

Also, I've got an iPhone 3GS, and I see lots of area for improvement ... the biggest annoyance for me being that all these apps I have (Facebook, Twitter, Skype, yahoo messenger) ... are not using the iPhone's contacts list for storing people profiles ... so even Apple screws things up in the details department.

<comment><USER15> > the biggest annoyance for me being that all these apps I have (Facebook, > Twitter, Skype, yahoo messenger) ... are not using the iPhone's contacts > list for storing people profiles ... so even Apple screws things up in the > details department.

I'm not sure that's a screw-up so much as a philosophical view of the contact list as being for actual contacts and not random twitter user names with no associated addresses, phone-numbers, etc. I'd be pretty irritated if yahoo messenger were able to clutter up my contact list, personally.

On another note entirely, overuse...of ellipses...is a terrible...habit.

<comment><USER16> When it comes to Android you can choose to synchronize only those Twitter/Facebook profiles that have an existing address book entry. Thanks to that the list is not littered with useless contacts and you have all kinds of information, like the recent status update or profile photo, integrated under a single address book. Very handy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The difference in build quality, materials, and tolerances between a MacBook > Pro and a Lenovo are still obvious

Yes, ThinkPads are still some of the most sturdy laptops around while MacBooks tend to need more support/repairs. Of course Apple's (repair) service is very good, and MacBooks do look nice(r), but "build quality" means something else to me.

<comment><USER18> I agree with you, having had my share of back-and-forth with Apple Care.

But I think there's the build quality vs. the durability of the products. For me, Apple products win in build quality in the sense that the pieces are cleanly fabricated, properly aligned, don't wiggle, shake or bend, etc. I've had a ThinkPad and was disappointed from that point of view. Certainly better than many other brands (Dell, Toshiba), but still a bit under Apple.

But as I said, Apple does have some issues of durability. (e.g. MacBook's plastic cases, iPod/iPhone earbuds...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Once it's all about glass, it's all about software._

This is a good thing!

This can dramatically lower the barriers to entry for great interface design by exposing more of the end user experience to programmers. Just like the move from desktop to browser, the cream will rise even faster. What a great time to be a software hacker!

</comment><comment><USER20> There's nothing new here. The truth of the matter is that the UI experience for computers is largely defined by what happens on the screen - be it laptop, iPad or iPhone. There's this cool scene in Gary Hustwit's Objectified where Bill Moggridge talks about designing one of the very first laptops, and the conclusion he comes to is that it didn't matter how usable or how good his physical design was, in the end the user's experience of the laptop came largely from within the screen.

That surprised him, and got him thinking about what we now know as 'interaction design'. (Incidentally, Moggridge coined the term shortly after his experience with the laptop).

He describes his experience as: 'being sucked into the screen.' Which is true, if you pause to think about it: the design of the laptop only matters when you're carrying it around with you - when you're working on it the screen overrides almost everything else.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think this post vastly underestimates the difficulty of rolling innovative hardware into production.

Glass is not the end of history. Apple could include thermosensors, audiosensors, or miniature holographic projectors. It could go towards flexible screens or wearable computing.

But new hardware is buggy before it's commoditized. The reason Apple's touch sensitivity is so good is in part because they control both the hardware and software layers. Any kind of temporal or spatial variation in touch detection at the hardware layer due to manufacturing issues can be corrected at the software layer.

It's that vertical systems integration which lets them push the envelope on technology. Others can easily copy, but they will only be followers unless they play to their strengths (e.g. Android with search).

</comment><comment><USER22> They are hitting everything on all cylinders – industrial design, mechanical engineering, material selection and finish, manufacturing, supply chain, hardware, customer service, marketing, advertising, retail stores, their website, company structure and internal product development processes. And the software they make is deep and wide – OSX , iOS, respective dev platforms, all the productivity utilities they make, iTunes (owning the music industry), whatever cloud apps they are working on now…

All are benchmarks of the industry.

I'm not a blind fanboy, just impressed and happy to witness a company constantly iterating and making themselves better.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's interesting insight, but look at it like this...

Apple's dominance isn't from hardware alone. But they are exceptionally talented at it. It isn't in software alone, but again, they know what they're doing. They've got a lot of mature, battle tested code and an outstanding developer community who knows how to wield it. It's not in digital distribution alone, but yet again, they got there very early, have a lot of practice and many deep relationships with the rogue states (thanks, PG) who bully would-be media companies.

Marketing isn't their top achievement, but they love the things they make and the authenticity of their marketing works very well for them.

I could go on and on, but you probably get my point.

Apple's core strength isn't any one thing first, then something else second. Their strength is their ability to see the whole board and make every single thing they do complement everything else in a very meaningful, very equal way. It's an absurd game they play, a combo of three dimensional chess and hacky sack, but their focus makes it work.

No one can compete with Apple by trying to crib any _one_ of their strengths. To be successful, you need to be able to attack several of them at once, and that's very challenging.

They've created an absurdly defensible position. The vision needed to get there makes my brain hurt. No matter how you feel about Apple, you can't argue that their organizational synergy is an incredible force.

<comment><USER24> What you're describing here is the notion of activity systems! Michael Porter describes the concept in detail in the article "What is Strategy," Harvard Business Review. The crux of the idea is that the strategic position of a product hinges on a system of activities across a range of areas, from marketing, to product development, to distribution. Activity systems are a source of sustainable competitive advantage because a competitor can imitate one or two activities, but often not the entire system. In other words, a competitor (e.g., RIM) can imitate Apple's hardware or its software, but this is not sufficient. To really compete with Apple, a competitor would need to imitate (and supersede) Apple on a number of fronts: hardware, software, marketing/branding, distribution, logistics, etc. Needless to say, this is quite a challenge!

One of the most stark examples is Southwest Airlines. Scheduled passenger air transportation is a highly transparent industry due to the heavy regulation by the U.S. DOT and the FAA. Despite the fact that competitors know the precise activities that Southwest Airline's performs, they have been generally unable to imitate and compete. And there have been a number of attempts by both legacy and start-up carriers.

<comment><USER24> I'm excited about the number of upvotes for this post about "activity systems." There are a number of excellent concepts/tools in strategy that could help founders assess and develop their start-ups. Anyone have any thoughts on how to best convey these concepts/tools to generate interest and understanding (e.g., book, blog, app, etc.)?

<comment><USER25> Thanks for posting it. I think a blog on this would be interesting to the HN audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think this post makes some very bold assumptions.

It assumes that there is no place for innovation in industrial design with glass. Apple's dominance in industrial design has given them the advantage to set the standards for industrial design.

Additionally, I think Jason assumes that industrial design and software design are mutually exclusive. He ignores that part of the beauty of Apple's products is the interaction and combination of software AND hardware and the quality of interaction between them.

<comment><USER27> "Additionally, I think Jason assumes that industrial design and software design are mutually exclusive. He ignores that part of the beauty of Apple's products is the interaction and combination of software AND hardware and the quality of interaction between them."

I'm not ignoring any of these things. I'm simply suggesting that one of Apple's key first impression advantages - their unique hardware design - is a bit less powerful as all the hardware designs in the industry trend towards a slab of glass.

<comment><USER26> Understood; however, I would argue that consumers (ignoring early adopters) don't look at the parts individually.

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

IMO Apple won't cease to be the leader in hardware design. Even as things trend toward being all glass, they will still find innovative ways to create beautiful products that bring together all of their competitive advantages. Example: iPhone 4

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think Jason is wrong about industrial design being the singular primary differentiator for Apple devices.

Sure, Lenovos look like shit next to a MacBook, but people buy Lenovos for entirely different reasons and the rugged design plays in their favor.

Other competitors offer laptops with near Apple levels of hardware design — certainly near enough to meet Jason's criteria of "immediately obvious".

I think software _is_ the primary differentiator between iPhone and some of the better looking Android devices, between MacBook and some of the better looking PC laptops. Software, and some of the, by Jason's definition, "less obvious" hardware attributes, like screen quality, UI responsiveness, precision, etc.

The simpler the hardware gets, the more important and immediate these attributes become. This only plays in Apple's favor, and is in my opinion what has already been so hard for Nokia to deal with; they're a hardware company with poor software chops. Superficial industrial design is easy to emulate or fake, to a certain point. After that, it becomes hard, and not many companies other than Apple have the skills or the patience for it. Look at the _tragic_ excuse for a Windows tablet HP is releasing for another example.

<comment><USER29> Compare the ratio of Mac Books to Thinkpads in a marketing class with the same ratio in a sociology class.

(Note: I deliberately didn't choose, say, an Art class vs. an Engineering class, because what I'm getting at is the conspicuous consumption angle, not the ease of use/technical ability angle).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Also, it's not just about the technology. Apple has created a very desirable brand that people want. A lot of Apple's gadgets have become status symbols.

<comment><USER13> Apple's marketing team alone (with Phil Schiller) has been a successful revolution.

<comment><USER31> I recently purchased my first Mac in 15 years of programming. While browsing around the reseller I was struck by just how sexy everything looked. I always try to hide PC's under desks in my home, I'm happy to have the Mac on display.

<comment><USER32> My ex-girlfriend bought an iMac and _proudly_ displayed it to her friends. She showed them travel pictures, watched movies, etc. The computer had, for her, transitioned from a _computer_ to an attractive designer object that provided utility. It didn't really feel like a computer so much as just a part of the environment of our apartment.

That always struck me as Apple's greatest success. There are way fewer hackers and hardware connoisseurs than there are normal people in the world. Apple has been able to appeal to people who used to merely tolerate technology.

<comment><USER33> And it's silent!

Got an iMac (first Apple product ever, for us) for my wife back in early 2006, and that's the thing that stood out to me the most. Compared to my pc at the time, and every other one I'd ever owned, the iMac was as good as dead silent. You never really appreciate silent computing until you have one (a quiet computer, that is, not necessarily a Mac)

<comment><USER31> I have a Mac mini sitting on my desk and I have to keep checking the lights to see if its own, I love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The iPad can play HD video for an estimated 10 hours. That has nothing to do with the glassy interface, but I would still call it great hardware design.

<comment><USER35> Absolutely. I don't think many people appreciate just how dedicated Apple is to excellent power management. The iPad is a dramatic example, but Apple has excellent power management across its product lines. Macs have had near- perfect power management for years, whereas PCs _still_ struggle to get it right. This is one area where controlling software and hardware is a huge win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow. What a great post of nothing but idle speculation. Everything is going 'all glass' until it goes the other direction, and whatever that direction is I'm sure Apple will be leading it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Software has always been their edge.

I worry more about shaking-to-undo on my iPad and faux leather buttons in my Calendar app than about other companies figuring out there is more than plastic to build with.

</comment><comment><USER38> If this article is any indication, Apple needs to seriously needs to improve it's software. I love my Mac, I love the environment, but there are so many lost and forgotten pieces to their software that it's highly frustrating.

Take iChat, for example. So limited, even the supposed features it has do not work (Bonjour for iChat fails to work to let me and my wife chat via her MBP and my iMac). Indeed, the entire Bonjour system and file sharing is so annoying and cumbersome. Finder can see the other computer, but it can't actually go there, even when they are sitting next to each other.

Then you have iTunes. iTunes loves to create duplicate music files. The best part is, when I tell iTunes "Yes, control the management of my music" I suddenly end up with three copies of every song. Then there is the disappearing devices. Why, my iPhone/iPad/AppleTV where there a minute ago. My iPad/iPhone are still plugged in. Why can't I access them anymore?

Then their is iPhoto. Which controls movies. And photos. Sort of. Movies!? In iPhoto? iMovie uses iPhoto to import movies? And then outputting movies is so confusing. So many different options, and then you can't just have iTunes pick it up, you have to load up iTunes, tell it to import the movie, and going through numerous other steps to get it onto your Apple TV.

But back to iPhoto. You ever create a slide show with iPhoto? I did. iPhoto is the only application I know that showed me a preview of the movie it was going to create, and then the output changed the complete order of the pictures. How does this happen?

Let's not forget the harassment iPhoto inflicts on users by default whenever you plug anything in. It snatches focus away, loads up, just to import. Oh, sure, you can set your iPhone to import quietly, but even having done it, I forget where the setting is buried.

And then there is the default way you install software. Now, I know, it's simple enough, right? No, it's annoying. I have to drag an icon into a folder? And then I have to dig through that folder and find a generic icon just to find the application, and then launch it. Why not just let me click a button to install, and then be like "Hey, you _just_ installed this app, which means, you probably want to run it, well, do you?"

And that's just the beginning. Let's not forget Time Machine randomly barfing because your Time Machine drive suddenly lost power, or not importing pictures as events by default properly, or just countless other problems.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a Mac user. My house hold is filled with Apple products (1 iMac, 1MBP, original AppleTV, iPhones, iPods, iPad). But if Apple wants to compete on the software end, they need to up their game and really focus on finishing their half-complete products.

Edit: To be fair, I think Apple can do it. They don't have to do everything, but what they do, they have to do well. And that means not abandoning projects simply because they lose interest.

<comment><USER33> _And then I have to dig through that folder and find a generic icon just to find the application, and then launch it_

Spotlight is your friend. Cmd+Space, first few letters of the app name (first is usually sufficient for new apps) then hit enter. Indexing in OSX is as good as instant, and new apps seem to show up at the top of the results.

Agreed, auto launching with a confirmation dialog would be better, but I find using spotlight preferable to digging about in Applications

<comment><USER38> I agree. Spotlight is sweet. The problem is, to install the app, I have to use the mouse. Then, I have to come back over and use the keyboard to open up spotlight to load the app I just installed. I mean, it just seems like an absurd number of steps to get to the most likely scenario.

Though, I find that often. I love creating a movie in iMovie for iTunes, and then having to tell iTunes about it. You can't just save the media into the appropriate folder and have iTunes pick it up. At least, it's never worked that way for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't know, what DOES happen when it's all glass? Is part metal, part glass supposed to be particularly difficult relative to that? And who says hardware is ever going to be 'all glass'? I don't understand.

My suggestion is that probably at that point, Apple will continue to have sleek, advanced products that dominate the high end of the market.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm sure somewhere somebody few years ago thought "what happens when all the phones will have a qwerty keyboard?"

</comment><comment><USER41> I just saw a Microsoft recruiting video last night that perfectly illustrated this point. (In true MSFT fashion, it's not available online.) It was pretty awesome - splitting apart a "phone" into two panes to do a video call with one screen in front of you, and one up to the ear to better hear/speak; moving a document from a wall to a table to a phone; etc. etc.

I've had a dream that someday the White Sox would build a stadium where Meigs Field once stood with the wall behind the bleachers being entirely made of transparent glass. You could have a view of the most beautiful skyline in the world during action, but it'd turn into the most amazing widescreen scoreboard/video screen for replays and stats during breaks in the action.

</comment><comment><USER42> In response to the question of design:

\- Use the golden ratio whenever possible/practical.

\- Be careful with the rounding of the edges. (Sharp corners aren't good, but rounded with unused potential screen real estate and subsequent violation of golden ratio is bad too.)

\- Don't skimp on thickness. At least as thick as a Kindle 3.

\- Like the author said, the software UI and UE should be tailored to the screen width and input method.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think Jason doesn't have much of a clue what he's talking about. There's still a lot of details just with the display itself, see this for example: <http://www.displaymate.com/Smartphone_ShootOut_1.htm>

</comment><comment><USER44> Yeah, where are the stickers that advertise the processor? Or an AT&T logo you can't remove. By god, Apple is at a disadvantage aren't they? Do 37signals really think people can't tell Apple products are good when they're made of glass and aluminum? Apple products just feel more solid and reliable because of those things.

But maybe people prefer the silver paint rubbing off under their palms because their laptop is really made of cheap black plastic.

<comment><USER45> Except my real metal MBP had a bend (I have no clue how it happened) over my Ethernet jack the week I bough it. Everything has faults. There is equal built quality competitors to every Apple products.

My HTC magic has been dropped about 50 times. I have yet to see a crack anywhere. Same generation iPhone had a massive screen problem.

I like my MBP but it's not for the hardware or built quality that I bought it.</comment></comment>


Hackers can fake radio signals to 'hijack' aircraft landing systems - <AUTHOR> https://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/3075890/hackers-aircraft-landing-fake-radio-signals <comment><USER2> Given my sort of 'maker' inclinations, I find these articles amusing. The "3D print a gun!" ones were similar.

Basically they come down to, if you learn how a system works, or how something is made, you can learn to implement or influence that system and/or build that thing. Back in the 60's the click bait was "kid learns how to build an atomic bomb!" This was pretty eye catching but really it is just physics, material science, and a bit of math.

That said, so many people rarely look past the surface of things, seeing something like a cell phone as an opaque magical brick that can do wondrous things. And yet all that the phone does, and how it does it, are knowable if someone chooses to invest the time. (admittedly it is a _lot_ of time if you don't have the basics).

The headline, "People who know how radios work can affect systems that are based on radio." is so much less scary.

<comment><USER3> > The headline, "People who know how radios work can affect systems that are > based on radio." is so much less scary.

No, it is not. Nobody should be able to influence air traffic in that way just because she/he understands the transport layer.

After spending a night with a friend who just returned from a security audit (lots of cocktails were involved too) 15 years ago, I am convinced that the only reason we have not seen major disruptions yet is because of a pretty strict adherence to hacker ethics: one of the global "airport tech players" was deploying systems that used UDP for ground traffic control.... Having a bus or lorry use an active runway is just a single, malicious UDP packet away...

<comment><USER4> > Having a bus or lorry use an active runway is just a single, malicious UDP > packet away...

There are multiple safeguards in place to avoid single points of failure, such as runway crossing procedures with mandatory call to air traffic control unit for explicit permission before entering a runway. Many ATC recordings on VASAviation Youtube channel show that even rescue services (during emergencies) adhere to that.

Taxiways leading to runways are marked with holding positions that may not be crossed without authorization: [https://i.imgur.com/dCF8lFi.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/dCF8lFi.jpg) For extra visibility in poor weather, many airports are also equipped with runway guard lights paved into the ground or blinking on either side of the taxiway: [https://i.imgur.com/dbix1Aw.png](https://i.imgur.com/dbix1Aw.png)

Surface movement radars and transponder-based systems have also become widespread. They trigger alerts when a vehicle is about to enter an active runway: [https://i.imgur.com/sJQ94zq.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/sJQ94zq.jpg)

<comment><USER5> True, and you have real pilots. Many really busy airports do visual approaches and I know a couple pilots personally who don't often bother with ILS unless the conditions are bad.

Remember in San Fransisco where a plane almost landed on a taxi way instead of the runway? It's worth reading the complex situation with the off-line runway and the way ILS was setup with those runways being so close together, but what prevented the disaster was a pilot in the Taxi line of aircraft getting on the radio and saying, "Where is this guy going?!" and everyone suddenly realizing they were lined up for the Taxi way!

Real people, being aware, looking and reacting prevented that accident. That's why human checks and cross-checks are so important.

<comment><USER6> > I know a couple pilots personally who don't often bother with ILS unless the > conditions are bad

Because it is a pain.

Every pilot has to learn to do visual approaches.

I think it just makes one thing apparent though. If we go to fully automated flying then there must ALSO be a visual check. In fact we can make it better than humans because we should make sure that the plane can see through fog. But key point is that there is always some redundancy built in.

<comment><USER7> _If we go to fully automated flying then there must ALSO be a visual check._

I don't think a _visual_ check is needed (otherwise you would be much more limited in where/when you can land), but cross-checking some other data is. Turns out we're already there, and in an ILS approach the pilots should already be checking other instruments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The localizer (lateral deviation indication) is going to be harder to spoof due to the beat/squeal that it would introduce when broadcast alongside the legitimate localizer. The pilot (or PNF) will monitor the audio signal for the Morse code that identifies the localizer and the squeal will be apparent.

The glideslope signal (vertical deviation indication) would be easier to spoof. Set that up 1/2 mile short of the runway and aligned to intercept the proper glideslope shortly before the true glideslope intercept point (Maltese cross on the chart). That has a chance of working and going undetected. If you're able to get an aircraft onto the rogue glideslope lobe, even when ATC gets a low altitude alert, the crew is likely to report they're perfectly on glideslope. I'm not sure this is as practical an attack as simply firing on an aircraft on approach, of course.

<comment><USER9> And with WAAS, the world is moving towards GPS approaches anyway. Even without careful planning anyone with a mildly powerful VHF radio and a yagi antenna can jam ILS, VORs and ATC comms rather effectively and has been able to since the end of WWII.

I've seen these articles pop up a few times in the past couple days but everyone in aviation already knows that there isn't any security on this stuff. People even jam ATC for giggles sometimes[1]. There's enough redundancy that nothing bad has happened as a result so everyone goes on with life. I think this is just low hanging defcon fruit targeting non aviation-aware readers.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvA_- linhg8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvA_-linhg8)

<comment><USER10> > People even jam ATC for giggles sometimes.

Or impersonate. One of my pilot friends was planning a trip across the CA Central Valley, and he reported with some bemusement that there was at active NOTAM (NOtice To Air Men) to be on guard about some guy in the Fresno area that was impersonating ATC. Apparently it had been happening for months and nothing much by way of investigation had taken place.

At this point I pretty much concluded that bad Part 15 devices or PG&E power line noise h0rk1ng over my ham radio reception was not going to get any attention, ever, if the FCC can't be bothered to find an ATC impersonator. I mean really, there are hams that do hidden transmitter hunts purely for sport. A posse of them could find that clown easily on any random Saturday morning and not be late for lunch.

<comment><USER11> > _there are hams that do hidden transmitter hunts purely for sport. A posse > of them could find that clown easily on any random Saturday morning and not > be late for lunch._

So why don't they?

<comment><USER10> What is a bunch of random nerds going to do? They have no power to fine or arrest. All they can do is document the evidence and turn it over to the FCC, which does happen on occasion. But, I have listened to ARRL division directors talking about trying for _years_ to get well-documented egregious cases of malicious interference dealt with by the FCC. The FCC just can not be bothered. It's not so much that they can't be bothered to collect evidence, which they can't, but even if they have evidence, that can't be bothered to act on it. The FCC should be a technical organization but is pathetically political.

One of my ham friends deals with the FCC often, because he works in spectrum management at the NTIA. The stories he tells make me never want to set foot in D.C. except to visit all the museums that my taxes fund.

<comment><USER11> No power to fine or arrest isn't entirely true.

What stops them from finding who's transmitting and then filing a civil suit?

<comment><USER12> They keep telling you that the FCC has the power to do it but does not have the political will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is an issue, but I wouldn't be too alarmist. It probably wouldn't _crash_ a plane though, just severely cripple an airport. (Cause all take offs to be cancelled, all incoming flights diverted, and the planes in the air land one by one in order of fuel urgency using line of sight.)

<comment><USER14> (not a pilot) I'd think causing the autopilot to believe it is substantially off-course would induce a sharp bank to correct course. That bank at low altitude can lead to a wing strike. If not, still seems plausible to deviate enough to impact obstacles near the runway.

<comment><USER13> Possibly? Not a pilot either (but I took multiple human factors courses which talk a _lot_ about air crashes).

I'd hope that the pilot would notice something is off and abort the landing before that. (Eg: visually be like "oh there is something on the runway I thought I was cleared on)

Theoretically even if cleared for landing they should keep an eye out and abort if, say, an errant baggage cart was in the way.

<comment><USER15> Pilots aren't always that eagle-eyed, and it is of course much more difficult at night. The very close call of the Air Canada jet that nearly landed on four or five other jets waiting on the taxiway at SFO is a testament to just how badly this can go. And an attack that leads the aircraft into terrain or buildings could put the aircraft into a local minimum that it can't fly out of.

Frankly aviation is ripe for cyber attack. The problem is not simple to solve, mainly because introducing crypto into critical navigation systems will also introduce failures where legitimate service is interrupted due to system glitches. It will take crashing a jet before the industry decides to take this seriously, and it is entirely possible that a terrorist group or state actor will use this weakness. Government and industry can and would respond, but it would take money and time.

<comment><USER13> >Pilots aren't always that eagle-eyed, and it is of course much more difficult at night.

I would not place blame with a pilot who is cleared for landing, and fails to see something on the runway. Even if they are making a good faith effort to scan the runway, it's _hard_ to see things from the sky with your eyes.

>It will take crashing a jet before the industry decides to take this seriously, and it is entirely possible that a terrorist group or state actor will use this weakness.

I agree it's an issue that should be worked on, but I think it's much more likely (as a parent pointed out) someone will simply fly a drone into the airspace.

After all, bird strike incidents are a major cause of crashes:

> _The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates bird strikes cost US > aviation 400 million dollars annually and have resulted in over 200 > worldwide deaths since 1988.[56] In the United Kingdom, the Central Science > Laboratory estimates[8] that worldwide, the cost of birdstrikes to airlines > is around US$1.2 billion annually. This cost includes direct repair cost and > lost revenue opportunities while the damaged aircraft is out of service. > Estimating that 80% of bird strikes are unreported, there were 4,300 bird > strikes listed by the United States Air Force and 5,900 by US civil aircraft > in 2003._

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

<comment><USER15> Birds do most of the work to avoid bird strikes, and are avoiding airplanes daily. The same can't be said for terrorists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is news?

Def Con in 2012 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1QAjCH_1oU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1QAjCH_1oU)

<comment><USER17> 1990: [https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0099423/](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0099423/)

<comment><USER18> 1700: [https://opencurtains.wordpress.com/2014/04/22/false- lights/](https://opencurtains.wordpress.com/2014/04/22/false-lights/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(shipwreck)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_\(shipwreck\))

(Fictional, but widely believed to be true, at least for a time)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Skimmed over the whitepaper and did not notice any mention of ILS monitoring systems. Modern ILS has continuous automatic monitoring that triggers alerts or shuts off the whole system if disturbance of beam characteristics is detected.

Such monitoring systems date back to 1960s: [https://sci- hub.tw/10.1049/ree.1967.0009](https://sci-hub.tw/10.1049/ree.1967.0009)

</comment><comment><USER19> Ars Technica covers this story much better at [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/05/the-r...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/05/the-radio-navigation-planes-use-to-land-safely-is-insecure- and-can-be-hacked/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The underlying paper here: [https://aanjhan.com/assets/ils_usenix2019.pdf](https://aanjhan.com/assets/ils_usenix2019.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> There's too much sensation on this headline. The hacker does not take control of the aircraft, simply gives misleading information to the pilot.

"Hacking" is a bit of a heavy handed word here, too.

</comment><comment><USER21> ILS works pretty much the same way as the Lorenz/Knickebein system used in WWII by the Germans to guide bombers (described in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737056)), so the attack described in TFA sounds basically the same as the countermeasures deployed by the British.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is well known and has been for decades. Unlike attacks based on the internet though it's trivial to track down people who are doing illegal broadcasts. There isn't a concern here.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can see all the politicians lining up now, "ME, ME, ME. Let ME remind the people that they are under attack", from something they have no control over

</comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like a single point of failure if the pilots rely on ATC too much. Low visibility landings and such.

</comment><comment><USER25> How powerful would a malicious transmitter need to be in order to overpower the legitimate ILS signal?

<comment><USER26> If you got it close enough you could probably do it with a pretty low power transmitter. (Radio on a drone or something)

<comment><USER27> You'd need to be out by the transmitter in the middle of the airfield though to truely spoof it.

<comment><USER28> If you flew low at night I think you'd have a decent chance of getting a drone to the right location. You'll need either a decent setup or a decent position to control it though.

Although as others have mentioned, if you're trying to crash a plane or cause a disruption at the airport there's easier ways. Including just flying the drone over the runway (to close an airport).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> HFDL and ACARS (encryption is optional) don't have much in the way of protection either.

</comment><comment><USER30> How about MCAS?

<comment><USER31> Irrelevant to this discussion.

<comment><USER32> I think the point being made is that this feels an awful lot like a 'hey, don't keep talking about mcas.... look at this huge problem that terrorists might exploit (if they rent die hard 2), look how scary it is, boogaboogaboo'

<comment><USER33> I didn't know we could only talk about one thing at a time.

I don't think anyone has forgotten about MCAS</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Election Oasis: Coping with Anxiety (Research-Backed) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/goodripple/election-oasis-coping-with-election-anxiety-research-backed-f3036c86d64c#.fzjfypikq <comment><USER2> Full title is "Election oasis — Coping with election anxiety (research- backed)"</comment>


Debian 9 not including support for UEFI Secure Boot - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-9-Secure-Boot-Maybe-Not <comment><USER2> Direct link to the announce: [https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel- announce/2017/04/msg00...](https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel- announce/2017/04/msg00013.html). The Phoronix article doesn't bring anything.

The reasons of forfeiting secure boot support can be found in the following bug report: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=820036](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=820036) (look at the list of blocked bugs). The main blocker seems to be this one: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=821051](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=821051) (and the root cause seems to be the lack of time from the FTP masters).

<comment><USER3> A decent amount of Phoronix' content is basically blogspam. Can a moderator update the URL as vbernat has suggested?

<comment><USER4> > A decent amount of Phoronix' content is basically blogspam.

This has not been true for a long time. Phoronix may have started as an amateur site with dubious content but it has now become a serious resource.

These days, it does a good job of (1) highlighting important developments around Linux and (2) providing context and fact-checking for new developments beyond what is provided in primary sources.

If you still hold a grudge against Phoronix for its reporting style from ten years ago, please reconsider.

<comment><USER3> It's still true. Look at this very post, for an example.

Phoronix is just Larabel banging out short blogspam around 3rd party sources and very dubious benchmarks. It's all sloppy and rushed.

If you want to follow important developments around Linux, I would highly recommend LWN.net over Phoronix. The writing is professional, for lack of a better word.

<comment><USER4> You're just repeating yourself without addressing the points I made. The value in a news site is in summarizing new developments, putting them in context, explaining their impact, performing fact checking.

Phoronix does all of this fairly well. Perhaps the style of writing or length of articles is not to your liking, and that's unfortunate, but that doesn't make the site blogspam.

This article doesn't prove anything at all. The Debian announcement was quite short, and there isn't much more that can be said about it, since most users have Secure Boot disabled anyway.

A significant point of difference with LWN.net is that Phoronix doesn't require a subscription in order to read the content, which makes it appropriate for sharing.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree with you on several points, but I don't think it would be a good use of either of our time to get into a silly point-by-point rebuttal. I don't think I'd convince you Phoronix is a bad blog dressed up as a news source for ad revenue. Instead, I'll just address the last wrong point:

> A significant point of difference with LWN.net is that Phoronix doesn't > require a subscription in order to read the content, which makes it > appropriate for sharing.

LWN doesn't require a subscription to read the vast majority of its content. Period.

The only thing you need a subscription for (which can be as low as $3.50/mo for students or anyone else who feels they are low income) is reading the current weekly edition.

In return, there are no ads and you get some high quality journalism. It's difficult for me to explain how much better the writing is than Larabel's.

<comment><USER4> LWN is a fine resource for original articles about Linux technology, and I am happy to recommend it on that basis.

But as a news provider, it is seriously lacking compared to the alternatives, which have at least half a dozen stories per day and cover a broad range of new developments. If you care to look, it should be obvious just how much LWN misses out.

> LWN doesn't require a subscription to read the vast majority of its content. > Period.

This is misleading, though. Perhaps it is true if we count each post on LWN as a piece of content. But a lot of posts on LWN are just noise and not really what most people would consider to be content.

For example, there are _daily_ "Security updates for today" posts consisting of just links, as well as frequent one-sentence announcements about new kernel prepatch releases and stable updates. One wonders whether they are automatically generated.

Such posts provide little value to a general reader compared to a dedicated mailing list digest. They don't even attempt to summarize what changed, or describe the context or impact of the changes.

If you exclude such items then a significant amount of LWN content will require a subscription, maybe more than half, especially stories that go beyond one sentence/paragraph in length.

<comment><USER5> All that content is made available to non-subscribers in the following week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Secure Boot is utterly broken (for general purpose pcs at least) anyways. I can just take an old windows kernel and boot with a configuration that loads a driver with a known vulnerability (a certain gpu manufacturer might be a good place to look) and a script that use it to run kernel mode code that does whatever it wants.

Newer Windows kernels generally blacklists drivers with know vulns, but you can just use an older version, and practically speaking old windows kernels can't be blacklisted because then people's install media that they might have paid for would stop working.

<comment><USER7> You could also unenroll all vendor supplied signing keys and load it up with one that you keep in a HSM.

Yes, you are _technically_ correct that any opportunistic encryption scheme can be bypassed but it adds cost to the attack and (more importantly) it is a step towards a more secure system.

<comment><USER6> I feel like that is missing the point. You need social engineering (and probably not an easy case) to get people to change the keys. Using a pre-made image that allows you to bypass secure boot by way of a windows driver with a known vuln is practically free as soon as anyone packages it. I don't know whether that is currently being done, but I suspect it since I have seen people discussing bypassing PatchGuard in Windows 10 where they used a known exploit in a driver from a company that starts with n and ends with vidia.

<comment><USER8> PatchGuard can be disarmed on 8.1 ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those of you who glossed over the title, It's secure boot that is now unsupported, _not UEFI_. UEFI is still supported.

<comment><USER10> An important detail which doesn't change what you are saying: Secure Boot is from the UEFI specification, but I think SB is optional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if it'll actually finally have useful a SELinux implementation and policies like they promised they'd have before releasing Jessie (8), or remotely up to date clustering software such as pacemaker, corosync, ha resource agents and DRBD which is pretty much unusable in any modern in 7, or 8. Jessie (8) was such a flop of a release so many people and business's I know that were loyal to Debian moved to CentOS 7 + EPEL/Elrepo with great success and given how hostile the Debian community (mainly packing community) has become over recent years and how helpful and inclusive Fedora and RHEL's community and bug tracking ecosystem has become I can't see many of us moving back.

<comment><USER12> Seconded. Migrated from Debian to Fedora after Jessie. And to CentOS on my servers. Stretch isn't as bad now, but... I don't think I'm switching from RHEL for a long time. So much just works out of the box, including SELinux, and all of the documentation seems to be security-focused.

<comment><USER13> idk. I have been recently setting up some new RHEL/CentOS systems both at home and work. While the base system and documentation both feel really good, the experience still has been somewhat frustrating to the point that I'm moving to Ubuntu LTS at home. The biggest pain point is the amount of stuff that is missing from the main repos, like:

* Python3

* Nginx

* ZFS (this I can understand)

* LXC

RHSCL is supposed to alleviate the pain, but using them also loses one of the big reasons of using RHEL in the first place because RHSCL releases are only supported couple of years. For example for Python3 the RHSCL version is 3.5 and supported until May 2019; even Python.org supports 3.5 series longer than that!

<comment><USER14> You would be better off with Ubuntu LTS or Fedora at home. For client usage, RHEL will always feel old within a couple of years of its release. That's just how fast things move on the client side. You may find something like OpenSUSE Leap a better fit since it is a hybrid between LTS and rolling releases.

<comment><USER13> But it's not that it is old, that I planned for and can live with. The stuff I mentioned was already included in e.g. Ubuntu 12.04 which was released two years before RHEL7 and in Debian 7 which was released a year before RHEL7.

<comment><USER14> All the stuff that you mentioned is already there in some capacity. python3 is at 3.4 in the main channel. SCL would likely have newer versions. SCL is mostly for development. I wouldn't expect crazy long support for the SCL stuff. That's by definition though. Use the main channel for long support. nginx is in epel. zfs is in the zfsonlinux repos. LXC used to be in main channels, but they deprecated it in favour of docker. You can still get it from epel. RHEL + EPEL should cover most of the useful stuff. There are also some multimedia and nvidia driver packages packaged by negativo17 if you really need them.

<comment><USER13> > python3 is at 3.4 in the main channel

Sadly, nope. Only in EPEL.

> LXC used to be in main channels, but they deprecated it in favour of docker

Docker is hardly a drop-in replacement for LXC. In Debian I can just have both and make my own decisions.

> zfs is in the zfsonlinux repos

Which reminds me of another missing piece; DKMS

Overall your comment feels to confirm my view; RHEL/CentOS installations tend to end up being a frankestein patchwork of different repos with varying degree of support.

Please don't take me as a RH/CentOS hater, I do still plan to run CentOS VMs for the software they do support. But I've now learned that I can't easily use it as a default go-to system to run whatever springs to mind.

<comment><USER14> > RHEL/CentOS installations tend to end up being a frankestein patchwork of > different repos with varying degree of support.

Yes, that is kind of true if you need to push the boundaries of RHEL into client/workstation use. However, I've found EPEL to be quite stable and mature. I would say that the quality of packaging is on par with Ubuntu's universe and other auxiliary repositories. Ubuntu makes it less obvious that their non-core packages are not actually supported. EPEL fits sort of in a similar category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So when will Debian 9 be released anyway? I can't seem to find any planning on the Debian website...

<comment><USER16> The usual date for Debian releases is "when it's ready."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A pity - however I always disabled UEFI boot for my partitions... At least the good news is that the release is very near now.

<comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, why have you disabled it?

<comment><USER19> Not OP, but I also disable it on my home boxes that run Linux, mainly because 1) I know how the BIOS boot process works very well (and I kinda like knowing how things work, especially on critical paths that can get broken sometimes), and 2) I know how to set up Linux with BIOS boot because I did it so many times before.

So I guess it boils down to "it's not broken for me, why change it?"

<comment><USER20> Because it's old. Because it's _painfully slow_. Because messing with a FAT partition feels much better than messing with MBR or whatever weird "boot partition" thing that happens in a "legacy-BIOS-plus-GPT" situation.

<comment><USER19> Who said anything about GPT? I use MBR partitioning as well. Again, it's simple, and it works for my purposes, why change it?

And I don't consider a few seconds to be "painfully slow" for something that is done maybe once a week, if that (suspend is there for a reason...).

As far as "messing with MBR", why is that somehow problematic? MBR was specifically designed for this exact purpose - hosting a partition table and a boot loader. And there are tools to do precisely what needs to be done to it, and these tools have been there for a very long time - so I'm confident that they work right. On top of that, MBR structure is simple enough that I can manually inspect or edit it with dd directly on the block device in question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone know what other distros support UEFI? I hope Debian supports it in a later release I wouldn't mind going back to my second distro ever (first one was Slackware, not an option for me these days).

<comment><USER22> Debian still supports UEFI, just not Secure Boot (which is not very secure these days if you're using a Microsoft-signed key).

<comment><USER23> Can you elaborate on why it's not secure? Too many people have MS signed keys that just work out of the box ?

<comment><USER24> Microsoft's secure boot key is compromised* on ARM, and it's not feasible to revoke and replace it.

AFAIK, Secure Boot is still secure on x86_64, at least if you trust Microsoft to not be doing something (either deliberately or unintentionally) malicious.

* The key isn't actually exposed, but a signed binary that will run unsigned code has been-- which allows secure boot to be bypassed without turning it off on affected systems.

<comment><USER25> Found the story: [https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/microsoft-secure- bo...](https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/microsoft-secure-boot- firmware-snafu-leaks-golden-key/)

It's things like this that make me want to try using an FPGA dev kit as my next motherboard. Not because the FPGA is relevant to this, but because it demands a lot of the high speed components (CPU cores, RAM controller) that a desktop computer would have.

Mind you, having an FPGA running the show would be the ultimate in extensibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When Debian 9 (aka Stretch) goes stable then time to install sid:)</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good developers conferences? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good, general purpose development conference? I went to WWDC and Google IO last year and both are (unsurprisingly) very platform specific. So, I'm hoping to find something more general; although a good language oriented conference would be fine too. <comment><USER2> OSCON has been great, in my experience. There's a wide variety of stuff to jump into:

<http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011>

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://codeconf.com/> should be awesome

<comment><AUTHOR> That does look like it could be really interesting</comment></comment>


Could SOPA give us back a decentralized Internet? - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/could-sopa-give-us-back-a-decentralized-internet.html

<comment><USER2> More likely a balkanised internet. I'll post a link to HN and you won't be able to access it because your country blocks it.

The internet is already balkanised to some extent --- linguistically, and by e.g. the Chinese firewall. Also video --- non-Americans can't watch the Daily Show on Comedy Central's website, and non-Brits can't watch Doctor Who on the BBC's website.

But these are all either predictable or peripheral for most of us. A danger is that SOPA is the start of pulling the English-speaking internet apart into national not-terribly-interoperable zones.

</comment><comment><USER3> How developers working on this decentralized Internet will get paid? Also I imagine this decentralized Internet should look similar to Freenet, but to have bitcoin based domains for easy of use.</comment>


Ask HN: Your Thoughts On The Present Bitcoin Rally? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I remember recently seeing a poll on HN & seeing that many of us hold bitcoin, and I'm wondering what HN'ers opinions are on the recent bitcoin price rally.
I'm personally of the opinion that it's not going to be a bubble but rather a new normal in terms of a higher value in bitcoin overall. I have no idea where it's likely to level off however, and am enjoying watching my portfolio increase in value. <comment><USER2> I really like this chart [http://i.imgur.com/GOYWUMo.png](http://i.imgur.com/GOYWUMo.png) The bubbles and corrections really stand out.

<comment><USER3> Obviously something increasing in price by 10x each year is only sustainable for so long.

<comment><USER4> Indeed.

But, do not be fooled and think that we seeing the last 10x cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The rally was great until around yesterday. Now it's growing far too fast.

When we peak, it will be for 30 seconds at some arbitrarily insane high. If you intend to "cash out" at the peak, good luck.

And I'm far from anti-bitcoin. I own some btc, and also ltc. I'm optimistic about their long term future.

If you don't realize that we're in for a major correction soon (within days) I have to assume you're a bit inexperienced.

There are parallels between bitcoin and the early days of the web.

Believe me, it's not "different this time." It's always the same story.

The bubble will pop, even though, like the internet bubble, bitcoin has real potential, and won't disappear entirely.

I could see it losing perhaps half its value, before ramping up again next year.

I'd urge anyone thinking about buying bitcoin this weekend to hold off. Wait a couple days until the crash.

<comment><USER5> ...and the wait is over. An adjustment has started (although I doubt we'll see a full-fledged crash tonight), so far it's plummeted almost $100. On the bright side, it might buy a couple weeks of time, continued rallying, before the real crash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the price is increasing way too fast at the moment, but I'm 100% sure it will keep going up, and will do so for years. More and more people will want to buy them, but there's a max of only ~21 million of them. If you do the math, the real value of these things should be much much higer (assuming that everyone accepts it as a real currency of course, but more places accept it as a currency every day).

Edit: I own 2 BTC, bought them last week at €150/each. My investment of €300 was worth €550 this week, but it's mostly a long-term investment for me so I'll keep them.

</comment><comment><USER2> Something that bitcoins have that gold doesn't is as their value increases, it encourages the adoption of infrastructure to exchange bitcoins for commodities. This increase of real world value figures into the exchange price.

</comment><comment><USER7> An interesting article a short while back framed bitcoin's value in terms of technical adoption. Still has me nodding my head, though more from an intuitive than intellectual standpoint.

</comment><comment><USER8> I remember when it was a currency. Now, it is just something which is only viable for selling to the next guy in town; he is hoping he won't be the one buying before it pops and you selling hoping you won't be the one regretting it in a week. Unless it stabilizes and is not hoarded for the sake of selling at a higher value, Bitcoin will be a bubble.

Its value is changing too rapidly to properly use it as a currency.

<comment><USER4> It is changing in the same pace as always.

See this log chart. [http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl)

Right now it is rising, but soon enough it will stabilize for some time.

Happens every year, once or twice.

If you do some research, you will see that it is being used more than ever for purchases. You may think otherwise because of the media hype/bubble time that is happening now.</comment></comment>


Elon Musk donates $1M to plant trees after testifying that he's cash-poor - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/29/20939016/elon-musk-mrbeast-tree-donation-1-million-spacex-tesla-testifying-no-cash <comment><USER2> Elon has a charitable foundation. This donation could have come from those funds. I'm assuming those funds would not be considered part of this wealth in regards to his cash-poor status.

</comment><comment><USER3> One million dollars is ~1/23400 of his wealth. If you had $500,000 in your investment accounts, that would be like donating $21.

</comment><comment><USER4> Neophyte here with a stupid question. What if he just used a credit card to donate money?</comment>


EdX - Harvard & MIT - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/edx-faq-050212.html

<comment><USER2> These two submission seem to have gotten more traction:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3919184>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3918654></comment>


Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking - <AUTHOR> https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/10/eaav5916 <comment><USER2> (rant ( So that explains it!!! I must have memory bias.

So when I remember that I've had a job (or several) continuously since I was in 6th grade (paperboy, oil-change,food delivery,etc.) and then I notice that the 22-25 year old college new hires, that have NEVER worked a day in their life before, seem lacking in the "umm... it's a JOB" department, it's probably just my _memory_ bias.

I was probably sitting in the basement gaming, not actually working my way through school at 3 different jobs like my memory bias says.

And it totally makes sense now! Because I'm really good a troubleshooting and working out solutions to problems, that's why I notice it so much that if "Dr. Google" or "Mr. StackOverflow" don't have an answer, or if that answer is ludicrously wrong, that the youths seem so lost at what to do next. Just cognitive bias. I probably got really good at what I do by staring blankly at the screen when I was stuck, claiming success anyway, hoping no one would notice, and organizing a taco run. Maybe some memory bias too, because I remember having to solve problems myself and not being able to afford tacos runs.

And I thought I was good at looking at things and making sound judgements. Good judgement is part of being a good engineer, after all. So again that must be why I'm so extra unconvinced by shallow (and/or excessively elaborate) arguments that the current generation as a whole isn't lacking in certain obvious ways. Of _course_ every generation in history has always said that and only _some_ of them were right.

Not all people of a generation are the same or have the same qualities. My generation, the ones before, or after. Perhaps the youths of today, as a group, are better at different things. Like things that don't involve work or survival... For example, posturing as if they are suffering, while avoiding it, mostly. Deflecting. Blaming.

Not all individuals of any generation fit a generalization. So if you are a good one, or a great one, of any generation, don't be insulted by my opinions. Be insulted by those that do fit the generalizations that let us all down. ))

<comment><USER3> You found a way to completely miss the point, be offended, and do the very same deflecting and blaming that you accuse younger people of.

Just because you're closed minded and ignorant of the next generation's challenges doesn't mean they don't exist. This is nothing more than wanting to feel special for something as stupid as your age. Congrats, you're the subject of this research.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I'm not offended. Whether it was my generation or my upbringing, I'm not sure I know what that even means.

I do understand the challenges and they largely do not exist. Ask someone who grew up in WWI, WWII, or even the cold war. They got all of the same, with an extra side of famine, war, totalitarianism, nuclear annihilation and more. You have expensive housing and degrees that are a bad value proposition. And weather.

Who is a study of whom? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think a person's trajectory can introduce some biases. In antiquity, culture and economics changed more slowly. The same people did the same jobs, often by heredity. Now things move so fast it's entirely reasonable for kids to assume they may have a career path that doesn't yet exist. The pioneers of the previous generation who built up now well-established industries with their skilled colleagues are no longer on the edge. Their pool of applicants has changed because they have become the safe bet. The highly skilled youth are off elsewhere carving out their own niches.</comment>


All Our N-gram are Belong to You - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html <comment><USER2> Why isn't this being trumpeted everywhere?

This is amazing news for natural language processing! Often tasks are encountered that are hampered by the size and nature of available corpora.

</comment><comment><USER2> Ah, now I know why it wasn't trumpeted anywhere:

It was released in 2006, and it's still behind a $150 paywall.

<comment><USER3> My favorite parts of this blog announcement are the numerous comments requesting that google release the data on bittorrent. Google still has this option, if it ever _actually_ wants to release the n-gram corpus to as wide an audience as possible.</comment></comment>


DarkPulsar - <AUTHOR> https://securelist.com/darkpulsar/88199/ <comment><USER2> What is interesting about Kaspersky is how little Russian state malware / spying tools they find / report on at least in comparison to what they discussion about such software from other countries.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, but not all that surprising. At this point it's fair to assume most security research institutions are co-opted to some degree by intelligence agencies.

<comment><USER2> You are correct on most being co-opted but they don't yell from the rooftops like Kaspersky does that they are fully independent. I have loads of emails from Kaspersky explaining how they aren't yet their actions don't support their PR.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious. Can you be more specific? Describe some of these actions explicitly?

<comment><USER2> They, Kaspersky, have sent out lots of emails to partners and resellers saying how they are independent of Russian government melding which isn't exactly the most honest read of the situation.

Comments like this, from Kaspersky PR, are interesting don't you think?

"Kaspersky Lab has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyberespionage or offensive cyber efforts, and it's disconcerting that a private company can be treated as guilty merely due to geopolitical issues."

This tells some of it but I would recommend you do some checking yourself. [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/15/kaspersky_labs_anno...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/15/kaspersky_labs_announces_move_to_zurich_dutch_government_questions_firm/)

<comment><USER4> That part is about what Kaspersky says. That part is okay.

The more curious part is the other part: What Kaspersky does, or does not. You, for example, do not say "here are links to Avast's web site for 2/5/10/20 Russian threats that Avast detects and Kaspersky doesn't". All you do is link to more innuendo and suspicion.

In this age of databases that suspicion ought eventually to show up in database records.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does no one else find it deeply distressing that all our tech has been so completely co-opted by outside agents? How can we live this lie that we are free while every day we see how we are controlled and watched?

<comment><USER6> They could always tap your phone, read your mail, follow you, find out some secret about you .... no matter what nation / time.

It's not the tools that worry me. Those will advance with technology and just like non governmental tech, it will progress no matter if we like it or not.

Oversight, rule of law, and etc is where it is at to determine the end result.

Call me old fashioned but the idea that my democratic country has intelligence agencies making tools like this (or this one...) is not worrisome at face value to me. I would expect them to do so.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. I want them to have the capability. I also want them to use it properly and only where appropriate and consistent with law. Maintaining access to potentials adversary's systems is fine and necessary since they're doing it to us. CPB potentially (I haven't heard any allegations but who knows what they do with it in the back room) loading malware onto people's phones is not fine.

<comment><USER8> > and consistent with law

Nitpick: consistent with moral, ethics and/or human rights

Most of the stuff that _[A-Z]{3}_ does is lawful (if only legitimized post- facto) but not nearly half as often does it fulfill the other criteria.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Alleged" NSA Dark Pulsar implant

<comment><USER10> We've reverted the submitted title "NSA DarkPulsar implant" to the original.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _We found around 50 victims located in Russia, Iran and Egypt, typically infecting Windows 2003 /2008 Server. Targets were related to nuclear energy, telecommunications, IT, aerospace and R&D._

Great. So because the NSA has crappy security (contractors!) the democratic West has just weakened itself against autocratic regimes that seek to control their people.

People that care about self-government and individual freedom have to start to recognize that the NSA - with its democratic controls and checks and balances - is far superior to an autocratic or dictatorial spy agency. And we only get to choose one.

<comment><USER12> Except they don't act like a democratically controlled spy agency. They routinely hide their internal memos stating their perceived legal authority from Congress who is in charge of oversight and the source of that legal authority.

<comment><USER13> NSA disciplines employees who violate their rules on who gets to access data. [https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/nsa- spi...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/nsa-spies-who- couldnt-resist-snooping-their-loved-ones/310567/)

And senior congressional officials, including people like Feinstein, Grassley, Burr, Schiff, and Warner, are effectively briefed on all intelligence matters. Not every member of congress is. America did a decent job after Watergate implementing supervision of intel.

NSA is probably not perfect, but it's better than the alternative. You know the old quote "Democracy isn't a great way to govern but it's better than the alternatives" \-- probably fair to say "Western intelligence agencies aren't perfect but they are the best way we know to navigate today's surveillance economy and secure democracies."

<comment><USER12> The problem is as much oversight as there is they intentionally dissemble and use twisted definitions when testifying before the congressional oversight committies. In 2013 the claimed their PRISM and associated wide scale surveillance activities didn't 'collect' information about or surveil american citizens because respectively they didn't task or view the information and didn't listen in on the actual content of the conversations. It's impossible to properly oversee an organization that is that circumspect with the people overseeing them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your Hulu Questions, Answered - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/your-hulu-questions-answered/

<comment><USER2> I would have asked him do you watch or subscribe to cable TV and how many early adopters has Hulu voided the need for a Cable TV subscription.

Hulu is my favorite site and since im not a sports fan it saves me like $80 a month I used to spend on cable.

No doubt over next 5 years the cost of our monthly Internet bills will get jacked up; bill by the byte, possibly</comment>


Commercial Real Estate Lurks as Next Potential Mortgage Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125167422962070925.html <comment><USER2> Read this article, and then notice that gold is over $1000/oz. Next, call your broker.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you tackle your Cloud Cost Management? - <AUTHOR> Hello Community, We are a team of engineers and product guys, that have built SaaS products in the past and got bitten too many times with cloud cost surprises which ended up taking too many innovation product cycles not just $$. We believe teams responsible for keeping things up and running are wearing too many hats now more than ever and each of those chipping away at your operational cycles. Our desire is to shift the conversation from tools to workflows for tasks as tedious as (and critical) cost management. Appreciate if you can take sometime to provide your inputs to our Survey Link: https://goo.gl/9y5qY1.Looking forward to the conversation. Thanks. <comment><USER2> Another cloud cost SaaS product!

I'll slightly modify my response from another place:

For those unfamilar with my work/nonsense, I write Last Week in AWS, a snarky gathering of news from the AWS ecosystem, published (rather obviously) weekly. What's somewhat less known is that this is a side project of mine; by day I'm an independent consultant who solves one problem: I fix the horrifying AWS bill. To be clear before I dive in, I've got no vendor partnerships with ANYONE, my work is purely advisory in nature, and I write zero production code for my clients. Please don't think of me as anything even slightly approaching a competitor to what you're likely thinking about building-- I'm not. I wish this were a nut you could crack with code, believe you me.

"Dealing with the AWS bill" is a deceptively complex problem. If I can lay out something of a maturity model I created just now off-the-cuff, there are five stages:

Stage 1: You don't really do anything about your bill. You try to remember to check it, and if you get an unpleasant surprise (think "someone compromised my account," or potentially more expensive, "I used Amazon Macie") you call AWS Support, sob into the phone, and they take pity on you.

Stage 2: You're starting to think about billing more proactively. You break things down via cost allocation tags. You look through the account monthly and remember to turn things off when you're done using them. Good on you!

Stage 3: The bill is Too High(tm). You've got a managerial mandate to start taking steps to reduce the bill. Nevertheless, it will continue to climb, until you hit...

Stage 4: The CFO has a heart attack, but survives. When the paramedics depart, he or she kicks your door off of the hinges. This is often misunderstood as "you're spending too much money" when in fact it's usually of the form "Last month the bill was $3 million, this month it's $4 million, and while $1 million is a giant pile of money to you personally, what the CFO really cares about is whether this is a fluke or the new normal, what this means for the 18 month projections, the unit economics of the business, whether they'll have to issue guidance, etc. This is incidentally where virtually all of my clients are. It's not so much "lower the bill" at this stage as it is "understand the bill and predict it accurately." It just so happens that by doing the latter you accomplish the former as a side effect.

Stage 5: You're several years ahead of the rest of the industry, and are looking at cross-service, cross-account cost attribution of the form "I ran a query on some stored data across a boatload of services and it cost $50K. While that's a drop in the bucket of my total bill, it'd be nice to know what it's going to cost before I click the button." If you fall into this category, there's a terrific chance we've spoken at least once, and your bill is at the point where Jeff Barr has named one of his yachts after you.

The problem isn't the lack of tooling-- it's that all of the tooling in this space is relatively similar, and just waiting around for AWS themselves to render them obsolete when and if Cost Explorer evolves to the point where a human being can make sense of it.

Since you're talking about building a SaaS product and looking for feedback, allow me to give you some. Please don't take this as criticism-- it comes as the result of many hundreds of conversations I've had with virtually every player in the AWS costing space.

If you charge a percentage of the AWS bill, you're mathematically being very smart-- you charge people based upon usage and your incentives are aligned. Unfortunately both your customer's finance team and AWS themselves with absolutely hate you. The psychology doesn't work. Finance barely tolerates variable spend from AWS itself; they'll not even slightly accept it from a third party vendor. Specifically to this point, my entire business is built around reducing AWS spend; my billing model is a fixed fee paid in advance, and if I don't save you $X, I give you your money back. I have never had to give someone their money back. It's not because I don't want a percentage of the 8 figures a year I save my clients, it's because there's no great way to get there from here. Talk to any of the large vendors in this space, and they'll tell you that the variable pricing model is a bear to overpower during the sales process.

Giving some form of SaaS platform or hosted bot access to my AWS account is a complete non-starter for any company that has any form of regulatory requirement, or indeed any form of diligence program in place unless and until you can borderline pass a SOC2 to attest that you're a grown-up corporation who takes things seriously.

You're also likely not aimed for success if your approach starts with something like "if you use Cost Allocation tags correctly, it spits out great reports that are highly accurate." Well... yes. That's the entire problem. People don't do that when they start, and don't think to until it's a huge mess. If they have tagged everything properly (hint: EVERYTHING has to be tagged, including things you're probably forgetting), your Slack bot or SaaS offering that charges a percentage of their (presumably large) bill gets replaced with Cost Explorer, either via dashboard or API.

Lastly, this is a very, very, very crowded market. "I'm reporting Cost Explorer data into my platform" isn't enough of a differentiating factor to stand out in this crowd-- and Cost Explorer itself is coming for you.

Please let me know if I can help shine any more light on anything I've mentioned, or otherwise help crush someone's dreams.

As a consolation prize, if you're at re:Invent let me know; I'll buy you a drink and trade war stories with you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Corey, We have heard you talk at multiple conferences and appreciate your perspectives. We are in the Bayarea and will definitely take up in your offer on some of the points you describe above. Thanks</comment></comment>


My first app: wat2do, a daily map of events in SF - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfwat2do.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a student at General Assembly and this is 1/2 of my first project. The other half is an API I built that scrapes [http://sf.funcheap.com](http://sf.funcheap.com) (one of my favorite sites ever) once a day for events and gives me a JSON to use when I call it.

Feedback/suggestions/bug reports are totally welcome.

</comment><comment><USER2> Thanks, I was able to find the SF Jewish Film Festival through this. I love the interface!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Have fun at the filmfest :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice mashup!

I did something similar a while back using Google Maps for finding stuff to do in San Diego: [http://sdhangouts.com](http://sdhangouts.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This is awesome! I'm thinking of adding neighborhood functionality in a future iteration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is fantastic, nice work!

Are you planning on adding any ability for people to add their own events directly to the map?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much! That's definitely in the pipeline somewhere but I'm trying to add more curated events via other API's + Facebook. The last time I thought about how I'd handle user submissions I ended up staring at a wall for half an hour trying to think of how to eventually get users to share events which led to more possible features like a live feed and, and...

<comment><USER4> Awesome.

For what it's worth, I also look at this: [http://squidlist.com/](http://squidlist.com/) from time to time for events around the bay area.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now that is actually in the immediate pipeline :) Expect to see squidlist events appear on the map soon!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat. SF Fun cheap needs something like this

</comment><comment><USER6> This is great, just book marked.</comment>


Using Google Assistant with AutoPi to enable voice control of a car - <AUTHOR> https://www.autopi.io/blog/speak-to-your-car-like-kitt-from-knight-rider/ <comment><USER3> First off this looks cool.

But these 4G connected smart ODB dongles scare the crap out of me. You are giving an IOT device the ability to disable breaks, the transmission, and lock you inside. I'm not really worried about a Maximum Overdrive type situation, giving this much control to a category of devices that was able to take down Dyn because so many of these devices used a subset of 60 common factory default usernames and passwords.

I think there is a good use case for these type of devices, but I think ODB, isn't the right mechanism for it. But I don't know if there will be a new standard.

<comment><USER4> OBD2 is incapable of doing any of those things. It is a diagnostic interface to read out information about important systems. There is a standard set of data streams, and vendors add customizations on top. So any OBD2 scanner should work on any car, but it may not be able to parse/display non-standard data streams.

There is some danger of control over the interface, but the interface does not specify any control operations beyond resetting diagnostic codes. The vulnerabilities in the interface stem from automakers repurposing the protocol, and are model/maker specific.

It seems like another protocol would only help if it defined control mechanisms so that carmakers would stop abusing OBD2.

<comment><USER5> >OBD2 is incapable of doing any of those things.

 _This is false._

OBD2 is utilized very differently by different manufacturers.

I am capable of applying brakes through the ABS system, applying any given throttle percent, shifting the cars sequential manual gearbox, forced over- pressurization of the transmission hydraulic system (for pressure vessel testing and relief valve testing) , or reflashing ANY of the ECMs available to the CANBUS network via the normal OBD2 interface on my BMW E46 M3 using the (bootlegged) OEM Rheingold/INPA software. (Among many many other things)

The ONLY ECM on the E46 M3 that is cordoned away from the OBD2/CANBUS interface is the SRS system (thankfully)

This software is freely available on most public trackers. It's by no-means rare or uncommon.

OBD2 is MUCH more capable than most are aware, especially on manufacturers like BMW or Audi that needed to shoehorn additional tech and diagnosis capabilities into the system.

P.S. I know you mentioned that manufacturers make the interface unsafe; I just wanted to clarify to those reading that it is by no means uncommon for manufacturers to do so nowadays. A consumer should by no means make a judgement about the control of their car by thinking "OBD2 is incapable of doing any of those things." when that's demonstrably not the case for many modern cars.

<comment><USER6> This was really informative. Is there a way to find out how different manufacturers have enabled (or left disabled) such functionality? Would love to know the potential pitfalls before messing around with something like this.

Of course, one thing you could do is have the AutoPi locked down to only reply to a certain IP, VPN connection, etc, but the underlying security issues once connected, remain.

<comment><USER7> Google most likely to find the enthusiast forums for the car/manufacturer, then searching the forurms. Probably there is a subreddit too for your car.

<comment><USER6> I keep my social media on a diet but will def expire reddit. Appreciate the pointer!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How do you control windows over OBD2? I've never seen any universal car control over OBD2, only specific model/ECU tuning.

<comment><USER9> this was my question as well, like other people have pointed out OBD2 can get you diagnostic information but cannot actually control movement of vehicle or other parts on the car

<comment><USER10> (Some?) modern cars expose a CAN bus via the OBD port. There typically are pins that adhere to the OBD2 spec as well as additional pins for the CAN bus.

On my car (Mk6 VW) there are multiple CAN buses which are separated by a gateway device. A device plugged into the OBD port has to negotiate with the gateway in order to access the other buses, but once it has done so can control the windows, lighting, instrument cluster, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I didn't see Dashbot ([https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/dashbot-a-49...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/dashbot-a-49-robot- for-your-dashboard)) mentioned here: it's pretty much the same thing but instead using Alexa and not using (potentially scary) OBD port connection. With Ford announcing Alexa integration coming this summer to SYNC3 ([https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2017...](https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2017/01/04/alexa- car-ford-amazon-shop-search-home.html)) it seems devices such as these will be more commonplace.

Question to HN: What can Alexa/GA integration enable in a car other than the mundane music search, ask directions, etc. scenarios? How many of you would want to use it to send short messages (e.g. "Sorry!" after cutting someone off) to a small LED display mounted on your rear bumper?

</comment><comment><USER12> Heh, it would be cool to script it so that if it detects someone talking for a minute or two with the window down, then accelerates quickly away, it loudly plays the Knight Rider commercial break theme music.

Best example I could find is this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTcvE5ptk6Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTcvE5ptk6Q)

</comment><comment><USER13> Just a question of time until you can say "Hey Kitt, come to me!"

<comment><USER14> All I really want is Turbo Boost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The heavyweights are already there...

[http://www.techradar.com/news/you-can-now-get-amazons- alexa-...](http://www.techradar.com/news/you-can-now-get-amazons-alexa-in- your-car)

<comment><USER16> This is not equivalent. The key distinction in the device from OP's post is that it actually connects to the OBD port in your car, giving you a direct connection the cars systems. The one you linked does not seem to do that at all.

<comment><USER17> Anyone know how Android Auto (and Car Play) compare to the functionality exposed through the OBD port?

I have Android Auto and love it for navigation/music, but it is missing any car specific controls, eg. climate controls, reporting speed, maintenance, etc. I have to exit out of Android Auto and into Sync to access some specific functionality only available through the Sync touchscreen.

Is this just a case of the manufacturer needing to provide the right app, or is that information not available to third party apps running in those environments?

<comment><USER18> They sandbox many of the different systems. Carmakers won't cede deeper control to Android Auto or Carplay because they want to hold on to being the main user interface. There's also safety, security, and data-sharing issues at play.

<comment><USER17> Fair enough, I would be OK with having to run a Ford app through Android Auto to access that functionality on a Ford.

I just want the best of both worlds .. trying to hold onto being the main user interface feels short sighted. I'm not going to NOT buy your vehicle because I can use Android Auto vs your custom UI, so having both available shouldn't be a negative to the manufacturer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This looks an amazing project however I am very concerned about just how secure it is. Anyone remember the vulnerability disclosures of the existing in car systems and their ability for remote exploit resulting in a malicious party having control over things as essential as the cars velocity? AutoPi, while undoubtedly cool, definitely feels like quite an exploitable attack vector if not _very_ carefully engineered. So I'd personally wait for an independent audit before buying this product.

</comment><comment><USER20> It looks like a promising piece of hardware (though I am not sure if it's an RPi Zero they're adding BT and Wifi to, or actually an RPi Zero W - <USER2> would be easier, you'd think). My last two cars both put their OBD II ports exactly where my left leg is under the steering wheel, so I hope they ship it with a short right-angle extension cable (I use a much shorter BT dongle to connect to my phone current, it doesn't project too far).

</comment><comment><USER21> When is AutoPi going to add the option to go keyless through facial, voice, optical, or fingerprint recognition?

I guess Ford already patented something like this but it would be nice to have it open source too.

[http://www.biometricupdate.com/201502/ford-granted-patent- fo...](http://www.biometricupdate.com/201502/ford-granted-patent-for-keyless- biometric-system-for-vehicles)

</comment><comment><USER22> I was actually hoping this was more a hardware sale only where they give us something like Automatic* that we can tweak ourselves.

[*] [https://www.automatic.com/](https://www.automatic.com/)

<comment><USER23> What do you mean? It's a Raspberry Pi running Linux, you can tweak it as much as you like: [https://www.autopi.io/hardware- dongle](https://www.autopi.io/hardware-dongle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cool, and no offense, but let me know when a third party reviews it.

Voice recognition and personal assistants are annoying enough in a quiet house (but arguably useful). I would be surprised if it is useful yet in a noisy moving car.

<comment><USER25> I've seen people use Google Voice in a loud bar. It seemed to be effective. I can't get Siri to work under those conditions, however. The noise should be a solvable problem.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, Google's voice recognition has worked for me everywhere, even loud clubs. It's quite magical. I'm sure it would work in the car.

Now, whether I would trust Google with that data is a different question. (Spoiler: no.)

<comment><USER18> Inside the car is a bit of a different since the device won't be handheld and you may not even be directing your voice toward the microphone.

If you have a phone with a high-quality mic, mount it in the right spot, and speak loudly, it can usually get the job done though.

Performance in general has gotten a lot better in recent years, though it's tough to call it a "solved problem".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


100 Thing Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.guynameddave.com/100-thing-challenge.html <comment><USER2> It's interesting to see other people collecting that many items... I can hardly name 30 items that I _want_ to have (not including clothes), but that probably just depends on the personality. Then again, being able to put everything you actually need in one big suitcase, is a nice benefit.

<comment><USER3> Really? No equipment-related hobbies?

My list has at least 15 items that are basically dedicated to hiking. (And I could probably do with a couple more on there)

<comment><USER2> That includes equipment - 6 items for paddling, 2 sets of weapons and a guitar. The rest is just electronics, travel bags, books (around 20 items, so it makes ~30 in total).... can't think of anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the wake of "Up in the air", nice film I recommend, that opens a few doors without being over the top. Just enough to start your own thoughts. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1193138/></comment>


Ethereum: A Next-Gen Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper

<comment><USER2> Is this the same as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7552863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7552863)?</comment>