Privacy Protects Bothersome People (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html <comment><USER2> To make it short: Privacy is about protecting Democracy!

As the newest information, we see that we are not only spied on, but there are also stealth techniques to mute bothersome people. It can go thus far, that you will become jailed for something you did not do.

This way, anybody that becomes bothersome to mighty people (and I don't speak about any president here) can become a target. People that are against atomic plants or against chemical fertilizers, or against ... you name it.

This thing can become worse to the democratic nations than killing random people by drones.

<comment><USER3> Fact: the worlds biggest and most spectacular privacy-breaching operation is being run by veritably democratic states, the "west". It's not some evil dictator who dictates this, it's the majority of citizens who demands spying on the rest. Another fact is that there are no _major_ (think, ukraine-size) protests about this anywhere.

My conclusion is that even democracy demands some privacy breach. Privacy may be protecting individual rights but it's not a prerequisite for democracy.

<comment><USER4> One could counter-argue by claiming that these are not true democracies.

<comment><USER3> The west has the best functioning democracies, unless you can provide better examples. No true Scotsman.

<comment><USER4> I'm not disagreeing with that, nor am I packing up my bags to move out of the United States at the moment.

However, "the best we've got right now" is just a local maxima.

<comment><USER2> That's something, that makes me shiver, too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _privacy is a fundamental right_

The problem here is that there's no such thing as a "fundamental right". All we have is government and our legal framework; nothing about what we can or can't do exists outside of that[1]. Philosophers have looked at this many times[2], and none have managed to come up with a satisfactory definition of 'rights' that works. Consequently all we have to work with when it comes to saying what we can do, what we have the 'right' to do, and perhaps more importantly what the government can do, is the law. Really, the problem is that governments are tasked with limiting their own power over us; surrendering power is something that very few people are good at.

[1] There's morals and ethics, but that's what you _should_ do rather than what you _can_ do.

[2] If you're interested, I highly recommend reading about Jeremy Bentham who wrote about the topic more than 200 years ago: [http://www.iep.utm.edu/bentham/#SH5b](http://www.iep.utm.edu/bentham/#SH5b)

<comment><USER2> I am not interested in, what philosophers say or what the government says, or even what the law books say.

It is just obvious to me, that living together (and that is basically what laws, governments etc. are all about) is only possible and can last, when some fundamentals are respected. One of them is privacy (this becomes more and more obvious in the digital age).

<comment><USER5> I absolutely agree with you - that's the same society that I want to live in. The notion of 'rights' won't get us that society though. The only way to get there is to elect governments that understand what we want, respect what we want, pass laws to make what we want happen, and ultimately realise that those laws also apply to what the government itself does.

While people believe that they have privacy by virtue of something outside of the law and government, they're never actually going to have privacy.

<comment><USER2> I think, we think similar.

The problem is, that from time to time, people have to stand up for their rights -- either by voting or by other means -- to change the behavior of governments.

What did Benjamin Franklin write: "Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

That is not only an inheritance for governments but also for all societies that want to be free. Freedom is not something to be inherited or some "virtue" you have by be born in the right country, but something that must be fought for in daily practice ... by everybody. Else, we will loose it. And we in the western countries are at the verge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Privacy in this case can be replaced with "anonymity", too. The less free speech a country has, the more important anonymity is. But even in super free speech-friendly countries anonymity can be important to hide from the judgement of the masses who might "not get it" because of the status quo culture or whatever.

Sometimes ideas can take years to develop and make their way into a culture. If a person is attacked the moment he wants to plant the seed of an idea, either by the status quo-loving crowd or his or her own government, then progress will happen much more slowly.

<comment><USER7> The article says that "privacy is a fundamental right".

Are you saying that anonymity is also a fundamental right?

<comment><USER8> Anonymity is a special case of privacy. Privacy is the ability to control how much you reveal about yourself to others and the circumstances of how you reveal that information. Anonymity is simply the choice to reveal no information about your identity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Privacy laws also protect the people who don't think about privacy. Those are the ones most susceptible to being manipulated by people tracking their activities.

See [http://mathbabe.org/2014/02/26/what-privacy-advocates-get- wr...](http://mathbabe.org/2014/02/26/what-privacy-advocates-get-wrong/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Three letters: IRS.

Based on their whim, your privacy can be completely invaded, and you can be thrown in jail. This happens ALL the time.

What is the NSA going to do? Bring you ("meddlesome kids") into court based non-admissable evidence from PRISM? Never heard of it happening once. Please cite a case if you disagree.

And bothersome people working way outside the law like Deepthroat, LulzSec, etc. already do take enormous steps to preserve their anonymity in communications. NSA changes nothing for me.

<comment><USER11> Here is how it can go down, the cops are chasing Bill, because Bill is able to demonstrate that fracking is causing cancer, and all the politicians knew about it and were bribed. PRISIM intercepts bill talking to his dealer, and knows that he will have a small amount of weed on his person for sciatica because his state doesn't have medical marijuana. Send the cops an "anonymous" tip, and are instructed to make an example of this guy, and throw the book at him. Any hard documents are now confiscated as part of the arrest, and the state simply declares the documents to have been tampered with, but include sensitive data, so the public will never see it.

<comment><USER12> Why so convoluted? If we're going to make up completely unsubstantiated stories, let's go with a simple one.

Bill gets shot in the head because the cop doesn't like him.

The end.

You greatly overestimate how complicated corruption has to be.

<comment><USER13> Life is often convoluted as much as it is simple, also that story details an example of parallel construction which is a technique that has been shown to be in current use, while yours seems more of a description of a movie you saw while too drunk to be really paying attention.

<comment><USER12> Do you really need me to link to all the times cops shot people they didn't like, for no reason other than the cop didn't like that person?

Bad cops shoot people for no reason all the time, relatively speaking, so _this_ story has plenty of precedence, unlike the above story, which is _pure_ conjecture.

<comment><USER13> Both stories have plenty of precedence, I just thought the first was perhaps slightly more illuminating considering the context.

Someone killing someone they don't like, purely because they do not like them, and then getting away with it because they hold a position of influence or power of course happens, and is nothing to do really with whether or not anyone involved is a cop. That situation has been playing out a lot longer than there have been cops in existence and also has very little to do with the current discussion.

edit -

also, in the simple version of your story, where 'a cop shoots someone they don't like, the end', the story is actually too simple to be about corruption.

You need the rest of the story to know if that particular cop is corrupt. As it stands it is just plain murder.

Now if the cop doesn't then hand themselves in and starts planning on how to get away with the killing, then you are into corruption, but also the story gets more convoluted.

<comment><USER12> Both stories do _not_ have plenty of precedence. The original story is conjecture - as told, it's never happened. My story (we can add, "and was not punished in any way", for clarity's sake - I thought that was implied), however, has happened many, many times.

<comment><USER13> Both stories as told never happened, the first invents a character who is then killed to make a point in the second.

Both stories are about things that occur in the real world, however one is about the subject of privacy and surveillance and one isn't, so given the thread I think the one on topic is possibly more constructive.

<comment><USER12> My story actually has happened, multiple times. Happens fairly often, in fact. During the civil rights movement, all sorts of injustices were _actually_ happening to blacks (not just non-consequential murder), for example.

Yet there are _no_ examples of the story being told in the above comments. It's literally fiction, and it hurts the conversation.

<comment><USER11> The beauty of the example I provided is it would be almost almost impossible to prove. Shooting a guy in the head, as opposed to arresting him raises more questions, and investigations. Your solution is a product of an unskilled mind. Though the competency of government is weak, the competency of the TLA's is anything but.

<comment><USER12> Isn't that convenient for you, then?

<comment><USER13> [http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod- idUSBRE...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod- idUSBRE97409R20130805)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article has been posted before, but I'm glad it's come up again. Personally, it puts into words something I struggle to put into words myself, especially when I am trying to argue against massive breaches of privacy by governments. Thanks for the reminder.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a good argument, but, by now, the practical good of privacy is stone cold obvious. The same agencies that rob us of privacy engage in dirty tricks campaigns against dissidents. As if to prove this point in one neat package.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I find it interesting people are all for protecting their privacy and against NSA intrusions, yet the US just handed over millions of people's health records to a government who clearly doesn't care about their privacy.

I don't understand this logic at all.

<comment><USER2> I am not so current in US politics. What do you mean?

<comment> at-fates-hands [http://www.trunews.com/obamacare-law-creates-data- services-h...](http://www.trunews.com/obamacare-law-creates-data-services-hub- tracks-social-behavioral-data/)

The federally-run exchanges, euphemistically called "new health insurance marketplaces," are accompanied by collection of a wide variety of personal data, which can now be legally shared numerous faceless government agencies — agencies which previously had to snoop, steal, or spy to get it. No longer will any of our intimate medical details be reasonably considered either private or protected.

To facilitate this forfeiture of individual privacy, the Department of Health and Human Services has created a massive, comprehensive database to record and store Americans' personal information called the Federal Data Services Hub. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that the purpose of the Data Hub is to provide "electronic, near real-time access to federal data" and "access to state and third party data sources needed to verify consumer- eligibility information." No longer will any of our intimate medical details be reasonably considered either private or protected.

<comment><USER2> OK, now I better understand. As I am not an US citizen, I am not affected by it, but you are right, that this seems to be a scandal of its own. But you also can see it complementary to all the surveillance stuff. It just seems, that the Obama gov. does not care to much about the privacy of US people.

I think, this road taken, by the country, that once was the big model for many countries like the one I live in, is a really bad omen for freedom in the whole world.

<comment><AUTHOR> >I am not an US citizen, I am not affected by it

Being in Germany, you are already in fully socialized medicine, so any battle for privacy of health records is already lost.

<comment><USER2> I don't currently know. The socialized medicine is not the problem. We once had a system, that the full records where hidden from the health funds. But I think, recently this principle was weakened -- but not because of "socialized medicine" but just because of the infamous "electronic health card" \-- governments like to play with new technical gadgets (that bring more costs and bureaucracy and no gain).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sounds less like a complaint about breach of privacy, but more of complaint about information asymmetry -- where the powerful have access to the data, while the commoners have not.

An obvious way to level the field is privacy, so that nobody has access to anybody else's information; another way would be transparency, so it's difficult for the power to hide their abuse of power.

<comment><USER17> No, that isn't a viable strategy. This Hacker News thread is evidence that transparency of some kind exists, and that public scrutiny is completely, 100% inconsequential for the elite.

<comment><USER18> Information asymmetry exists as a continuum and less as definitive states. Say, what if the avg person could boot up an NSA terminal to be able to search (and everyone know that they are logged in and searching) the database? That, to me, would seem to be on the other side of the spectrum than it is now, and I highly doubt that would be 100% inconsequential for the _current_ elite. Would something like this possibly enable a future elite, possibly (as all systems seem be good at doing eventually), but at least it will be a change of the status quo where the few can leverage an information advantage against the masses.

And if the startup I've founded with a friend and been working on for two years is any proof of concept of something like that working (yes we are revenue generating as of a month ago, and growing with plenty of things in the pipeline), I beg to differ. We have managed to get people who never would have heard of/or read Hacker News to care (because we made it relevant to their everyday lives in ways they can see the manifestation of their collective behaviors these past decades) about mass surveillance/data collection and acknowledge that as a society if we have collectively let things get to this point, to think that a roll back of the technical capabilities of governments/corporations/other organizations through political pandering will placate, is naive at best. Here's a post I made before the Snowden leaks[0]. I think about these things everyday, and work on ways to show that the emperor of mass surveillance is naked for everyone to see if they remove their hands from their eyes and plugs from their ears because perhaps at the end of the day, we will only see ourselves in front of the mirror reflecting upon our individual and collective actions we make everyday.

[0]: [http://blog.pictobar.com/post/47787766458/why-so- silent](http://blog.pictobar.com/post/47787766458/why-so-silent)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> if you think about this like an inductive proof, you will see that giving up privacy to catch 'bad guys' will lead to a very scary Orwellian life for all of us. I would say most everyone I know does something illegal every day, certainly all of my friends in NYC jaywalking as a way of life and it is scary to think of the ways that computer systems can be used to enforce all of the shitty laws that serve no real purpose. Red light cameras for example are proven to cause more accidents than they prevent but they pay the bills.

</comment><comment><USER20> a box filled with rocks does not need locks

<comment><USER21> You might reconsider your statement if said rocks are diamonds ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I agree that privacy is a fundamental right. However, has anyone thought about how we haven't seen any real terrorist attacks in the past decade? There are people out there wanting to hurt the US. And it's not difficult to do. It really isn't. Clearly the NSA is doing something right.

Like I said, I wholeheartedly agree that privacy is a fundamental right. But, I would like to see more people acknowledging the flip side of the argument.

<comment><USER23> > _" Clearly the NSA is doing something right."_

Unfortunately, there's no way to independently verify this statement. Only those inside the security apparatus have any data to examine this but they have a clear incentive to make themselves look indispensable (and indeed, get more funding).

<comment><USER22> Poor choice of words. What I'm saying is that there have undoubtedly been thwarted terrorist attacks. I would like more transparency from the government on what led to those. That way, we can at least have an intelligent debate.

<comment><USER24> I don't think anyone has cited specific cases of thwarting terrorist attacks. There's been quotes about some number (52?) of terrorist attacks thwarted, but so what? Which ones?

I agree that more transparency is necessary, and that we must have an intelligent debate, leading, ultimately to dismantling the current mass- surveillance apparatus. But I disagree about the "undoubtedly" part. If you'd said "maybe" I might have agreed, but there's just no evidence. There is evidence of abuses, but no evidence of successes.

<comment><USER25> It was later dropped to 13, and then to 0. SIGINT does not work.

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140111/22360125843/nsa- go...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140111/22360125843/nsa-goes-saying- bulk-metadata-collection-saves-lives-to-prevented-54-attacks-to-well-its-nice- insurance-policy.shtml)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup advice: iPhone developers should stop relying on handshake deals only - <AUTHOR> http://deals.venturebeat.com/2009/07/31/fairsoftware-tries-to-kill-the-handshake-deal-for-iphone-app-developers/

<comment><USER2> Lots of businesses started out of garages and college dorms, a handshake is all you knew or cared about. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, a handshake is a starting point. Without trust between the original members of a project, you are doomed.

But I have met too many entrepreneurs who were _foolish_ (small _f_ ) and lived to regret it dearly. Why take the risk?

Would you give similar quality advice on tecnhnical matters? "why worry about testing your code, just push your updates live". It's bad technical advice and you wouldn't want to give bad legal advice either, would you?

<comment><USER3> _But I have met too many entrepreneurs who were foolish (small f) and lived to regret it dearly._

On the flipside, I have met many entrepreneurs who obsess about stopping the world from screwing them, to a degree where it distracts from solving problems from customers for money. See: license agreement text, resistance to money back guarantees, worry about piracy, wanting an NDA executed by a blogger you're pitching your product to, etc etc etc.

<comment><USER4> Yep. This happens very often, here on HN as well. Somebody will come and say I have this fabulous idea/businessplan/whatever and then they'll clam up, it's so good they can't really talk about it.

Which is funny. I can't shower without having some 'good' idea, and by sharing them - here and elsewhere - I get a pretty good feeling for what could fly and what doesn't stand a chance. I'm counting on my willingness to pursue an idea all the way through to implementation and user support as the edge that will make me win if someone else should want to run with it too.

Let go of the paperwork, get moving. 6 months head start is worth more than all the contracts in the world. And if that head start is not enough to establish yourself then look a little longer for lower hanging fruit, there is plenty of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds good, except for the part where they are going to help find people to work with you. There is no way in hell I'd go into a venture like with someone I didn't already know and respect.

</comment><comment><USER6> Could use a better HN-title. Interesting concept.</comment>


Beating hash tables with trees? The ART-ful radix trie - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-paper-trail.org/post/art-paper-notes/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411619)</comment>


Asus ProArt PQ22UC 4K OLED Monitor: £4699, –$5150 - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/14123/asus-proart-pq22uc-4k-oled-monitor-5150-usd <comment><AUTHOR> I remember seeing the announcements for this model and thinking I'd like to get one. That thought is no longer entertained.</comment>


AV1 and the Video Wars of 2027 - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/08/the-video-wars-of-2027/ <comment><USER2> Here's my favorite exchange from the comments:

> _Tigt: I have no idea what you want me or others to do, even after reading > this 3 times._

> _Judy DeMocker [Author]: That's a valid point._

I'm sure it was fun to write a post that imagines how the use of anything- other-than-AV1 ultimately leads football fans to firebomb police stations in 70 cities. But I'd rather have read a thoughtful post on actually-legitimate reasons to care about this.

<comment><USER3> _> I have no idea what you want me or others to do, even after reading this 3 times._

I think that's actually pretty clear. Keep pushing for free and open standards. Oppose lock-in and patent protection racket.

<comment><USER2> > _Keep pushing for free and open standards. Oppose lock-in and patent > protection racket._

The commenter is looking for a list of specific, actionable steps they can take to make sure AV1 "wins". Unfortunately (as the author effectively acknowledges), there really aren't any.

My worry about seeing thinkpieces like this is that Mozilla hasn't been able to influence Apple through AOMedia — it's not accidental that Apple is still missing from the front page — and so is resorting to general-audience emotional appeals. I'd go so far as to say that "here's how the sky will fall" posts like this are harmful to their cause.

<comment><USER3> Apple are just being their usual lock-in jerks. Influencing them for anything positive is only possible under heavy pressure. In this case they were pressured, because various systems with video playback are not going to play along with HEVC racket schemes. I.e. for Apple's video services to be able to reach more users, they'll be forced to support AV1.

In more practical down to earth terms, what you or any other regular user can do is to ditch Apple products and avoid paying them any money. Vote with your wallet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gah,

Look, the digital video world exploded, 90% of it using MPEG's standards(MPEG1/2 to start with, h.264 now. HVEC/av1 is just a blip) they were all patent encumbered

FFMPEG runs 60% of the digital media world. _if_ patents were to be called in, places like disney, netflix & fox would have to spend literally billions swapping out FFMPEG or licensing it.

Your phone/computer pays a h264 tax, in the same way that they pay ARM/intel, qualcomm, wifi alliance, HDMI alliance et al.

HVEC gives you more efficient 4k, and HDR, but for most people that just isn't important. Streaming services still use h.264, because there is not hardware/software support upstream.

Now, the thing that will decide it is the speed/quality/cost tradeoff. If the hardware doesn't support a codec, it won't be used.

AV1 has a really slow encoder, so until that has changed it's not going to be used for on-the-fly encoding (live or just in time delivery from mezzanine codec)

for industry noise, see [https://www.ibc.org/delivery/codec-wars-the-battle- between-h...](https://www.ibc.org/delivery/codec-wars-the-battle-between-hevc- and-av1/2710.article)

<comment><USER5> I don't know where you get your sources. Netflix switched to HVEC for 4K and YouTube is using VP9 whereever possible. Those are the biggest players on the market.

<comment><USER6> On the US market. Which is not only market in existence, nor even biggest one. Take China for example - where neither Netflix nor YouTube are present.

> Compared with the US, China still has plenty of room to grow in a country > with a population of about 1.4 billion and 751 million internet users. The > proportion of internet users who pay for video content has increased more > than 10 times in four years, rising to 13.2 per cent in 2016, and is > expected to further increase to 40 per cent in 2022, iResearch said. By > comparison, Netflix's US-based paying members represented around 28.1 per > cent of total internet video users in the country as of the end of 2016.

[https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas- consumers-a...](https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2137870/chinas-consumers- are-paying-watch-movies-online-foreign-streaming-giants-are)

<comment><USER7> So they have 13.2% of 751M ~= 99.1M (and that's all subscribers, of all services in China). Meanwhile, Netflix alone has 130M users worldwide.

How are they not the biggest service?

<comment><USER6> You are comparing 2016 China numbers with 2018 Netflix numbers.

Talking about _paying_ users only, maybe Netflix is still on the top - not for long, of course.

> According to research firm IHS Markit, video streaming in China will more > than quadruple from $3.5 billion in 2015, to $17.6 billion in 2020. > Membership payment will take up a bigger share of the pie, increasing over > 500% to $2.6 billion, with the rest coming from advertising revenue.

But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2018/03/07/the-billion- do...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2018/03/07/the-billion-dollar-race- to-become-the-netflix-of-china/)

<comment><USER7> _You are comparing 2016 China numbers with 2018 Netflix numbers_

Yes, but it's all Chinese services combined, not just their top 1st. Unless every of those Chinese subscribers pay for the same service, Netflix is still probably the 1st worldwide paying video service.

 _But talking about active users, iQiyi now have more than 500 million active users._

Which is small compared to YouTube's 1.8 billion.

But fair enough, maybe YouTube and iQiyi are the biggest players; foepys was still at least half-right.

It does seem that iQiyi is using HEVC for high-res content as well, so the point still stands :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In September 2015, I was one of the people celebrating the expiration of Mp3's license.

I scoured the web looking for others talking about it. I brought it up on Reddit, no one seemed to care. I still don't hear it talked about often.

<comment><USER9> I remember the _weirdest_ news cycle where like >4 news sites (including The Guardian iirc) ran articles calling MP3 a "dead" format now that the patents expired.

Definitely felt like a "wet streets cause rain" story.

<comment><USER10> A large proportion of all "news" is placed by PR companies, essentially advertising but with maybe some light fact checking. It's cheaper than buying advert space.

Fraunhofer essentially wrote these stories, complete with the plug for its newer (patented) audio formats so that's why they say MP3 is dead rather than hooray it's free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Author's Note: This post imagines a dystopian future for web video, if we continue to rely on patented codecs to transmit media files. What if one company had a perpetual monopoly on those patents? How could it limit our access to media and culture? The premise of this cautionary tale is grounded in fact. However, the future scenario is fiction, and the entities and events portrayed are not intended to represent real people, companies, or events._

If this were from a personal blog of an Mozilla employees I would have been perfectly fine with it. Instead it carries the name of Mozilla, and most of the story are simply fiction.

I don't know why the title is 2027, and 2027 was never mentioned again within the article. And for those who knows, 2027 is the year all AVC / H.264 patents expires.

I sometimes wish we could extend H.264 and create a new codec in a way, we will have a better codec that is patents free by 2027.

<comment><USER12> Except the point where the evil monopoly buys the patents and keeps refreshing the patent pool, thus locking things like H.264 away forever.

<comment><USER11> If that was valid we would never had a patent free MPEG-2 and MP3 codec by now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Eh, it's a good message but the dystopia is a little _too_ over the top and reduces it's efficacy at making a statement.

</comment><comment><USER14> >Meanwhile MalCorp found a way to tweak the law so its patents would never expire. It proposed a special amendment, just for patent pools, that said: Any time any part of any patent changes, the entire pool is treated as a new invention under U.S. law.

This is a little silly. Patent law isn't like copyright law. The term has _never_ changed appreciably.

<comment><USER15> I've always wondered about this. Why is it that I've never heard of large corporations trying to lobby patent law into extending, much like how it happened over and over with copyright law? Had this battle already happened and I just never heard about it, or is there something in the law (or norms/culture surrounding it) that makes people never consider doing so?

<comment><USER16> It does happen with drugs in the US, but in a roundabout way. In a nutshell, the original manufacturer releases a new version of their product with a new patent and it's existence makes the manufacture of the old clones illegal unless they go through an independent regulatory process.

<comment><USER14> I don't know much about drug regulation, but that sounds crazy. Do you have more info?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Related: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to- read.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> The entire debt-based economy is based on extracting more dollars from "consumers". This is also part of the reason for DRM for example.

<comment><USER18> It's the As-A-Service model - the idea that software not only shouldn't be free, but also shouldn't even by run by the client. It's a pretty fundamental renegotiation of the terms of ownership.

On better days I see it as a last gasp by entrenched interests to re-establish the landlordism of old now that compilers are free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Read this if you want the other side of the story: [http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a- solut...](http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/)

> So don't expect that in the future you will see the progress in video > compression technology that we have seen in the past 30 years.

Google has bought a whole "camp" which is badmouthing MPEG for monetary reasons. Nothing has been over-hyped as much as AV1. Who is really evil? In the end it will all be about SSIM in non-geologic time scale.

<comment><USER20> > Google has bought a whole "camp" which is badmouthing MPEG for monetary > reasons. Nothing has been over-hyped as much as AV1. Who is really evil? In > the end it will all be about SSIM in non-geologic time scale.

I will always sympathize with the side that does not enforce protection money (i.e. patent fees) upon others via violence (e.g. legal system).

<comment><USER19> That "violence" has allowed to fund video research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm really confused.

We went from everyone backing an open codec to a dystopia with no explanation of how, only what.

The writing style is fun but makes it impossible to tell what parts are shared by our reality.

<comment><USER22> > makes it impossible to tell what parts are shared by our reality

Actually, it's pretty straightforward. Everything before 2018 really happened in our reality. Everything afterward is dystopian speculation.

<comment><USER21> Yes. However, it is still difficult to discern what is verbal flourish and what is a step along the way to dystopia.

By difficult, I mean impossible, and there's a large number of commenters talking past eachother about this issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> AV1 will win if torrents adopt it...

<comment><USER24> nah. scene stuff operates within it's own alternate reality. 10 bit x264, and 10/12 bit x265 are either the default for some scenes (anime) or popular in others. there's zero hardware support for them yet, so in my mind they haven't won. AV1 will win if cheap decoding chips flood the market.

<comment><USER25> Likewise the scene adopted MKV and everybody else kept using MP4 or TS.

<comment><USER26> Container choices are way less important. You can convert losslessly from one to another.

<comment><USER27> Though Matroska is the clear winner in this regard.

<comment><USER28> Is there any other format for multiple audio tracks/multiple subtitles?

<comment><USER29> MP4, IIRC - it can definitely do multiple audio tracks (iTunes uses it for AAC and AC3, for example), and I think it can do multiple subtitle tracks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Should've thought about that before implementing h264 support in Firefox, back in the days where Mozilla was still a relevant vendor in the browser market. At this point in time, such articles seem hypocritical.

<comment><USER18> Not sure why the downvotes - I think it's pretty relevant to view statements in terms of previous positions taken. I'm a big supporter of Mozilla and Firefox is the only browser I use, but another point would be the promotion of the closed ecosystem of Pocket.

<comment><USER31> I think the downvote is a well deserved punishment for the pointless denigration of Mozzila. I use Chrome at home and was using Firefox at work untill very recently. I had to switch to Edge at work. I also use Internet Explorer (for sites of previsou century). Firefox is around the same level as Chrome on almost everything. Edge is a notch below. Denigration is a poison that hurts a lot.

<comment><USER18> I agree the tone of the parent comment could use a little work, but think it's a valid point - I'm not sure it can count as denigration if it's something they've actually done.

In terms of "put up or shut up" I should make clear I'm not advocating Mozilla shut up, more that they put up next time something like DRM in browsers is on the table (which they ordinarily do, which is why I use their browser).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you are interested in dystopian fiction of these sorts, I highly recommend Manna, by Marshal Brain.

In any case, don't think it will be that dystopian. There is competition from elsewhere in the world, you know.

</comment><comment><USER33> I doubt I see a day when AV1 seriously used in the wild.

It's encoding is so slow to the point that the encoding speed should be measured by FPD(Frames per Day)

</comment><comment><USER34> This article is full of cliches and contains no actual technical information on AV1

<comment><USER35> It also contains no technical information about Disneyland or the Superbowl, despite their mentions.

Technical information about any of the three would be equally (ir)relevant to the article's topic: _intellectual property law_.

If you're really hard up for technical specs, the most cursory search might reveal [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16796127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16796127) regarding [https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml), or the part 2 follow-up [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417586) regarding [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/06/av1-next-generation- video-...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/06/av1-next-generation-video-the- constrained-directional-enhancement-filter/)

<comment><USER36> > intellectual property law

Please stop perpetuating the use of this term. There is simply no such thing as "intellectual property" and nor are there any "intellectual property laws". The term is perpetuated by proponents of the "intellectual property lobby" which hope to confuse people over what precise laws are being changed, and what precise issues are in dispute.

Not to mention that it is effectively a rewrite of history to pretend that copyright law is somehow a subset of "intellectual property law" \-- the closest thing to what we would consider copyright law has existed since 1710 with the Statue of Anne in England. Laws and agreements similar to copyright (though in reality they were systems of censorship) existed even further back than that.

Copyright law, patent law, and trademark law. They are separate laws, with separate rules and regulations, separate rights, and are therefore worthy of separate discussion. Not to mention that most people (understandably) have different views on these different topics -- your opinion on whether the trademark "Coca Cola" should be used by third-parties is probably different to your opinion on whether the text of Alice in Wonderland should be used by third parties, or whether the designs for penicillin should be used by third parties.

The article in question has also (unfortunately) made the same mistake -- conflating patents and copyright law. I say "unfortunately" because I agree with the general point they're making -- that free software and patent-free standards are very important. But conflating the two doesn't make sense and just leads to confusion.

<comment><USER35> The term "intellectual property" was used in 1845 in _Davoll et al. v. Brown_ , 173 years ago. The WIPO was created in 1967: 51 years ago.

Whatever your personal objections are to a collective term for intangible human creations, claiming that "there is no such thing as intellectual property" is unhelpful to your cause, as that contention is simply absurd.

It is beyond belief that a cabal of lobbyists has convinced practically every nation on earth [1] to collectively supervise a nonexistence.

No, copyright/patent/trademark/trade secret/trade dress/design rights/moral rights/publicity rights/mask work rights/database rights/plant variety rights/geographical indications/etc(^) are _not_ always detailed in separate laws. As early as 1916 the big three were grouped alike: see the Pan-American Convention's "Patents Trade Marks Copyright Status Report" and South Africa's "Patents, Designs, Trade Marks and Copyright Act" both in that year.

Yes, _some_ separation exists for _some_ of these ideas in _some_ jurisdictions - US law separates copyright from trademark, for example, but not from moral rights, which are directly incorporated into copyright law in Title 17 USC. And no, you can't argue that copyright and moral rights are indistinguishable: even after assigning away copyright, an author retains the moral rights (e.g. right to attribution). And of course, the US also groups trade marks and patents together under the purview of the USPTO, and collectively joins invention rights (utility patents), plant variety rights, and design rights (design patents) all under the umbrella of 'patent law'.

Even where there is separation, that separation does not preclude the existence of a collective noun for the set. Nor does assignment into a collective set does imply a "rewrite of history". In fact, nearly all sets _must_ be predated by at least one of their members; it would generally be nonsensical to create and name empty sets before any of their eventual members even exist.

In any case, arguing the merit of individual discussion is nonsequitous -- the existence of a collective name in no way precludes it.

Using your reasoning: "There simply is no such thing as the 'United States of America', nor are there any 'federal laws'. The term is perpetuated by proponents of the 'federal government'. It is a rewrite of history to pretend that that Virginia is somehow a subset of the USA -- the closest thing to what we would consider a state has existed since 1606 with the First Charter of Virginia in England. Native settlers of a similar area existed even further back than that.'

(^) Man, that's awkward. If only there was a term to denote that set that I just needed to name.

1: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/WIPO_members_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/WIPO_members_2012.png)

<comment><USER36> I originally wrote a much longer response, where I argued that in order to group laws together they must have something in common -- and there is nothing that is obviously in common between copyright law, patent law, and trademark law. They all protect different things in different ways, and arguing that they "protect ideas" doesn't really get you anywhere (it doesn't help clarify much -- because in what way can ideas be protected -- and it also isn't really true because those laws protect specific things rather than a more nebulous concept of an idea).

But I found that there is actually a section on the Wikipedia article for intellectual property that outlines the basic argument against the term[1]. I understand why you might find my argument silly on its face (of course people with much more stature than me have used the term "intellectual property" before, making it silly to argue that the term itself is not used anywhere of significance) -- but my main argument is that it is not really easy to come up with a single unifying idea behind "intellectual property laws". You can fairly easily come up with a unifying idea behind "fraud laws" (use of deception to profit in some fashion), or even just "property laws" (people who have a greater claim than anyone else to something are granted certain exclusive rights to it). But the fact that even the Wikipedia article for "intellectual property" cannot describe the concept without immediately breaking it down into the specific sub-rights leads me to believe that it is fairly hard to describe the common idea underlying copyright/patent/trademark laws.

I was probably too forceful in my original response, which wasn't really fitting (since I actually agreed with the general point being made).

> (^) Man, that's awkward. If only there was a term to denote that set that I > just needed to name.

I mean, my point is that the only time you need to name them together is when discussing "intellectual property". When it actually comes to filing a patent, or registering a trademark, or suing over a copyright infringement claim, you never would reference those laws together. I agree it's awkward, but I disagree that you would ever need to list them like that (because they are naturally separate concepts that aren't much more related than any other legal concept).

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#The_term...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#The_term_%22intellectual_property%22)

<comment><USER35> I think what you're encountering is that _most_ broad areas of law immediately break down into specific definitions and lists of rights.

Examine [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiralty_law) and see that in the opening summary the article similarly resorts to naming "marine commerce, marine navigation, salvage, maritime pollution, seafarers' rights, and the carriage by sea of both passengers and goods" while distinguishing it from the Law of the Sea -- which is again immediately defined-by-list: "navigational rights, mineral rights, jurisdiction over coastal waters, and the maritime relationships between nations."

Sadly, no, "most people" don't feel differently about these rights. In fact, most people cannot even differentiate one from another. This is certainly made no better by the growing use of the umbrella term, but is not caused by it. Search any online art site and find thousands of artists disclaiming "<character> is copyright <entity>", when in fact the only copyright in question is held by the author himself on the drawing he just drew. The artist intends to forswear the trademark, but cannot or at least does not distinguish these legal ideas.

EDIT:

Removed further arguments, because in actuality I agree with you (and this article). My original reaction was a kneejerk to your admittedly overstated claim of nonexistence.

I too am concerned that greed-motivated lobbyists deliberately distort issues to strengthen intellectual property laws against the public interest. Your linked wikipedia section quotes Stallman and Lessig, as well as economists who would prefer the more descriptive term "intellectual monopoly", all objecting to to _property_ 's false implication of scarcity.

<comment><USER36> I broad-strokes agree with most of what you wrote (and we appear to agree on the main topic), but I did want to make one small correction:

> Your linked wikipedia section quotes Stallman and Lessig, as well as > economists who would prefer the more descriptive term "intellectual > monopoly", all objecting to to property's false implication of scarcity.

Stallman does actually believe that the term "intellectual property" to group copyright/patent/trademark/... laws is intentionally deceptive and causes confusion[1]. Personally I don't quite agree with all of his arguments, but he does have a far more radical view than the others mentioned in the article.

[1]: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not- ipr.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Image/video recognition, what's the status quo and application? - <AUTHOR> I'm just curious in this field, but don't know where to start to look at after a few tries on google. So perhaps I simply have not found the right terminologies to start.
The specific applications I'm interested in is motion recognition (e.g., finding out the form of athletes is more efficient).
My uneducated guess is there should be some way to recognize an image first and video recognition is to process a sequence of images.
Thanks in advance. <comment><AUTHOR> Just sharing what I found, Learning to Track and Identify Players from Broadcast Sports Videos [http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/papers/weilwun- pami12.pdf](http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/papers/weilwun-pami12.pdf).</comment>


Windows 10's terrible installer - <AUTHOR> http://movingfulcrum.com/windows-10s-terrible-installer/ <comment><USER2> No offence to the poster but stealing images from a Reddit mega thread, one of which is an outlier error and the other being 2 lines of text that wasn't changed in the "help" text, does not a terrible installer make. The same thread has hundreds if not thousands of posts indicating how easy the install was, only a few people are having issues which is to be expected on a product launch.

Also if you say, " I cant remember an instance in the last 10 years when it just failed on me randomly while updating Windows", I really can't take you seriously, especially with the qualifier: that Windows updater is a "rock solid" platform.

<comment><USER3> > The same thread has hundreds if not thousands of posts indicating how easy > the install was, only a few people are having issues which is to be expected > on a product launch.

It's not "having outliers" that is a problem: it's how you _treat_ them that matters.

"Something happened" is not useful a useful message to anyone: not the end- user, _nor_ Microsoft. Imagine being the poor dev having to troubleshoot problems based on that message alone.

<comment><USER2> I agree to certain degree that it is how you treat the outliers. However 1) they are outliers for a reason: they happen to a very small subset of users. Its not as if every other person is having this error, that particular image was up-voted because it is a hilarious error to have not because it was happening to the majority of people. You can't plan for every eventuality which brings me to point 2) it would ludicrous to assume that every single issue is taken into account and that every install will go exactly as planned. With something as big as a new OS launch things are going to go wrong, that's just the way it works. If you can find me a company that has everything exactly perfect at launch with a product as big as Windows 10 with no errors I would be very impressed to see it.

I'm not trying to Microsoft "fan-boy" or come off in that manner, it's just silly to me that people are bashing Microsoft (or any company) for things not going PERFECTLY on launch day. It comes off as childish IMO.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I agree with everything you said.

I didn't agree with the tone of the article, but "Something happened" is a poor error message, and I feel bad for the devs who put so much work into an otherwise well-received launch to be stymied by their own coworker's uninformative error dialogues! ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just did a factory restore of my Windows 7 PC last night in preparation of the Windows 10 update. After finishing 4 years of Windows Updates (eventually), I wasn't offered an opportunity to upgrade to Windows 10 via Windows Update. Apparently, it's given out at random and you can't manually request it.

In order to manually update, you apparently have to download the Windows 10 ISO ([https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software- download/windows10I...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software- download/windows10ISO) ) and create a boot media? And some are saying that this doesn't count as an "upgrade" for the Win7/Win8.1 Product Key. Maybe.

The Windows 10 upgrade path is more confusing than it needs to be.

<comment><USER5> I updated this morning using the installer tool available at that link. If you're running the tool on the computer you want to upgrade, you don't need to create any media.

It will do everything automatically, I think I only had to answer two questions.

edit: Forgot to mention I was also on Windows 7

<comment><USER4> Will give that a try. Thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's strange.

We have a pile of the new Intel Compute Sticks, HDMI windows 8.1 x86 devices. They're pretty slick. So, I threw Win10 on them.

My big complaint is that the install took 2.5 hours. That sucked. And then it came up.

Like a charm. Super smooth, responsive and it just worked. Admittedly, I didnt have a firefox window to surf the web whilst being installed, but this was a 1 time affair.

I'm rather impressed with Win10 so far.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not clear how this is more than FUD based blogspam.

</comment><comment><USER8> As a virt developer I spend a lot of time installing Windows and various Linux distros, and Windows (all versions) has terrible installers. However I'm also not surprised by this: almost no end user needs to run the Windows installer since the main way they get Windows is preinstalled on their PC.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have updated several machines and had no problem at all.

</comment><comment><USER10> Getting that dreaded "Something happened" error on my machine... very annoying.

</comment><comment><USER11> Barely three paragraphs of text, not much background, and a bordering hyperbolic headline. Not the sort of "article" I would hope to see.

</comment><comment><USER12> Installing was a piece of cake. The only thing that annoyed me slightly was a dialog that said 'We will be done soon' and it took a few minutes.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's a helpful link [http://www.howtogeek.com/190217/10-alternative-pc- operating-...](http://www.howtogeek.com/190217/10-alternative-pc-operating- systems-you-can-install/)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you flag features in your codebase? - <AUTHOR> I am an engineering manager at a 30 person startup in New York. Recently, we found a last minute bug in our code as we were preparing a deployment for our biggest client. This happened on a Friday after everyone left, so I begun to message each engineer individually (9 staffed on this project) to track down the source of the bug and figure out a solution. Luckily, it only took an hour to figure out where the bug was occurring and which engineer had originally developed the code for it. This ordeal made me think about a better way to manage dependancies in code - specifically, some system to keep track of WHO has special knowledge about a specific feature in our codebase.
At any given moment, I have a general idea of who is working on what, but I don't know who is working on what parts, i.e. Bob and Charlie might both be working on a billing system together, but I don't know which one of them is working on the DB models and which one is working on the Stripe API.
Git Blame is a theoretical solution to this problem, but it is only useful once I have isolated a bug to a specific point in the code. Ideally, I would like a Git Blame-like system at the repo level so that I (and my non-technical colleagues) can quickly track down which engineers are responsible for specific features in my codebase.
How do people manage this process in their organizations? <comment><USER2> I ran the production systems for various Google products and this was an interesting challenge there because there were many engineers and many changes done every day.

One imperfect but helpful technique is to use release notes for your application.

Ask the team to write good commits when changing code, and aggregate all code changes done to the application into a page that describes what went in that release. GitHub releases do that for you automatically. When a release is pushed that breaks something, it's easier to scan the release notes and find who changed what.

Another technique is to use explicit feature flags to protect all code changes. Then use a dashboard that shows recent changes to feature flags – again this helps tracking down the culprit.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know of any service that does this, but you could write a process that could analyze every line in a given repo. Weight for each line of code would have to be balanced against the number of lines previously written by that developer, as well as the date of the commit (more-recent commits weigh more) and perhaps the TFS work item associated with the changeset, and other details of the TFS work item/bug.

IMO, it seems a lot more work than the value can provide - a simple answer from one of the devs suffices, it's what the process has been for me.</comment>


Microsoft's oData (Open Data Protocol) - <AUTHOR> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Mar-22.html <comment><USER2> I didn't really "get" why oData was cool until I watched the keynote about it at MIX. They start getting into it around 61 minutes into the keynote

<http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/KEY02>

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like overkill really. Rest is just fine. If i have to look for 10 minutes to figure out how to share my data with oData, why bother? It's available with REST already.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, I think it is adding a layer that might be another layer that needs tools to even use. REST is the way now. They are just trying to describe the content in the REST transport. But I think we have that already with JSON, JSONSchema, ATOM and others. Trying to write wrappers and descriptions too specific or globally acceptable is what got us in trouble with Web Services built on SOAP and bloated XML. This looks like it is more ontology focused (OWL) but probably overkill.

<comment><USER3> The SOAP tragedy was my first thought. In 2000, SOAP was just coming out and I had written an XML to Javabean mapper based on reflection that was much more lean and with much higher throughput than SOAP. At that time, Microsoft was the biggest SOAP proponent and was pushing it very hard.

I thought it was bloated and unnecessarily complicated to integrate and conform to, so we skipped on it. I suspect most will skip on oData too unless it is simplified. It's an architect's abstract dream and I think some people need to wake up.

I suspect the only people who will choose oData are the business managers running budget legitimizing projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The actual website for the protocol has recently been updated with a lot of good information: <http://odata.org/></comment>


Jump.js – a 0 dependency smooth scrolling es6 library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/callmecavs/jump.js <comment><USER2> MY OPERATING SYSTEM SCROLLS WINDOWS SMOOTHLY JUST FINE AS IT IS I DON'T NEED SOME HALF-BAKED JAVASCRIPT ON YOUR STUPID SITE CONTROLLING THIS FOR ME THANK YOU</comment>


Secret to a successful job interview - <AUTHOR> http://consequenceofsound.net/2014/08/scientists-discover-the-secret-to-a-successful-job-interview-listening-to-high-power-bass-driven-music/

<comment><USER2> electronic music (progressive house) definitely gets me going.

<comment><USER3> any music with a high BPM.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article says that bass is the driving factor for the psychological boost</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommended domain name registrar - <AUTHOR>

I'm planning to get my own domain this month. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> I have no complaints with Namecheap.

</comment><comment> workhere-io Gandi or Namecheap.

Namecheap is cheaper than Gandi when it comes to .com domains. However, Gandi's domains include IMAP/POP (1 GB) hosted in France, and they have more TLDs than Namecheap.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://gandi.net](https://gandi.net)

<comment><USER4> Same word of caution I always give in these threads:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5085850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5085850)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For quickie or throwaway projects, dot.tk is pretty useful.

I use Namecheap for everything else, but when my budget is $0, dot.tk works just fine.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use Dreamhost. Free private domain registration. They also have two factor authentication to protect your account.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hover, Gandi and Namecheap are the suggestions you're likely to get here. They're all fine.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hover always seemed best for me. Loved that I could call and get an immediate answer.

</comment><comment><USER9> namecheap and gandi do it for me.</comment>


Using Git as a NoSQL database - <AUTHOR> https://www.kenneth-truyers.net/2016/10/13/git-nosql-database/ <comment><USER2> Nice! wonder how it scales though.</comment>


Open source VPU side bootloader for Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware <comment><USER2> Was this the result of much reverse-engineering, or was there a recent Broadcom release/leak of the needed information? The files in [https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open- firmware/tree/master/...](https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open- firmware/tree/master/bcm2708_chip) are interesting... I'd suggest making a copy of them for safekeeping. ;-)

I looked a little more in detail, and this might make it easy to enable/unlock the hardware codecs that were initially locked-down.

<comment><USER3> It wasn't a leak, Broadcom publicly released all this code a while ago to aid the making of an open source GPU driver. All this has been licensed under 3-Clause BSD license and distributed by Broadcom themselves. There's no point in making a copy since you can just download these files from Broadcom themselves.

This won't help you with codecs, codecs are mostly code in the firmware that uses vector instructions of the VPU to accelerate the video decoding. If you want to use the codecs I would recommend paying for them instead of engaging in piracy.

<comment><USER2> The "BROADCOM CONFIDENTIAL" header in a few of them certainly made me think otherwise...

 _codecs are mostly code in the firmware that uses vector instructions of the VPU to accelerate the video decoding_

That means it should be possible for open-source firmware to add more, freely usable, codecs than in the proprietary firmware.

<comment><USER3> Yes if you can implement high performance video codecs using pretty much undocumented vector instructions of the VPU, you are welcome to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, there are hardware blocks for JPEG and MPEG for best performance. See vcodec.h etc.

But the VPU 2D SIMD is good for non supported codecs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Boy, it would be sweet if ARM or someone would sponsor some kind of common system architecture. Sure, lots of vendors would keep making their own boards like Pi, beagleboard, ODROID, etc. But having an extensible architecture like UEFI or similar to facilitate bootstrapping while still being open would be awesome.

<comment><USER5> The SPARC architecture is open and fully documented, the only licensing encumbrance is a token administration fee of approximately $100 that helps maintain the organisation that is the steward of the SPARC ISA intellectual property and the fee only applies if you intend to implement your own hardware commercially.

I'm constantly amazed at how much work is done to reinvent the wheel as far as ISAs are concerned, SPARC is an excellent platform and has an extremely high level of "shovel ready" hardware designs that you can just ship to a manufacturer and get back hardware. There is even open VHDL to fabricate modern high power CPU designs.

<comment><USER6> But the problems here are nothing to do with choice of ISA and everything to do with standardisation of the bringup/boot process.

Free/Open Source chips are a lovely idea that doesn't work without a financial sponsor because software can be made and distributed at near-zero marginal cost, including by the end user, but hardware can't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Context: This is a first step in allowing blob free development on the RaspberryPi.

</comment><comment><USER7> Link to the author's blog: [http://crna.cc/](http://crna.cc/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the video capabilities especially in connection with the CSI camera is what sets the Raspberry Pi really apart from Odroid and so on. It's pretty amazing that it can encode 720p video at 48fps - didn't something like encoding a DVD take like 8 hours 10 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER9> Holy smokes, the thing everybody said would never exist!

<comment><USER10> Still doesn't exist, though it's a step in the right direction. Before, the most anyone had managed on the Raspberry Pi without the closed-source bootloader was to run small VPU programs that toggled GPIOs and talked serial; now this can run small ARM programs that do the same. It still needs some way to actually read programs from external storage and a whole bunch of (completely undocumented, IIRC) clock and power management hardware initialization.

Don't get me wrong, it's impressive what the Raspberry Pi community have managed given that just how heavily hamstrung they are here, but don't expect to be running Linux without the blob any time soon. I remember people involved in this talking about having reverse-engineered enough information to boot the ARM core in theory over a year ago. It's slow going.

<comment><USER3> Actually, the bulk SDRAM/ARM work was done by me in the space of around month (though I only ARM to finally work three days ago with Herman's help).

You could run Linux on ARM using this but you would need to write some more drivers, otherwise you'd be limited to pretty much GPIO/serial/SDHOST PIO.

SDHOST is actually a fairly trivial interface to implement, I'm going to use it in my chainloader but I haven't had the time to look at it yet.

<comment><USER11> > Actually, the bulk SDRAM/ARM work was done by me in the space of around > month

Full-time? Rainy weekends? This borders on personal territory of "what do you do for day-job?", so feel free to skip answering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder, could we see a potential let's say Raspberry Pi 5 use a quad-core RISC-V processor, as well as an open source GPU (and open source everything else)? I think that would align quite well with Raspberry Pi's mission, and it's an an better position to kickstart the adoption of open source CPUs and GPUs than some other noname project.

<comment><USER13> Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting idea, but in terms of the Foundation's actual goal to "advance the education of adults and children, particularly in the field of computers, computer science and related subjects" I cannot see the huge effort required to move to new hardware being a good use of their limited resources. Focusing on improving software and the actual teaching materials/training available to educators would make more sense for their mission.

<comment><USER12> Then my guess is the Raspberry Pi will be "disrupted", because the hacker/maker community, which may be an even bigger market currently than the "school market", will adopt the fully open source alternative. Some Arduino boards are already starting to support RISC-V processors, so I think it's only a matter of time.

<comment><USER14> Got a link to those RISC-V based Arduino boards?

IIRC the RISC-V ISA itself isn't finalised so I would be surprised if people were manufacturing it already.

<comment><USER11> Come on, it's a middle of 2016, everyone gotta know about projects like [http://icoboard.org/](http://icoboard.org/) , [https://olimex.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/ice40hx1k-evb- open-s...](https://olimex.wordpress.com/2016/05/06/ice40hx1k-evb-open-source- hardware-fpga-board-designed-with-kicad-and-working-with-icestorm-foss- toolchain-first-prototypes-are-ready-and-run/) , etc. projects. They allow to have completely open-source process to bring up RISC-V CPUs on a reverse- engineered FPGA. When they collect enough funds (if people of the world will give it to them), they will make ASIC silicon too. The only risk is that big corporations won't give up their prerogative of being the only parties who make the world better, subsume RISC-V and shove out closed-down RISC-V chips like they did before. But how it should work is that there should be competition between classical NDA-ridden and close-down stuff and open RISC-V, to let customers decide what they want in a particular case.

<comment><USER14> Ah, I thought you were talking about ASICs. Are those FPGAs big enough to support RISC-V?

The closed corporate versions of RISC-V thing is very likely and probably will become the easiest way to get a RISC-V chip.

<comment><USER11> > Are those FPGAs big enough to support RISC-V

RISC-V is a flexible and configurable architecture, with support ranging from small MCUs to 128-bit ISA which nobody else have yet (for a general-purpose ISA) to tagged memory (which failed to rule the world in 1970ies but now might be just used when gives benefit).

Those FPGAs of course run an MCU variant of RISC-V (as we started with talking about Arduino), e.g. [https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32](https://github.com/cliffordwolf/picorv32)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ah, the VC4...I had the impression the toolchain for that will be a nightmare to setup outside of the "close guarded internal tools"( which were "fun" to use).

Besides except the video stuff I do not see a point of running (lets say a Linux) on the VC4.

But still fun moment to see all this being done, congrats :)

<comment> david-given The VC4's actually quite a nice processor; it's fun to write code for. 32 registers, massive DSP unit which I haven't looked into, instructions can be 16, 32 or 48 bits long (inline 32-bit constants!), FPU which shares registers with the integer unit, and some really interesting instructions for fast loops...

(My favourite is addcmpb, which will increment a register by a constant or register, compare the result to a constant or register, and do a branch based on the result... all in a single 32-bit instruction. It's a for-next loop in a box.)

...but the downsides are that the FPU is single-precision only, doing 64 bit arithmetic is really hard, and the processor seems not to have any kind of MMU, which means that running real operating systems on it is likely to be very hard.</comment></comment>


2000 Year Old Analog Computer - Decoding the Antikythera Mechanism - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSQNEPbQOiI&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> Such an amazing object ... of itself, and that it even survived that long on the ocean floor.

After being found, it sits around for 50 years before anyone qualified to understand it takes a hard look. Then forgotten for many years, then decades more to sort of prize out how it worked. Then the need for advanced imaging tech to pry apart and decode the (physically fused) layers.

To me probably the most amazing single-object story ever. And we may never know the who or where. (Are there more out there?)

</comment><comment><USER3> Coincidentally, I have been watching this YT channel about machining metal where the presenter is attempting to build the same mechanism while staying true to its design:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4_jDU2)</comment>


I should be able to opt out an app's feature based on the permission required - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mikepland/sling-tv-do-you-really-need-access-to-my-photos-so-i-can-watch-tv-7f17422e21b1#.b8k8uaj5d <comment><USER2> Isn't this post just asking for something that has already been implemented in iOS and in later versions of Android?

<comment><USER3> Yes, and that's now pointed out in an update at the bottom.

The overall idea is still important, though. Even if the OS supports granular permissions, that doesn't mean the app does. I've seen apps ask for irrelevant permissions and then refuse to proceed if you deny them.

<comment><USER4> Just a random thought: would feeding dummy data solve the issue? E.g. an app requests contacts, OS returns seemingly-innocent randomly generated contact information. Or app requests to send an SMS, the OS informs the app the SMS was sent, but it wasn't.

Is there any permission where dummy data would still be easily detected or produce inconvenient (for the user, not the developer) results?

<comment><USER5> No need to return randomly-generated contacts; just hand the app an empty contact database. Likewise, tell the app that you just don't have a location fix.

For requesting to send an SMS, tell the app that there was a failure to send the SMS (for reasons unrelated to permissions). Act as though you have no signal.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't be surprised to see apps choke up and crash with an empty contacts database. It goes to inspect your contacts, tries to read the first one alphabetically, and fails to handle "There is no first contact."

It _shouldn 't_ happen, but you could say the same about any untested edge- case bug.

<comment><USER7> I concur, maybe give the user an option?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The larger issue is that the app stores are full of predators who are simply interested in stealing data and selling us ads. Actually finding useful apps is tough. For a long time I used ES File Explorer on android, a popular file browser, until I realized that the whole app is just lbuilt to scrape my data and show me ads. I now favor Ghost Commander, which only requires permissions to access my files and is GPLd; the latter seems to me the best indicator of not trying to fuck me over.

<comment><USER9> ES used to be a solid app but I think they were bought by another company which added all of the dodgy "value add" crap that got me to uninstall it.

Thankfully there are several other file explorers with similar functionality although I've not settled on one yet. I've mainly been trying out a few when I happen to need a file explorer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> iOS is fantastic with this. You don't want the app to access your location or camera? Deny permission when it asks for it. It's as simple as that. This should be implemented across the board.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE: Sling TV Support Response: @mikepland In regards to your inquiry, the user is prompted for this permission because the AP stores log files on external storage. *MD

[https://twitter.com/slinganswers/status/703255132935356420](https://twitter.com/slinganswers/status/703255132935356420)

<comment><USER11> Can an Android user explain what this means to me? Why does storing log files on an external storage device require access to photos? That makes no sense to a user.

<comment><USER12> There's only one external storage. And in an attempt (irony alert!) to make permissions "easy" for users to understand, some Android people decided to call the permission that grants access to external storage "Photos". Because that's where the photos are stored, and it's sometimes/often the most important/sensitive thing there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another option would be for permissions to be a bit more fine grained.

Also, forcing apps to fill in a form explaining why they need permissions Foo and Bar could help.

Having "opt-out" features put the burden of the developer. It may not be trivial to provide this functionality.

<comment><USER14> It's a great idea, but wouldn't this only work for well curated repositories? Basically, it only works if someone is actually enforcing it?

Forgive my ignorance since I've only had two iPhone freebies as smart phones, but I was under the impression with Android that you could load apps from virtually anywhere and that for the Play store there wasn't much in the way of curation.

As far as the implementation goes, at least, with iOS, if you forbid access even to a key service such as Location Services for an app, the app still launches, it just doesn't do the function requiring the service, and you get a small nag every time you launch the app/try to use the service telling you "X service is disabled for this app, go to Settings to enable". I can't imagine a similar function for Android is that much more difficult.

<comment><USER13> I have very little experience with mobile apps. I only worked on a few iPhone apps, and on the backend :) I wasn't suggesting this for store admins to review and approve. Simply to force devs to provide informaiton.

Maybe we can trust users to curate. The form should be there at submission time, a field per requested permission, devs should be forced to put at least 100 characters for example. If they put garbage, we can trust that the users who care will do the right thing and ignore the app.

A lot of apps already try to provide this information on their website, or apps description. Maybe the next step is to embed that in the store itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> All the permissions models are flawed. IMO Marshmallow actually makes it worse. They have permissions groups so, if you request access to Play Games accounts to reduce the login friction the app asks you for access to Contacts. When a user opts out they get a painful login process. The real answer is for Google to stop asking the user for permission on the group and instead ask at the actual permission level.

</comment><comment><USER16> Apps should have core permissions and optimal permissions. This way the dev can assume some permissions and the app won't crash.

</comment><comment><USER17> The first problem this guy has is that he's using Sling. Sling is a terrible service at the moment, with terrible app UI, terrible stream performance and reliability, and terrible TV integration. Just terrible all around. Great concept, though.

<comment><USER18> I used to use it years back and thought it was perfectly fine, although a little costly. Has it degraded recently? I just recommended it to a friend that is moving overseas, but they haven't bought it yet. Is there something significantly better?</comment></comment>


Disruptions: The Holodeck Begins to Take Shape - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/disruptions-the-holodeck-begins-to-take-shape/?_php=true&_type=blogs&hpw&rref=technology&_r=0

<comment><USER2> "Begins"? A writer who knows little of history. The piece even mentions CAVE2, without mentioning the original CAVE work from the 1990s. News articles about the CAVE in our building, back in the mid-1990s, used similar holodeck references.

(The enthusiasm has been here for decades. See for example Howard Rheingold's 1992 "Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds - and How It Promises to Transform Society".)</comment>


Zorin OS Is the Alternative to Windows and macOS - <AUTHOR> https://zorinos.com/ <comment><USER2> It is a Linux distro offering an interface that looks like Windows and macOS. It is as much an alternative as Ubuntu is.

</comment><comment><USER3> > .. full Microsoft Office-compatible office suite ..

Really? Seems unlikely unless they are restricting the meaning of compatibility to exclude scripting.

If someone would produce an Excel compatible spreadsheet that executed Excel VBA that would be a real achievement.

<comment><USER4> They're probably just bundling OpenOffice. It's just another Linux distro based off Ubuntu, nothing new here.

<comment><USER5> From what I have read, they have really simplified moving to Linux for those who don't want to spend time tinkering, e.g., they make installing Nvidia drivers for games very easy.

You are right about office - they bundle Libre Office with Zorin. If there was a Linux distro with seamless support of Office 365, I would gladly pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FreeBSD is also an alternative to Windows and macOS

</comment><comment> m-p-3 I always thought ZorinOS was a chinese-made distro because of the name, it's actually made by a group in Ireland.

</comment><comment><USER7> What can be said about Zorin OS that can't be said about dozens of other Linux distros?

Edit: Why was this downvoted?

<comment> m-p-3 I guess the emphasis on aesthetics, which seems to go for a Windows-like look and ease of use.

I personally prefer Elementary, but anything that makes it simple and secure to use is a win for Linux.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help me find an online hangout for freelancers and remote people? - <AUTHOR> I am working solo on my little projects at home.
Sometime back, I came across a site, styled like stackoverflow, where freelancers posted casual questions and chatted. It was more like an virtual water cooler.
If anyone knows a site like that, pl post it here. Thank you <comment><USER2> Possibly Nomad List? It's for digital nomads, so there's lots of freelancers & remote workers on there, but also mixed in with travel discussion. They have Slack channels too. I think it might be a paid membership now:

[https://nomadlist.com/forum](https://nomadlist.com/forum)

If you're looking for solo developers, there's the Bootstrapped forums, which is like a modern version of the Joel On Software forums. It's starting to attract some of the growth-hacker / info-product types lately though.

[http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/](http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://indiehackers.com](https://indiehackers.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> The guys from the Coding Blocks podcast have a Slack channel where quite a few people interact, though it's not totally limited to freelancers. I've gotten some good feedback and input when I've asked questions there, however. And most of the conversation is good.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.reactiflux.com](https://www.reactiflux.com) serves that purpose for me. It's React-focused, but lots of knowledgeable, helpful people in there including the great #jobs-advice channel.

</comment><comment><USER6> The #freelance on Slack, but it's not free. I'm a member there, and it's been valuable. I've gotten gigs that have paid for the membership price many times over.

hashtagfreelance.slack.com

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out [https://digitalfreelancer.io/](https://digitalfreelancer.io/)

They have a slack group for developers that's really good

</comment><comment><USER8> wouldn't Reddit be a place for that?

you could also checkout indiehackers.com

Not sure if there are any slack channels.

<comment><USER9> Reddit's programming related subs are all pretty much overrun by n00bs (I readily admit that I am one of them) up voting every shitty tutorial they can find (i don't do that). I also suspect that the non n00bs are somewhat dominated by opinionated folks who have a sort of tunnel vision for their various careers / the tech world in general.</comment></comment>


FSF marks commons clause as non-free, recommends users fork software using it - <AUTHOR> https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/recent-licensing-updates <comment><USER3> This judgement by the FSF is unsurprising, Commond Clause is like the Patriot Act, a purposeful misnomer by its authors to attempt to gain unearned goodwill & respect.

<comment><USER4> > Commond [sic] Clause is like the Patriot Act, a purposeful misnomer by its > authors to attempt to gain unearned goodwill & respect.

The author (not plural) describes in depth the differences between recognized open source licenses v. the commons clause ([https://commonsclause.com/](https://commonsclause.com/)) and also describes her intent behind developing the license. Specific emphasis appears to have been devoted toward distinguishing this license as being distinctly non-open in the FAQ _printed on the root of the domain._

(To be clear: I have no affiliation with the author or with this license and any known implementations of it.)

<comment><USER3> The Commons Clause is added as a restriction to existing open source licensed projects, to those that aren't clued in that the Commons Clause has been applied, they can easily be misled by this poorly named restriction.

<comment><USER5> Creative Commons offers noncommercial licenses even more restrictive than Commons Clause.

I'd've picked a different name, too. But the idea that "commons" means only open source, or only free software, doesn't sit right. Compared to pulling their software back as fully closed or source-available, all-rights-reserved, a Commons Clause combo makes a lot more available.

<comment><USER6> Creative Commons specifically recommends against the use of any of their licenses for software. The CC licenses are primarily intended to be applied to artistic works, and the NC/ND variants make a lot more sense in that context.

<comment><USER7> They make an exception for CC0 though [0].

[0] [https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC...](https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F)

<comment><USER8> CC0 is basically a public domain contribution with a very permissive fallback, and is very unlike any of their other licenses.

But this is getting off-track -- the CC licenses being discussed are the ones other than CC0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is the controversy here that the Commons Clause piggy backs on top of existing free software licenses and thus could mislead users to think that software using it is free software when it's in fact proprietary by their definitions?

As a part-time independent developer of software myself, I personally find the combination of a free software license + Commons Clause to be very compelling. I'm willing to grant to the user every right offered by free software licenses with the exception of rights to commercial use.

If that means my software has to be labeled as proprietary by the FSF, so be it, but at the same time I'd prefer not to mislead users into thinking my software is being offered under a vanilla free software license.

Is there a proprietary license I can release my software under, with the properties of a free software + commons clause license, that doesn't run the risk of misleading users? If not, I'll likely continue releasing my software under a free software + commons clause license, along with some kind of disclaimer above the license section in the project's readme.

<comment><USER10> Free only for "non-commercial use" is a license style that failed in the software ecosystem a long time ago. Feel free to choose that if you think it's right for you and your goals, but if you were hoping to form a successful community around your code, that's pretty unlikely.

<comment><USER5> I would say that forming a successful community around code is a slim prospect under any license. The median contributor count on an open project is one or two, depending on how you count.

Strongly recommend: [https://youtu.be/vBknF2yUZZ8?t=80](https://youtu.be/vBknF2yUZZ8?t=80)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised there's not a mention of AGPL as an alternative. While not equivalent de jure, it seems to be equivalent de facto.

<comment><USER5> I'm really happy to see someone else emphasize the difference between the effect AGPL has had, and what it actually says.

If you haven't already, take a look at MongoDB's Server Side Public License. In particular, here's their submission statement to OSI:

[http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license- review_lists.o...](http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license- review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003603.html)

I've written about the license, and what I think it means politically, here:

[https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/04/Copyleft-Bust- Up.h...](https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/11/04/Copyleft-Bust-Up.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thats what killed Redis, good on them for warning about it.

[https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will- destr...](https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/22/Commons-clause-will-destroy-open- source.html)

<comment><USER13> Isn't the "commons clause" only on a few modules? Redis itself is still BSD.

See: [https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/](https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/)

<comment><USER14> They failed so badly at the PR around this change that many people overlooked that fact. They still inflicted damage on their reputation.

It's kind of like how the Internet was left with the incorrect impression that Google removed "don't be evil" from their Code of Conduct. (It's still there, now at the end instead of the beginning after a rewording. The new parent company Alphabet has a different but similar slogan; both apply to Google. This is separate question, of course, from any more concrete discussion of Google's current ethics than what their code of conduct says.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm still wrapping my head around the commons clause but I think I really like it. The FSF licenses are designed to create a parallel open "copyleft" ecosystem. However, they fall short of identifying capitalism as the system that creates value in "copyright" and creates scarcity where none exists in the name of profit. The commons clause has more revolutionary content in that it prohibits participation in capitalism.

I'm trying to decide if there should be additional limitations or exemptions for institutions that build a better more democratic and humane society. For example, perhaps worker coops can use the software, but heirarchical institutions cannot. Perhaps science and medicine can use it, but stores cannot.

I recognize the point of the commons clause is a kind of rebellion within capitalism against exploitation of individuals by business. However, like the GPL, perhaps it's time to go further than copyleft and advance a real left agenda by supporting left institutions.

<comment><USER16> While I agree with you, and personally I think we're on the brink of (or perhaps we've shot right past and just haven't noticed yet) a new kind of software creation - some kind of "company-supported, source-available, relatively-free-to-use, but with restrictions on uses that compete with or financially benefit from things the company that mostly funds the software do" thing. I don't know if it'll work out long term, or if it does whether it'll be a good thing or a bad thing, but I think it's worth a shot to see what happens when you pursue those ideas, and will be watching RedisLabs and MongoDB (and others) with interest over the coming years.

There's a very left leaning socialist part of me who thinks "That's bad. Apache and MySQL and Perl/Python/PHP and many many other genuinely free software projects have worked fine for decades now, why change to less free alternatives if Stallman-style free software can and does work?", but there's also a pragmatic part of me that thinks "I wonder what new software might come into existence if companies can afford to hire teams of devs and architects (and QA people and tech writers and and and) by limiting _some_ of the freedom to allow themselves to generate revenue more easily, without limiting anything like as much freedom as, say, Microsoft or Oracle do?" Personally, I don't think I'll be contributing to any "commons clause" restricted software, but I _do_ wish the people experimenting with that new model the best of luck and have some optimism that it _might_ open up new and unexpected opportunities as it changes the landscape around how software gets written, shared, and monetised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's not surprising FSF sees the Commons Clause as non-F/OSS according to their definition.

The question, though, is whether OSI's taxonomy is even relevant today when there are other, more imminent concerns. Namely, if you want your software project to contribute to software and information monopolization in "the cloud" and on very few content aggregation sites such as Fb, github, and others that themselves don't reciprocally allow eg. indie search crawlers and untracked linking.

<comment><USER18> This is a different issue, as you yourself have mentioned. And it has an easy solution: you are free to host the code yourself if you don't like putting it on a centralized service.

<comment><USER17> That's exactly the kind of limited perspective I'm questioning. FSF bases their copyleft concept on ethical beliefs. But what are the ethics of publishing your project on github such that your user's clicks are tracked, and you can't even scrape github for building up a search index unless you're GoogleBot or Bing? What are the ethics of giving your labor to cloud providers working hard to lock users in to their ecosystem? What is ethical about OSI's no-purpose-limitation criterion such that your software can be easily weaponized in one form or another? What is ethical about promoting the idea that software developers need to give all their work away such that only very few cloud providers can benefit, to the detriment of financing further development and maintenance?

<comment><USER18> I still don't understand your point. The GPL provides none of the protections you are asking for, since I am free to post my code wherever I see fit. Are you asking for protections as to where I am legally allowed to host my code?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "So if anyone tries to convince you that Commons Clause is wrong because it doesn't meet all the requirements of the Open Source Definition, you should ask them if proprietary is better."

"Freedom for others to commercialize your software comes with starting an open source project, and while that freedom is important to uphold, growth and commercial pressures will inevitably force some projects to close."

[https://commonsclause.com/](https://commonsclause.com/)

<comment><USER20> _> "you should ask them if proprietary is better [than Commons Clause]."_

Neither is better, because they are the same. Commons Clause _is_ proprietary.

If a piece of FOSS that I used became proprietary, I would fork (or use a fork) based on the last FOSS version. Just because the Commons Clause kinda looks like it's FOSS if you squint, doesn't make it any different.

<comment><USER21> Commons Clause is clearly neither Free Software nor Open Source, but I don't see how that makes it proprietary.

<comment><USER20> Well, the FSF defines ""proprietary software" as synonymous with nonfree software."[1] But that's kind of a cop-out answer.

"Proprietary" means that the copyright holder retains certain rights, rather than granting the rights to the recipient. In the case of the Commons Clause, the rights that they retain propriety of are the rights to commercial use.

[1]: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#ProprietarySo...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#ProprietarySoftware)

<comment><USER21> When someone releases their software under GPL, they still retain certain rights rather than granting them to the recipient - notably, the right to sell it commercially without providing the source, and without requiring the buyers to adhere to the terms of the GPL. This is clearly a valuable right, seeing how many companies have business models that are built around dual-licensing GPL'd code for commercial proprietary use.

Strictly speaking, the only license that doesn't have the copyright holder retaining any rights is the lack of one (i.e. releasing to public domain). If you're not releasing to PD, that's necessarily because you want to retain _some_ rights. And then it's just a question of which ones. GPL has one answer, something like MIT has another, and Commons Clause has another still. I fail to see what makes some of them proprietary, while others are not.

From my perspective, if I can get the code, hack on it, and release the changed version to others who can also do all of these things in turn, that's enough to make it non-proprietary already. Proprietary is when the software is closed source outright, or the source is provided for "educational use only" (i.e. no derived works allowed), or when derived works cannot be redistributed. Licenses that allow redistribution of patches, but not original code with patches applies, would be the grey territory.

<comment><USER22> > Strictly speaking, the only license that doesn't have the copyright holder > retaining any rights is the lack of one (i.e. releasing to public domain).

This is a bit nit-picking, but releasing without a license is pretty much the opposite of releasing to the public domain.

If you release without anything, the raw unmodified copyright laws apply, which are rather strict and give the recipient basically no rights - <USER2> no right to redistribution.

You have to make some kind of explicit statement if you want to release something into the public domain. That's why things like CC0 exist.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


He Was Supposed to Be the Next Stephen King. Then the Aliens Came - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/reasonable-doubt/he-was-supposed-to-be-the-next-stephen-king-then-the-aliens-came-afd7195e0b49 <comment><USER3> Well, he sounds pretty crazy. Believes a lot of super-nutty stuff, anyway. (My mother believed a lot of super-nutty New Age stuff, but I wouldn't say she was crazy at all.)

I felt lied to after I read _Communion_ , when I found out later that he didn't actually _remember_ that stuff, the alien abduction or whatever - <USER2> came out of guided hypnotherapy sessions. You know, like that fictional child abuse scandal etc. Yet it's written as an absolutely true story, like he's writing about stuff he can remember. You trust him, and...he sold a lot of copies. I felt deceived. I see him as a con-man.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've found Strieber's books to be entertaining, but part of me thinks he's playing the long-con with his claims about his experiences. It's like he has written _himself_ as the protagonist in one of his stories.</comment>


Caudit: Audit Your Performance - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Cetsoft/caudit Caudit is a simple library to log application performance, health and statistics in an organized manner. <comment><USER2> nice one.</comment>