"autocomplete=off is ignored on non-login input elements" - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=468153#c164 <comment><USER2> Good. It's my browser. I get to turn its features on and off, not you.

And that goes double on my phone.

As a compromise, I'd accept a prompt like:

        +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+
        |    This page recommends we disable    |
        |    autocomplete. What do you think?   |
        |[Okay] [Fuck them; autocomplete anyway]|
        +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+

<comment><USER3> Sometimes it's better to turn off for usability reasons, and the browser doesn't have a clue about when that's the case. For example when the page has its own autocompleter, which has more information available to it than the browser does.

A good example is the branch-switching widget on Github's repo page. Browser autocomplete is a major pain in the ass when trying to use this widget. The page can load all the branch names itself, but your dumbass browser is "helpfully" autocompleting a bunch of branch names that probably don't even exist anymore, or exist in other repos. Gee, thanks soooo much.

<comment><USER4> I'd much rather have things like that broken then have to futz around with someones stupid login form that disabled password pasting and autocomplete.

<comment><USER5> Man, is that annoying, or login forms that are in a dynamic dialog and/or ajax-login out of band instead of a post, so that it doesn't offer a save option... I mean, I tend to use LastPass over the built-in manager, just the same, it gets annoying when sites work extra hard to subvert those things that make actually using the web easier.

Along the same lines is one of the reasons I actually like OAuth/OpenID/OpenAuth logins, etc... simply that I can avoid yet another login that I only use on one site, with yet another password, that I generate and won't remember anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm going to side with the Chrome team on this one. There's very few occasions when autocomplete being disabled makes sense, the vast majority are just developers dumping it in there because they want to make doubly-sure the user actually entered a field by hand (e.g. email addresses) and often for vaporous reasons like "Improve Data Quality," "Stop Spammers/Bots," and "Make sure the user enters the right data in the right box."

Ultimately if you want to assure data quality then use data or format validation, or verification (e.g. send an email with link). If you want to stop bots/spammers use captcha.

We did go through a period where people were "misusing" standard input boxes for other things and autocomplete would ruin that extra usage. But hopefully we've moved beyond turning an input box into a richtextbox using a complex array of hacks, and can now instead use things like Canvas.

PS - Hopefully they disable "smooth scroll" scripts next. So tired of having my scrolling ruined by "helpful" sites.

<comment><USER7> > There's very few occasions when autocomplete being disabled makes sense

What are those (seriously, I can't think of any off the top of my head).

<comment><USER8> I know of one from a previous project. We had a prompt that said "enter your home address" with JavaScript autocomplete using google location APIs. Unfortunately chrome would try to auto fill this box with a city name (not even the full address) and this auto fill prompt sat on top of the JS drop down.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't making it a textarea w/ rows=1 work? AFAIK textarea is not completed.

<comment><USER9> So we're back to hacks to replicate a feature that browser developers have decided to ignore? Gotta love web technology.

If "just use a textarea" is a valid solution, why did Google even bother not honoring autocomplete?

<comment><USER7> Well, the web technology is a pile of sh.t and in this case with the textarea you don't put your hands as deep in to is as you'd with the text input. That's how I interact with the web technology.

<comment><USER9> It's just amusing, that's all.

Prediction for the future:

1\. Google implements auto-complete for one-line textareas

2\. Web developers create textareas with 2 lines but hide the bottom line with CSS and disable the return key

3\. Something so diabolical even I can't think of it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google's own Search field:

        <input class="gsfi" id="lst-ib" maxlength="2048" name="q"
        autocomplete="off" title="Suche" type="text" value="" aria
        label="Suche" aria-haspopup="false" role="combobox" aria
        autocomplete="both" dir="ltr" spellcheck="false"
        style="border: none; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; height:
        auto; width: 100%; position: absolute; z-index: 6; left:
        0px; outline: none; background: ....

oh....

autocomplete="off" and autocomplete="both" really strange.

<comment><USER11> One is `autocomplete`, the other is `aria-autocomplete`.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not just Chrome. Safari[1], IE and even Firefox[2] haven't respected it either for quite some time.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22636673/safari-saved- pas...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22636673/safari-saved-passwords- are-overriding-autocomplete-off-in-forms)

[2] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906)

</comment><comment><USER13> Horrible. There are cases when autocomplete="off" is necessary to improve user experience. It's sad that such policies are defined by people not familiar with web development enough to know such cases.

Also, some forms will become inconsistent when autocomplete="off" is ignored (radio button filled by autocomplete instead of the value specified by developer, but the related text input field is disabled as specified by developer).

Moreover, it's a standard. Everyone was complaining about Microsoft when it introduced non-standard HTML and Javascript semantics. Now Google does that.

<comment><USER14> Are there any cases which can't be handled by autocomplete="okay-google- really-off"?

<comment><USER15> It'll be amusing if this creates an arms race where Google ignores more and more autocomplete values, until someone just makes an Apache/nginx extension which just gives them a random value.

<comment><USER16> Chrome 60 will now calculate the entropy of the value, and if it appears to contain more entropy than typical strings it will ignore the value and whack the programmer on the head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I actually find this particularly annoying working for a service aimed at elementary schools.

Our user base is almost entirely shared desktops / Chromebooks in schools. Not all school admins are smart enough to disable password saving / autocomplete (not to mention not all schools _have_ someone for this) so we see cases of a kids account getting misused because it was saved on some library desktop all the time.

Give users the option to opt out, but taking the power out of the app developers hands by default is short-sighted.

<comment><USER18> What you raise is a valid concern, but letting websites decide on enabling/disabling auto-complete is solving it entirely wrong way around.

If local admin is incapable of configuring user accounts, how are websites supposed to figure out who is who, and which browser is on shared computer?

After all, if managing user accounts is too hard for said admin (or we are talking about a shared PC in a library, which doesn't have user accounts as a matter of principle) - just make browser always start in private/incognito mode on shared computer. It is as easy as adding command-line argument "\--private-window" for firefox or "\--temp-profile" for chrome. That's it. Window closed - autocomplete gone. Problem solved.

<comment><USER19> Assumes a competent, dedicated local admin is on staff. This is not the case at about 75% of the SMBs I've come into contact with over the past two years

<comment><USER20> Modern operating systems have a guest mode which doesn't preserve state across sessions - if they cannot manage something this easy, everyone should be using a guest login.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good riddance. Now can we please start ignoring:

      onpaste="return false;"

<comment><USER21> There is a chrome extension for that (NSFW name) [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-fuck-with- pas...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dont-fuck-with- paste/nkgllhigpcljnhoakjkgaieabnkmgdkb)

<comment><USER22> Banking websites do this. I cannot stand it. Thanks.

<comment><USER21> It is like they want to prevent people from using password managers and strong lengthy passwords!

<comment><USER23> In some cases because their legacy systems can't support long passwords. I know my previous bank was restricted to 6 digits (maybe even just 4). Their solution was to add in those annoying security questions like "What was your first dog's name". Sigh.

<comment><USER24> I use Diceware for those things, in case I have to use them over the phone. "My dog's name is effervescent mandible egg voldemort; my mother's maiden name is regent utterly busted harpy"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How is this going to work with honeypot fields? Chrome will autocomplete hidden fields like this:

            <input type="text" name="phone">

Where "phone" is the honeypot field. Not shown in-browser, so usually only a bot will fill out the honeypot field, sending a strong signal that the form is an automated/spam request.

Of course, autofill messes this up. So the more correct implementation is to turn it off:

            <input type="text" name="phone" autocomplete="off">

But if an autofill of "off" is ignored this technique will no longer work, as the user's browser will fill in the honeypot field.

<comment><USER5> Another possibility would be to add two fields dynamically via JS at load, the first populated at load with a timestamp when the form was loaded... then add onkeyup/onfocus/onclick events for the other form fields, and when triggered populate the second field with the current timestamp.

From there, you can compare the numbers, offset from the current time, and do other checks. I mean, you might want to allow for up to an hour of drift, but most people won't sit on a page for an hour then hit submit.

Though it would be circumvented easy enough, if it's custom, would worry less about it.

Also...

          <input type="text" name="phone" autocomplete="section-honeypot nofill" />

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I ranted about this on my blog whilst drunk, and then went off in a tangent, you can find it at jameshalsall.co.uk, 2nd post.

This really makes me uncomfortable, standards are there for a reason, you don't just ignore them because you don't agree with them.

<comment><USER27> And sometimes the standard is wrong. The page telling the browser that the user isn't allowed to auto fill a form puts too much control in the hand of the page.

<comment><USER28> Sure. Fix the standard, don't just make shit up.

Maybe the standards process is broken, in which case that's something that needs fixing. I can't see why the four browser makers can't create their own browser standards.

<comment><USER29> > Fix the standard

The standard is that autocomplete attribute can be used to _hint_ to the user- agent how to apply any autocomplete functionality it has.

The standard is _not_ that the UA must provide autocompletion when it is "on", or must not do so when it is "off".

So, I don't see any problem with the standard and Chrome's behavior.

<comment><USER30> Actually, the standard says that "on" is a MAY, but "off" is a SHOULD.

<comment><USER29> Yes, and neither is a MUST.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The rationale for ignoring autocomplete=off makes sense to me. What I don't understand at all is the suggested "workaround" for disabling autocomplete:

 _> In cases where you really want to disable autofill, our suggestion at this point is to utilize the autocomplete attribute to give valid, semantic meaning to your fields. [...] As an example, if you have an address input field [...], you can give it semantic meaning that makes sense relative to what you're asking for: e.g. autocomplete="new-user-street-address". If Chrome encounters that, it won't try and autofill the field._

So essentially they encourage authors to make up random, nonstandard values for the attribute that may or may not do what the author is hoping for.

I don't see what this will archieve except making the autocomplete attribute a pain to use in practice.

(Which might be what the Chrome team intends, but even then, a more straight- forward and more honest way would be deprecation.)

<comment><USER32> > they encourage authors to make up random, nonstandard values for the > attribute

No, they are encouraging you to give _more_ meaning to your fields. For the example given of a CRM app, using customer_email_address as the input field makes much more sense than using a standard value for email address, as the two fields are asking for different things: The latter always wants _your_ email address, whereas the former wants the relevant email address for the record you're viewing/editing.

<comment><USER31> But there is no guarantee all sites will use the same values or even give the values the same meaning: One might write "customer_email_address", another "e-mail-address-of-customer". A third one has separate input fields for the parts before and after the "@" and uses "email-address-name" and "email- address-host" respectively...

So in the end, _if_ everyone followed the advice and used "semantic" values, this would likely lead to the same problems that HTML already had with semantic class names, rel values and meta tags. The discussions about them fill mailing list archives. I don't see why all this should be repeated, even more so as the problem of semantically annotating your elements is already solved.

But in this case it's even weirder as that was presented as a way to tell Chrome "please don't autocomplete". So if that's the real motivation, then sites are likely to just put some variant of "really-really-off", or just random strings in it without any regard to "semantics".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here's a huge reason why this is bad. Our company let's you set a "global password" to lock your site. Chrome was auto-filling the password site silently, and exposing people's personal passwords to their whole team when they saved. I understand wanting control, but... Sometimes this is horrible behavior.

<comment><USER20> Why isn't that a bug in your application? Unless you're building a password manager, passwords should never be shown to someone else. If you need the ability to let multiple people do things, they should still perform the action using their private credentials so you'd have accurate records for who initiated the action.

<comment><USER33> No, it's an outward facing password to preview non-live sites, like Shopify or Squarespace have. More of a beta code than a password.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've noticed that a great deal of secure websites will disable autofill in their username and password fields on purpose. For ages I've had a Chrome extension installed that disabled autofill=off to get around exactly that, and I believe I'll leave it enabled. I know better than to trust plain password auth anyway, and mostly use the feature to remember one-time passwords to things like forum sites that have the ridiculous policy of hiding plain URLs to non-registered users. (I will never understand what a forum gains by having a large number of users in their database who registered once to download that one attachment, then never came back again.)

Regardless of the intent, I think when you try to make decisions on behalf of your users, you're doing them a disservice. I mean, really, the security risk of autofill on password fields is that the user's passwords are now saved on their computer? I think users who need to utilize this feature and have it denied them will just end up typing the password into a word document named "Passwords.docx," and that's a heck of a lot less secure than Chrome's encrypted password store. Not that Chrome's implementation couldn't be better, but still.

<comment><USER35> Why use a Word document? I put all my security passwords—especially the ones that won't autoflll or that make me change them often—into a Google Docs spreadsheet online. That way I can get to my passwords from anywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > We don't just ignore the autocomplete attribute, however. In the WHATWG > standard, we defined a series of new autocomplete values that developers can > use to better inform the browser about what a particular field is, and we > encourage developers to use those types. [2] > [https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/forms.html#autofill](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/forms.html#autofill)

Okay, aside from what you think about being unable to just turn off autocomplete, those semantic tabs actually sound super useful, and i hadn't known about them.

> As an example, if you have an address input field in your CRM tool that you > don't want Chrome to Autofill, you can give it semantic meaning that makes > sense relative to what you're asking for: e.g. autocomplete="new-user- > street-address".

Um, "new-user-street-address" does not appear in the list of recognized values from the WHATWG spec that was linked to above.

How do we find the list of values that Chrome actually recognizes and what they mean?

Am I missing it somewhere else? How does Chrome expect devs to use something completely un-doc'd?

<comment><USER37> You elided the relevant sentence:

> In cases where you really want to disable autofill, our suggestion at this > point is to utilize the autocomplete attribute to give valid, semantic > meaning to your fields. If we encounter an autocomplete attribute that we > don't recognize, we won't try and fill it.

They're saying that they don't autofill when they see autocomplete values which Chrome doesn't recognize, so if you don't want autofill, they suggest you just put in a description of what this field is, which won't be recognized. The functionality is the same as if you put in autocomplete="foobarbazquux", but it's better-described.

<comment><USER36> Ah, thanks, I didn't do it on purpose, I was just confused. Because:

> our suggestion at this point is to utilize the autocomplete attribute to > give valid, semantic meaning to your fields. If we encounter an autocomplete > attribute that we don't recognize, we won't try and fill it.

How is a value not allowed by the spec "valid" as they say? They're encouraging you to violate the spec to trigger chrome-specific behavior (can't really say what other browsers will do when spec is violated, can you?), really? Or does the spec say you're allowed to make up new values too? i don't _think_ so, but maybe I missed that part (not being sarcastic).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I fully support the decision by Chrome. I hate when forms try and force it off and get me to type the same thing over and over. It's an abused attribute.

</comment><comment><USER39> Some years ago we had trouble with autocomplete. Browsers would fill in credit card details and customers would call us where we've got their credit card details from. Or they we're completed into a different website and people called us why we gave the other website the CC details.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think it is necessary for some fields to have autocomplete="off" for PCI compliance (login/password field if I remember correctly). So this creates the interesting situation where I should set autocomplete to something else so that chrome doesn't complete it, but that would result in a failed compliance check.

<comment><USER35> Yes. PCI is a silly substitute for actual security. But the alternative is that many banks and their partners will run with no security because bank executives as a class are firmly opposed to sharing authority with competent IT security people.

This is one cost of their class solidarity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This causes many problems for app devs to work around this broken policy. StackOverflow is full of silly tricks from field naming to odd JS. Wasting time

<comment><USER42> What's the use case for not allowing autocomplete?

<comment><USER43> Getting 25% fewer users to continue through the funnel. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911434](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911434)

<comment><USER19> Very nice, except when you have something that is explicitly not a conversion funnel. Admin functionality being a big one

<comment><USER43> This is the use case where the web page should not interfere, thereby enabling the user to use their password manager. You can't even log in to eBay using 1Password any more. That's ridiculous.

Perhaps what is needed is autocomplete="secure" where the browser will only autocomplete after challenging the user for a master password.

<comment><USER44> I used to solve this "security" feature by patching the Safari binary to ignore the attribute. Became too much of a hassle to chase that, but I seriously resent site developers who think they know better than I how I "should" be entering data on my machine.

Seriously - a number of the complaints on both sides of the issue in this thread point to this. Running a lab and have a problem with autocomplete remembering passwords? That's should be a site-specific setting. Have a physical issue with typing, and use assistive software? The browser should have a setting to get out of the %$&^@*% way. Run your own machine securely (by whatever standards you choose to judge that)? It shouldn't be eBay's, or Apple's, or Google's decision how you choose to type your password.

While I'm ranting, I'm seriously sick of a particular strain of arrogance mixed with refusal to take responsibility that emerges in these discussions. I recently had a discussion where a UX person confidently told me that they did, in fact, know better than I on a similar topic. OK, fine; here's a use case in which it seems that you're wrong. "Well, we can't cover every case; we have to plan for the 80% scenarios".

You know my needs better than I, but refuse to take responsibility when you're wrong? Sounds like a good time to show a bit of humility and allow the user you apparently think so little of to make a choice.

<comment><USER19> I come off the opposite end, where this browser thinks it knows the data I want to enter better than I do. It doesn't. Neither do developers. I just want to use my browser plugin and ignore them both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Not making a comment either way on whether they should be doing this, but ... I think we all know what's going to come next :(

        //add random number to stop Chrome from disabling autocomplete
        //--number is stripped off in form processing routine
        print "Address: <input type='text' name='address--" . rand() . "'>";

</comment><comment><USER46> > As an example, if you have an address input field in your CRM tool that you > don't want Chrome to Autofill, you can give it semantic meaning that makes > sense relative to what you're asking for: e.g. autocomplete="new-user- > street-address". If Chrome encounters that, it won't try and autofill the > field.

Reminds me of the good old days of making things work with IE6.

> Again, thanks to everyone for your comments. We look forward to continuing > the conversation.

Sure you do. Then why is commenting closed?[1]

[1]: See the " _Restricted- Only users with EditIssue permission may comment._ " box on the left pane.

<comment><USER47> > Sure you do. Then why is commenting closed?

From the post:

> All this said, we're still learning. So we would like to better understand > your use cases for setting autocomplete=off. To have that conversation in a > more focused manner, I've created a new bug: crbug.com/587466\. We're going > to try and keep that conversation focused and productive, so we want to > avoid "+1s" and the like. I'll be closing this bug in the meantime.

Commenting is open at [https://crbug.com/587466](https://crbug.com/587466).

<comment><USER46> Ah! Well that's what I get for skimming through the post.

I stand by the IE6 comment though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Would you ever want autocomplete on, say, a field where you're inputting a 2FA response? Probably not, since any suggestions would be useless.

I find the workaround of "just put some other random bullshit for the value" hilarious. And once developers start over-abusing that as well (they will), then what's the plan?

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm trying autocomplete='sudo-off' now. It's not really semantic, but it does get across my intention.

(in this case, a new user form designed for a current admin. Sometimes the site developer really does know more than the browser)

<comment><USER50> I think you mean "pseudo".

<comment><USER51> No, he meant "sudo"

[https://xkcd.com/149/](https://xkcd.com/149/)

[http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/149](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/149)

<comment><USER50> Seems like a stretch of a joke.

<comment><USER52> It would make more sense, if you were familiar with the Unix command line. Pretty much whenever something tells you "Permission denied", you just retype the same command with "sudo" before it and then it does what you want. And yeah, that definitely happens often enough to be a running joke among Unix users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> If you follow the link to the next discussion it quickly becomes pretty clear that it's a bad idea: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=587466](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=587466)

Anyone who has to fill forms for other people is going to end up putting his own personal information into the fields by mistake.

</comment><comment><USER54> One of the commenters on the linked bug to discuss valid use cases for autocomplete=off hits a wonderful nail on the head:

> Actually there is a famous site called > [http://www.google.com](http://www.google.com) they use autocomplete="off" > for their search form since every time you visit the site you want to search > something completly different.

</comment><comment><USER55> I have some pages with passwords but not usernames, and chrome keeps trying to treat it as a login, picking an arbitrary nearby field as username, and ignores all markup suggesting otherwise. It's on my todo list to figure out something that bypasses its stupidity, like setting it to a normal field with a weird font, as it's not necessary to prevent copying out of the field.

</comment><comment><USER56> > In cases where you really want to disable autofill

Dude, we've already told you.

</comment><comment><USER57> It's tough to say that Chrome made the right call, as I enjoy being able to (in theory) rely on browsers aiming to be standard compliant. The standard is there for a reason, no?

I noticed that the Chrome team also developed a feature called Threaded scrolling in an attempt to improve site UX, but instead (or additionally?) completely ruins the ability to rely on onscroll/onmousewheel events (let alone being able to trust the values pulled from scrollLeft/scrollTop using requestAnimationFrame or similar). This can be seen on these two GIFs, with threaded scrolling enabled (currently the default behavior): [https://gfycat.com/DiligentHomelyIndianelephant](https://gfycat.com/DiligentHomelyIndianelephant) and with threaded scrolling disabled (behind a chrome flag): [https://gfycat.com/SlimDefinitiveErin](https://gfycat.com/SlimDefinitiveErin)

The same flag/feature is active on mobile Chrome as well, so the same effect can be seen. The only way to guarantee jank-free work with scroll position (for parallax or w/e) is to implement handling user-input-to-scroll-behavior entirely yourself, which is rather unfortunate imo.

You can play with this yourself: [http://jsbin.com/mohehotupe/edit](http://jsbin.com/mohehotupe/edit) (might need to click "Run with JS" / or tick "Auto-run JS" to start the scroll- listening script)

My take on autocomplete is that the standard says it's something I can disable, so autocomplete="off" is simply something the browser should obey. I have no problems with users using extensions or taking "advantage" of a browser setting to "fix" websites they say have abused this attribute. But there are valid use cases for disabling autocomplete as other comments have mentioned, and all they have done is make it to where I just have to do autocomplete="sudo-off" and it "works". But what happens when other webmasters misuse the attribute again? Might as well just toss support for it if they really can't trust the page to do the right thing.

</comment><comment><USER58> Trusting users over developers will lead to less security overall. In this case it will make providing intranet access to employee owned devices a little less secure or less user friendly (by blocking chrome)

</comment><comment><USER59> I see this as a good thing. Far better to streamline password management than to make it bumpy, encouraging users to use memorable passwords, which most likely will also be painfully weak.

It's a good and sane default.

</comment><comment><USER60> So many ugly hacks are needed as a consequence of this.

I know what I want my app to do better than you Chrome. Please don't purposely break the Internet.

When I try to do user management. I can't call the fields `username` or `password` because Chrome will attempt to autofill it with the saved user/pass from the login. So annoying. :(

Also, it doesn't trigger onChange events when it gets autofilled. :(

This breaks Angular because the field's value is different from what Angular thinks the field's value is.

</comment><comment><USER61> How long before somebody uses that to guess your physical address by creating a page with input field named 'address' and so on just to read their values with JS?

<comment><USER62> The problem is you can't read autofill values with JS. This leads to a horrible experience for users when you have say an Angular form that gets autofilled and they click submit and it tells them the form is missing data.

<comment><USER61> Disappointing. I don't use Chrome, so for me it's difficult to even believe such thing is possible

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > As an example, if you have an address input field in your CRM tool that you > don't want Chrome to Autofill, you can give it semantic meaning that makes > sense relative to what you're asking for: e.g. autocomplete="new-user- > street-address". If Chrome encounters that, it won't try and autofill the > field.

Seems reasonable to me.

<comment><USER30> Except, Google themselves now do "google-chrome-autocomplete-off" and "both" and similar values instead.

We just replicated the PHP or IE situation with mysqli_real_surely_this_time_it_works_escape_string or autocomplete="sudo- off".

<comment><USER29> > Except, Google themselves now do "google-chrome-autocomplete-off" and "both" > and similar values instead.

That's clearly a suboptimal practice by Google's web team. Which doesn't make Google's Chrome team wrong, but maybe the latter should have a word with the former.

<comment><USER30> Well, there's no alternative.

You don't want the Google search box, or the hidden textfield in Google Docs, or so, to autocomplete.

<comment><USER29> > Well, there's no alternative.

Sure, there is. You could do a meaningful semantic autocomplete tag that isn't one of the recognized ones, rather than a variant of "no, really, don't autocomplete this". (Actually, "body" is probably not a bad practice, but the other one was.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This is one of the few cases where I'm actually in favor of Chrome's rogue behavior, though I think they're probably doing it for the wrong reasons. I've been annoyed one too many times by webpages that refuse to allow me to autofill login credentials from my browser, to the point where I had to keep a js bookmarklet to strip that attribute from every element on the page. I always hated that it took such a hacky solution to do something which is so simple, and resented sites that attempted to take that ability away from me.

So to me, any change which puts control back in the hands of the user is a good one. I suspect though that the motivation is mostly to "increase engagement" rather than to empower the user.

</comment><comment><USER43> "We announced during the Chrome Dev Summit in 2015 that when Autofill is enabled we see 25% more forms submitted than when it's disabled [3]."

In other words, 25% more users will make it to the next stage of your conversion funnel if autofill is permitted.

<comment><USER64> That's a reason to turn on autocomplete in your signup form, not to force it on in the browser.

<comment><USER43> That would be a negative user experience, given the prevalence of legacy forms on the web. Example: "Why does this autocomplete feature fail most of the time?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I'm not very familiar with autocomplete behavior, but does this work across domains? on hidden fields?

Would this help <malicious website> or even <legit website but with malicious tracking intents> to extract information without my consent?

</comment><comment><USER66> It feels like the solution here is to have a serious-business flag for chrome like phabricator does. Is the browser working for me or is it just helping me work for someone else? That seems to be the real intent problem here. I feel for all the CRM types and data entry people that are going to struggle with this. The user may decide that they don't want autocomplete for a page but they may not be sophisticated enough to turn it off in a meaningful way, or for a particular site.

I still think it's really troublesome that it invents a user-side data store of potentially sensitive data that they really had no say in.

</comment><comment><USER67> Firefox has been doing this for quite some time now: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906)

</comment><comment><USER53> The one that I wouldn't mind changing is when the site somehow blocks pasting a password into the field. Yes, I'm not typing it because I use a password manager thank you very much!

</comment><comment><USER32> Chrome, IE11[1], and Firefox[2] _all_ do this, and have for a while.

[1] IE11 does not support the attribute at all [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- webapps/2014JanMa...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public- webapps/2014JanMar/0015.html)

[2] Firefox ignores it too [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=956906)

<comment><USER29> Both of those apply just to ignoring autocomplete settings for password management, not other input fields.

That's different from Chrome not giving effect to autocomplete=off for _any_ fields.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I was wondering why my Pizza Hut login process got a lot smoother.

</comment><comment><USER69> For the love of FSM, why is it that browser vendors are always so f%!#ng arrogant?? It's not just Chrome, we've seen this attitude from Firefox devs before as well: "fuck you, we know more about what you meant than you do".

I really wish somebody would fork either Chromium or Firefox and commit to delivering a browser that just fully, completely and accurately implements the various specifications, instead of trying to "improve" them like this.

</comment><comment><USER70> >In the WHATWG standard, we defined a series of new autocomplete values

      ...
      "language"
      "bday"
      "bday-day"
      "bday-month"
      "bday-year"
      "sex"
      "url"
      "photo"

I can't resist the feeling these were specifically developed by the User Data Mining department.

</comment><comment><USER71> I wrote this extension a long time back: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/docomplete/onlplld...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/docomplete/onlplldgmkgpoangfokimmikjheamnfb?hl=en)

It removes "autocomplete[off]" from all input elements.

</comment><comment><USER72> Good. It's taken far too long for user agents and web standard to remember that the intent of a user agent is to be an agent for a user, not something that an external server can dictate with pixel perfect precision.

</comment><comment><USER36> The weird thing is, `autocomplete=off` _does_ seem to have the intended effect on my Chrome. OSX 50.0.2661.102. Huh? Was this change made in a later version I haven't gotten yet?

</comment><comment><USER73> I wish I had been able to find this a few weeks ago. Was working on a modified login feature where the autocomplete behavior was actually a hinderance to a UX improvement we were working on.

</comment><comment><USER74> i love autocomplete and i hate when the page tries to turn it off for no logical reason. I have an extension installed that forces autocomplete on for everything.

</comment><comment><USER75> Isn't a chat a better and more common example than a CRM system? You don't want to autocomplete your old chat messages.

</comment><comment><USER76> Is there ever a reason to honor that setting?

<comment><USER49>
      * One time password fields.
      * Admin pages for dealing with users
      * CC virtual terminals
      * Any time that the data being collected is about a third party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> ignoring standards worked for IE.

</comment><comment><USER78> Probably best for the 99%. I suppose for the 1% they could consider a flag?

<comment><USER79> Good idea. What if we include an attribute in the form itself. I propose "autocomplete" You can set it to "on" or "off" depending on your needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Google isn't the new Microsoft, it's the new Halliburton.

</comment><comment><USER81> Pretty sure that Satan's minions invented auto-complete as a vector for side channel crypto vulnerabilities.

</comment><comment><USER82> Google Internet Explorer.

Might as well adopt the name now, rather than later.</comment>


Too many IT Jobs but not many IT candidates in USA - H1 Transfer and GC Filing - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/Qk00XP4X

<comment><USER2> Whenever I talked to HR about H1 visas they told me it was a gimmick to save money. I also noted some years back medical doctors successfully lobbied Congress to decrease the number of visas for foreign docs because it drove down their wages.

As an American I am pro-visa and immigration, I just think we should get rid of perverse business incentives.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. This was an email sent to me. I was shocked at what I read because it was in sync with what people with H1B status have told me.</comment></comment>


Have Online Reviews Lost All Value? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/have-online-reviews-lost-all-value-11569606584?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/m39hT](http://archive.is/m39hT)

</comment><comment><USER3> No, but I find myself gravitating much more towards the negative reviews. Not only are they more likely to be legitimate reviews, they tell me the reasons someone didn't like a product, which I find more valuable. Often because a failure for one person might not be an issue I care about: For example, if a reviewer for a book says, "Author spent too much time on the individual people and not enough time moving the plot forward" then I might view that as a _positive_ if I like deep character building. It's a legitimate complaint, but from my perspective it's a feature, not a bug. Or I just might not care: "Item arrived broken" is not something I care much about when it's something that's easy to return/exchange, unless many people are also saying even when it arrived intact, It breaks too easily on use.

<comment><USER4> Negative reviews can also be compromised. I was reading through Borderlands 3 metacritic user reviews when I noticed at least 3 reviewers made identical complaints of boring, "repeative" gameplay... My best guess is it's attracted a culture war brigade for some reason. But it was a good a reminder to keep my guard up even on negative reviews- the same sockpuppets companies use to pump up their own products could be easily redeployed to undermine a competitor's.

<comment><USER5> No, some people just feel Borderlands is excessively grindy, and not the fun kind. I hold that same opinion, and I don't think I'm part of any culture war or brigade. Some people may not like what you like for exactly the same reasons that you consider positive. Doesn't make them shills or brigadists or whatever. It just means they have different preferences.

<comment><USER6> It definitely indicates a brigade when multiple reviews have the same improbable misspelling though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I worked for Luma when they were having a review war with Eero. Since Luma is defunct I don't mind straight up telling you.. we were paying a lot of money for positive reviews in order to make our rating match up with Eero's. We had an inferior product with a lot of problems, so it was a losing battle in the end.

Probably the most interesting part is that Amazon was one of our lead investors. We came to them for help, and they told us in a wink wink nudge nudge sort of way that our only option was to just keep buying positive reviews.

<comment><USER8> > Since Luma is defunct I don't mind straight up telling you.. we were paying > a lot of money for positive reviews in order to make our rating match up > with Eero's.

I can't help but feel that in addition to being unethical, this might also be illegal. [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2017/03/los-a...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2017/03/los-angeles-based-sage-auto-group-will-pay-36-million-settle- ftc)

<comment><USER9> I have been disappointed to find that many startup founders — even those who work in "impact" or "education" — do not care about the ethics or legality of paid reviews. I had a discussion with one founder a few years back, and at first I thought he was simply unaware of the then-new FTC guidelines. But it became clear that he did not care if what he was doing was illegal since "it's just the way business gets done", in his words. Caveat emptor!

<comment><USER5> There are also no consequences, so there's no reason for a company to act morally/legally in our current economic system. I've never heard of a company paying fines for buying positive reviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lately I've been looking at the distribution of reviews. TripAdvisor and Amazon both have bar graphs of rating distributions. In general, I see these distributions:

Great products: Generally a very good product will have between 80 and 90 percent 5-star reviews and then the remaining percentages will tail down with the lowest percent of 1 star reviews. This was how I picked where to go on my honeymoon on TripAdvisor.

Fake Products: All 5-star reviews with zero reviews of any other rating.

So so products: Similar to great products in that the number of reviews decreases as the rating goes down, but the percentage of 4 star reviews is significant and there are less than 70% 5 star reviews

Bad products: Less 5 star reviews than 4 or 3 star reviews. These are surprisingly uncommon and feel quaint when I see them.

Mixed supply chain (Fakes) or serious quality issues: What I refer to as the "1 star bump" where a product has more 1-star reviews than 2, 3, or 4 star review. Similar to "so so products" except you see the 1 star bar sticking out noticeably in the graph. The 1-star bump is my most reliable signal not to buy something. Unfortunately it's very common on Amazon.

<comment><USER11> I feel like I see only the "1 star bump" distribution for nearly everything. Most people happily rate something as a 5 with little thought, and a few write a very long screed to accompany a 1; almost nobody cares to do anything in between.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think reviews have lost most value, but mainly due to Amazon's co-mingling of inventory, merging similar product listings, and overall massive counterfeit problems. Even if you have a high quality review from a trusted source (Wirecutter? Friends and family?) you have no way to know if what you receive will be equivalent to the thing they endorsed.

This happened to me recently with an exercise bike which was an absolute piece of trash compared to what my sister bought and recommended. It makes me want to completely avoid Amazon.

<comment><USER13> _It makes me want to completely avoid Amazon._

Then why don't you?

I seriously don't want to be glib, but I read so many complaints about Amazon, their intermingling of stock from various, partially shady sources, fakes, dodgy reviews, which they do shit-all about, etc, etc.

Personally I don't buy at Amazon since when they pulled a bait and switch on their privacy pledge, which was pretty much in the beginning.

Their predatory behavior, their treatment of employees, their not giving a fuck if you get sent fakes, their systemic viloation of privacy, their dodgy support of law enforcement and their overall creepy behaviour all just reinforce me in this and frankly: I can live quite well without buying anything at Amazon.

So I'm genuinly curious: Why do so many people still buy despite an avalanche of complaints?

<comment><USER14> > So I'm genuinly curious: Why do so many people still buy despite an > avalanche of complaints?

Personally, I do try to avoid them. Originally it was because I didn't want them to grow in market power; now its' because the results are a lot worse.

But it's not always possible. Probably 80-90% of the time I'm able to find what I'm looking for somewhere else. But sometimes what I'm looking for I can only really find on Amazon.

That, and people still buy me Amazon gift cards.

<comment><USER15> > That, and people still buy me Amazon gift cards.

When people give me gift cards of any sort, I just sell them to someone else outright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As the trope goes, if the author asks a question in the title of their article, the answer is "no, not really."

I'd counter that online reviews still have pretty much the same value they ever have had, and that we're more aware of what the limits of that value is.

Lot's of real-person reviews exist on many platforms, and reading through a few often gives you a decent idea of what you're getting yourself into.

Paid-for reviews are certainly a scourge, and one business getting loyalists to down-vote a competitor is also a problem. But that's been a thing since the beginning of recommendation features, and we should celebrate a little bit that we're more hip and conscious today to these operations.

<comment><USER17> The real question is: What is the alternative?

There are some useful review sites like Wirecutter that arguably cut through the clutter in a lot of cases. But the amount of "stuff" and experiences (e.g. restaurants) out there is pretty overwhelming for what's left of professional reviewers outside of some fairly narrow domains.

I do a lot of travel. Are Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews of restaurants great? Not really. Are they generally better--given _some_ critical mass--than picking a restaurant at random or because it has a cool name? Almost certainly. (Of course, online menus and the like can be somewhat useful as well.)

<comment><USER18> We're building Bibimapp so you can get recommendations from your direct and extended network. Personal recommendations from people you trust.

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

<comment><USER19> Off-topic: is the name related to this delicious Korean dish? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibimbap](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibimbap)

<comment><USER20> It has to be. This article has peaked my cynicism and I suspect your comment is just intended to seem like an organic response to legitimize that app plug. To keep it on topic, I suppose that's the result of the modern review-scape: I'm sceptical of any review or comment about a product.

<comment><USER21> Nitpick: "piqued", not "peaked" (though it's a homonym)

<comment><USER20> Weird. I know this. Maybe I added it in to make my comment seem more legitimate and to trigger a response. ;) All swell that ends swell I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One thing I've noticed is that negative reviews, even very specific ones, often just serve to delay my purchase. I was looking to buy an ab wheel recently, and almost every single option on Amazon had some negative reviews which seemed legitimate and did give me pause. "Handle snapped off after just one week, causing me to smash into the floor and loose a tooth", for example. Of course I don't want that to happen, so now I end up spending over an hour looking through products, all which are under $40, none of which are free from some sort of specific complaint - "Handle is too narrow, this is not good for your lats. Can't believe the manufacturer would cheap out on this, I ended up with back pain after less than two weeks of use.", "The additional wheel makes this too stable. I've had many in the past, I clearly do not get as good a workout from this one. Will be returning it." etc.

These all have 4-5 star reviews, and otherwise seem perfectly fine. If I saw them in a store I would have purchased them without a second thought.

Ultimately I just went back and bought the first one I saw. It seems perfectly fine, I can't see any issues with it.

<comment><USER23> I went through this with power tools. What I found was products would end up with three broad classes of negative reviews, segmented mainly by price:

* Expensive tools would have gripes about price or lack of inclusion of accessories. If I bought something in this category it would be problem-free, but so far in excess of what I need as a hobbyist/DIYer that it was comical, e.g. a circular saw that could happily saw my car in half when all I'm doing is building bookshelves.

* Cheap tools would have a consistent pattern of reviews mentioning one or more specific failures that occurred during normal use - e.g. belt sanders that swallow belts or drills where the chuck quickly comes loose. If I bought something in this range, I'd experience exactly the same failure myself.

* Finally, mid-price tools would have the same number of poor reviews as the cheap ones, but the scenarios described would be abusive or unrealistic expectations: people complaining that they couldn't use an orbital sander on concrete tiles or fit enormous router bits to something consumer-grade.

The realisation I wish I'd come to earlier is that stuff in the last category is fine, particularly when it comes to a tool I only use occasionally. Stuff here does exactly what I need, gives good results, and doesn't result in me paying for power I'm never going to use. I guess that's part of the problem with online reviews - needing to get to the level where you're analysing them in depth to differentiate between "it broke because it's badly made" and "it broke because I was doing something completely crazy with it".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think shopping sites should simply show the percent returns for each item. Maybe break it down by return reason.

<comment><USER25> At first thought, this might be useful information. It might be less helpful for very inexpensive products where returning the defective item isn't worth the effort. I suspect sellers wouldn't want to encourage returns as a way to show dissatisfaction, since they are so expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yes, but.

I don't Amazon anymore, but the reviews were and I assume still are completely unreliable for many segments. Too many players running to the bottom.

For other things, you need to know the market. Restaurants and hotel reviews are full of bad info (fakes, ultra-picky people, etc) but it's easy to extract useful information. Usually the fakes have details that only workers would care about or are just pure praise without specifics. People on a vacation tell stories and business travelers usually complain about things that cost them time.

You also need to consider how you use a review. The stars are there to sell the product. I look for corroborated information about things I don't like, and mostly ignore the positive. That doesn't work on Amazon because the fakes are more common and brazen than real reviews, and Amazon facilitates the fakery as more reviews drive transactions.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've found ReviewMeta ([https://reviewmeta.com/](https://reviewmeta.com/)) useful for Amazon reviews, though it still doesn't solve the issue of co- mingling products. So generally for buying items I use Amazon or a niche subreddit's recommendation, then buy the product off eBay, the manufacturer's website, or a physical store.

As far as "place" reviews, Google reviews in my area haven't let me down yet. Yelp has been hit-or-miss; I dislike their "not currently recommended" review system. TripAdvisor isn't too useful in my local area as there's not nearly as many reviews as on Google/Yelp.

<comment><USER28> I don't get the feeling ReviewMeta is very sophisticated. FakeSpot and ReviewMeta often contradict each other. I often spend time on both sites and then realise that either all the candidate products are not great, or I've wasted time gaining little confidence and should just pick one.

<comment><USER29> Fakespot CTO here. That's a good observation. Our engines utilize NLP heavily conjoined with proprietary ML models to detect influenced reviews that basic statistical analysis will never (or with low levels of success) be able to infer from review data sets, unless there are very basic signals such as 100 5-star reviews posted in an hour.

Fake review authors and providers are increasingly becoming sophisticated to bypass various filters in place on Amazon and other websites so you need to be able to leverage SOTA analysis to detect them. We also don't reveal how we detect certain fake reviews due to the fact that they will use that information to their advantage to further exploit our system, which allows us to be a couple steps ahead.

Anyone interested to know more about this topic feel free to email me at email@example.com.

<comment><USER30> It would be awesome if you could support amazon.de

<comment><USER29> We'd love to add support for German. We'd need a lot of retraining of our models to support the language however, it is in our road map!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For me, once I became aware of the fact that it is now a commonplace activity to pay for falsified reviews, and there are technology platforms that scan reviews to determine if they are fake or not... almost any review I read on a mainstream shopping platform is suspect to me now. Which is unfortunate, because that's where most of the convenience and value as a consumer is to me.

If I now want to make a purchase based heavily on user reviews, I do like many of the other posters here have said: I look at the reviews and low and high middle of the spectrum, have to read each review for obvious, glaring generalizations and seek out language that implies real-world usage vs. hyperbole, and use other features at my disposal, including a verified reviewer stamp (if on Amazon), tools like FakeSpot or ReviewMeta, and reading reviews from competing shopping platforms for the same item if possible (if shopping on Amazon for a widget, look for reviews on eBay or the website of the widget manufacturer). If it's a technology purchase, I'll also look up a bunch of reviews from at least 3-4 technology review platforms, placing a greater weight on those who have included screenshots of their actual usage of the product, which tend to imply a greater deal of rigor to go through for a fake review (but this doesn't mean it's completely trustworthy either).

These additional forms of verification, on one hand, could be likened to how we used to shop before internet shopping was a thing (we'd ask a bunch of people for reviews in real life, visit a bunch of stores and window shop, and perhaps read about it in a newspaper or try it ourselves in a real-life demo in the store), but at the end of the day, I choose to shop online for the convenience vs. brick and mortar stores, and this is the unfortunate evolution of that technology.

</comment><comment><USER32> I now look first at 3 star reviews. These are less likely to be biased and more likely to represent a middle ground between the good and bad aspects of the product. It's sad that we had to get there but the trust is gone with 4-5 star reviews for me.

<comment><USER33> Something strange I've seen on more than one occasion and on multiple platforms is 1-star glowing reviews and 5-star bashing reviews.

Also, when looking at overall reviews for a given thing there is usually a pattern for fraudulent ones, kind of like students having to summarise from the same text.

<comment><USER34> I've noticed this is particularly common on the Google Play store. Apparently the reason is reviews which go against what most people are reviewing are given a higher priority and more likely to be shown to potential users.

E.g. if an app is getting mostly 5 stars and you give it a 1 star, your rating will be more prominently shown in Google Play.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was looking for something on Amazon the other day, my searches revealed dozens of odd-sounding brands that I had never heard of before, all of which had lots of 5-star reviews, all of which seemed to be for a different product than the one listed.

<comment><USER36> You're looking at a confluence of two problems. One is that drop-shipping directly from Chinese manufacturers has become so cheap and easy (because of an international-postal-rule exemption that has been discussed here before) that everyone's doing it. Including the manufacturers themselves, some of whom I'm pretty sure make up the brand names literally at random. It costs them nothing at all to make up a few dozen brands, each presenting the product in a slightly different way, in hopes that one of those presentations will catch a few more eyes. It's basically the same incentive structure that gave us junk mail and (even more so) spam email.

The other problem is "review washing". Some vendors do the "bait and switch" themselves, but there's also an actual market for Amazon listings with good reviews attached. All an unscrupulous vendor has to do is buy one of those and change literally everything that goes into it, from contact details to the actual product. It's like if you could buy the right to a best-seller book cover, replacing the content for books already in brick-and-mortar stores with whatever you want. That's why sites like ReviewMeta and FakeSpot are absolutely essential for anyone shopping on Amazon nowadays.

<comment><USER37> If you have some spare time and are going for an item that's hard to make wrong, this can serve you too. I bought an item that was using a brand name in the title on eBay, but what I got was a cheap knockoff. The box itself had the Chinese branding so it was very obvious.

I ended up getting a full refund and it works fine. I was annoyed at the deception more than anything - the item is fine, but they may have cost a sale to a legitimate supplier by abusing the trademark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Answer is no, as others have said. But I think it depends a lot on which reviews and what you're looking at.

I frequently use Google's reviews for finding food places. While it's not 100%, and is HEAVILY biased to the top end (you probably want to aim for 4.2 or higher), it's been very reliable across many locations and even countries for me. Something I like is that a hole in the wall banh mi place is just as likely to earn a high rating as a 3 star restaurant - the ratings reflect the execution of what is being attempted, so cheap eats can rate well and sometimes that's all we want.

For games and media, I actually like the aggregators a lot (Metacritic). It's not the final word, and idiots do review bomb some titles (but mostly AAA games that I would avoid), but the "wisdom of crowds" seems surprisingly accurate overall. Steam reviews with their "Overwhelmingly Positive" is similar.

For individual items on Amazon or hotel rooms though, as other posters have said the mid-range reviews with something to say beyond the rating are the most worthwhile. I can tell if they're like-minded or whether their concerns mean nothing to me. On this note one amusing thing is that US reviews often focus on "the service" (probably because they're expected to pay extra for it) while I don't really care much about that and don't see it mentioned in other countries unless it's egregious.

</comment><comment><USER38> Something I've been thinking about recently is that there should be a site that only takes the "good" products from amazon and displays them for different categories - maybe only the top 20 or so. If i'm looking for an oven mitt / phone case / whatever the amount of junk is overwhelming. I envision it would essentially be a semi-curated list of amazon items. Anyone know of something like this? It's on my backlist of projects to build if I can't find any substitutes.

<comment><USER39> Isn't that kinda what [https://thewirecutter.com/](https://thewirecutter.com/) is doing?

<comment><USER38> Thanks for the link - I'll probably just use this instead!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If I'm looking for reviews, I look at results from forums. There's internet communities out there for everything.

Forums are usually good for compiling lists of 'approved' items as well.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have fully shifted away from doing my own research on what to buy to going to recommendation sites. I've always thought I had an astute ability to detect fake reviews (and I was probably right for the first wave of low effort paid reviews). What made me change was the following: 1) Companies and consumers cooperating in huge, fake review rings, 2) product search at places like Amazon becoming totally undifferentiatable, and 3) the lack of trust in tools to combat them (fakespot, etc).

I now just go to a recommendation site that earns income through affiliate kickbacks. I use Wirecutter [0], Rtings [1], plus a handful of smaller forum / community sites for categories those don't cover.

I actually think this is an enormous opportunity for several huge categories:

1) Tool reviews: especially with the rate of battery innovation, there is a huge opportunity to have thorough reviews and category recommendations of both consumer and professional tools.

2) Camera / DSLR / video - There's no lack of thorough reviews in this category, but making sense of it is near impossible unless you're a professional.

3) IoT gear - This isn't hugely important to me, but similar to cameras and tools there are a variety of systems that lock users in, and getting recommendations based on which system a user already has would be relatively simple.

I have found these categories to be lacking not only in trustable reviews, but mostly in updated recommendations. Even if reviews exist, it is up to the effort of the user to read them all and build up a knowledge base of similar options to select from. Each of these categories have a high enough volume and purchase price that affiliate fees could easily support a recommendation business.

[0] - [https://thewirecutter.com](https://thewirecutter.com)

[1] - [https://www.rtings.com](https://www.rtings.com)

<comment><USER42> I don't follow why you distrust sites like Fakespot but trust something like Wirecutter which as you note is directly incented to shill review products that offer more affiliate revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> They haven't lost all value, but you certainly can't take them at face value. I always make sure to read the negative reviews, as others have mentioned. I'll also frequently look at the review history of any review that resonates with me one way or another to see if they appear to be a normal person or a paid shill. Amazon could probably solve this problem if it wanted since it has access to purchase histories, shipping addresses, and review histories for all accounts on its site. I assume that the problem of fake reviews isn't solved because Amazon doesn't care enough about it to take the necessary action and fix it. It may also help Amazon's bottom line to have a bunch of highly-rated products for sale, even if those ratings are fake.

</comment><comment><USER44> I first and sometimes only read the one star reviews, and look at their percentage. If one-five have a distribution with a big slope discontinuity…

If it passes this test, I might read some of the other reviews looking for problems that I might agree with the viewer on.

</comment><comment><USER45> Considering that anyone can go on Fiverr and pay for hundreds of 5 star glowing (or 1 star negative) reviews for nearly anything that can be reviewed on the web, I would say online reviews are largely BS.

</comment><comment><USER46> They have not. They've just graduated to a place where you can't lie: Reddit. On Reddit, everyone is sceptical of the guy who doesn't have a long history of comments. People who've only just joined a subreddit will be viewed sceptically.

You'll get pretty good reviews if you do "XYZ reddit".

The problem for the guy trying to game the reviews is that a real user reviews things too sparsely. There'll be one review in maybe a hundred comments and five submissions.

<comment><USER47> I do exactly this. It has worked for me so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> TrustPilot is just completely ridiculous. For a company who's entire USP revolves around 'real' reviews, the vast, vast majority are so obviously fake.

<comment><USER37> A very easy way to stack the deck on such providers is to just send review requests to customers that you know are happy. This is even easier if you have a two-tier system (use your internal reviews on-platform to find the happy customers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Same media illiteracy problem as Fake News. Most people are unable to discern ulterior motives. So, "trust".

btw; The solution is not improving one's ability to discern (because that is an arm's race the people with power motives (political, financial) are gonna out spend you and vast majority of humans are incapable of beating that) Rather it is by default not to trust and have high bar for earning your trust.

</comment><comment><USER50> I was getting a screen protector and apparently they're so cheap / specialized that they have no reviews at all. I ended up looking at reviews for other products by the same company.

It could also be that they're all dropshippers and change their brand frequently to avoid negative reviews, but the stock graphics were at least slightly tweaked compared to Alibaba's.

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't trust reviews at all unless I know the "reviewer" in real life, that is if someone I know tells me it's good.

Good thing you have 14 day "no questions asked money back" guarantee on anything physical bought online in Europe. I've used that option quite a few times when the product is trash.

</comment><comment><USER52> It wouldn't solve everything, but I think that the problem could be significantly helped with the following changes:

Only allow reviews from people who actually purchased the product.

Make it fraud to pay spammers to review your product.

Show the country where a seller is located.

Make Amazon (and similar marketplaces) liable and on the hook for returns if a seller disappears.

</comment><comment><USER53> Failed due to Homogeneity, Centralization, Division, Imitation and Emotionality as per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Failures_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds#Failures_of_crowd_intelligence)

</comment><comment><USER54> The star-ratings are nearly worthless, and to the extent there is any value, it is in 2-to-4 star reviews (less likely to be fake).

However, the explanation, because harder for a bot to churn out believably, is still often worth something, not least because things that bother other people might be a plus for me.

</comment><comment><USER55> the reviews are hosted by amazon. they exist to facilitate profitmaking by selling stuff. the company never even pretends to have goals at odds with that. some part of that requires barely pretending to not encourage this behavior... but this is inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER56> I look for practical information in reviews such as 'works well but the plastic grommet holder snapped off after a week of use, look out for the weak electric dimmer switch' etc etc. The subjective reviews are mostly a waste of time

</comment><comment><USER57> For popular things? Yes, not enough of the information is reliable. Unpopular and niche things still benefit from reviews. It's almost as if the quality and usefulness goes up as the review count stays low.

</comment><comment><USER58> When it comes to entertainment, largely a high level of positive reviews no longer tells me anything because the internet has saturated the planet. Average people are upvoting everything.

</comment><comment><USER59> A big percentage of reviews on Yelp are fake.

Sure you can buy fake yelp reviews on [http://freepage.io](http://freepage.io) and other sites.

</comment><comment><USER60> Nope. They just require the same critical thinking and situational awareness that is required to spot phishing, obviously malicious links, dark patterns, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> From my point of view, online reviews are not quite entirely without value, but their value is extremely low. I rarely bother reading them anymore.

</comment><comment><USER61> In the enterprise side of things, I find G2Crowd and TrustRadius reviews useless in that they are too skewed towards the positive end of things.

</comment><comment><USER62> An AI-based platform that identifies legitimate reviews can easily find a product/market fit. Is anybody here interested?

</comment><comment><USER63> View reviews by nth degree friends.

</comment><comment><USER64> Goodhart's law in action.

</comment><comment><USER65> I post frequently here with an anti-advertising stance. Briefly: advertising is often just unambiguously lying, and when it's not, it's still a one-sided collection of facts. Advertising breaks one of the core ideas of capitalism: that the best products or best prices will win, because a better-advertised product can beat a cheaper, higher-quality product. If one company spends money on advertising, all their competitors have to start spending money on advertising, which means that the entire market has to take money away from researching and manufacturing quality, or pass that cost on to the consumer.

A common response I get is, "But how will we find out about products?" My stance is that professional review sites supported by users (examples: Consumer Reports, OutdoorGearLab, LabDoor) are the solution.

So why not consumer reviews?

1\. The obvious thing is that it doesn't solve the problem with advertising. Advertisers can pose as consumers and post reviews. Sophisticated methods of detecting this (i.e. ignore all 1- and 5-star reviews) just fall prey to more sophisticated advertisers (i.e. computer generate 30 5-star ratings to keep your star rating up, and then post one carefully-crafted 4-star rating written by a human).

2\. Even if you do manage to filter advertisers, you still tend to hear from the extremes. Irrational positivity isn't better than irrational negativity: a person who posts all 5-star reviews because they want to be nice isn't better than the furious customer with a grudge.

3\. Consumer reviews encourage what I'll call second-level advertising: if you can't advertise directly, then you try to get your consumers to advertise for you. For example: spamming your users with "If you like our product please leave a review on iTunes/GooglePlay/Amazon" or the YouTube classic, "Don't forget to Like and Subscribe!"

4\. Consumers generally aren't experts, which means that consumer reviews are more susceptible to Parkinson's Law of Triviality[1]. A good example of this are the reviews on products that say things like "The parts feel cheap and flimsy." Well, did they break? Probably not, or you would have said that. Titanium parts are thinner and lighter than steel, which sometimes gives them the impression of being cheap and flimsy, when they are in fact more expensive and stronger. But in a more general sense, consumer reviews tend to focus on the look or price of something rather than harder-to-understand things like performance and durability.

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

</comment><comment><USER66> I prefer to read the 1-star reviews. Often, there's nuggets of information written if it's not entirely someone's complaint about a product/thing.

</comment><comment><USER67> Betteridge's law thwarted at long last?

<comment><USER68> No not really. They didn't have much value to begin with. Nothing fundamentally changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> 1/5 Stars - Would not review again.</comment>


Why did Mac OS 7 perform poorly with virtual memory enabled? - <AUTHOR> https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2804/why-did-mac-os-7-perform-poorly-with-virtual-memory-enabled <comment><USER3> _all memory writes are also to disk_

I'm pretty sure that is wrong. What most likely slowed down with VM was that as soon as a page operation had to be performed, the OS would block and do nothing else until the disk access was done.

<comment><USER4> How bad is that? If I'm actively using one program, and that program is waiting on a page from disk, what useful thing can you do in the meantime?

<comment><USER5> IIRC, OS 7 was only cooperatively multitasked. If that were the case, and the program was blocked by the VMM so that it couldn't release the CPU to the next program, I'd imagine the whole system would hang until the read was finished.

I worked with a web developer in the mid 90's who served some image files off his desktop Mac. We noticed intermittent hangs and slowdowns during file transfers. After much head scratching, we pieced together that every time he held down his mouse button, networking stopped until he let go. This was 100% reproducible, and 100% hilarious to us Linux folks.

It got eventually got better.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like this web developer's computer may have been one of the infamous Performa/Power Macintosh x200 series[1]. These are _ridiculously_ designed machines.

Choice quote from [http://lowendmac.com/1997/performa-and-power- mac-x200-issues...](http://lowendmac.com/1997/performa-and-power- mac-x200-issues/):

 _One of the biggest complaints about the x200 series is slow Internet handling. For one thing, looking at the chart above, all data from either the ports or the ethernet controller must pass through the processor to get to memory, then be processed, sent to the IDE controller for cache saving, and then interpreted for graphics display.

There are symptoms to notice because of this. While a web page is loading, typed characters will be lost. When dealing with high IDE access, the graphics controller will seem to freeze. When copying to a network or downloading a file, the monitor will rarely update and will have redraw problems. Spooled print jobs will take forever if lots of processor resizing is necessary._

[1] [http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and- performa-x200-road-a...](http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and- performa-x200-road-apples/)

<comment><USER7> When I was a kid we had a Performa 5200, and I suffered from this. We also got a surplus Quadra 800 with a 66 MHz PowerPC upgrade from my dad's work - <USER2> outperformed the 75 MHz Performa in everything aside from MP3 decoding.

We also ran into the serial port issues the article describes, we got better performance hooking our 56k modem up to the Quadra and sharing that connection to the 5200 over LocalTalk via IPNetRouter than actually using the modem directly.

<comment><USER8> Didn't the Performa use the PPC 603? ISTR it did. The 603 was the 'cheap-n- cheerful' chip in the family, I suspect the Quadra upgrade would have had a 601 or 604, both of which had more oomph.

<comment><USER7> Yeah doing the research now - the 5200 had a 603 @ 75 MHz, and the PowerMac PDS Card had a 601 @ 66 MHz. I was also reminded the 603 had too small of a L1 cache to hold the the 68K emulator, reducing performance even further...

Now I'm curious what made the 5200 better at MP3 playback. My recollection is that the only way to get the upgraded Quadra to play MP3s in realtime was with SoundApp monopolizing the CPU so you couldn't even click anything else. On the Performa, you could run MacAmp in the background while browsing the web, with stuttering "only" during whole page repaints. This was 20 years ago, my recollection could be poor... I soon got my own Quadra 660AV (video digitizing!) and eventually a PowerMac 7500 (that I upgraded to G3 and could even run early versions of OS X with Xpostfacto)

<comment><USER9> I had a 5200, and I had AOL Instant Messenger installed. I'd be working away in some other program, and then the whole thing would freeze for a second, and repaint, every time I got a new IM and was using another program.

After a few days of that crap I just installed YellowDog Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > If the OS and apps you needed to run required 4MB RAM, then you really > should have at least 4MB RAM. [...] Set your VM page size to only 1MB more > than your physical memory size.

ahhh... I'm fond the days from when you could run whole applications in all of 4MiB -- GUIs included.

<comment><USER11> Yeah. I had a colleague who used Photoshop a lot. She got management to spring for 30MB of RAM for her machine. I thought that was the most outrageous thing I'd ever heard.

<comment><USER12> My father used to run a desktop publishing bureau that output people's print jobs onto film, which was then sent to printing presses for printing. This was for magazines, artwork for packaging, etc.

He had a Quadra 950 with 128MB of RAM, which required some pretty exotic SIMMs. That would be a pretty expensive machine in today's money. This was for handling Adobe Illustrator files with large embedded images.

<comment><USER13> Ah, 16MB 30-pin SIMMs. One of the reasons they were not popular was that the first 16Mbit chips was 400 mil, making them pretty tall</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NASA - New Solar Cycle Prediction - <AUTHOR> http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/29may_noaaprediction.htm

<comment><USER2> wow, I didn't know about the huge solar storm of 1859:

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-space- sto...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127001.300-space-storm- alert-90-seconds-from-catastrophe.html?full=true&print=true)</comment>


The title of this video should change with the times [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxV14h0kFs0 <comment><USER2> Can you please email email@example.com? I'd like to ask you something related to story re-upping as described here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380).</comment>


Ask HN: How can I be happy with my pay? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I work in one of the big 4 tech companies, and I make reasonable money. However, I have this problem that whenever I hear about another company that pays more for the same role, or another person who get paid more, my day is usually ruined. I get unhappy and feel like a failure.
I understand this is not a healthy way, and this is not the correct way to think about life, but I am not able to help it.
Most commonly people tell me to enjoy work, but most work is basically crap at any of the big four - so I feel like I should aim for money instead.
Does anyone else feel like this? How do you get over this nonsense, and be happy with pay instead? <comment><USER2> I'm going to guess that the money has nothing to do with it.

You use $ as a way of keeping score and when you hear of others making more, you feel like you failed.

Bad news - no amount of money will fix that.

Good news - you can change it today with a real healthy and honest talk with yourself (and good friends who know you) to find out how you should define success.

Put it in your own terms. For me: I found much more happiness when I made a little less but increased my autonomy. It was huge for me. Like Night and day difference in my happiness.

Hope that helps

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by "increased autonomy"? Could you give some examples of what that looks like? Thanks

<comment><USER2> Being assigned a certain amount of work with a deadline, instead of being expected to clock in 9-5pm.

Being allowed to work whenever (or where ever) is convenient.

Being able to chose the projects you do and pass on some (not all - but for God's sake - some) that are less interesting.

Being able to decide who you work with (no arrogant and demanding know it alls).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I struggle with this too. Perspective is really what helps me. Any amount of money that you make can be high or low relative to who you are surrounding yourself with. Try volunteering at a homeless shelter or getting involved with Habitat for Humanity or something. It's hard to feel bad about your salary when you work with people that just want a bowl of soup. On the contrary, if you hang around with a more affluent group than yourself, you may be more likely to feel like you are not making enough. Take a look at mean/median salaries in your area [1]. You are doing fine!

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States)

</comment><comment><USER4> At a certain point more money doesn't really mean much unless it amounts to a lifestyle change. Suppose you make $120k/yr and you hear someone makes $132k/yr for the same job at a different company. Is the extra ~$660/mo really going to change your day to day life? Probably not. So, it's at that point that more money doesn't really make a company change all that attractive unless it also comes with better work or leaving a company with better work for a pay increase that doesn't change your lifestyle.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a bother if the amount is that small. I currently make ~180k including stocks. Then I hear AirBnB guy that gets ~230k including stocks, or an Uber employee getting ~280k including stocks.

This annoys me beyond reason. I can't keep job hopping around!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why the push to feel happy? You want to be paid more, identify where you'd like to go (company and/or position) what you feel that ought to be worth, and what you need to go to get there. Then execute on that plan, move into that next position, repeat until you hit your skill ceiling, run out of upward mobility, or are satisfied with the compensation.

If you can get a job within the big 4 you probably have a least a base line competency; leverage that and climb the ladder. Life is too short to settle.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's always a bigger fish. So likely the moment I move I am unhappy again.

But I see your point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today"

Read this: [https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for- life/](https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/)</comment>


Lauri Love and the potential civil law "backdoor" for obtaining encryption keys - <AUTHOR> http://jackofkent.com/2016/05/lauri-love-and-the-potential-civil-law-backdoor-for-obtaining-encryption-keys/ <comment><USER2> Background: [https://freelauri.com/arrest-and-uk- investigation/](https://freelauri.com/arrest-and-uk-investigation/)</comment>


Content Stealing Jerks - <AUTHOR> http://www.kevinwilliampang.com/post/Content-Stealing-Jerks.aspx

<comment><USER2> I look at this as a reality that has to be adapted to rather than fought. It would be terribly inconsistent to preach that the MPAA and RIAA have it wrong, and then get in a rut over someone copying your article.

Now, to be fair, these guys are trying to make a profit off your articles (unlike the average joe downloading a movie on BT), but I doubt that many are succeeding too well. I have yet to see one of my own successful articles be supplanted by a clone in the Google search results, and sites like Reddit or HN are usually pretty good at rooting out blogspam. These guys are more like poor sods trying to sell a photocopy of your book for $0.10 on the street corner, than like organised pirates making tens of thousands off illegally copied DVDs. Even if one of them occasionally manages to get some real traffic, considering how hard it is to monetise even when it's on your own site, how hard do you think it is for them?

Getting angry about this seems, to me, on about the same level as getting angry at someone for paying attention during your speech and then going around giving that speech to others without crediting you. Yeah, so they're copying you. So what? The minute the content leaves your computer and enters the internet, it is publicly available and copiable, in the same way as the moment your speech leaves your lips, anyone with a good memory and delivery can copy it.

I'm not one for fighting fundamental reality with papier maché laws. I've summarised my feelings on the topic in my blog's repository, at:

<http://github.com/swombat/danieltenner.com/tree/master>

 _All code is open to use for whatever purpose you have in mind (though I'd prefer if you used it for a good purpose!). You can copy the content and images too (though I'd really rather you didn't copy the content, or if you do copy some of it, please include a link to my blog). If you want to use the danieltenner.com look/CSS/etc as a basis for your look, that's fine too (though I'd appreciate it if you evolved it over time rather than keeping it looking exactly the same)._

<comment><USER3> To me its quite different to the RIAA's copyright dilemnas. I find the misappropriation of authorship to be much more offensive than acquisition without license.

<comment><USER4> Plagiarism is so completely different (morally at least) from social copyright infringement.

<comment><USER5> What's the fundamental difference?

Bloggers don't want to be plagiarised because the plagiarism destroys the remuneration that they get from their work: reputation, feedback, etc. Pay for media doesn't want to have work copied because it deprives them of their form of remuneration: money.

They're both exercising control over an intellectual property so that they get something back from it. I see that there might be mild differences (for example, copying still provides some _possibility_ of the owner getting something back, since the authorship link is retained), but fundamentally, it's the same right that is getting exercised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The hacker news community discovers that stealing ain't so cool when it happens to you.

Various posters then tie themselves into knots trying explain this double- standard. Proferred reasons why it's ok to steal from musicians, but not from technical authors:

\- it's not that stealing is per-se wrong, it's the _plagiarism_ that some posters find distasteful. That musicians' primary source of income is removed when piracy is widespread doesn't seem to concern these posters. Their currency is the kudos obtained from producing engaging and informative technical articles. E.g. (greendestiny): "I find the misappropriation of authorship to be much more offensive than acquisition without license." rcoder has this to say: "Because of that, they can still drive real revenue for those artists -- people may initially acquire an album or episodes of a TV show illegally, then go on in the future to pay for new content from the same people." That rcoder finds this theory compelling in the face of the direct and incontrovertible evidence of a 50% decline in record company revenues in 10 years is somewhat surprising.

\- the RIAA engages in lobbying, and that's evil. Since two wrongs makes a right, it's ok to steal from them and those they represent.

I note also that one of the typical arguments given for why recorded music should be free is that "it costs nothing to reproduce". Which is true, although one wonders why this argument doesn't equally apply to any other creative content reproduced on the web. Books, articles, movies, computer code, anything, essentially!

I'm a musician/hacker and the "fuck you" attitude so prevalent here towards musicians and artists is really saddening. It's almost that people here expect us to live like paupers because that somehow fits some romantic expectation of how an artist is supposed to live, complete with alcohol problems and living in the gutter. That, or we're expected to make barbie dolls of ourselves or find new, cleverer ways to whore ourselves to ad companies (those that support this method as the only method of sustaining the industry will never be able to explain which ad company would have supported Lou Reed's "Heroin") There is no sympathy or empathy or any trace of human compassion towards this constituency.

And this is supposed to be the enlightened, rational hacker community?

Frankly watching some of the self-serving argumentation here is sickening. It's watching intelligent people who really should know better engaging in sophistry in order to justify their blatant pilfering of music.

</comment><comment><USER7> "It's not like Jeff has a copyright on his CSS, javascript, or design"

Well, actually he does (and so do you). Most of the world (all the signatories of the Berne Convention, in blue at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Berne_Convention.png>) grant you automatic copyright on anything you create. You don't need to file any paperwork, you don't need to have a little disclaimer, it just happens.

Now, usually it isn't worth the trouble of pursuing legal action, but you can.

<comment><USER8> I think CNProg just copied the design. Chinese companies copying American design is not exactly anything new.

<comment><USER9> TaoTao (twitter), youku (youtube), digg.cn, faceren, and now cnprog.

I heard that there are teams in China that take orders as simple as "copy site X," and get it done within a month or so.

<comment><USER10> Google the name of any tech startup and you'll come across oDesk projects titled "[startup] clone", with tons of bids. There are teams actively cloning Twiddla right now (as evidenced by accepted bids to projects like the above). It's just the way it goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I always find it interesting when articles like this take the stance that piracy is bad, but articles about copying movies/music/game piracy take the opposite stance (piracy is good).

Perhaps I am missing something? Content is content, if someone copies you and shares it without you getting the payola, how is this any different from what happens in the movies/music/game industries?

<comment><USER12> People who download movies/music/games do not edit the content to make themselves appear as the creators and artists. Quite the opposite, warez releases usually come with a synopsis and background info on the distributed work.

<comment><USER13> To add to that, the offenders here are not only lifting content but presumably profiting from it (with AdSense) as well.

<comment><USER11> Mininova make 1million pounds per year, probably more. What's the difference?

<comment><USER14> Mininova doesn't host or distribute the content.

<comment><USER6> Right, so actually storing the illegally-obtained copyrighted content is what you consider wrong.

In other words, you oppose the RIAA going after The Pirate Bay. But by your own argumentation going after, say, a college kid with a terrabyte of fileshared music on his computer _is_ ok, because the material is hosted on his computer.

Could you please confirm that this is what you are saying, or admit that you're in fact engaging in sophistry to justify you stealing content (music), but at the same time defend yourself from others stealing your content (blog entries, technical articles).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What do you do? You exercise the rights that deep-pocketed copyright holders have acquired through lobbying Congress.

Send a DMCA complaint to the CSJ's ISP or hosting provider. The ISP or hosting provider gets safe harbor from the DMCA, but only if they promptly remove access to the infringing content.

</comment><comment><USER16> Out of curiosity a question to the HN community at large: how would you defend yourself against a particularly cheeky content stealing jerk who claims that you stole her content? I have been wondering about this in the context of non- watermarked photos/images. How do you prove you were the actual original creator?

<comment><USER17> "how would you defend yourself against a particularly cheeky content stealing jerk who claims that you stole her content?"

I defend myself by embedded comments, and sometimes by fictitious entries

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

that mark my work as plainly my own. I learned a story about this when I was in school. In World War I, the Heast newspaper chain appeared to be copying Associated Press stories from the eastern front, and the AP started running stories about a Russian general Nelotsky who was enjoying great success against the Germans. Pretty soon the Hearst newspapers picked up the story too, and then AP revealed that "Nelotksy" was a completely fictitious name of a nonexistent person, based on a reversal of the spelling of the word "stolen." I was able to catch a plagiarist red-handed with a similar technique.

I will say that I like the post-Google era better than I liked the era of the hand-edited Yahoo directory, as Yahoo's original directory pointed to my site in one category, but also pointed to a very blatant plagiarist of some of my best content from another category. Since Google page rank has ordered search results, generally people who search for content on the issues I write about best are able to find my site first, not the plagiarists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> One distinction for me between copying an online article and copying music or a game, is that with the latter, people are pirating it because they'd can't otherwise access it. They'd have to pay or inconvenience themselves somehow, so they go for the free version.

A piece of online content, assuming it's free, is something anyone can effortlessly access from anywhere.

So they may as well go to the original source, reward the author for his work, and not support someone else who's being more parasitic.

<comment><USER19> One could argue that propagating(copying) the content across disparate site removes the inconvenience of finding the original content while still not rewarding the creator of the work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Delimitdesign.com are using wordpress with WooThemes' "The Gazette Edition" premium theme: <http://www.woothemes.com/category/themes/page/2>

They removed the credits from the footer and the css file, so I bet they stole this too (Torrents for this theme are available).

</comment><comment><USER21> and to think all this is supported by Adsense. Surely to hit them where it hurts is to get G to pull their ads from the site.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the idea you propose is a good one, but there is no need for a firefox plug-in.

It can just be a site where content providers post side by side articles detailing their content was ripped off. Just as you did. Also the community of said site can thumb up or down the poster's argument; labeling who the real jerk is!

<comment><USER23> There are sites like this that already exist in the web design field.

<http://www.pirated-sites.com> is one that I remember.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Where are you? The site you referenced in the post is registered in the UK, which may or may not make pursuing copyright infringement feasible.</comment>