Have you tried Tex – The most secure message App? - <AUTHOR> http://texapp.co/ <comment><USER2> Implementing complete secure communication solution is an hard topic. For now, signal and its axolotl protocol is considered by the community as the top secure communication project. Challenging signal and strong experienced developpers like Moxie will be very complicated (but not impossible ! ...working on defiance;-). It is impossible to claim that your app is the "the most secure" without providing source or documentation (or I did not find them). How community could review your project ... This is not credible, or maybe it is a joke ?

</comment><comment><USER3> "most secure"? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11748826](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11748826)

<comment><AUTHOR> did you try it?</comment></comment>


N_is_stolen: It seems that Twitter simply ignored my claim - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/N_is_stolen/status/428751111298621441 <comment><USER2> Ridiculous. Twitter management needs to start acting like it _wants_ to solve problems.

At this point, there should be a small department to deal with these sorts of issues, another to deal with abuse problems, etc. Way too many things go unchecked and it makes for an unpleasant user experience.

I barely even click on trending topics anymore, because it's spam city.

</comment><comment><USER3> why is this guy getting so much press for a twitter name when people are starving in the world and there are ideas to be made manifest?

Can someone explain it to me a a complete moron?

<comment><USER4> By your logic, all but the most heinous of crimes are trivial and do not deserve any attention. Obviously that's not true. You could also use that method of thinking to minimize the trials and pain of almost everyone in the world because they're not starving Africans. "I mean, there are kids starving on the streets, shut the F up already about getting fired."

<comment><USER3> there are people starving in other places besides Africa. I see you just did a knee jerk reaction and didn't answer my query.

What's so important about N and this twitter name that the world has to stop just for him to get it back?

<comment><USER5> The world doesn't have to stop, Twitter just needs to give the original owner his handle back. The evidence that the original owner was extorted to give it up has been making the rounds on HN for the past day or so.

Believe it or not, the author received a $50,000 offer for "@N" before, so there's non-sentimental reason behind it as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Termites act as tiny miners, lead humans to gold - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/termites-act-as-tiny-miners-lead-humans-to-gold/ <comment><USER2> "The team found that metals also accumulate in the excretory systems of termites. The termites then actively rid their bodies of excess metals by excreting little stones, much like kidney stones in people. According to Stewart, these excretions are "a driving force in redistribution of metals near the surface."

Aussie termites crap gold. Learn something new everyday.</comment>


MIT cuts ties with Chinese tech firms Huawei, ZTE - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-huawei-tech-zte/elite-u-s-school-mit-cuts-ties-with-chinese-tech-firms-huawei-zte-idUSKCN1RG0FS <comment><USER2> I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to leave because he essentially scraped every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home.

What was amazing to me was that he was allowed to return a few months later with the explanation "it was just a cultural misunderstanding"

I want to be careful not to point fingers at a particular country or culture, but that experience taught me that a grey-area version of corporate espionage is _very real_ in academia — an environment that operates with all guards down and no defenses against it.

[Edited to fix tappos]

<comment><USER3> What grey area? It was bad enough they decided to send him home.

<comment><USER4> How was it bad that they sent him home? A spy is a spy. In China they would have just killed him or imprisoned him if a student were sending information "back home." If you don't believe me that China simply kills spies, look at the spy purges in the Obama years after a breach in the CIA's communications.

<comment><USER5> Reread their post. They said their action was bad enough for them to be sent home. Not that it was a bad decision for them to be sent home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's an anecdotal story.

My team was interviewing engineers last year. We had a Chinese engineer come interview with us. She was in the States on a work visa, and her first job here was for a state government project. She was on a team building a web application that had public-facing and internal-facing UIs, and she was apparently working on both of these.

Anyways, she comes in for the interview, and shortly after our conversation begins she pulls out her work laptop, opens up her work project, and start going through the code with us! I asked "is this open source?" and she said no. I could even see slack messages coming up from her team mates.

I honestly couldn't believe it. We asked her to stop. As you can imagine, she didn't get an offer from us.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like a FOIA request should fix that "open source" problem. If its software developed by or for a governmental agency in the US, we as citizens have the right to access it as the public domain work it is. The recent ORCA fare enforcement app shenanigans with Sound Transit is a great example, even with a contracting company as a layer of indirection for developing said software doesn't escape said code's FOIAbility.

<comment><USER8> >ORCA fare enforcement app shenanigans with Sound Transit

Can you please provide a source for the details?

<comment><USER7> See Fare Enforcement Apps: [https://www.muckrock.com/agency/washington-54/central- puget-...](https://www.muckrock.com/agency/washington-54/central-puget-sound- regional-transit-authority-sound-transit-6356/)

Edit: Litigation is here: [https://kevin.wallace.seattle.wa.us/v/vix/](https://kevin.wallace.seattle.wa.us/v/vix/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is what a commerce war looks like.

It's not about China being an oppressive state, spying, etc. The former didn't matter all these decades, and the latter goes on forever from all sides and nobody bats an eye.

It's about China catching up to (and surpassing in some cases) US tech, and not being content to be the mere "factory of the US" but sell its own stuff. Like Korea, Taiwan, and Japan each did in their own timelines decades ago (from laughed at copycats and cheap foreign manufactures, to competitive themselves).

Expect to see more of China as the "enemy du jour" going forward.

<comment><USER10> Japan caught up and surpassed the US without the corporate espionage or subsequent commerce war.

<comment><USER11> You should brush up on the history of Japanese-US trade relations during the Reagan era if you are seriously convinced that is a remotely faithful retelling of history.

<comment><USER12> Enlighten us?

<comment><USER11> The US felt extremely threatened by Japanese manufacturing in the 80s and in fact most of the world had this cultural idea of Japan becoming the dominant global technology force. As a consequence the US government imposed a 100% tariff on Japanese electronics, accused the country of "currency manipulation" (sound familiar?). And on the topic of IP Japanese faced the very same copycat accusations that China does now.

Let's just take this fortune article from 1987 as an example:

[http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...](http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1987/12/21/69996/index.htm)

Try and replace every occurence of Japan with China and see how it sounds.

It even seeped into fiction. There's a reason neo-tokyo imagery is at the forefront of Gibson-era sci-fi.

<comment><USER13> The big difference is that while Japan was frequently accused of IP theft, the actual occurrences were few and far between as the result of individual corporate activity.

Chinese IP theft isn't just rampant--it's actively promoted and paid for by the Chinese government, which even goes so far as to identify targets for IP theft and provides governmental assistance in extracting stolen IP from the victim country.

<comment><USER9> > _The big difference is that while Japan was frequently accused of IP theft, > the actual occurrences were few and far between as the result of individual > corporate activity._

The accusations against Japanese companies at the time were including that the Japanese government were assisting them, and that the IP theft was part of national competitiveness policy. (And of course in Japan - as in S. Korea - corporations and state go hand in hand, though not to the degree of China).

Not that the inverse was also not happening (then and now):

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/07/31/national/wikile...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/07/31/national/wikileaks- alleges-widespread-u-s-spying-on-japanese-government-major-companies/#.XKaAi- gzbUI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> First off, I am not pro or anti USA or China. Just curious and hoping to have a constructive dialogue.

What moral high ground is USA on in the Snowden era? Why trust Cisco or Apple or Google or Facebook or Microsoft in USA's Prism? With the "Five Eyes", how to trust Nokia or Ericsson or Blackberry? What ethical high-ground are the tax evading tech giants on? Lets not forget how the pharma mobs are gaming the patent system to run an extortion ring on life saving medicines like insulin or the planned obsolescence when the world is rushing to reduce global warming.

Its sad to see a place of learning is getting into politics & business. How different is this from the patent battles between Oracle & Google or Apple, Microsoft & Samsung? Google is poaching chips guys from various sources to compete with Apple. Then all the poaching in AI & self driving & electric cars. Lets not forget the "borrowing" done my Jobs & Gates from Xerox PARC that founded the Silicon Valley.

As a consumer, due to Huawei & Mi. Samsung & other brands have started lowering the price. Hope Google poached the right team to make a better chip than what Apple has. Hopefully Apple also will start selling sensible priced devices. MIT should instead be working for growing an opensource culture in China. Which already seems to have something of that sort but limited due to all being in Chinese language.

<comment><USER15> I get what you mean but it has more to do with who's running those companies.

Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are American companies. In all honesty I'd rather have an American company spy on American people, rather than a Chinese company doing so.

China is catching up with tech and their government is totalitarian. Privacy doesn't exist in China, and it could be scary to think what they would do with data gathered from spying on us. I don't want any involvement of theirs in American schools or companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hmmm. From the article: "MIT is the latest top educational institution to unplug telecom equipment made by Huawei and other Chinese companies to avoid losing federal funding."

It seems like my government is pulling out all the stops trying to compete internationally against Chinese companies in the 5G market. I understand that other countries also pull out all the stops in trying to help their industries compete internationally.

</comment><comment><USER17> I just finished reading 'AI Superpowers' and I hardly understand now if US has any single chance to compete with China's Tech fairly, openly, democratically, with respect.

<comment><USER18> ...in what area is China actually leading? Catching up and leading require two very different skill sets.

<comment><USER19> Do you follow ML ? A lot of big-impact papers in Computer vision has come directly from mainland China and Hong Kong. MSRA, CUHK, Sensetime, and Baidu have made quite a few advances in the field.DMLC a group of members composed mostly of Chinese students basically wrote things like MXNET and Xgboost.

Granted most of these are collaborative ventures, but calling China 'catching up' at this stage is ignorant.

<comment><USER20> And yet nearly all SOTA research is done in the US.

Eventually folks in China realize they could easily be making $500K+/yr at FANG and be financially independent in 10 years, so they leave for the much, much greener US pastures, and stay here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there any evidence that these two companies aren't Chinese government operatives?

<comment><USER22> Couldn't you count any US based company that takes major government contracts, or has board members who were formerly high in government (eg. Dropbox/Condoleezza Rice) as a "government operative"?

<comment><USER21> Nope. Presumably their former positions on their resumes are why former government employees are on such boards/in such positions. Expecting/wanting certain things on a resume are standard practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if US carriers can start discouraging consumers from using Huawei, ZTE cellphones. They know the IMEI numbers.

<comment><USER24> How would this work? A monthly ZTE surcharge? The consumer already bought the phone. Retroactively punishing them when they already gave money to ZTE isn't the right solution. Just ban new phones from joining the networks.

<comment><USER25> ZTE is super popular amount the more "budget" carriers like boost, cricket, metro, etc. Not to mention their parent companies like Tmobile and Sprint which I'd still consider semi-budget carriers.

Source: Work in phone repair. We don't repair phones that cost 100USD new and have a non-existant parts market.

<comment><USER26> What is a "premium" carrier and what are they offering for the extra price?

<comment><USER25> Mostly just AT&T and Verizon, and Verizon is definitely the more "premium" one. I consider them premium because they cost more, they don't try to be the most affordable, they own other brands for that (cricket, etc.).

The biggest difference is their coverage. If you live in, and mostly travel within a metro area you're fine with sprint/tmobile, but anybody who's ever travelled will find that verizon is the only option if you work in, or go to the middle of nowhere at all. Basically Verizon has towers everywhere, including farmland that I can't figure out why they'd want to cover, but hey you get coverage while picking blueberries!

(This only goes for the USA, and includes my experience living in Michigan working in phone repair/retail, as well as my travels with other people/their carriers outside of Michigan)

<comment><USER26> This is true that Verizon (AT&T included) cover a lot more physical area. I was in the middle of the forest in northern Michigan, and the only signal out there was from AT&T. As it turned it turned out, T-Mobile allows you to roam if there is no T-Mobile coverage, so I was getting AT&T coverage.

I don't think Verizon can be considered high end, at least not definitively. Wherever T-Mobile does have coverage, their speeds are higher, and their offering of international roaming and by-default unlimited data are clearly geared to the "upper" end of the market of professionals that live in cities, that travel frequently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Ultimately the freedoms we take for granted here stand on preserving sovereignty.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there any chance Chinese phones will stop working too?

<comment><USER29> As the owner of Huawei and Xiaomi devices, I would say the chances that they stop working is extremely high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder how China will retaliate after this. This is a pretty public thing.

</comment><comment><USER31> It could be argued that if the news needs to introduce you as "an elite US school", you aren't really an elite school.

That's an odd conclusion to draw about MIT though. Who's the target audience here? MIT really is internationally known.

<comment><USER32> Everyone in the West knows MIT. That's a clue the Reuters headline target audience is in the East.

<comment><USER31> They know MIT in China too. They don't read Reuters much though.

<comment><USER33> I used to live there and they don't really know MIT in China. I'd say only among the academics. Certainly not a household name.

<comment><USER34> Are you sure? Because there's a bus load of fascinated Chinese tourists clamoring to look at MIT every other hour.

<comment><USER35> I live in South Africa. One of my local malls has a busload of Chinese tourists arriving not hourly but possibly daily. Not a special mall.

China is so big that even if a tiny percentage have any interest in you, you'll think it's a heck of a lot. MIT can be a non-household name and still attract hundreds of thousands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If US wants to compete and be a leader in tech, then they are going to have to focus on an open-source mostly patent-free future.

</comment><comment><USER37> Lackluster outline of implicated strategy regards placement of a fore-settled time-line(course of action); thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER38> There has been a lot of fud and scaremongering on China and Russia with very little evidence and facts. This makes it look like the commitment to competition, free markets and due process is hollow and self serving and the moment it doesn't benefit you you try to change the rules.

China is now running into some of these invisible barriers and constraints that have been in place all along and this brings them into light and exposes the self serving hypocrisy of the current system to the rest of the world. There are global mechanisms to take complaints with evidence yet this 'war' is not being fought in the trade commissions but in the public press with innuendo and smears and political pressure on allies.

How do we then even talk about words like competition, free trade and innovation in neutral terms when companies like Qualcomm can succeed unhindered while others like Huawei are politically demonized and constrained in market access.

<comment><USER39> Without a doubt, China, Russia, AND the US are most certainly engaged in large scale espionage and stealing each others intel and corporate R&D via any means necessary by nation-state backed hacking and etc.</comment></comment>


Making a 3D Delta Printer for Ceramic - <AUTHOR> http://www.keep-art.co.uk/Self_build.html <comment><USER2> More recent article on the guy and his craft:

[http://www.slate.com/features/drivingforces/ceramics/index.h...](http://www.slate.com/features/drivingforces/ceramics/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The result of printing itself is not discussed and smallest amount of time reserved for showing it off in video at 480p. Impressive printer build overall but really lacking description of unique point of this one - resulting ceramic product. What can be seen is still interesting and implies potential for ceramic printers since source material is easily obtained.

That's also the smallest size and lowest contrast font I've ever seen in article. Impossible to read.</comment>


Programming Conversations with Alexander Stepanov - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHxtyCq_WDLXFAEA-lYoRNQIezL_vaSX-

<comment><AUTHOR> Alexander Stepanov and Paramjit Oberoi have started teaching an weekly course on programming for software engineers at A9. From their internal announcement "We plan to cover a wide variety of topics, starting with the nature of programming, and continuing, in no particular order, with benchmarking, algorithms, data structures, caches, instruction level parallelism, generic programming, variable sized types, and Platonic ideas."

The course will be offered in a series of 2-hour lectures that will be published on the A9Videos channel on YouTube ([http://www.youtube.com/user/A9Videos/playlists](http://www.youtube.com/user/A9Videos/playlists)), typically on friday afternoons. The first two lectures are now available.

Previous classes from Alex, "Efficient Programming with Components" and "Four Algorithmic Journeys" are also available on the A9Videos YouTube channel.</comment>


Show HN: UK Political Parties' Twitter Interactive Word Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://alastair.io

<comment><AUTHOR> A quick weekend project to satisfy my desire to visualize how many times key words are coming up in this campaign ('hardworking families' for instance)

It was my first time using the twitter api and jquery to create a front-end interactive application and an interesting learning experience, will post source shortly.</comment>


How 16 famous electronic companies got their names - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/28823.html

<comment><USER2> For anyone who enjoyed this article, here's the holy grail of company name etymologies:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_name_etymologie...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_name_etymologies)

<comment><USER3> The reason the article exists is that the "holy grail" is tedious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> More interesting than how they got thier names is what these companies were doing before their names got famous. For example on this list there are decendants from a pulp mill, dried fish exporter, and a playing card maker.

</comment><comment><USER5> > 10\. Seiko: The watchmaker takes its name from a Japanese word meaning > 'exquisite' or 'success'.

It does not mean 'success' in this case.

And it's rather 'precision work' than 'exquisite'.

BTW the old Canon logo is quite lovely, isn't it.</comment>


'Overtourism' Worries Europe. How Much Did Technology Help Get Us There? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/technology/technology-overtourism-europe.html <comment><USER2> > "You can't talk about overtourism without mentioning Instagram and Facebook > — I think they're big drivers of this trend," Mr. Francis said. "Seventy- > five years ago, tourism was about experience-seeking. Now it's about using > photography and social media to build a personal brand. In a sense, for a > lot of people, the photos you take on a trip become more important than the > experience."

The article falls directly into the "good old days" fallacy. No, people in the past were not looking for "more authentic experiences".

I bought in a flea market a photo album of a trip of some Swedish couple in the 60s. It is awesome. It could be posted picture by picture on Facebook and nobody will notice. Except by details like that the plane tickets, included in the album, were printed by a mechanical typewriter. Also includes tourism flyers, tickets for the theatre, and a menu from a restaurant. Sounds familiar? Because people are people in all places at all times.

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days)

<comment><USER3> I don't know if it was meant to be a subtle joke, but tourism 75 years ago (in Europe or otherwise..) seriously?

<comment><USER4> Sweden was neutral. Presumably Swedes would've had their summer holidays as normal (though staying within the country)?

<comment><USER5> There was massive fuel and food shortages in Sweden. I doubt that very many people had normal vacations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see complaints/worries about overtourism, housing prices in cities, overfocusing on restaurant reviews, and other problems not as arising from the use of Instagram as some people think, but more basically as an unavoidable side-effect of globalization. Basically it used to be harder to find the 'perfect' restaurant, vacation, or house because information was not transferring efficiently. With the internet, a process of arbitrage has commenced, where all people are able to put themselves where they feel they will be happiest based on their economic power. Obviously people living in sleepy picturesque villages in Europe would rather no one visited, but these places are just going to have to deal with it in the same way that San Fransisco, Seattle, Austin, etc. are. The truth is that some places are nicer to live or visit than others, and if you don't have the money to play the game then you aren't welcome.

Once my wife asked her father how people chose what restaurant to eat at when all you had was a phone book, and his answer was telling: "There just used to be fewer places to go."

<comment><USER7> Well yes that and, many in the world have gotten ridiculously rich. You don't see middle class tourists from Malawi flooding the Vatican Museums despite them having access to the same information on their smartphones, you do see it happening with Chinese tourists because there's a ton of them who can actually afford it.

I mean, I've traveled to four different continents as a student on minimum wage jobs. A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back. And especially if you're from a rich country, traveling means the odds are in your favour of actually spending less on things like food or local transportation than if you'd just stayed at home for the week.

How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle- class is beyond me. Owning a home with a toilet, access to a self-driving shared vehicle and a computer is an actual possibility for the hypothetical 3 billion middle-class people of the future who could afford it. But having an access ticket to Paris, despite 3 billion people being able to afford it, is not going to be feasible, ever. In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.

<comment><USER8> > A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries > like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts > in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, > spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the > world and come back.

I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country.

> How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the > middle-class is beyond me.

It is certainly not a small problem. But that is always why every growing economy spawns these industrial giants that do a bit of everything like GE, Samsung or Hisense. The latter being a state owned Chinese company.

> In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain > cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to > prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't > one of them.

The greatest difference (other the obvious access to information) is that it used to be sort of self-regulating, if not plain regulated. Because it only makes sense to have so many hotels in one place when you have to consider things like off-season. So if some city got popular at a certain time it got expensive to tourist there and you did care much because you just went somewhere else. When 'everyone is a hotel' you instead essentially compete with locals.

<comment><USER9> >I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country.

Inequality is another issue, but this "overtourism" is because of the massive growth in the global middle class. It used to be only a tiny fraction of Chinese citizens could afford to go overseas. Now hundreds of millions of them can. And Europeans are also able to get around very cheaply now within Europe.

People travel more. I think that's fine, sorry if you lived in a picturesque town, but I think it's fair to share it with the world if you live in a nice place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want to avoid unpleasant tourist traps, go off the beaten path to smaller towns and villages. You'll find a much more beautiful, and genuine experiences talking with real locals, who aren't just trying to sell you overpriced crap. You'll get the real food, and the real place you're visiting. Famous landmarks really don't stick with you like the experiences you get meeting new people.

<comment><USER11> > If you want to avoid unpleasant tourist traps, go off the beaten path to > smaller towns and villages.

That only works until someone with a sufficiently large follower base promotes it on instagram. Instant tourist influx. Many of the tourist traps started out as hidden treasures.

<comment><USER10> Actually being one of those influencers, I can tell you that most people in this world don't care what someone on Instagram says. Those that do pay attention are there for the fantasy, and not actually jumping on a plane to a remote location because one of us posted a pretty picture. The rest of the planet is going to see the Taj Mahal, and Fontana de Trivi, because that's what you're "supposed" to do when visiting a foreign land. It doesn't take much effort to find a quiet home outside of a major city, and see what's really going on. There are nearly infinite places on this Earth to go, only a handful are being 'promoted' because they are already popular.

btw, the Taj Mahal is indeed beautiful, but it's a very small oasis in the literally the most vile city(Agra) I've been to in all my travels. Absolute filth. The best thing to do is drive there, see it for an hour, and then drive back to the place you came from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Seventy-five years ago, tourism was about experience

75 years ago was 1943, there was no tourism in Europe unless you were flying a bomber or driving a tank.

The first jet airliner didn't fly until 1949 which enabled tourism for the common person.

I'm sure tourism was "better" in the old days when only the wealthy could afford to travel.

<comment><USER13> That's not true - Sanremo did a decent business with Brits getting the train to the med in the late 1800s. Here's a link to the nyt report of Queen Victoria going there in 1888 [https://www.nytimes.com/1888/02/25/archives/queen- victoria-a...](https://www.nytimes.com/1888/02/25/archives/queen-victoria-at- san-remo.html)

And one of my recent trips was to walk a bit of the Camino de Santiago which has the oldest known tour guide book published around 1140. Though people have been walking it before Jesus was around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article resonates with me after my recent vacation to the Amalfi coast. The narrow roadways are clogged with buses and the buses themselves are so full you often have to wait in line for an extra hour to get on one. I definitely wouldn't recommend it.

After Amalfi, we went to a small fishing village nearby and had an experience that was so, so much better. I even got to speak some Italian and buy some homemade grappa from the local shop, which would be difficult in a more 'disneyfied' place.

It would be nice if TripAdvisor or Google had some sort of 'tourist jam' avoidance algorithm, letting you pick places like or near the place you want to go, but slightly off the beaten path.

Or some kind of warning if you're planning to go somewhere during the peak season.

<comment><USER15> I recently had the opportunity to stay for considerable time in a villa on a 100 acre vineyard in the italian countryside. Rode a bike into town every morning and did the days grocery shopping, I was living just like all my italian neighbors where and it was fabulous.

The quick jaunt through Rome and Florence I tacked onto the end of the trip was very loathsome in many aspects. I'd bet you have to go at least 3 miles away from the colosseum in any direction to find food of a higher quality than Olive Garden.

<comment><USER16> If you'd visited the Vasari Corridor or tried the Uffizi on a Tuesday morning, I think you'd have had a much different experience. Rome is constantly crowded in the same way NYC is, but you can't really expect to have the entire forum to yourself - it's one of the most famous places in the world! Loathsome is the polar opposite of how I feel about visiting either of those cities.

<comment><USER17> Mind you, you couldn't have expected to have the Forum to yourself for _millenia_ now. Rome seems to have plenty of experience with barbarian hordes (/joke) - or more seriously, how to mix the locals with tourists while remaining a city, not a preserved relic to be gawked at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At least part of it was caused by the cheapness of flights - which also brings tourists with less disposable income to leave behind.

<comment><USER19> We all like to complain about the annoyances and uselessness of the TSA (EDIT: and other post 9/11 security changes) or the cramped seats and extra fees that come with a standard economy ticket, but not enough attention is paid to how much safer and cheaper flying has become over the last few decades.

<comment><USER20> When did the TSA make flying safer and cheaper?

<comment><USER21> I don't think OP is saying that TSA has affected safety or cost, merely that flying has gotten cheaper and safer(independent of his statement about the TSA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "He noted that in 1960, when the jet age began, around 25 million international trips were taken. Last year, the number was 1.3 billion."

I honestly did not expect the number to be that high.

So a double digit percentage of all humanity travels internationally, every year.

<comment><USER23> Could be, but I think that number includes people taking multiple trips each. Think businessmen.

<comment><USER24> I really don't think it's close to double digits. I don't even consider myself as having travelled a lot and I've taken two international trips per year for the last five or so years on average. There should be people who do dozens of international trips a year but there must be a lot of people who do two or three international trips a year.

<comment><USER25> Like a lot of things it's probably a heavily-skewed distribution. For a large number of europeans it could be a half dozen from holidays alone. For businesspeople in Europe it could easily be dozens of trips per year.

But there's probably huge swaths of the population who have never traveled internationally for economic reasons, or because they live in a large country (like China, the US, India or Russia) which makes that less necessary.

<comment><USER23> Or my relatives in Geneva, who regularly shop in France, dine in Germany, and then drive home, in the same day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't know about Facebook and Instagram being the main "culprits", but rather the fact that it's so much easier to travel today, than it was before. And I'm talking about everything from price to accessibility. You just grab your phone, order a ticket, book a room somewhere, pay up and wait for the departure date to come. Sure, social media helps promoting places and creates an urge to show that you also travel to these ultra amazing locations. But if it was more difficult to travel, people wouldn't be touristing as much either. As I see it, it's a two way relationship where both ends fuel the other.

</comment><comment><USER27> We have seen nothing yet. Chinese tourism is going to go through the roof for the rest of the century. Boeing produces about 40 737s a month, plus other models, and production is only going to go up. Every fifth Boeing is going to China.

<comment><USER28> This felt very true in Switzerland this winter. We were the only non-chinese in a local bus through Interlaken. Not that I have something against it, just that they sure advertise it well in China. Also chinese street signs are slowly showing up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A lot.

Travel now is part of conspicuous consumption as much as a flashy purse is. Displaying that you went to some small French village on your Instagram can generate a fair amount of prestige and envy. Also, unlike purses though, there is a permanent record of your purchase for all to see.

</comment><comment><USER30> I find it fascinating that people want to fill their lives with "authentic" experiences and then they go out of their way to set themselves up for cookie cutter "zombie" experiences. Cram your vacation into a minimum amount of time. Spend all your time in generic airports, hotels, and tour buses. Take the exact same pictures everyone else does. Blaming all this stuff on millenials and instagram is lame, these same patterns have been common for not just decades but generations.

It doesn't take much to get away from the crowds. It also doesn't take much to have unique, different, more satisfying experiences. Walk more, explore more, don't be so concerned with ticking off the classic "must do" checkmarks, take the time for your vacation to be for you.

<comment><USER31> It's a socioeconomic class thing. Humans organize themselves into heirarchies, so if the class you're in (or one above) starts doing something that can illustrate their status, and not doing it can separate you, then you are also compelled to do it to keep up.

But once the class below catches up, the class above will change what it is that separates them (by definition since humans are inherently wanting to outdo each other). Once material goods become cheap, the thing that separates people with status from people without is time. Upper class people have time to go on lengthy international vacation, something lower class people can't do even with money.

In my circles, it's not cool to just go to the big sights that mass Chinese and Indian tourists go to. So now a riskier trip with more expenses and planning is required to show status, such as going out on your own backpacking in South America or Safari in Africa or hopping around some islands no one's heard of for scuba diving or hiking in Nepal. The older people opt for luxury in their vacations, showing that not only can they afford to go traveling, but they can go with their whole extended family and rent huge houses in national parks.

But it doesn't have to be explicit thinking of "I'm going to show this other person up", it's just the way humanity works in my opinion. You have a certain network, and you either maintain yourself in it or you fall out of it if you don't continue to do the things that network is doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I live in a relatively small (population ~260,000) Western European city. It's really pleasant during most of the calmer months, but come summer (and the festival of nearly ten days), there's 2+ million people visiting during that time. Having been to the festival (which is spread throughout the small city), it simply becomes impossible to stay beyond a couple of hours, lest you get nauseated with the pressure of the crowds. Most locals simply leave the city during that entire festive season.

<comment><USER33> Serious question: do you notice or feel any of the economic impact of the tourists? It seems like there's a decent side hustle to be made during the summer from all those people

<comment><USER32> By "you", if you mean the city, I presume so—when I see the cafés, restaurants open almost until 03:00 AM (at least during the ten days of the festival), and probably the local musicians and artists might also make a buck or two from their performances (not to mention people renting out their homes via AirBnB; I don't know how popular that option is here, as I certainly see lots of closed and 'dark' homes at night).

But many locals say that they don't feel like being in the city during summer due to overcrowdedness and they feel like they can't get the day-to-day errands done in the city without going through a sea of people.

<comment><USER25> It was like this in Barcelona. In August the center is crowded to the point of disfunction; it's like being at a festival or something. I used to live a few minutes from Las Ramblas and I dreaded even going down the block to pick up milk from the corner store during high-season.

<comment><USER32> /me can relate; I recall that neighborhood (was in Barcelona a couple of times in winter, for conferences).

Here I just bicycle the complete opposite direction from the center to go to "known quiet spots" where we can get errands done. And pleasantly enough, the city has also recently implemented a plan to expand the "no cars" zone in the city, thus it has become even more safer for bikers and pedestrians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I traveled around South America while working remotely a few years back. There's almost none of this disneyfication. In Ecuador, Peru, and Chile it was extremely normal to have days with no interactions with anyone who could speak English.

I know that this article is mostly about those who live in the host city, but it does also mention the experience of the traveler. For any travelers looking to avoid these situations, there are plenty of wonderful places to go where there's not disneyfication. I almost just began to list countries out but really: It's almost everywhere other than a few major cities in Europe!

<comment><USER35> Not sure I quite agree with this - Scotland for example is facing problems in a number of non-urban areas due to growing tourism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Well if certain cities don't want them, I'm sure there are many places that would love to have the boost from tourism. Maybe we'll start seeing more tourism advertisement and viral marketing campaigns through social media (pay a trend-setter to come to your city and vlog about it, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER37> "Europe" isn't worried. Some Europeans are. Some others aren't. In Barcelona there is a three-party war between hotels, leftist council and landlords. Council hasn't allowed to build new hotels in years, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER38> "for a lot of people, the photos you take on a trip become more important than the experience."

Cheap photography is to blame for this more than anything else. I was transiting through Dubai a few years back and spent a bit of time at the Burj Khalifa. There is a fountain at the base that does a performance every so often. The majority of people were not seeing the fountain directly at all, they were watching it through their mobile phones. It was a weird sight. I personally didn't take a video since you can see much better ones on Youtube than the one I'd have been able to take with trying to keep other people's phones out of it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Travel off-season, and if you want to be away from other tourists (I don't buy this traveller/tourist distinction) invest just a little bit of time to find somewhere that's not a hotspot.

As for overtourism - it's a nice problem to have.

</comment><comment><USER7> I still think summer vacation is one of society's worst inventions. It creates so many problems in different fields, like the summer education loss. Overtourism is just one of them.

<comment><USER21> Could you elaborate on the summer education loss? My understanding is that grades drop across summer/fall breaks, but the (little amouht of) research shows that shortening the breaks doesn't actually resolve the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've even noticed it in the California wine country. While in decades past the weekend flow was typically from the North Bay to San Francisco, now on weekends we regularly have traffic throughout the day in Santa Rosa. Healdsburg, a town of around 10,000 people has added around 300 hotel rooms this year. We are no where near tourists outnumbering locals, but it is definitely much different than when I was a kid

</comment><comment><USER40> does anyone notice how if other people say something along the lines of: 'we need to stop outsiders from coming here' it gets explained away as something like 'altering the character of historic cities'

whereas if an american says it, it gets explained way as: 'they are a racist protectionist bigot'.

<comment><USER41> There's a big difference between tourists and permanent migration.

<comment><USER40> I'm not talking about that, but if they don't want you visiting, they sure as heck don't want you staying.

<comment><USER17> Nope. Nope nope nope.

There's a great deal of difference, and it hinges on time.

If your plan for visiting is "get the cheapest one-day return flight from Wherever, binge drink all night with your buddies, retch it up en route to airport and sleep on the return flight," all you care about is the cheap booze - literally nothing else matters (yes, this is a significant set of tourists around here).

Then you get the other tourists who actually come for something else spend money in addition to using the infrastructure. That is normal, albeit with major scaling problems (there's the issue - "don't have enough space to put all the tourists coming to see the Major Must-See Sights, as those aren't inflatable"). Those care about the appearance NOW ("people retching on public transport? How revolting!").

And then you get the normal city traffic - with locals, expats, and whoever else actually _lives_ here. And those care about quality of life in long term ("what good is public transport, if it efficiently gets you into a city center that's devoid of actual life, only with a disneylandesque imitation? Will I want to live in such city in 5 years? What do I want to _change_?").

In other words, the longer you're planning to visit, the more probable it is that you'll be nicer about it, because you'll be expecting similar behavior in return. If you just pass through: eh well, break that window, piss in the street, kick that dog - not likely anyone will catch you within the remaining four _hours_. Note that this doesn't have any relation to _whence_ the tourists are coming - the behavior correlates very closely with the length of the stay, be it an just-out-of-town sports team (common) or a stag party from the UK (also common).

<comment><USER25> Yeah this was a big complaint about tourists (especially from certain countries) in Barcelona: they viewed the city as a playground and somewhere to let off steam, and they acted in inconsiderate and disrespectful ways in which they would never act back home. It's like to them Mediterranean culture seemed permissive and relaxed compared to what they were used to, so they made the false assumption that "anything goes" rather than putting in the effort to actually learn and respect the norms of the culture they were guests of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I am more than happy for the trend to build brand on social media with all the picture they take. It retires the fun practice of them showing everyone a slideshow of their trip. Like 8-track, I am overjoyed at watching slideshows becoming a historical curiosity.

</comment><comment><USER43> They didn't list google maps and google translate. Once we have live translation speech to speech, the world will see a real reshuffle of populations, not just tourism.</comment>


Google's Video Nasties - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-03-21/google-s-video-nasties <comment><USER2> I get the argument that corporations ought to take responsibility for where their money goes, but I feel like this is a bit similar to if I buy a cookie and the cookie baker buys a house and the former owner of the house buys a gun and kills some people - is it reasonable to hold me partly responsible for contributing to it? Should we want that level of control in our lives? What's the average degrees of Kevin Bacon between someone and an unscrupulous person? Do we reserve this kind of judgement for felons or white collar criminals as well?

From what I understand of online targeted advertising is that it's a way for corporations to target the _viewer_ , as opposed to the video they are watching. I have a diverse array of interests and watch a whole bunch of videos on YouTube on a variety of subjects. I am not defined by a single video or channel.

As per my understanding, I am the commodity. If I am a history buff and I want to watch an Adolf Hitler speech for academic reasons or just curiosity, by casting aspersions on the channel or the video, you are effectively casting aspersions on me! Is the value of my time tainted because of one video or channel?

In my experience, when I look at something on Amazon, I invariably see an ad for it later on on some other site. It's clear to me that this is a connection between Amazon and me via the ad network. It puzzles me as to why there seems to be this outdated mentality about how this works, which incorrectly associates the ad with the page instead of the user.

<comment><USER3> I think there's two factors at work here. Number one, the ad buyers have a brand image they wish to control, and therefore they have an interest in ensuring that their brand is not associated with content they think would tarnish their image. Even if every ad-viewer consciously knew that the ads did not imply endorsement of the content, there are subconscious factors to consider (factors which form the basic premise of a huge percentage of corporate advertising--eg that positive subconscious associations with brand imagery is one of the purposes of advertising).

Second, this is a (needed) power play on the part of ad buyers. Google has growing control over huge swaths of online and mobile advertising. Ad buyers need to push back, questioning the value of this sort of advertising and demanding more control over where their ads are displayed. Why should they trust Google to do the job of deciding where their ads belong for them? Google has proven time and again that they trust their own AI and machine learning tools far more than they should. And the longer they wait, the worse it's going to get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The ironic thing is that this creates the very problem it seeks to solve...

If advertisers have no control over which content their ads appear near then they can legitimately claim, when criticised, that they are unable to pick and choose.

By giving advertisers control, when criticised, the critics can use that same control in order to pressure advertisers to limit ads to inoffensive content only (which, frankly, is almost nothing anymore).

But with the direction "being offended" has taken (i.e. someone on twitter will take offense to anything, and they feel they have a legitimate right to never feel offended) it won't be long before most content is inaccessible.

<comment><USER5> _But with the direction "being offended" has taken (i.e. someone on twitter will take offense to anything, and they feel they have a legitimate right to never feel offended) it won't be long before most content is inaccessible._

I dunno. I find Nazis, cat torture videos and pro-ISIS propaganda offensive. But you are right, clearly free speech must be protected at all costs and even made profitable, and clearly it being remove from YouTube and no longer subsidized by major brands advertising would be a huge set back for it.

Maybe people could go to NaziCatTorturers.com and pay to see it or something.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure why you were downvoted, hyperbole maybe. But you raise a very valid point. People are using a "slippery slope" argument to justify supermarkets indirectly funding terrorist groups by way of sponsored propaganda videos. Advertisers should absolutely have some choice over how and where their adverts are shown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _In reality, they don 't really want to clamp down since more controls reduce ad inventory and add to their costs. (As Gadfly colleague Shira Ovide points out, the tech giants' biggest enemy is hubris.)_

That seems forced. I understand it's a link to another article that they wanted to include somehow, but it's specifically not hubris if they have a valid reason, and _as just stated_ it's because it reduces inventory and adds to their costs.

</comment><comment><USER8> YouTube also just had a big pushback from the LGBTQ+ community because they quietly instituted a feature that (unevenly) blocked videos having anything to do with being LGBTQ+ as "objectionable."

[http://teneightymagazine.com/2017/03/19/youtubes- restricted-...](http://teneightymagazine.com/2017/03/19/youtubes-restricted- mode-limiting-lgbtq-visibility/)

They've walked it back with "our algorithm went overboard," but I wonder when people are gonna stop buying this excuse. If the automated system you put in place serves extremist ads or deems a whole class of people as objectionable, that's on you.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if front-loading advertisements is the future. Drinking your verification can before you get on the YouTube ride.

<comment><USER10> I know stuff like this is usually noise, but this 4chan[0] image is super relevant to this comment. If you weren't specifically referencing this, color me impressed.

[0]: [https://imgur.com/r/4chan/dgGvgKF](https://imgur.com/r/4chan/dgGvgKF)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's google's platform and they can do what they want, and I have little issue blocking actual racists. But, banning hate speech (correctly) stopped any ad revenue from going to Tommy Sotomayor, a black man who grew up in the poor south and who talks about black issues. The problem: He's very critical of black people/culture, issues he personally faced growing up.

The algorithm works in this instance. His speech is hate speech by most definitions of the word. But that's the main problem. Hate speech includes reasonable hate!

If I had it my way, reasonable discussion about a culture should never be blocked. Even if it's hateful. Hate should not be banned, otherwise people will vent their hate in worse ways.

Here's his channel if you're curious: [https://www.youtube.com/user/sotomayortv2](https://www.youtube.com/user/sotomayortv2)

Example video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycYDUCGi7no1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycYDUCGi7no1)

<comment><USER12> How can you say "He's very critical of black people" in tht wording with a straight face, after acknowledging that he is black too? The point is that there's a difference between saying "I hate this person and the thousands like her who behaving this way" and "I hate black people because they behave this way".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this related to the "restricted mode" fiasco with its over-broad restriction on LGBT content? [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/03/21/youtube- rev...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/03/21/youtube-reverses- restrictions-gay-themed-content-following-uproar/)

<comment><USER14> What's the real deal with "restricted mode"? I don't think they care too much about people having to sign up to be able to watch a video. Do restricted videos show no ads? I can understand certain businesses not wanting to see their ads displayed next to some BDSM gay parade, LGTBI++ propaganda, beheadings or other extreme violence, etc. In that case, if they show no ads, why host them at all, if they can't cover the bandwidth they consume?

<comment><USER15> In theory restricted mode gives some control to parents who might be happy to let their children watch Etho playing minecraft, but not RoosterTeeth Let's Play playing minecraft.

In practice, and everyone knows this, filters fucking suck and either have terrible false negatives and don't block awful content, or terrible false positives and block stuff that shouldn't be blocked, or both.

That's nothing to do with this, which is that advertisers don't want their ads next to people saying rape is ok.

<comment><USER14> Maybe I'm confusing restricted mode with something else? I think it's this: [http://i.imgur.com/Kne3CvL.png](http://i.imgur.com/Kne3CvL.png)

I don't think those restrictions are applied automatically. I believe they are set when a video get lots of reports. Maybe it only takes a few reports to restrict the videos, or maybe a human has to evaluate them before flipping the switch. As much as filters suck (I agree with you), I think a few false positives are worth it if we don't show a kid a video of some idiot saying rape is ok.

But I don't use youtube much, so I might be wrong... that's why I ask. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the finance category, so many posts are robo written now. If you Google just about any ticker symbol you get a very unnatural reading post about its recent movement. Just meaningless analysis that say nothing and recites some ratios. I spend about 2 seconds on those pages when researching a company.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think instead of these corps virtue signalling they should look at it this way: a person might be watching jihadist content and descending to a bad place, but then they see your sweet ass Mercedes ad and are like "fuck this, I eschew my extremist tendencies and vow to join the Western consumeristic rat race so that maybe one day I will have my own Merc and hot model friends inside of it! USA!!" I mean standard lane assist technology? Thats way cooler than using a shitty cell phone to blow up your clunky suicide vest.</comment>


Edward Snowden promotes global treaty to curtail surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/edward-snowden-promotes-global-treaty-to-curtail-surveillance-1.3243469 <comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what the chances are for something like this taking off. On the one hand it is popular for politicians around the globe to criticize the U.S. surveillance programs - on the other hand, most governments probably want the same kind of power over their own citizens that mass surveillance can give them.

Governments which don't currently have the technical means to run these kind of programs might be more likely to sign up.

I really hope some country will step up soon and get the ball rolling.

<comment><USER2> The chance is zero.

Treaties work in a situation where states are happy to stop doing something if they can be reassured that other states will do so too. But this isn't even really about state vs state, it's primarily about state vs non-state actors. The interests of all states are aligned here in not signing any such treaty.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not all states have these kinds of programs already running. And even if all states interests are aligned, that still leaves the people demanding change. Does democracy have no chance in this instance?

Remember that this is not the first time that mass surveillance programs have been defeated. East Germany might be a good example. Of course it's different - but also it's the same. I hope we don't need to go further down the Orwellian rabbit hole before we realize the problems and stand up to fight them.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Saying the GDR's surveillance program was defeated has the causality wrong. The state was dissolved entirely amidst the Fall of Communism. With unification, the main SIGINT, HUMINT and foreign surveillance agency is now the BND.

Unless your proposal is to topple nation states.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just because a government is overthrown doesn't guarantee that the new government uses less repressive policies than the old. But it worked here because the new government had a different vision for life than the old.

I am not hoping that violent coups are necessary - or even possible in many places. But the fact is that not all governments around the world are as cordial as the Western ones, and mass surveillance has a terrifying potential in many places around the globe.

I do hope that democratic states can avoid these outcomes when enough political will has been gathered to affirm a way of life that values privacy, and a transparent government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A more realistic option would be to institute a strong audit process. Anytime personal data is viewed or matched against some criteria, it would be logged. By default, those logs would be available after something like a few years, unless there's an ongoing investigation (and that extension would be logged along with who/why it was authorized).

The only way something like this could even work is if there was a completely separate government agency that was both empowered and motivated to be the counterweight against warrantless surveillance. Unfortunately, I have no idea how this could ever happen.

</comment><comment><USER4> The only way surveillance on the current scale will be defeated is if technology makes it moot.

Perhaps someone could comment on whether current encryption protocols are sufficient? If not, what would it take?

<comment><USER5> There is currently no system that can provide perfect anonymity against a global adversary (someone who has wiretaps on all links and can possibly inject data as well), and it's not clear if it is technically feasible to build one.

There is also no feasible way of mathematically proving that complex hardware or software does what is supposed to do, which means that you need to trust the authors, and isolation against bugs with security impact is required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can see something like the Open Skies treaty, actually working. But that doesn't end the surveillance it merely formalises the situation so all parties have equal access to the same level of spying capabilities on each other.

</comment><comment><USER7> They were already doing it secretly and lying about it. Why wouldn't they just sign the treaty, win their political points and votes, and go right back to doing it secretly and lying about it?

</comment><comment><USER8> He's got a better chance of being pardoned, unfortunately.</comment>


The Web's Creator Looks to Reinvent It - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator-looks-to-reinvent-it.html <comment><USER3> It's simple: make computers secure enough that connecting one to the net won't imply being hacked within a few days (minutes in some cases). Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections, make them dead simple to set up and bullet proof. And so on. You can only wind this clock back step-by-step, a reboot will break too much that we have come to depend on.

It all went wrong at NAT, we were supposed to be _peers_ , not producers and consumers.

<comment><USER4> _> It's simple: make computers secure enough that connecting one to the net won't imply being hacked within a few days_

It's not really simple. It's actually complex and having a general purpose computer be hardened enough for non-geek homeowners not to screw up (social engineering, security warnings fatigue, etc) is possibly an _unsolvable_ problem.

If RSA SecurID whose very business competency is _security_ can be hacked[1], the homeowner running Dovecote/Sendmail/Qmail/etc on Linux or Linux container has no chance at all. If uber-techno-geek Mark Russinovich can get infected with a rootkit[2], the average homeowner has no chance.

One could supposedly burn an embedded chip with email software (a dedicated "email server appliance") that can't be hacked -- but that also means it can't be updated. Email technology evolves (cleartext email --> SSL email --> next tech is ???) Also, if a vulnerability is discovered, the homeowner has to buy a new email appliance. If you make an email server on FPGA than can be flashed with new firmware, you've now re-opened an attack vector from social engineering.

 _> Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections, _

If you're talking technical issues such as ISPs opening up SMTP traffic on port 25 for residential internet connections, that's not really the problem. The real issue is the social dynamic of _trust_ which is affected by bad actors and spam. Analyzing it through the lens of "technology" disguises the true problem. The puzzle of "trust" happens in a layer above SMTP/25.

[1][http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/the-rsa-hack-how- th...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/the-rsa-hack-how-they-did-it/)

[2][https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2005/10/...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2005/10/31/sony- rootkits-and-digital-rights-management-gone-too-far/)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for Russinovich link. I hadn't read it and it was extremely interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Software is the result of business models. Business models are the result of risk management around desired outcomes. Making more money, for example. Making more money is the reason we've had bubbles and new business layers appear. MSPs were the precursor to SaaS, for example.

Software sucks because business models must frequently be addressed before customer's needs are addressed. Of course this is a simplification of the process, but no company continues writing software if their business models for that software fail and they run out of money or is threatened with shutdown if they don't comply with the government.

To "reinvent" the "web" (or what I call the Intercloud), business models must be removed from the equation. New models of work storage and exchange must be created to allow developers to write code for the people who need it. When a user relies on a feature, there should always be a clear path for them to a) continue using that feature for as long as they see fit and b) enter into a contractual agreements with a developers to develop new features they need. This should be able to be done without a corporation or business model getting in the way.

It also implies all the software down the stack is reinvented in the same way to support this new methodology. Deployments/installs, for example, will need to be done differently moving forward.

This is obviously bad news for the "startup" scene, but good news for humanity. Things are getting complicated and clearly don't scale well doing it the old way. It's time for a change.

<comment><USER7> Wat?

> To "reinvent" the "web" (or what I call the Intercloud), business models > must be removed from the equation.

This goes into my "and everyone gets a pony" set of solutions.

<comment><USER6> Actually, I think the entire software model needs to be peer-to-peer, no businesses or brands involved. I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about this and building a prototype of one solution that does immutable software deployments using the blockchain. This may elicit another "wat?" from you, but I assure you it's been vetted with peers and it appears to be a sound approach. That's not to say my hypotheses are correct, or all the software is done for this yet.

You may also want to check out IPFS and Sandstorm for other examples on this topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Efforts towards thorough decentralization are easy when dealing with static resources(see ipfs, torrents etc).

Issues creep up when you need to support dynamic resources, which rely on :

a) user input b) stateful server

With b), a will feel more comfortable sharing data when there's trust built up in b). This seems to go directly against legacy-web as centralization was the solution to the trust problem.

With new technologies like bitcoin showing trust can be based in mathematics, and ethereum showing that interactions can be based around mathematical rules, we definitely have the technological raw power to built a scalable, trustable, non-censorable alternative to www.

I do hope these new technologies are not too-hampered by how ubiquitous and entrenched www is.

<comment><USER9> They managed a) user input b) stateful server with Diaspora as an alternative to Facebook. The trouble with decentralisation is users aren't bothered with it unless they need it to circumvent laws with things like bittorrent for copyright laws and bitcoin for money laundering, drug dealing, cryptolocker extortion and the like.

<comment><USER10> Users don't bother with Diaspora because while it makes some gestures towards being simple and friction-free, it's essentially still a geek project for geeks, and not a mass user project for mass users who have zero interest in technology and just want to be social.

The distributed network idea has been around for a long time, and ideally it's how the web will go.

But it's much more of a technical _and social_ challenge than today's server- based web.

To win users it has to be significantly better than what's available today - not just another way to do the same things, but with a few extra complications and unreliabilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the way the web has been conceived once and then evolved around a relatively small set of core concepts is amazing. I find it hard to imagine though that after 20 years of evolution we could go back to a point where we apply another round of centralized planning how it _actually_ should look like. The existence of centralized services is the result of demand and evolution, not of false planning in the beginning.

20 years is still a very short timespan, and we should probably admit that for huge societal changes like this we simply need more experimentation and more time. The rapid changes in technology sometimes lead people to the misconception that everything else would move similarly fast, but our human world is still slow. I'd rather see more people just try out different options on the web as it is and then have the most successful win rather than putting a bunch of clever people in a room and plan for everybody else.

<comment><USER12> One way to think about this is that these guys are going to try, they'll come up with stuff that no one uses and it will be some nerd somewhere that comes up with the next iteration of the web. I.e., it won't be Berners-Lee that does it, it will be the _next_ Berners-Lee somewhere.

Satoshi (whether one person, or a group) did it with Bitcoin. The concept is now ingrained into every architect's toolbox. While Bitcoin itself won't revolutionize the web, it is a huge step forward in how to think of decentralization in an environment where it is too costly (technically, financially) to effectively decentralize.

Perhaps the next step will be combining said decentralization with anonymity.

Then in 50 years, maybe we'll all have our own anonymity-preserving "cloud boxes" that follow us wherever we live, just like routers do now (save the anonymity and storage).

<comment><USER11> Yes, that's what I would favor. Not only decentralized web, but also dezentralized thinking and tinkering.

Maybe it's because the emphasis of the article is put on Berners-Lee and thereby creating a notion of authority, or because the group meeting and church-like environment somehow looks and sounds very much like design by committee, but the article didn't really convey that path to me.

<comment><USER12> My point was to say that it doesn't matter what these guys do. The web became centralized because that was expedient, convenient and we could pay someone else to do the work. Anything that doesn't have these characteristics will not replace the centralization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "People assume today's consumer has to make a deal with a marketing machine to get stuff for 'free,' even if they're horrified by what happens with their data. Imagine a world where paying for things was easy on both sides."

I can't see that friction is the problem. It's easy to implement payment on the web nowadays. The issue is getting people to want to actually pay, rather than going and looking elsewhere for the same thing for free.

The challenge with the web is as is noted at the end, not one of technology, but one of society. Making a better web means making how people work with each other through the web, what we expect of it, and how we want it to work better.

Unfortunately, time and time again we've seen people prefer free, lousy web content to even a ludicrously small payment for something really good.

How you fix _that_ (getting people to value what they get from the web and to be willing to pay for it), I don't know. Spotify, Netflix, The FT et al have shown that it's possible to get people to pay, but I can't imagine even the majority of the web going that way for now. Hopefully that changes in the future.

<comment><USER14> I think that the problem isn't paying per se, but rather just the inconvenience. After all people already pay plenty for their web connection. Something like Flattr might be the solution.

<comment><USER11> As a flattr user from both sides (site owner and site visitor), I can't say I was entirely happy with it. Although it's well implemented.

I find it difficult that they constrained the concept to payoff = $monthly_amount/$number_of_clicks. From both sides I would prefer to be able to set and see prices, not arbitrary equal results for all the sites I click. That had kept me from clicking in most cases, because I wouldn't want to give the equal amount to go to some 1-paragraph blogpost as to a 1 hour podcast. Even though I would want to contribute for both.

<comment><USER15> Potential to integrate the amount of micropayment as a star rating - think a combined "donate & rate" action after reading / watching. Let people contribute from 0.01 to 5.00 units of currency, in easy increments, that also indicate how much they liked it. Automatically bill and aggregate monthly.

<comment><USER11> I guess the charm of their solution is that they don't have to put these complex semantics into place. It sounds like a good idea, but rating and paying are two very different things - in my example, I would merely want to reward more effort (1h podcast) with more money. That doesn't mean I didn't like the short blogpost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Centralization really is a social problem. Among alternatives, most people will mindlessly choose the most popular one, while extreme popularity of something should instead be a reason to avoid it or at least to be very cautious about it.

No decentralized technology is immune to this herd behavior. Even Bitcoin is probably doomed to become dominated and effectively controlled by some popular mining pool or online wallet provider. This will not change until new ethics of decentralization forms in the society. And that will happen eventually, but it could take a lot of time.

<comment><USER17> So I agree with you in general and also wish to un-pack a little of what you mention based on my personal growing up alongside internet access. As in, I can do the 2400 baud modem handshake from memory, ran a server on a cable modem, and now consider myself more a user/consumer of technology than a creator/in the field.

Traditionally access to the WWW had a pretty high threshold of combined factors: Cost for hardware and communications, time and effort to understand how things worked, and a still pretty basic group of sites and such. Lee is wrong in that the Web used to be 'more open' from a general social sense - <USER2> was AOL chat rooms before Snapchat, it was GeoCities before Facebook, and on and on and on. Large organizations like Dropbox have made it competitive and a more intelligent decision than trying to set up a personal server and jump through all sorts of intellectual and digital hoops to make it work.

Or, in other words, the easier something is to use, the more idiots are going to get their hands on it and use it. The Web is simply a reflection of the human species. Both stunningly beautiful and tragically ugly, it's certainly evidence to me that Utopia is, fundamentally, irrational and likely impossible without exlcusion and selection bias.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> More than "reinventing the web", I would worry about finding strategies to keep the web open against the strong pull towards (semi) walled gardens that is coming from Facebook and others.

<comment><USER19> I'm afraid this can only be done by introducing new laws.

The network effect is just too strong, and most people don't care enough about privacy and openness to switch to different networks.

<comment><USER20> Or by providing a more attractive option.

<comment><USER19> How? In this new economy, big corporations have structured themselves such that they can compete with and protect against "disruptive" startups.

Also, coming up with something more attractive takes time (trial and error), and big corporations can easily incorporate (copy) those new features in their products in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The end of the article said it best. It isn't an infrastructure problem. It's a society problem; people want to use centralized services, ie. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc. Muggles don't give two fucks about privacy - idiots aren't usually political dissidents until their food supply gets low or their Snapchat gets filtered by the Great Firewall.

<comment><USER22> People don't want to use these services. People have to use them, as there is no other method. Had the web's been decentralized from the get-go, and someone would come with a centralized service, you'd find the goldenkeys of the world arguing "people want to use decentralized services".

<comment><USER21> The federation idea seems to be the best way to create decentralization . The problem is that most people working on a type of website usually combine forces and host together. ThePirateBay and Libgen have come the closest to being federation-like. Tons of mirrors and different host names with the same source code and content that is meshnetted across the federation. The only thing that tpb isnt a good demonstration of is divided private data. That is the motivator for most decentralization proponents

<comment><USER16> Federation does not solve the problem. Eventually most users will flock towards single most popular instance of a federated service. Email is federated, but most users betray it by choosing the most popular provider (Gmail). And Google will happily drop email federation "to protect users from spam" when they get enough user share as they did with XMPP.

<comment><USER22> Technically email isn't federated. Like the web you have an email server that hosts an email address and all mail to and from go to it, and while you can IMAP to it through a client, and host a "mirror" of it, to send/recieve emails you still need to go through the single email server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> With a computer in every pocket, we're ready for a peer-to-peer Internet. I'd rather host my own wall and email than rely on Facebook and Google. Of course I would still rely heavily on some good open-source software. And for most people this open-source software would have to be packaged nice and simple, like "apps."

Also I've read that distributed networks (or "meshes"?) are much harder to get working well than centralized ones. I don't know much about them, though. We might need to wait for another battery breakthrough, too, if my phone will be doubling as a server. I guess we would also need more blockchains, sharding and encryption like with Tor, and a greater comfort with eventual consistency.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't like how the article completely left out IPFS.

</comment><comment><USER25>
      "The web is already decentralized," Mr. Berners-Lee said.
      "The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one
      big social network, one Twitter for microblogging. We
      don't have a technology problem, we have a social
      problem."

      One that can, perhaps, be solved by more technology.

This is a very confused article. It's a social problem! But we're going to solve it with technology!

I'm sure Tim Berners-Lee has a great understanding of the situation, but since it didn't come across in the article let's try to build our own description of the problem here in the comments. To do this we'll go through the most interesting projects in the "fix the web" space and steal their key insights.

# Camlistore - All Your Data Should Be in One Place

I probably have important data in two dozen different places. Google, FB, Dropbox, Reddit, GitHub, Mint, Stack Exchange, Amazon, etc. This is crazy!

All my personal data should go into a personal data store. I'm not sure how we'll ever approach a sane system without this step. Camlistore is all about making that data store.

More info here:

[https://camlistore.org/doc/overview](https://camlistore.org/doc/overview) " Camlistore is your personal storage system for life. "

# Urbit - Everyone Should Have a Name

Right now only techies own their names. We do it in two ways -- the total ownership way where we make a private key and identify ourselves with it, and the "technically renting but basically ownership" way where we buy a domain. You can reach me at <myname>@<mydomain> today, tomorrow, and probably for the rest of my life.

Most non-techies get by with Gmail and a FB page. This isn't the worst, but it's not ideal.

And for every different service we use we get a different name. I don't want 20 names! I want to use my name! (Or sometimes one of my pseudonyms, which Urbit has first-class support for).

In Urbit everyone has a name[1]. Even better, this name maps to their computer, so if I know my friends name I can connect to their computer -- the foundation of getting an actual peer-to-peer network back from the current mess.

[1] Connected to a private key and human readable! But often silly, eg: ~gumdob-tumlub

# Sandstorm - Everyone Needs a Server

Servers are necessary to be real internet citizens. I think this is basically self-explanatory. If your entire internet presence disappears when you close your laptop lid you're basically beyond helping, and will always need some kind of walled-garden to watch out for you.

The problem is that Linux servers are a pain to host. With Sandstorm you can set up a server with one click. You can install apps with one click. This is . . . basically such an obviously good idea it's hard to find more to say about it.

If there are more interesting projects in this space please mention them, I'm going back to coding:)

EDIT: I wasn't really sure what to write for a conclusion, but now I've thought of one: The web evolved, what we get next will be _built_. This is very exciting.

</comment><comment><USER26> What's the killer app?</comment>


How Many Die from Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals? (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/how-many-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-us-hospitals <comment><USER2> As a Doctor, the potential for improvement begins from very basics. For instance - a radiologist sees a funny looking line on an xray and reports "this is probably nothing, but we should repeat the xray in 6 weeks to make sure." Sometimes these requests slip through the cracks and in a fraction of cases the patient presents 2 years later with terminal cancer from their metastatic lung Ca.

Ensuring blood thinners are prescribed post coronary bypass surgery or stenting is another one. It should happen every time, but sometimes by human error it may not.

A good startup idea would be to make a hotlist of the top ~1000 of these obvious, preventable errors, combine IT data sources to predict when they might be occuring, and have checking systems in place to prevent them. If it worked even adequately, hospitals would be seen as negligent for not using such a system.

<comment><USER3> There was an article making the rounds here on HN about medical checklists, similar to what pilots use for takeoff and landing procedures, for example. Can't remember good keywords to search for, though...

<comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Checklist_Manifesto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Checklist_Manifesto)

Another example of doctors advocating checklists.

<comment><USER5> This article is by the same author:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the- checklist](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist)

I like the quote from the doctor doing a lot of the work with checklists, answering a question about when they will be widely adopted in medicine:

 _"At the current rate, it will never happen," [Pronovost] said, as monitors beeped in the background. "The fundamental problem with the quality of American medicine is that we've failed to view delivery of health care as a science. The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored by research funders, government, and academia. It's viewed as the art of medicine. That's a mistake, a huge mistake. And from a taxpayer's perspective it's outrageous."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem, and the root cause of many medical mistakes, is medical staff not getting enough sleep.

I know of nurses who could barely keep their eyes open while driving to work. And that's because they just finished a shift at a different hospital.

At a time, a friend of mine had to be picking up his wife from work, because he was afraid of what might happen if she drove herself.

So let's fix the sleep deprivation problem.

<comment><USER7> Some studies show that sleep deprivation is not a major factor in medical mistakes. Others indicate that patient hand-off is a more important area for medical mistakes.

This isn't to say that doctors shouldn't sleep, only to suggest that having doctors work longer to reduce patient hand-off is a legitimate and justified choice.

My ideal would be to improve the process and technology behind hand-off enough so that there isn't any justification to have doctors work longer hours. That is how you fix the sleep deprivation problem. Not seeing my wife for 30 hours because she is on call is no fun.

> "Overall, the risks of adverse outcomes of elective daytime procedures were > similar whether or not the physician had provided medical services the > previous night."

[http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1415994](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1415994)

> "Implementation of the handoff program was associated with reductions in > medical errors and in preventable adverse events and with improvements in > communication, without a negative effect on workflow."

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25372088/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25372088/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I'm not mistaken, in Kaiser hospitals, each time a drug is administered to an in-hospital patient, the patient's wristband is electronically scanned with a handheld gun to re-verify that this is in fact Patient X with condition Y who needs treatment Z.

<comment><USER9> Correct, both the patient _and_ the medication are scanned and confirmed against the electronic order before administration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a few comments:

My main experience as a patient tells me that one major area of improvement comes from the utter lack of coordination there in on the part of hospitals, insurance companies, and pharmacies to get me the meds I've been prescribed. How many hours do I need to be on the phone? This is "just" at home, though.

In the hospital, I often have just as hard a time to get all my meds because some of my meds are so specialized that the in hospital pharmacy doesn't have them, and I have to bring them from home. If I come in due to an emergency, I am likely to forget them. Thus, additional problems can come about from not having these meds.

Those aren't what most would consider mistakes on the parts on doctors or health care professionals, though, that's institutional blockers to my health care. Do they get counted in this?

As for mistakes on the part of human workers, I wonder just how much is from workers not washing their hands. Anecdotally, a lot of people I know complain that doctors are loathe to do that and other cross-infection control procedures that are simple, but repetitive.

Another barrier I see (although not exactly a "mistake" from one person) to good care is how much effort this can all take, and that it often necessarily means taking time off work. Taking too much time off means you may get fired, etc. Is this taken into account?

I suppose many of my concerns are not direct causes--not getting your meds or getting to the doctor to figure out a problem early on means you miss the opportunity to prevent or fix an easier problem. Then have to deal with it as a full-blown disaster, which means more complicated care, and more opportunities for mistakes in the OR.

</comment><comment><USER11> At a CU medical shool lecture I just saw a paper cited when the infection rate was reduced from 3% to no incidents (two quarters) after the teams used checklists for a certain complicated procedure. That is one of many improvement tools being adopted.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm working on a startup to help with this problem. My belief is doctors don't have enough opportunity to practice the complex tasks of diagnostics and treatment planning. Right now best-practice for medical training involves expensive life-size manikins and dedicated simulation rooms with real staff. My goal is a realistic software simulation of the emergency room with a wide variety of patient scenarios to let students and docs easily practice in a setting where failure is okay.

<comment><USER13> Care to share the details of your startup? Lot's of ER docs involved with sim in my group of friends.

<comment><USER12> Sure.

[http://minervasoftworks.com/Minerva](http://minervasoftworks.com/Minerva)

I'm dedinitely looking for medical collaborators, so a mention to your friends would be appreciated.</comment></comment></comment>


Peek inside Rdio + invites  - <AUTHOR> http://www.usefultools.com/2010/06/your-music-made-portable/

<comment><USER2> My experience with rd.io:

1\. A friend offered an invite. I checked out the home page and saw a screenshot on a nexus one and was thankful there was an android client.

2\. Registered and found out there was no android client ('coming soon')

3\. Realized that my invite was for a 3 day trial and that the monthly cost would be $10.

4\. Said 'screw it' and went to play a few songs. more than half of the songs I went to play would just be skipped on my playlist with no explanation.

All in all, a terrible first impression.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't had any songs skip on my playlist, but yeah, that would have annoyed the crap out of me. And I was also disappointed at the lack of an Android app.

For what it's worth, the monthly cost is only $4.99 if you're not using the mobile app.

I think it has potential but I liked Lala better.</comment></comment>


A simple technique to increase productivity - <AUTHOR> http://blog.traindom.com/a-simple-technique-to-increase-productivity/

<comment><USER2> Trying to juggle gchat, work, email, and HN never ends well. I'm going to try this. Thanks.</comment>


In Negotiations, Play Stupid to Win Smart - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/tjan/2010/11/in-negotiations-play-stupid-to-win-smart.html <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be slightly different.

In _Start With No_ there is an interesting piece of advice that in a negotiation you want to make the other side feel comfortable, and one way to do that is to let the other side feel that they are one up on you. Which can mean not revealing what you know. But it can also mean deliberately looking awkward.

For instance one excellent negotiator that I know likes to show up to critical meetings without a pen. He then makes a show of needing a pen and borrowing one. Silly? Sure. But the trick has helped him get better terms in 7 figure negotiations.</comment>


Show HN: HNSlack – Front page of Hacker News to your Slack, every day - <AUTHOR> http://hnslack.xyz <comment><USER2> I have something similar, though it posts random links from HN rather than the entire frontpage. I have it set to run with a cronjob every 4 hours or so.

[https://github.com/ctrezevant/hackernews- bot](https://github.com/ctrezevant/hackernews-bot)

<comment><AUTHOR> looks good :) I wanted to make it easy to integrate it (someone without any knowledge of code can just set it up on their end and the front page once a day at 4 pm seems like an optimal medium to start with)

<comment><USER2> Thank you :)

And you did a fantastic job of that, setup is very easy and seamless!

By the way, is the source available?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would be great to have it post to slack if something reaches X points

<comment><AUTHOR> what's the threshold here? and if everyone sets up their own, with a million users, the server is making a million requests to the API and that's not super efficient

<comment><USER4> This is a good example of premature optimization at work.</comment></comment></comment>


Is Tesla 'Bricking' Story Just An Angry Owner's Warranty Claim? - <AUTHOR> http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1073312_is-tesla-bricking-story-just-an-angry-owners-shakedown

<comment><USER2> Yet another article that takes the original Bricking story to task without actually refuting any of it. So what if it's an angry owner if it's true?

Congrats to them for posting the owners manual, it's pretty clear keeping the cell charged is important, but the true risk doesn't get the treatment it's deserved. The fact that this car can essentially total itself from sitting idle for 2 months deserves more than some mentions in a manual, how about initials of the buyer where he has been explained the risks and the 40k price tag to correct the mistake?

Also, the letter mentions the pre-500 models not having the notification system, it's possible the pre-500 manuals didn't have all of this wording either.</comment>


We're moving away from torrents, so what's next? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getstrike.net/post/138192622233/were-moving-away-from-torrents-so-whats-next <comment><USER2> The headline is a bit misleading. I thought it was saying that the internet is moving away from torrents, not that a company was pivoting.

</comment><comment><USER3> What was it they did with torrents before ?

</comment><comment><USER4> I imagine a blockchain-based distributed file store that doesn't need a tracker. Or something that the blockchain IS the tracker.

<comment><USER5> Torrent's can work without a tracker BT supports peer discovery via DHT and few other distributed protocols.</comment></comment>