Auto companies are lacking key ingredients for the future of the automobile - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/the-auto-industry-won-t-create-the-future-ba1867c9f0d7 <comment><USER2> This is a great post from someone not in the industry.

Car companies can't outsource production to Foxconn.

Source: gesamtprojectintegrationleiter (complete project integration director) for a german car brand. After the car is "finished" setting up the production line and making the tools is a 24-36 month process. You _need_ suppliers both for sheer capacity and expertise. On my project, 17,000 parts (most with subcomponents) coming together. THEN crash, emissions, certification, etc.

Easier of course to do at small scale like Tesla, but growth and capacity planning are huge topics. Tesla's run rate is what 30K cars per year? (not sure, just a guess). BMW sold 2M cars last year. Factories, suppliers, labor, paint, tooling (not the fun stuff) consumes an unbelievable number of cycles.

Obviously that revolution will come from software, but there's no getting around the hardware. One of the software co's will have to buy a car company to achieve revolution and scale.

<comment><USER3> So build a Foxconn.

Someone is moving to create a billion dollar scale auto manufacturing facility in Atlanta. Seems nobody knows who, but guesses abound.

Both Apple and Tesla realize this is a solvable problem and have the money to make it happen. Blog Wait But Why brilliantly detailed the the return to first principles for enormous cost savings. We've seen it before, we'll see it again.

Someone did create Foxconn, after all.

<comment><USER4> To become a 'Foxconn' of automotive is really an interesting idea. The model of designing a vehicle might have to become more constrained which cuts right into the core of the automotive industry's design processes and car model portfolios. They're trying as hard as possible to horizontally differentiate from the competition and vertically differentiaite to access more segments.

A billion dollar plant isn't really novel for the car industry - that's what it costs to bring a new facility for a model or family of models online.

I think the missing link to do what you're describing (a 'flow shop' that can be very rapidly reconfigured to act like a 'job shop') would take an order of magnitude or two more investment which, given the automotive industry's single-digit profit margins, may be too risky for the incumbents. I've heard of Tesla trying to do this, but not without major difficulty (no one has ever scaled this while simultaneously building a brand new company and car and distribution network and being at the forefront of aluminum body components, etc.)

<comment><USER3> Thing is, there really isn't that much differentiation between automobile models. Everything out there is basically a sedan, SUV, or pickup truck (even the Jeep Wrangler is being forced, kicking & screaming, into the SUV form) with little meaningful difference between variants. In "trying as hard as possible to horizontally differentiate from the competition and vertically differentiate to access more segments", manufacturers are trying _really_ hard to make car-making as hard & difficult & expensive as possible. So back to basics: it's not that hard, it's a well-understood process with a robust supply chain ... an industry ripe for one company to arise focusing on turning designs into vehicles, without the additional overhead of design & marketing.

Insofar as the "flow shop" for car manufacturing "would take an order of magnitude or more investment", well, we all know one company that _does_ have that kind of cash (!) lying around, and the interest in re-inventing the automotive industry.

<comment><USER2> > manufacturers are trying really hard to make car-making as > hard & > difficult & expensive as possible.

I think you may be under-estimating the complexities market. In fact, the cheapest models in a give product are often the highest volume. So you have to deliver maximum _value_ in each price segment.

It's not solely about price: The last brand to compete primarily on low-price was Yugo. How'd that turn out?

Also, if marketing is so non-essential, why does Google make any money? For that matter, how many non-free [choose your industry, including software] companies don't use paid-for marketing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work for one of the tier 1 automotive suppliers mentioned, and the author couldn't be more wrong about data.

We have exceedingly large data sets -- equating to millions of km of driving from locations all around the globe -- and we use that data in a very disciplined and very effective manner.

(My particular area of interest is in the use of off-line machine learning algorithms to analyse and optimise the algorithms that go onto the vehicle as embedded software).

<comment><USER6> So where's the data from?

<comment><USER5> We buy lots of cars, equip them with lots of different sensors, design and manufacture data recording systems to fit in them, organize configuration- management systems to manage and track changes to these test platforms, then drive them around collecting data, driven by the requirements that are placed upon our algorithms and systems, then analyse the data using both automated and manual methods.

It _is_ a time-consuming and capital intensive endeavour, no doubt about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I bought new car recently and all the electronics is a bad joke. Especially the "on board computer" with "large touch enabled screen". Low resolution, dull colours, limited viewing angles, broken UI, bare minimum of functions. UX of a washing machine. Dear automakers, just open up the APIs to aircon and seatbelt sensors and leave a big hole in the middle of the front panel with USB-C connector and don't force your obsolete technology on me. Any half decent Android tablet is vastly superior to whatever "computer" you hardwired into the car back in 2007.

<comment><USER8> But you don't entrust your life - and that of your family - to any half decent Android tablet. With cars, you can't "break things, move fast" as in some other industries.

<comment><USER9> I'd rather trust my life to a half-decent Android tablet than whatever insanity the carmakers are likely to have perpetrated in their firmware, but the real answer is that it shouldn't matter. Only a criminally irresponsible degree of incompetence can justify the connection of any of that fancy crap to any part of the car that has anything to do with its actual operation through any connection more substantial than power+ground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If one mentally redefines what a "car" will become, it can inform (and also mislead) predictions.

Several industry writers have jokingly observed that a car like Tesla is really a "laptop with wheels".

If we extend that reframing to say that future cars are really "robots with wheels", it doesn't look so preposterous that Tesla, Google[1], and Apple (rumoured self-driving car) could dominate Ford, GM, Toyota, etc. It seems possible that a 75% or more of a future car's R&D costs will be the sensors + computer algorithms + petabytes of cloud data integration instead of things like the tires, paint formulations, suspensions, etc.

To riff on a phrase from CEO Reed Hastings, _" The Goal Is to Become HBO Faster Than HBO Can Become Us"_ ... it seems reasonable for Tesla/Google/Apple to acquire competencies in assembling chassis with wheels faster than Ford/GM/Toyota to acquire competitive knowledge in robotics+algorithms. Time will tell.

[1] robotics company acquired by Google: [https://www.youtube.com/user/BostonDynamics](https://www.youtube.com/user/BostonDynamics)

<comment><USER5> The automotive industry isn't populated by idiots -- but writing safety critical software isn't the same as writing an app.

It is true that there is no _fundamental_ conflict between modern software development practices (Agile etc..) and process-maturity oriented standards like ISO15504 / ASPICE / ISO26262 / DO-178b etc... but writing the tools, build-systems etc... that let these differing concerns coexist in harmony _does_ take some careful consideration, planning, and organisation.

<comment><USER11> Also "chassis with wheels" is easy. Congrats, you have built a trailer. Building a car to satisfy modern consumer is not that difficult, but it isn't trivial either. And it will be expensive.

Software companies are good at making software. But car manufacturers currently are some of the leading experts in computer modelling of physical world.

<comment><USER5> Quite. Also, organising engineering teams on a global scale isn't trivial ... and much of the engineering process is about coordinating people, rather than specifically being concerned with the things that those people are doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe I am wrong, but I think key innovation is to reduce cost and environmental impact. Tesla and other high tech cars are maybe cleaner to run, but have large footprint due to their complicated production.

At this front leader is India and China. Tatu in India is doing stuff like gluing car parts together. And China has huge fleet of electric vehicles and recharging stations, in form of electric bikes.

<comment><AUTHOR> The total footprint is already lower than for ICE cars according to this study: [http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric- vehicles/life-...](http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric- vehicles/life-cycle-ev-emissions)

<comment> vive-la-liberte What is ICE? India, China and something else?

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm skeptical about this. It seems like the people who say "I want a self driving car" seem to be really saying they wish they didn't need a car at all.

The people tho like cars often say "I want a car with less computers". What they probably really want is access to the technology they have already bought.

I'm pretty sure Uber has not run it's course yet. They could almost destroy the market for self driving cars. Especially with competition.

I hope that cars go to the direction of bicycles. Currently bicycles are more standardized than ever, with more options than ever. And with more competition than ever. It's hard(?) to find a new bicycle with all parts coming from same manufacturer. To me it seems this modularity is ultimately good for consumers. If capitalism works, that's where cars should gravitate too.

<comment><USER14> Seems to me that Uber won't stop the market for self-driving cars, so much as validate it.

They'll save a lot of money when they don't have to pay drivers anymore.

Or...

One person or company that owns a fleet of self-driving cars and sells them all on Uber.

I think this is what the writer mean when he said self-driving cars will eliminate the need for parking lots. You'll walk out of any building in the developed world and your ride to the next place will be an driverless Uber cab.

<comment><USER11> If someone gives me a ride with a deal that he drives and I pay the gas, how could anything compete with that? Lot's of people genuinely enjoy driving.

Also bus ticket costs me 45e/month. They have schedule, which is huge asset. You could make self driving bus, but that market isn't as big. And the cost savings aren't that huge. With bus, large share of the costs come from fuel and maintenance.

There are minibuses I can already order to my doorstep. [https://kutsuplus.fi/tour](https://kutsuplus.fi/tour)

And for really seldom occasions renting a car is becoming more and more easy and cheap.

If it takes 15 years to develop self driving car, it's possible that 90% of the current market for it has melted away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The note about car manufacturers these days being system integrator is the killer point.

Over 100 years now car industries have started, evolved, grown, multiplied, consolidated, failed, and experimented to today. Amazingly efficient at taking chunks of metal and plastic from around the world, turn it into a car in 17 hours in one of three or four locations in America, transport it to where you are so it can sit on a lot for another week before getting sold to you to take home.

That efficiency is what makes it amazing. And that efficiency is going to be what kills it.

Apple will come in, make a better ipod as they want to do and support it as they can do.

<comment><USER16> Yes. I agree.

I see a lot of companies determined to outsource all of their IT work. As we all know, most of the time this fails miserably. But even sadder is when it succeeds. IT is the brain of any organization. If you succeed in distributing all the brains of your organization, all you end up being is an integrator. You've just spent a big part of your resources training technical folks in a bunch of other companies all of the important parts of your business. Success! You've turned your company into a giant brainless robot which efficiently runs on very little capital. And then you stagnate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17>
      > ... their dashboards are (likely to be) gorgeous and
      > vastly improved over the mostly superfluous dials and
      > gauges car manufacturers think we need to see (when was
      > the last time you had to check your RPMs or engine
      > temperature?).

Being aware of engine RPMs and temperature is important.

I'm all for better interfaces. Personally, I drive a diesel Volkswagen and having a customizable dashboard that could provide access to additional engine parameters and sensors, such as I can access today with a laptop connected using Vag-Com (see [http://www.ross-tech.com](http://www.ross-tech.com)) could be useful. But the key is to provide better situational awareness for the driver, not more distractions.

In the US alone, more than 40k people die every year and millions are injured while operating or riding in these machines. Self-driving cars may be the future in some urban areas and on interstates, but we need to continue to optimize vehicles for drivers, not make them into more distracting spaces where people can continue to indulge their addictions to communication and media consumption.

</comment><comment><USER18> Whenever I read an article like this, with factual errors and inaccuracies in the details (eg no modern car sold today has a carburetor), I wonder how believable the big picture ideas presented in the article are?

Does the author have any idea what he is talking about? Did he just make a small mistake when trying to add details to his ideas, or does the lack of subject matter knowledge reveal the writer's cluelessness?

<comment><USER19> He clearly doesn't. Nearly every paragraph has either an inaccurate or ignorant statement that makes this really painful to read.

It's easy to criticize and sound prescient when you hand-wave away reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cars are kind of like tvs. My philosophy has always been to get the cheapest nav/entertainment system (or dumbest tv) and use the car speakers like a dumb pipe, because nearly every auto maker's attempt at integrating technology are completely subpar. If you expect to keep a car for more than a year or two, your best bet is aftermarket or third party components anyway.

I'd say one of the few that get it is Tesla. The huge touchscreen is pretty cool, even though you lose tactile feedback, a huge nav screen with consistent ota updates is neat.

<comment><USER21> I hated using a touchscreen navigation system in a previous car. The loss of tactile feedback is nothing to sneeze over, as I much prefer even a rotating dial interface which I can use while completely visually (not cognitively of course) focused on the road. This increases at least perceived safety by a large margin. An ideal combination might be a touchscreen with tactile feedback buttons, which I think has been used to limited success before. Or just voice or alternative input...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are some good points made, and I do believe this is a solvable problem, but I also view google and apples entry into car building as naive on some levels. I am way oversimplifying but it strikes me as a plot to "silicon valley". Hooli's CEO telling the board/company all hands one day after meeting with his guru- WERE GONNA BUILD A CAR!!! Everyone looks at each other incredulously and says "umm ok, I guess we're gonna build a car". Then queue the subplot that 90% of the engineers never learned to drive and bighead is the only driver...

I know this isn't the real case, and I know some brilliant people are working the problem for these companies, but I think that a better approach would be for a tech company to team up with the hardware company and leverage their combined strengths. That would probably yield a better product that is less "Jony Ive's magical mystery mobile". Shallow or not, that google car would embarrass me to ride in.

</comment><comment><USER23> The best selling car in America is the Ford F-series pickup truck. I can't wait to see competing trucks from Tesla and Apple.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've seen this movie before. In the seventies I had a birds eye view here in Michigan as the Big 3 totally missed the Asian threat.

Now the same smug group makes jokes about Tesla (and Apple) and when it rises up to smite them they will be caught totally unaware. This time a trade embargo won't allow them to regroup.

<comment><USER25> The car industry is a lot larger than 'the big 3' (or really, the big 2 1/2).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's not the ingredients, it's the future they are missing. Car companies wanting to generate money and not the future. They lost their vision.

Once upon a time a new guy will come with a vision. Hopefully he has enough money too change something.

I really don't understand why we are still driving with fossil oil. That's prolly due to the lack of competetion. car manufacturers thing we will buy their cars anyway.

</comment><comment><USER27> Software companies also lack key ingredients for the future of the automobile. The first to successfully combine the best of both worlds wins.

</comment><comment><USER28> you know i really like my carb'd V8. Nothing like taking it out early in the morning when no-one is on the road and quite literally pouring gasoline into the motor.

I feel that a cup would be more effective sometimes tho. Don't get me started on jetting configs.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is why you have automated companies like Mobileye which provide the innovation in autos</comment>


How to Measure Your Start-up's Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/entrepreneurship/all-in-the-numbers-how-to-measure-your-start-ups-success/

<comment><USER2> Nice list. It's always good to be able to quantify your progress - which can definitely help get young companies through rough patches where it might seem there's no growth happening.

<comment><USER3> I would argue it's the most important - if you don't know whether or not people are sticking around, the total number of overall new users is somewhat meaningless

<comment><USER4> Agreed - it just takes a small amount of time now to start tracking, so in the future you'll have a clear idea of where you began and how far you've come.</comment></comment></comment>


Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire OpenDNS - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1667697 <comment><USER2> I sincerely hope that Cisco keeps the OpenDNS Home free offering around, as it's by far the best filtering service for families I've used. Sign up, block inappropriate categories through the service, and point your router to the DNS IPs and you're done. (Oh, and grab the IP autoupdater.) Keeping the kids (and adults) safe is my favorite aspect of OpenDNS.

From the "we just got acquired" FAQ:

> The free service will continue to operate. It's part of who we are, and > Cisco loves who we are. We wouldn't have entered into this agreement if we > believed our free service would be in jeopardy. On contrary, Cisco's > commitment back to you is to maintain OpenDNS's DNS services exactly as it > is today. In their words: "This level of service for all users is a > priority."

<comment><USER3> Curious, what are the worries you're keeping kids safe from? I've got two daughters, now 7 and 8, and since they were born they've had unmonitored, unfiltered[1] IP connectivity. My parents did the same (well, with BBSes at first). The only thing I've ever wanted to filter out is the "kids" stuff since it's often so bad (e.g., Netflix for kids has lots of dumb shit, or those Flash games my kids like so much are ... low quality.) What am I missing?

(If auto updates are on, that pretty much eliminates exploits installing malware. (Assuming no one's gonna waste a 0day to install some spam/ad junk.))

1: The only filtering is client side, an ad blocker so they don't grow up accustomed to adverts. And just for general sanity - the web's rather obnoxious otherwise.

<comment><USER2> In a word: pornography.

Occasionally, even with Safe Search turned on, images that I don't want my children seeing will pop up under oddly innocuous searches. And it's easy to accidentally stumble upon it, especially to untrained searchers.

Now I know people will have varying opinions about the subject, but I for one (and I know I'm not alone) don't want to view pornography, and certainly don't want my children viewing it, so a filtering service like OpenDNS is awesome. Beyond pornography, there's a lot of other good stuff that you can restrict as well, like hate/discrimination sites, dating sites, etc.--stuff that I don't need and don't need my kids getting involved with an online dating site right now.

<comment><USER4> I'm much more worried about my son stumbling onto a beheading than porn, but I suppose to each his own. Obviously one good thing about any kind of imposed filtering is that inspires the little ones to figure out how to bypass it... which is at least good for their development in some ways.

<comment><USER5> The Windows Live Family Safety filter that was installed on my first internet connected computer taught me how to kill processes and manipulate startup entries on Windows.

Oddly enough, my only experience with OpenDNS is from me convincing my parents to let me try to set it up on the family router because I broke the other control (which makes no sense from a protection / censorship perspective).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Don't link paywall articles like that, it's really annoying.

2\. Is it sad that while OpenDNS has been a handy stopgap for me while I get other options in place, my first thought is "well, there goes OpenDNS..."

I spent quite a bit of my earlier tech days as a Cisco admin, so I have grown to hate them with a fiery passion only reserved for entities that buck/subvert standards and license companies to death because they have market dominance.

<comment><USER7> > 1\. Don't link paywall articles like that, it's really annoying.

the management of this site has said many times that they are fine with paywalled submissions.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9796231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9796231)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> David Ulevitch is one of the nicest people in Tech. Couldn't be happier for him. This is great news

<comment><USER9> He definitely is, and he changed my life. Working at OpenDNS has been my best life experience ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Link via Google, to avoid paywall:

[http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&url=http://www.w...](http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&url=http://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco- to-buy-network-security-company-opendns-1435668508)

<comment><USER11> I don't like the fact that mainstream publications (NYT, WSJ, Grauniad) show up on HN this often, especially the paywalled ones, but at this point just have your browser forge referrals for WSJ and always tell it you're coming from Google.

There's refcontrol[1] for Firefox. There are other options for Chrome[2].

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/En- us/firefox/addon/refcontrol/](https://addons.mozilla.org/En- us/firefox/addon/refcontrol/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941)

<comment><USER12> I'm curious as to why people on HN upvote WSJ stories so much. The WSJ version of this story has more upvotes than other publications. Do the HN readers who upvote this paywalled stuff actually pay for WSJ subscriptions?

<comment><USER13> It's because "people on HN" is not a monolithic group.

<comment><USER12> Many more people on HN upvote WSJ stories over similar stories on other publications. So "people on HN" is accurate, as it appears to reflect the majority opinion here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wonderful, another product for Cisco to buy and ruin (see Linksys). OpenDNS was good because it offered an alternative choice to Google's DNS and allowed you to do basic parental control filtering at the DNS level (which is surprisingly effective).

<comment><USER15> Well not google images or youtube. Or am I wrong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is an interesting buy for Cisco. The corporate/small business tier of OpenDNS looks like a good fit with some of their products.

But do they have any other freemium services like the personal/family tiers of OpenDNS? I can't think of any.

<comment> m-app Cisco also plans to go big on IoT and this will integrate nicely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats to David Ulevitch for building a great company and taking it to a successful conclusion! Well done. I could tell he was on a good trajectory when he hired away one of my more capable colleagues at a previous employer. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Damn, I thought OpenDNS would merge with CloudFlare and then take over Avast to create a new cloud security giant... :-/

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats to the OpenDNS team. I hope you continue the awesome OpenLate meetups ([http://www.meetup.com/OpenLate/](http://www.meetup.com/OpenLate/)).

<comment><USER19> Thanks! The plan is to continue them indefinitely!

(I started OpenLate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They'd be dumb to shut down the consumer DNS product. It's a goldmine of useful security data they can funnel back into their other products. Also, DNS doesn't cost much to run.

</comment><comment><USER21> OpenDNS is a great service. It has been my DNS server for at least 6 months now. I've turned off Tumblr, Facebook, Techcrunch, WSJ, NYTimes, & many others - but not Hacker News. Still, it has greatly minimized my web distractions.

</comment><comment><USER22> Congrats to davidu and team, you folks made an awesome product and I'm excited to see how Cisco can integrate it in their products as well as what they plan on doing with it in the future.

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9804877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9804877)

</comment><comment><USER24> This seems like a pretty great purchase. Is there anything other than Cisco's licensing model that people truly don't like them for?

<comment><USER3> The way they handled security when that guy made shellcode for IOS was pretty reprehensible. Apart from flat out refusing to believe it at first, I believe they tried to get him fired as well as using legal tactics.

And in licensing model, be sure to include adding checks to lock out fair competiton ("genuine" checks). There's probably some other shitty things they've done that I'm not recalling ATM.

But otherwise? Well I probably am partial to what I first learned. But I recently tried Fortinet, and the configuration is so braindead stupid, I felt bad for all the times I got annoyed with Cisco.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I bet their employees are rich now and the culture is going to be even better than ever.

<comment><USER26> How many employees had 0.1% equity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Non-paywalled article: [http://www.securityweek.com/cisco-acquire- opendns-635-millio...](http://www.securityweek.com/cisco-acquire- opendns-635-million)

<comment><USER28> Thank you sir

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sometimes I think there are literally people working for the shitty WSJ posting here

</comment><comment><USER26> Cisco acquiring security companies? It's like the 1990s all over again. :)

</comment><comment><USER30> And there goes the "Open" part of OpenDNS. With Cisco's strong ties to the NSA and with its general attitude of supporting censorship in many countries around the world, I'd stay away from using OpenDNS' servers from now on.

I think [https://www.opennicproject.org](https://www.opennicproject.org) is a nice alternative.

I'd probably be very vigilant about their future contributions to Libsodium as well.

<comment><USER31> What was open about it? I always felt weird with the combination of 'open' in the name and then tracking and advertising heavily.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: how do i delete an old comment? - <AUTHOR>

http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=2655492
i use a throwaway account as a login for pretty much everything to obfuscate my real identity.
i posted my email address in a thread not realizing it would be indexed so thoroughly by Google. now when you search for my throwaway account on Google, this comment shows up, linking the throwaway account directly to my name.
since i can't delete the comment, i don't know what to do. and i don't feel like emailing PG just yet.
any ideas? <comment><USER2> Your only option is to email PG - there is no way to delete old comments.</comment>


Secrets of the hated corporate intranet - <AUTHOR> http://www.intranetsecrets.com/ <comment><USER2> _We spent $860,000 rebuilding our intranet. The most popular page on the intranet is still the cafeteria menu._

Is it really _that_ surprising that people eat?

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Running some basic math, let's say the business has four divisions of equal size and one cafeteria. Every single person might be viewing the homepage for their division, but only 3 in 10 view the cafeteria menu; that means the division pages get 25% of traffic, and the cafeteria menu gets 30%, is still be 'most popular', but only because it appeals to the widest base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "the number one search term on our intranet is 'Google'"

Awesome.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't really surprise me. (I wonder what % of searches on google are for google?)

:) My firefox plugin to search the intranet (originally one I built myself - now just the supplied one), means that I occasionally do very strange intranet searches. (And very strange google searches at points)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clever :-)

The about page suggests that this is a viral marketing scheme for <http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/> \-- looks interesting.

</comment><comment><USER7> _We spent $860,000 rebuilding our intranet..._

That's where you went wrong.

<comment><USER8> That's one team of Java developers for one year.

Big companies are big, and this kind of money is pocket change, especially when their Intranet has 300,000 users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank you for this link. Brigtened my day. I was an intranet webmaster at a bank for some time...</comment>


A Trick That Hides Censored Websites Inside Cat Videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/a-system-that-hides-censored-websites-inside-cat-videos/524247/?utm_source=atltw&single_page=true <comment><USER2> Here's the website for Slitheen (the project described in the article): [https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/software/slitheen/](https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/software/slitheen/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting idea, but it depends on Decoy Routing.

Decoy routing (in the sense of expecting someone to let State (== NSA) run some code on their biggest backbone routers) seems basically unworkable -- both technically and politically. I don't understand why anyone pushes it, except for people trying to find an excuse to give USG access to their backbone under some pretense.

You could deploy this in a more workable "domain fronting" model, vs. the decoy routing model, though. In that case, especially if the sites are user generated content sites, you wouldn't need the active cooperation of anyone -- neither site operator nor backbone network operator.

</comment><comment><USER4> See also: [1]

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

</comment><comment><USER5> Direct link to Slitheen research paper with diagrams - [https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/software/slitheen/slitheen- paper....](https://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/software/slitheen/slitheen-paper.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> Would something like this lead to text-centred sites coming back?</comment>


Nginx now within 1% of IIS's Active Site Market Share - mike-cardwell http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/11/07/november-2011-web-server-survey.html

<comment><USER2> I love statistics. They can be used to say just about whatever one desires.

The goal of the post seems to be to show relevance and traction gains in the market. The charts from netcraft that discuss all domains are pointless for that, because domains are a dime a dozen. What we should pay attention to are the numbers across the busiest sites.

First, is a million sites a good measure? Netcraft has identified just over 180 million websites, so the million busiest sites seems a pretty good assessment. To be useful, we need to see how nginx fares in the market of websites where these decisions count. So, the busiest million sites is a good measure for that.

Of the four servers identified (Google App Engine is a toy, shouldn't be on this list), nginx is the only one that actually made quantifiable gains in the two months compared. Both Apache and Microsoft/IIS took steps back. In this consideration, nginx sits at 8% share, which is essentially "statistically relevant". But even then, it's only one month of data. A longer term view is more relevant.

Back in April ([http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/04/06/april-2011-web-...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/04/06/april-2011-web- server-survey.html)), nginx was measured in the same context at 6.5% of these same sites; half a year later, nginx sits at 8%.

Here's the summary: nginx is making relevant market share gains in the web server space, and is taking share from both Microsoft/IIS and Apache.

<comment><USER3> > Google App Engine is a toy

Compared to what? Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but last time I checked building fault-tolerant, arbitrarily scalable distributed systems was still pretty hard.

<comment><USER2> Compared to other web servers that don't put programmatic limitations or restrictions in place?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how many websites use nginx as a web server instead of simply as a reverse proxy server.

What nginx really needs is something like WAMP or MAMP to really spur adoption. I suspect lot of beginner web developers use Apache and MySQL because they're both installed by default on hosting providers. On Windows, you can't beat one-click WAMP installs.

<comment><USER5> beginning web developers don't run their own servers. they might run wamp on a local test machine, but everybody deploys to cheap shared hosts where they don't have a choice of server.

I don't know (or particularly care) what my personal site is running on. i pay dreamhost a couple bucks and they take care of all that boring stuff for me.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I'm a beginner and have used Apache because it's just what comes with everything. My non-toy sites always use Apache as I know I'm less prone to trouble because of my experience with it.

I do have a VPS account with Webbynode which lets you run several Linux flavors, and a choice of nix, apache, or node which is cool but still scary for someone like me who is comfortable with the command line on my own file system but a little shaky when SSH-img into my VPS.

This might sound dumb, but I'm a server newbie. What I've always wondered is why anyone would use IIS at all? It seems like all MS products make you jump through hoops to do simple things that work on Apache ad others with just a click or simple command. It's been a while since I've experienced it so I wish I could point to so,etching more solid but I remember a few years back having to install PHP on IIS with MySQL and it was a pain plus not everything worked by default and there was just a lot of hoops to jump through just to get a simple CRUD app online. What does IIS offer that others don't?

Also, why does most enterprise software get built with ASP and .NET? I'm in a CIS program in college and they're all about teaching us Microsoft technologies and I can't stand it because I feel like I'll be using languages, frameworks, and other tech that's open for the most part in real world situations (I don't plan to be a corporate programmer, I'm already in business for myself). Please excuse my ignorance, I really do just wonder, I could be thinking totally backwards here.

<comment><USER7> It depends on your clients and/or the work you're doing. On the server-side, I do almost entirely ASP.NET work for small and medium business. Much of that is public-facing and you wouldn't know it was .NET unless you viewed the source and looked pretty closely. You certainly can build drab, enterprisey software with ASP.NET (or any other language), but you can also build sites like Stack Overflow just as easily.

Trying to host an ASP.NET 4/MVC3 site on Apache would be a nightmare. So, for the same reason you might tend to avoid IIS for your PHP work, .NET developers will prefer IIS for their work.

As for why so much "enterprise" software is written in languages like C# and Java, I believe it has a lot to do with those companies having very large teams with high turnover. Static languages (and their tooling) do have some compelling advantages in that situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how accurate this is in some ways. Yes, Nginx is powering the web, but what about all those corporate servers behind firewalls running (custom) .NET or Java apps. Those aren't measured at all.

I think IIS in many ways is a different market...

<comment><USER9> Yes -- the vast majority of IIS implementations are run behind corporate firewalls -- they won't show up in surveys like this. These stats don't show web server popularity, they show the popularity of _public_ web servers.

<comment><USER8> Even public is debatable, many web application servers or servers requiring accounts likely won't be hit. The percentage of all HTTP requests that are to servers they measure will likely be pretty low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whats with the near-vertical growth of hostnames in 2011?

<comment><USER5> likely a change in the way netcraft counts things. i remember looking at some other netcraft graph with a similar jump, and after some research i found that it was because they decided to count every single blog on a chinese blogging service as a separate hostname. similar to counting every [username].tumblr.com as a separate host.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In terms of the top sites using nginx they saw a big gain this week -

<http://trends.builtwith.com/Web-Server/nginx>

Whilst IIS7 is gaining market share it's as the expense of IIS in general losing market share.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nginx's share actually went down, just MS's share went down more.

Apache is the real winner here.

<comment> mike-cardwell Yes, there are several ways to look at these statistics. You could also say:

Microsofts total number of active sites increased by more than Nginx's.

Or:

Relative to their totals, Nginx's number of active sites increased by more than Microsofts.

I think it will be interesting to see nginx push IIS into third place. I hope it manages to take some of Apaches share too. I'm a big user of Apache, but I'd like to see some more competition up there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Misleading headline, its still 7% short in total servers polled.

<comment> mike-cardwell I prefer the description "100% accurate" to "misleading".

If I'd have used "Market Share" instead of "Active Site Market Share", you might have had a point.

Would you have prefered this title? ...

"Nginx now within 1% of IIS's Active Site Market Share and within 7% of Server Number Market Share"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Question; how does netcraft determine what web-server serves a particular domain? Most big sites hide those details in http headers, so how do they tell?

<comment><USER15> ...Read the HTTP headers? I think you answered your own question.

<comment><USER16> I think GP meant that they hide that info even in their headers, such that you can't just see what's in Server:.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Woah, where did all those domains (300m+ over a year) come from?

</comment><comment><USER18> Isn't it true that IIS makes the most profit out of all the web servers and thus 'wins'? Just like that iPhone vs. Android argument.

<comment><USER19> Profits related to the iPhone tells you something about its users - <AUTHOR> spenders, good market to target. Profits related to IIS, unless you're in the business of selling breain-dead. NET components, only tells you how fucked up you are for choosing a commercial web server, when the alternatives are not only better but also free and also preferred by the top busiest sites ever (except MSDN).

<comment><USER18> Uh wow.That's not even wrong. Not sure if I should reply to a troll.

Even if what you said is true, how does it change the fact that MS makes the most money out of web servers and not others?

StackOverflow, NewEgg, PlentyOfFish etc. are not busy sites now? It's funny to see how StackOverflow was able to scale easily while Reddit couldn't. There's a lot more to running high traffic sites than just the web server.

Maybe you should enlighten the companies below?

Costco - <http://www.costco.com/> [costco.com] Crate & Barrel - <http://www.crateandbarrel.com/> [crateandbarrel.com] Home Shopping Network - <http://www.hsn.com/> [hsn.com] Buy.com - <http://www.buy.com/> [buy.com] Dell - <http://www.dell.com/> [dell.com] Nasdaq - <http://www.nasdaq.com/> [nasdaq.com] Virgin - <http://www.virgin.com/> [virgin.com] 7-Eleven - <http://www.7-eleven.com/> [7-eleven.com] Carnival Cruise Lines - <http://www.carnival.com/> [carnival.com] L'Oreal - <http://www.loreal.com/> [loreal.com] Remax - <http://www.remax.com/> [remax.com] Monster Jobs - <http://www.monster.com/> [monster.com] USA Today - <http://www.usatoday.com/> [usatoday.com] ComputerJobs.com - <http://computerjobs.com/> [computerjobs.com] Match.com - <http://www.match.com/> [match.com] National Health Services (UK) - <http://www.nhs.uk/> [www.nhs.uk] CarrerBuilder.com - <http://www.careerbuilder.com/> [careerbuilder.com] Newegg <http://newegg.com/> [newegg.com] Geico <http://geico.com/> [geico.com] Capital One <http://capitalone.com/> [capitalone.com] Zecco <http://zecco.com/> [zecco.com]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Netcraft confirms it!

(Sorry, the old ways die hard :)

</comment><comment><USER21> I doubt NGinx is gaining much market share at the expense of IIS.</comment>


A Look at Google's Newest Data Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/22/a-look-at-googles-newest-data-center/

<comment><USER2> Is down :(</comment>


Search User Interfaces - free book - <AUTHOR> http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/

<comment><AUTHOR> Google tech-talk by the author at [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpBAg4Ndi9w&feature=sub](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpBAg4Ndi9w&feature=sub)</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you go for political discussion with a somewhat good discourse? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Unironically anonymous imageboards (not 4chan, 4chan is overcrowded at this point). Sure, you will get called names, but at least you won't get censored and/or downvoted into oblivion as it happens on Reddit (or HN) if you express opinion, that goes againt majority's belief. Your comment will be as visible as theirs. Another big advantage is complete anonymity - nobody knows anything about you, they only see the content of your post and nothing else.

I have had some of the best thought-provoking discussion about politics or life in general on anonymous imageboards.

</comment><comment><USER3> Such as /r/PoliticalDiscussion/

To some degree, the best forums have gone private on Discord, Telegram, Slack, etc. Community members find each other via private invites. And rigorously enforce moderation rules...

</comment><comment><USER4> My friends and family. I know enough different people to provide almost the whole spectrum of political beliefs, which makes for interesting discussions. And the fact that we all respect each other and talk face to face makes for civil discussions too - a combination I have yet to find online.

</comment><comment><USER5> The web is way to hostile for that.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is that even possible?</comment>


High-tech deception of 'deepfake' videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.apnews.com/21fa207a1254401197fd1e0d7ecd14cb/I-never-said-that!-High-tech-deception-of-%27deepfake%27-videos <comment><USER2> I have to agree that this will be inevitable. Fake videos _will_ be created to spread misinformation.

I bring you no solutions. Our best programmatic tool for these kinds of video analysis is currently the exact same technology that enables it in the first place. Furthermore, any neural network that can detect fake videos will only be used adversarially to train a better deep fake creator!

The only solution I see is the camera somehow cryptographically signing the video, and enabling users to easily check whether the signature is valid. However I don't think this is feasible, due to the amount of cooperation we'd need between camera makers and video distribution platforms, especially since it's not really in the businesses direct line of best interest help.

The world's going to start getting real surreal.

<comment><USER3> To make it feasible you don't need much, just journalists signing videos and uploading them somewhere besides publishing anywhere unsigned. This will make every unsigned video easily verifiable, just not with crypto.

<comment><USER4> That's fine for journalists, but does nothing to prevent fakes captured by the populace. A good deal of our journalism now is by on scene witnesses. What can we do about fakes posted on social media purported to be the real capture of some scandal or event?

<comment><USER5> I think what we'll see is something less like the Jordan Peele version of Obama based on a public clip, and something more like a faked version of the Romney 47% video

Start with something naturally unfocused and exists only as a one off original, and it would be extremely hard to disprove without comparing it to other video of the same event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Deepfakes are surely no more a "problem" than photoshopped still images?

Everyone knows that a still image can be altered to (convincingly) depict something that never happened. So, a still image is not considered good evidence of anything unless it has a verifiable provenance, chain of custody etc. Presumably that wasn't always the case, but now that photo editing tech is universally accessible, we all know we can't trust a still image unless its authenticity can be corroborated somehow.

The deepfake tech merely puts video into the same category of (un)trustworthiness. The potential for abuse depends on people's trust that video is always authentic. So the "solution" is simply to make it as widely- known as possible that video is now easy to fake.

<comment><USER7> The volume alone might be a problem. It takes some Photoshop skills to pull off an acceptable fake. If there's a turnkey website that can spit them out en masse, that's something different than having to actually hire a human to do it by hand.

Previously it took at least one CGI artist to convincingly fake video, probably several. This inherently limits how much of a problem it can be, because it doesn't scale. AI scales.

I mean- either deep learning AI automation is going to be important and useful, or it isn't. If replacing all drivers with robots is important, then automated turnkey fakery has the potential for disrupting something, isn't it?

<comment><USER6> I agree, but I think my original point covers this - if video proves to be very easy to fake at scale (e.g. using your example of a turnkey website) then that should result in equally large-scale scepticism about video as evidence. The internet may drown in annoying deepfake-based memes but as long as everyone knows its all fake, there seems little potential for the kind of serious harm people are worried about (reputational damage, election meddling etc.)

<comment><USER8> > ...as long as everyone knows its all fake,

There's a shockingly large number of people who aren't even convinced that election meddling took place in 2016, or that propaganda was disseminated to many people on social media, despite unanimity from US intelligence.

If we as a society can't all agree that these things even happened, how can we hope to properly educate people on the existence/prevalence of fake video? It seems like common sense to many people, but we can't assume that everyone will accept these truths based on the political rhetoric we've seen in the last few years.

<comment><USER6> US intelligence doesn't enjoy a reputation for trustworthiness, to put it mildly. But if people can just go online, upload a video and get back a "hilarious" deepfake, that's an irrefutable demonstration that video-meddling is easy and widely-available, isn't it? They can literally see for themselves how accessible the faking tech is.

<comment><USER9> _Text_ can be convincingly faked at scale. Most meme images are widely reused photos. We do have Snopes and other fact-checkers, but it's only a partial solution.

And yet, fake news does seem to be a problem. Checking provenance of facts and statistics is often skipped, even by journalists, let alone on Twitter.

This suggests that people will have lots of fun resharing deep fakes and won't care much that they're fake, as long as they express some emotion that they agree with.

Give people a fake that they want to believe in, and it's going to be very hard to talk them out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd be more concerned with US officials using this technology to indict innocent people who disagree with them. Being able to conjure up a confession for anything by anyone is extremely powerful, given that the alternatives to accomplish the same thing today are basically apprehension and torture/threats.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Being able to conjure up a confession for anything by anyone is extremely powerful

Being able to dismiss credible video evidence as 'deepfake' is equally powerful.

In any case, it would be extremely risky to hang a case on a single confession video that the accused claims is fake, given the current pattern of prosecution the DOJ would never bring that case; it would be embarrassing in the public eye and probably overturned on appeal, if it even made it to trial.

<comment><USER11> The bigger risk would be PR types where there is no court and prosecuted. For example, the Clippers were forcibly sold after the owner-Donald Sterling[0] was outed as a racist. A few fake videos like that would have high impact and wouldn't need to go through court.

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

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, but would-be fakers should be deterred by the airtight defamation case that would cost them millions. That is, of course, if the plaintiffs can prove the video is in fact, fake.

<comment><USER11> I think it's actually hard to launch such a case. I mean take Sterling. The tape was illegally leaked and was there a defamation suit against the leaker? California requires dual consent for recording [0], and no criminal charges have been brought or civil charges. Not the same, but shows there's no repurcussion in this type of situation.

The issue is that it will be really hard to prove as fake so even if an adversary didn't just anonymously leak the material. In a PR situation you don't need authenticity, just confusion.

I expect that you could use this pretty effectively for stock scams (eg, video posted on Friday that Bezos is launching electric car tanks Tesla, etc). Or even more sinister fake videos of things that may be true (video of Musk assaulting some woman).

What I'm actually scanning for are small markets with small $10-100k upside potential like a fake video of Tom Cruise that impact Mission Impossible opening that can be shorted through mediapredict or other markets that aren't SEC regulated.

Not to do it of course, but to see trends in how these videos are developed.

[0] [http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-recording- law](http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-recording-law)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any "solution" to this that relies on crypto/signing will fail. Propagandists will just make their fake videos and then record them off of a computer monitor and claim that they're a whistleblower "leaking" the video from an internal system they can't otherwise access.

I don't really think reputation has a better chance of solving this either, people are all-too-happy to believe anything that confirms their personal beliefs and ignore whatever contradicts them regardless of source.

It's interesting that a lot of the comments here look at how to prove a certain video is real (and assume that people will accept that any video without a certain trait is fake) rather than proving directly that a certain video is fake.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not a totally lost cause — I wrote a piece on what we can do about this: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/02/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/02/22/digital- reality/)

It's a first step, and my thinking has also evolved since—expect more updates in this space soon.

<comment><USER14> From this article:

> AI researchers and platform technologists need similar in-house or third- > party societal impact review boards to help them evaluate the potential > unintended consequences of their work.

As a machine learning researcher myself (albeit one who is probably unlikely to run afoul of one of these boards), this suggestion for research gives me pause. In the context of deepfakes, are you suggesting that it would have been more prudent to stop the research that made it possible before it had a chance to do so? This seems like a good way to ensure that less scrupulous parties harness destructive technologies before more scrupulous parties (the kind who'd adopt review boards).

I imagine this debate to some extent has already played out with nuclear weapons and bioweapons. I'm much less familiar with these two spheres, but as I recall research continued in both.

<comment><USER13> Lots of details to be worked out, but yes there are models in other fields. You bring up a real concern and there are ways to address it.

I'm not suggesting stopping research on this. But the way in which that research is communicated, what the focus is, and the way which particular sorts of replication is enabled or discouraged has an impact.

An example that the HN crowd likely knows better is vulnerability/exploit disclosure. There are good ways to do it and harmful ways to do it.

You can perhaps think about deepfakes as an exploit for the human sensors/cognition that handle authentication.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know where deepfakes moved to? It was great seeing what was going on in /r/deepfakes but due to the "offensive nature" of some of the videos that subreddit was killed. Anyone know the best place to watch and observe the latest happenings in the scene?

<comment><USER16> Good question, I was just waiting for the all Nicolas Cage version of LotR

<comment><USER11> It's a bit of a pain to follow progress without the subreddit, but progress is still being made- [https://youtu.be/QhxTTshL3b0](https://youtu.be/QhxTTshL3b0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When this happens (not if), I expect it will play right into the current administration's habit of dismissing anything that disagrees as fake news. For the administration that follows? Who knows? I only have evidence for right now.

I do think most of it will come from people lower down the political food chain (the meme creators, etc) who seek to convince others of their POV out of desperation and/or maliciousness.

</comment><comment><USER18> As a filmmaker I am both in awe and horrified with this.

Some of these techniques can be used to make fixes in motion picture where it would be far too expensive to reshoot.

But there is the opposite where this technology can be used to falsify a video that can potentially be used to make false confessions or change what a person said for nefarious purposes.

Welcome to the world of what was once thought to be science fiction.

</comment><comment><USER19> Will FB, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks create tools to flag deepfakes? It wouldn't solve the problem, but at least it could blunt the spread.

It could also raise awareness of the issue, so that if people see a video that seems "too good to be true" on a different platform, they would know that it might not be real.

<comment><USER20> Inevitably you'll hear cries of censorship with varying degrees of veracity.

<comment><USER19> I would think that there'd be enough deepfakes on both sides that everyone would recognize that iff there are tools that accurately detect deepfakes, it would be useful to have them enabled on social networks. They don't need to censor the videos — just flag them as having deepfake characteristics.

<comment><USER20> Like when Facebook (briefly) tagged articles from certain sources as being disreputable and it led to an _increase_ in clicks to those articles?

People will believe what they want to believe. We're also seeing that they don't like mega corps acting as arbiters of truth. So, I'm not sure what, if any, effect this moderation/curation effort would have.

<comment><USER19> I think what we really need is an embarrassing term for "someone who was fooled by a deepfake" (like "catfish"), so that there will be a social stigma that incentivizes people to not be tricked by them.

I don't currently have any better ideas that "getting deepfaked". Suggestions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The only solution to this is signed live lifecasting to a blockchain for every person on earth. I'm only half kidding.

<comment><USER22> How about a sort of steganographic signing with assemytric cryptography.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A crucial thing will be to detect these videos as they appear just like it is possible to detect Photoshoped material

</comment><comment><USER24> You should never trust digital media.

You should be extremely selective about what analog media you trust.

If you weren't there to see it happen yourself, all you've got to go on is somebody else's perception. Be careful who you trust.

<comment><USER18> As a filmmaker I feel that completely distrusting a medium just because it is digital might be a little harsh.

I think that we may want to consider using cryptographic signature methods as a way to mark materials as coming from the source they claim to be from. Though this is not a perfect solution.

Though I still work with analog film, though it is becoming more and more cost prohibitive everyday. Analog can just as easily be altered. If you looked at a silver gelatin print, if the printmaker was talented you probably would never be able to detect the changes to the image that were made during the printing process. Is the resulting image a fake, or is it just an artists vision?</comment></comment>


Voice algorithms spot Parkinson's disease - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18427851

<comment><USER2> Biomedical applications of machine learning have great potential, but they suffer from a lack of data problem. It's great to see Little championing for a more open database, hopefully it has a positive effect.

For more traditional machine learning research, there are common sets of data (i.e. MNIST for handwriting recognition) which serve to benchmark new algorithms.

The main problem with biomedical data is the difficulty of acquisition, and the fact that many researchers are afraid of discovering findings that they may have missed.

<comment><USER3> I agree completely. Every time I do a talk on Big Data, especially to practitioners, I throw in a little speech about how sharing medical data could lead to one of the greatest periods of medical advancement ever.

The hard part is getting the privacy right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really think this is cool, machine learning has a lot to offer the world and this can improve quality of life for lots of people. However, two things come to mind:

1\. <http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Parkinsons> Does it really take 5 years for research to go mainstream? Max Little's original research on this was published in 2007. I think if I were able to better diagnose Parkinson's I would want to get it out to the public as soon as possible.

2\. Why the need for clinical testing? It's not like it's a drug. Last time I checked a voice recording wasn't something that had too many side effects.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wish they also keep track of other diseases, maybe they can use the voice to detect more than Parkinson's

<comment><USER6> Or combine it with other non-invasive techniques like this one:

[http://spluch.blogspot.com/2007/09/face-scan-can-spot- geneti...](http://spluch.blogspot.com/2007/09/face-scan-can-spot-genetic- illnesses.html)

and this one:

[http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/amplifying-invisible- vide...](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/amplifying-invisible- video-0622.html)

The first link dates back almost 5 years, anybody know what happened in that field?</comment></comment>


Replace github pages with keybasefs/git/jekyll - <AUTHOR> https://abhi.keybase.pub/2016/02/15/git-and-keybasefs.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone have a KeybaseFS invite to spare, please?

klaus {at} seistrup {dot} dk

TIA!</comment>


Why chess programs find good moves, but barely understand chess - <AUTHOR> http://www.zenpawn.com/chessblog/2008/07/chess-programs-are-not-smart/ <comment><USER2> I am not competent enough to comment on the design of computer chess programs, however, as a chess player, I can state that computers perform well in very tactical positions. When the positions are more strategic, such as a closed position arising from a large number of queen pawn openings (1.d4) and such openings like the Ruy Lopez Closed, the human's ability to take into account very subtle strategic ideas usually give the human the upper hand. That is why Kasparov tried to keep most of his games against Deep Blue closed.

What was interesting is when Kasparov played Fritz and Deep Fritz, he actually chose some very tactical openings and didn't perform too poorly. Then again, it's Kasparov. Kramnik had equal results.

</comment><comment><USER3> We don't understand how humans "understand" chess, either.

From what I've read, the latest research seems to indicate top chess players train their brain's facial recognition system to recognize tactical board positions. But it's not clear how a grandmaster finds the right move, especially considering simultaneous games where a GM plays on 20 or 30 boards at once against club players, often winning all of the games while only spending a few seconds, if that, on each move.

<comment><USER2> Much of chess is based on patterns. Grandmasters spend hours a day going over line after line in various openings. The real game doesn't usually start till around move 15. Every once in a while, an opening novelty is found before move 10 that dramatically changes opening theory. When the novelties finally are published (i.e., it was finally played in a game), it just becomes part of the theory that anyone who plays that line at the top levels must know. They will take that line and run it through Fritz, Shredder, Junior, and any other chess program they might have and work our preliminary strategies. Any promising lines will then be assessed by a team of weaker GM's helping a much stronger GM train for some important match.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of Searle's Chinese Room paradox.

Imagine you had an English speaking person providing responses to mandarin stimuli in accordance with a function that mapped every input of mandarin words to a mandarin output. Most people would agree that he doesn't really 'understand' mandarin, even though he can 'converse' fluently in it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Too speciesist.

</comment><comment><USER6> Chess programs that only look 1 move ahead and make all their moves in under a second are better than most human players. Their evaluation function to decide what is a good position is actually quite smart and has a lot of knowledge of chess.

Most of the article consists of saying that chess programs have _certain weaknesses_ that humans do not have. That's definitely true, but it doesn't mean that computers "barely understand chess".

The article's author doesn't seem to be a serious chess player. His 19 move "forced line" contains no branches to show what happens with other defenses and, at a glance, looks like black used some moves inefficiently and it'd be hard to be confident there was nothing better without seeing a lot more analysis. I'd only trust it either with extensive branches and notes, or if he checked it with a strong computer...

<comment><USER7> I think that the main problem here lies in meaning of "understand chess".

You can say that computers understand chess because they are able to consistently beat best human players. Or you could say that they understand it because they are able to play it at all.

Or you can say that they do not understand chess, because they use some combination of hard coded heuristics (and the evaluation function is nothing but that) and brute force, which is at first glance too trivial approach to be called understanding.

<comment><USER6> The eval function contains more accurate knowledge of what matters in chess than most humans.</comment></comment></comment>


Where is my Flying Car?: The autogyro - <AUTHOR> http://wimflyc.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-autogyro-as-flying-car-part-i.html <comment><USER2> Very informative 5-part series.</comment>


NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/tech-industry-tainted/ <comment><USER3> For me, all the revelations and confirmations of foil hat theories have destroyed the joy the internet used to be. To me its now a dirty high tech voyeur spy's dream.

As for the US part of this, yes, my country the UK, is up to its neck in it, but, the part that is driving me away from the internet is the fact that Americans think their laws apply to non-Americans, and if necessary, Americans will force those laws on people who had no vote in it what so ever. Government will be leaned on and pressured to hand their people over to a US legal system I have zero faith in, and a penal system that borders a barbaric reinvention of slavery. If that fails, the US will "render" people, or as the rest of us call it, kidnap. To get my encryption keys, as a foreigner I genuinely fear American torture.

Now, I suspect the likes of China also do or aspire to spy on us all in the same way, but I don't feel the same risk of state kidnap, their laws, legals system, etc.

The spying is one thing, to a point I can live with that and alter behavior to compensate, but the idea I could break laws I don't agree with and have no influence over, while getting no support from my government, or be kidnapped, is frankly too much to accept. Even in typing this post I am self censoring.

As such, the internet has now become something I'm now very wary of. I almost feel like the using the internet is the same as traveling to the US, which is something I would never ever do. Its simply not worth the risk to my liberty and freedom.

Sad, very sad.

<comment><USER4> The confirmation that there can be no expectation of privacy has destroyed a lot of the joy of internet use for me as well. At a more pressing existential level, it's making me despise working in web development. I may never work on a project 'noteworthy' enough to warrant the NSA seeing some use in collecting data from it, but I am firmly in the startup minded 30ish crowd willfully slaving away the prime of my life making tools and sites that encourage people to use and trust this byzantine conduit of an internet thoroughly infested with spooks gleefully abusing power and destroying privacy more and more every day.

Edit: perhaps research and training in security and seeing how I can contribute on that front is the first step back towards being proud of my work...?

<comment><USER5> > Edit: perhaps research and training in security and seeing how I can > contribute on that front is the first step back towards being proud of my > work...?

Well. The open-source tools might be as easy as the professional tools to taint.

Someone training for the CCNA/P-Security or any other certifications is still using the same corrupted conduits :(

William Gibson said this about virtual lights (a novel which deals with bike messengers and data): "In the future, information'll be more secure when written on paper and transported by physical human hands than on the wired."

Which reminds me of this: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm) [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11325452](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11325452)

And there is work to do : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Speaking as a foreigner, I now have very little trust for basically any major US tech corporation. The NSA claims it deals responsibly with data relating to US citizens: I'm not a US citizen.

I plan on spending the next few months moving most of my accounts back to self-hosted, or at least hosted nationally.

<comment><USER7> If having your own government spy on you instead of the US, and if having US spyware secretly installed doesn't bug you, then feel free to run.

But just remember: everyone is spying.

We're all in this together, and running from one nationality to another will only change the name and face of who is watching you.

<comment><USER8> > everyone is spying.

Gut feeling? Not all countries have can afford an expensive program like NSA.

<comment><USER9> Then, what you do, is what Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela did/does, you organize local watch committees. These bodies are set-up so that neighbors rat on neighbors. No big budgets necessary. You trust on one and by and large, you outwardly toe the party line.

<comment><USER10> Or maybe you do what Estonia does. False dichotomy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even if Microsoft is telling the truth (very skeptical about it), you could see how they can easily lie through their teeth with that statement " _We_ aren't _explicitly_ providing a backdoor for the NSA - but hey, if NSA knows of a vulnerability in Windows that is very hidden, and we know about it, too, then it's out of our hands, and NSA can do whatever".

This is also interesting, something someone posted on HN from Steve Gibson back in 2006:

[https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-022.htm](https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-022.htm)

At this point I would really start with the presumption that at least Windows and Intel's chips (possibly others, too) have backdoors in them, and that the chances of that happening at this point is _higher_ than _not_ happening.

I'd also assume most routers have at least dormant backdoors in them. Jacob Appelbaum has been saying for years that it's easier for manufacturers to just build-in the backdoors in _all_ routers that they're making, because so many countries demand them, and they just keep them "disabled" in the countries that don't ask for them. It might be a good idea to start installing OpenWRT firmware on your routers.

<comment><USER12> I debunked that claim: [http://blog.jgc.org/2006/01/wmf-setabortproc-problem- is-not....](http://blog.jgc.org/2006/01/wmf-setabortproc-problem-is-not.html)

Of course, it was still exploitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Many seem to be missing the worst part of this:

Services are forever tainted. And services are the most interesting part of the puzzle.

Open source software that runs on the client is nice, but frankly I'm not as concerned about the NSA having access to my desktop. Logging, parsing, and analyzing client data of this sort opportunistically probably doesn't scale. And it's easier for me to set up a system in my house where I can audit all incoming and outgoing traffic (not that I'm going to do it, but I'm confident that I could). The one exception to this is encryption software... more on this later.

But it's hosted services where a lot of my interesting data lives, is structured in a way that makes opportunistic scanning much easier, and there is no way for me to audit it.

There's no way for me to know that GMail's servers don't have a backdoor. Or likewise for Dropbox or Facebook or Citi or my Amazon, etc...

This means I have to encrypt everything stored on any service (which is why my encryption software does need to be backdoor free). But most services store data about me where I don't control if its encrypted or not (it's not easy to encrypt voice calls from the end user perspective).

The end result is I already have fatigue, and I haven't even done any work yet!

I think most people are going to rely on an old story:

"Two guys are walking through the woods when they run across a hungry bear. At this point one of the men quickly ties his shoes. The other man says, 'Why are you tying your shoes -- you can't outrun this bear!' To which the other man says, 'I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.'"

Internet services are too valuable to not use. But it will be too much work for 99.9% of the population to preserve their privacy. The lack of privacy from the NSA will become the new normal. I have trouble seeing it playing out in any other way.

<comment><USER14> _Services are forever tainted. And services are the most interesting part of the puzzle._

I see it as a plus. But I've been against the very concept of such services in the first place. I think most centralization is unnecessary, that the reason it is so common today is because it is a straight-forward business plan for a company to insert itself as an intermediary between all of the users and thus extract money (and therefore efficiency) from their interactions.

Facebook's the ultimate example. Their popularity is a result of people needing a place to easily host and share their photos. But the cheaper storage and bandwidth get, the less utility Facebook provides compared to a distributed system. I think we are at a point today where high-end phones could host all the content that the majority of people want to share. Combine that with a little smart caching between "friends" so that their phones on wifi can pick up the slack when the original host is cell-only and throw in a distributed hash table for finding new "friends" and the value that facebook provides users by centralization drops precipitously.

If these NSA revelations help kickstart a new (but actually old) paradigm where each internet user is essentially self-hosting, then I believe that will be a great boon in the long run.

<comment><USER15> Precisely! If there is any silver-lining to the NSA revelations (and there really is not a silver-lining, I'm just using it as a figure of speech), it is that the pendulum is swinging back to self-control of data and applications. I've for several years wanted to see a post-cloud model where an application and data host I control runs singular application instances for me and all my devices are merely views on those applications [1]. I call it personal application omnipresence, and the "personal" aspect is of chief importance.

I see the current configuration of Internet services--what I call the "plain cloud"\--to be a frustrating diversion, and one that passively or actives suppresses the "personal" aspect of applications. As Amadou points out, the plain cloud is facile because businesses can easily be intermediaries. _Oh, it 's so difficult to connect an always-on, secure, and self-controlled host to the Internet to share your photos with family and friends? Don't worry! We'll handle that for you. Oh and look, we also get all of your photos and data. But don't you worry, we're good people. Trust us._

For years, it has irked me that so many have voluntarily forfeited control of their data and applications out of convenience when alternative models that would provide convenience without sacrificing control are fairly easy to conceive. With equal R&D effort as the plain cloud has seen, these alternatives could be realized.

I was angry when Google made their terms of service for Google Fiber disallow home servers. I imagine Amadou was as well. (I don't have Google Fiber, but I want it or something similar with reasonable TOS.) Preventing home servers is just perpetuating the current narrow vision of centralized hosting, and that notion is overdue for disruption. Obviously that's favorable to Google, but I don't really care about what's good for Google.

Data centers in general should fear symmetric gigabit+ to the home. I know that without a doubt if I had fiber to my home, I would pull my servers out of my data center immediately and put a rack in my garage.

I want self-hosting demystified and mainstreamed. As the pendulum swings back to self-control, anyone who is working to make "self-hosting" synonymous with today's popular verb, "sharing" is posed to earn my business. The model should be embraced by open source advocates. I even suggest Microsoft should leverage the building momentum and be the first industry titan to champion disintermediating the plain cloud [2].

[1] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao) [2] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From the documents published by the New York Times it seems that the NSA have introduced backdoors into VPN and SSL hardware crypto chips. There aren't that many major vendors who make such chips and undoubtedly people are going to be trying to find them now.

The question is what's going to happen when the vendors are identified ? - <USER2> can't imagine it'll be good for their customer base or their share-price.

Imagine you're a bank using vendor X's backdoored SSL acceleration. Say you're involved in a lawsuit where a customer claims they didn't authorise a transaction, now the customer can point to the fact that you're knowingly using hardware which has backdoor which would have allowed a third party to silently steal the users credentials.

This is a huge deal.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can see Silicon Valley taking a big hit here. Being a foreigner I no longer trust US based services. I think I will move all my data and Web apps off Amazon, meaning no more Dropbox for me. Any website I have hosted on there now I will find a way to get off these US servers.

I even see things like Facebook and Twitter taking hits with competitive services hosted in "more secure countries" popping up.

At this point I feel Chinese based services is safer, and that is saying a lot.

</comment><comment><USER18> Strange policy to build an organization that could destroy the only industry that is keeping your economy going.

<comment><USER19> Not at all, they've made it quite clear that there are only two options: have the capability to decrypt everything or create America's Great Firewall. They couldn't give a rats ass about the economy.

Now that the cat's out of the bag I'm sure they will refocus their efforts on shoring up the defence of every government communications network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> David Dampier's comment about cryptography in this article is a bit surprising: "I don't care what company is selling you encryption software. Whatever they are going to sell you, it can be decrypted. There's nothing that is infallible." Leaving aside the fact that a significant fraction of cryptographic software that is free and open source (ssh, gpg, tls implementations in browsers, etc.) the idea that any cryptography available to an end user is breakable by an adversary like NSA is not supported by what we know about current and historical progress in the mathematics of cryptanalysis. Dampier's credentials on his academic home page are not that relevant or convincing when it comes to cryptography proper. I would be more likely to go with Bruce Schneier's opinion that cryptography is still secure with appropriate key sizes: "Still, I trust the mathematics" [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsas_cryp...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsas_crypto_1.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> > NSA Revelations Cast Doubt on the Entire Tech Industry

I'd say it's true for everything that's not open-source and doesn't allow for proper public key encryption. (Assuming that public key encryption is still holding up.)

<comment><USER22> It goes deeper than that.

If I owned any server hardware, chances are it would be in a rack in a datacenter. What's to say somebody hasn't walked in, flipped a badge and taken my SSL private keys? In fact, that's quite probable.

<comment><USER23> You're thinking too small scale.

Certificate Authorities are almost certainly compromised. Why bother with one at a time when you can just force the vendor to hand the keys to the castle over? Sign your own certs, MITM anyone you want.

<comment><USER22> MITM isn't the issue, we assume for the most part that the NSA is a passive eavesdropper. Easier in that situation to sniff and decode with a stolen secret, rather than rewriting traffic on the fly.

<comment><USER23> Right, but my point is that the CA is the central point of failure for all of those scenarios.

<comment><USER22> Not really. For a passive attack the key would have to be stolen from a server rather then the CA, who never sees the private key, rather only the CSR (public key).

<comment><USER23> We're assuming under the current circumstances that it's backdoored, basically. The NSA definitely doesn't want to have to go knock on doors to collect those private keys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the NSA revelations may also hurt data mining initiatives in the private sector. At some point I think the privacy advocates that are criticizing NSA access to private sector data, will turn their attention to the services that hold the data. I believe there will be more pressure on service providers to purge archived data, whether it be phone call meta-data or other kinds of information.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't think there's any doubt to it.

There are folks that made their fortunes and earn their livelihoods on the net. These folks are going to defend what we built to their dying day. There are governments and corporations, which believe they absolutely must have whatever data they view as honorable (and this definition is surprisingly flexible) in order to continue to privide their services.

Then there's the general public, including most reporters, who suspects something is amiss but keeps hearing all kinds of contradictory opinions, including calling out the folks who warned about these as tinfoil hat types.

Yeah sure, there's lots of noise and confusion, but doubt? I don't think so.

Note: I'm not trying to weave a conspiracy theory here. My only point about existing players is that they're too _emotionally_ wrapped up in things that took many years of hard work to see the situation objectively

</comment><comment><USER26> I will be interested to see how this plays out over the next few years. Will these predictions match reality?

<comment><USER27> It will indeed be interesting. One thing to consider is that we can assume the US Government has enough information about most individuals and businesses to cause significant harm, even if everyone (individuals and businesses) stopped trusting tech companies tomorrow, the damage is done and an enormous trove of intel has been captured.

This looming threat will only get worse as the government shifts its focus from capturing data to utilizing it at scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been wondering why WatchGuard firewalls require mandatory registration before working. There they ask questions like, is this firewall being used to secure important military site etc. Wtf, if I would use it to protect important military / nuclear research lab etc... Do they really think I would tell it? I'm sure that information is directly passed to "authorities" and then they can bypass that firewall/vpn/ipsec to steal secrets whenever they want to.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can Web of Trust/PGP be applied/adapted to client-server communication such as that handled by HTTP? Conceptually, HTTPS built on PGP? Would new products or services help the adoption of this (like a social network for PGP keys)?

Although it wouldn't solve all of the NSA techniques (social engineering, acquiring pre-encrypted data) it would certainly be harder to track down (i.e. steal, crack, coerce, subpoena, etc) tens of millions of keys rather than tens of thousands.

</comment><comment><USER30> I feel like anybody with their ear even moderately to the ground knew the NSA had encryption breaking techniques... Why else would higher-level encryption be illegal?

<comment><USER31> Which higher-level encryption is illegal?

<comment><USER32> None really anymore.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography#Current_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography#Current_status) [http://www.xanthir.com/document/document.php?id=6e54a9d38b4a...](http://www.xanthir.com/document/document.php?id=6e54a9d38b4ae29c9edf2f5e8bd8d9963e30c83a0b3706599b6598266067057cb8a862da0b804bc270490848a9e8b2473d7c8d5b5c9585004449a144f73b7664#section1.6.0)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Home Router (In)Security - <AUTHOR>

My new router has just arrived. As is the case for most now, it was supplied FOC by my ISP. When configuring the router, I couldn't help but notice that in the re-configuration maintenance page it said this:
"We'll periodically update your router software automatically. There may be times when you will be advised to do this manually. Our Technical Support Team will assist you if this is the case."
Immediately I started to look for the option to disable this. However I could not find one. I then contacted their technical support in an attempt to turn it off. Their advisor informed me that they would not turn it off. I proceeded to state that would not, did not mean could not and probed for information which would enable me to turn it off. At this point the advisor informed that it was a secure line and that the upgrade process was infallible in terms of security; yet was unable to inform me of the security processes/practices applied. The advisor (getting infuriated at this point as I was clearly off-script) stated that they would try to find out from a higher technical body (internally). After being put on hold for a further 20 minutes I gave up and hung up the phone.
Next I resorted to a (quick) Google search in the hope that an answer would be reveal itself. I couldn't find an easy answer. Most answers I found focussed on some means of hacking the firmware on the device (based on the fact that the router was a re-brand of some other common make/model e.g. Netgear).
Given that my logs tell me I receive unsolicited connection attempts out of some countries in the East every 5 minutes or so, I feel I should be worried that I have little or no control over the firmware running my router.  Have other people experienced this too? Is strikes me as a red flag in terms of security. <comment><USER2> You might want to take a look at these pages and see if your router supports OpenWrt or Tomato firmware.

[http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start](http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start)

[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Tomato_Firmware/Supported_Devi...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Tomato_Firmware/Supported_Devices)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hopefully, your ISP is using TR-069[1] to update your router. It's not perfect but it's not as bad as you might imagine. The router polls for updates and initiates a connection to the ISPs configuration server.

The servers are usually part of your ISP's infrastructure, not a third-party service on the public Internet.

I've seen TR-069 used very effectively to manage VOIP hardware (a lucrative target for hackers) however I was told that routers are more difficult.

The bottom line is, if you don't trust your ISP to update your router firmware, buy a different router. As others have said OpenWRT is awesome.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069#Security_and_authenticat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069#Security_and_authentication)

</comment><comment><USER4> Is the router your hardware? If the router was provided by (aka is owned by) your ISP, then I don't understand why you would expect to be able to control the firmware (it's not your hardware). From your providers perspective, this would imply that they've lost configuration management control of their hardware (not good for them). In this scenario, the simple solution is to install something downstream, for example a security appliance (firewall/vpn) or your own router with similar capabilities (use your own router as the ingress). If this is not correct, and you provided the router (ISP provides only the fiber), then you do have a valid issue. (but it could still be solved with the above solution).

</comment><comment><USER5> So your ISP has the capability to automatically provide you with updates to fix security issues on your router (thus helping keep out the 'countries in the East') and you want them to turn this off?

Smart.

If you're really that paranoid, I suggest you open your wallet and buy a firewall to put between the LAN port on your router and the rest of your internal devices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. How can I be assured that their mechanism has not, and cannot be compromised? I can obtain updates through their website. I should be able to register for notification when updates are available. Why would I want to allow remote access (even to my ISP) which I cannot monitor? Moreover, why would I want to (potentially) allow (whoever has access) to install whatever they want on my router?

<comment><USER6> If you don't trust their update mechanism to remain uncompromised, why do you trust their website to remain uncompromised?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Given that my logs tell me I receive unsolicited connection attempts out of > some countries in the East every 5 minutes or so,

Do you have a cut and paste of those logs? Often those connections are either noise and not worth bothering about, or they're your ISP and not worth bothering about.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you router can run a decent version of OpenWRT then go for it. Otherwise buy a decent router, unfortunately they are not easy to find. I would say go for a carambola2, it's cheap runs OpenWRT out of the box and has FreeBSD support too, if you are good with CLI.</comment>


China Disable all domain that end with "google.com" - <AUTHOR>

After disable some function, china disable all domain name that end with "google.com" just now.<p>like gmail, google reader, google group etc. <comment><USER2> [http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/167282/china_a...](http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/167282/china_appears_to_block_google_sites.html)

Appears to be true. It's not entirely surprising that the government would crack down in some way, with the controversy over their looming spyware requirement; but it's surprising that it's directed against the one company most famous for meeting their censorship requests.

</comment><comment><USER3> Imagine if China goes Bing or Yahoo overnight? scales will be tipped, even if google returns after a few days.

Zhongguo == HUGE.</comment>


Data on how age impacts social gaming monetization by Andrew Chen - <AUTHOR> http://andrewchenblog.com/2009/09/22/age-and-arppu-aint-nothing-but-a-number-data-on-how-age-impacts-social-gaming-monetization/

<comment><AUTHOR> Autocorrection: its by Susan Su and posted on Andrew Chen blog.</comment>


Ask HN: Microbiome and Diseases - <AUTHOR> I'm a layman who is very interested in the microbes that live in our gut. I want to initiate a citizen science project to relate gut microbes to known diseases. For instance, this research ties Lupus to gut microbes http://www.hcplive.com/conference-c...obiome-seems-to-have-role-in-triggering-lupus and this research ties asthma to gut microbes http://www.health24.com/Diet-and-nu...een-gut-bacteria-asthma-and-anorexia-20151105
I'm imagining to form a company like ubiome http://ubiome.com/ .
My question is: What type of machinery ubiome or anyone who wants to identify gut microbes uses? I'm in Turkey and I want to find out if this test can be done here.
My other question is: It is possible to identify gut microbes by traditional lab methods as in a Comprehensive Stool Test without using DNA. İs this technique inferior to DNA method?
I contacted ubiome and also American Gut Project http://humanfoodproject.com/americangut/ for answers to these questions but they never answered me. I wrote to several academics and they never replied either.
Thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links:

Lupus to gut microbes

[http://www.hcplive.com/conference-c...obiome-seems-to- have-r...](http://www.hcplive.com/conference-c...obiome-seems-to-have-role-in- triggering-lupus)

Asthma to gut microbes

[http://www.health24.com/Diet-and-nu...een-gut-bacteria- asthm...](http://www.health24.com/Diet-and-nu...een-gut-bacteria-asthma-and- anorexia-20151105)

ubiome

[http://ubiome.com/](http://ubiome.com/) .

American Gut Project

[http://humanfoodproject.com/americangut/](http://humanfoodproject.com/americangut/)

</comment><comment><USER2> [http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v4/n10/full/tp201498a.html](http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v4/n10/full/tp201498a.html)

This gives some information about method.</comment>


Fears of a Clown - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/fears-of-boswick-the-clown.html?mid=twitter_nymag

<comment><USER2> I think many people have a fear of clowns in the way that many people say they have OCD or ADHD. Yes, clowns can be scary but that doesn't mean you actually fear them.</comment>