The new 501(c)(3) and the future of free software in the US - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.gnome.org/jnelson/2014/06/30/the-new-501c3-and-the-future-of-free-software-in-the-united-states/ <comment><USER3> So, I'm a lawyer, but not at all a tax lawyer.

I was talking to a tax lawyer the other day, though. I told her that I heard a lot of public-interest journalism projects were getting rejected for tax- exempt status, and it seemed like a problem in the tax laws -- we haven't adjusted to a world where a lot of journalism is done by non-profits. A lot like this story, but with journalism instead of software development.

She said she had looked at some of those applications, and she would have rejected them too. She thought the problem was journalism startups haven't figured out that they need to talk to a _tax_ lawyer before filing important documents with the IRS. (And, yes, she's donating time to help with that, incidentally.)

Like I said, I'm not a tax lawyer. But I would wait to get a perspective from someone who knows this field before I concluded that the IRS is really opposed to free software in general. And I would do this kind of thing through a lawyer who specializes in it. Remember that you're helping out more than just you -- if you do it right you're paving the way for people like you. If you do it wrong, you're inviting bad decisions with broad statements like the ones quoting in this article.

</comment><comment><USER4> It sounds like the gist is that they were rejected because the code they create might be used by entities that are not nonprofits/charitable.

One one hand, this seems crazy if the software created is given -- for a bad metaphor: imagine a charity being unable to feed people because those people may use the energy they get from that food to do non-charitable works.

Separately, and to play devil's advocate, I can kind of see the logic here: it creates a loophole through which re-usable work that is funded under tax exempt status can then be used by anyone, so you could imagine some org donating some money to get some particular work done, then getting it and using it without having to have paid tax on the equivalent work that would have been done if they paid for it. Going back to the food metaphor, it might be like a charity offering free food to anyone, rather than just to those who have a particular need. I think that such a charity might run into a similar rejection, but I don't know.

Like I said, I think it sounds crazy, but hopefully this draws more interested parties into the discussion.

<comment><USER5> The NFL is considered a non-profit organization by the IRS, yet all of the teams which associate with its branding reap enormous profits.

How should all organizations which happen to open-source code automatically be "for profit" just because some other companies _might_ use such code for commercial purposes? The two examples are very similar but the NFL is non- profit. If the precedent is set, the damage to the FLOSS movement would be real and lasting.

<comment><USER4> To be clear, there are significant differences with the legal classifications of various non-profits. 501(c)(3) is much different from 501(c)(6) (the NFL is (6)) I am not a lawyer so I don't know what the differences are, but it's possible/likely that if someone was going for a different kind of non-profit the rules would change dramatically, so they can't quite be compared apples to apples.

see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501\(c\))

<comment><USER6> So I was curious about this and looked up some more information on it (the NFL tax exemption).

 _Section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code provides for the exemption of business leagues, chambers of commerce, real estate boards, boards of trade and professional football leagues, which are not organized for profit and no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual._

[http://sportsfans.org/2012/03/why-is-the-national- football-l...](http://sportsfans.org/2012/03/why-is-the-national-football- league-given-tax-exempt-status/)

One more needle to add to the haystack of bull shit from my government I put up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The IRS BOLO lists [1] are scanned bitmap PDFs, which make them extremely hard to search. Does anyone know if they also BOLOed Free Software, or was it just Open Source?

The reason I ask is that the term "open source" was designed to be more palatable to businesses. In Revolution OS, Eric S. Raymond said in regard to saying open source over free software: "If you walk in to an executive's office and say 'Free Software', OK, If you're lucky, the response you'll get is something like, 'hmm, hmm, Free Software, must be cheap, shoddy, worthless.' If you're not lucky, it has associations with the Free Software Foundation's wholesale attack on intellectual property rights, which regardless of what you think about the ethics of that, it's lousy marketing, it's not something that businesses want to hear" [2].

I don't know how savvy the IRS was about the nuances between open source and free software (probably not very), but if they were, they might be making a somewhat-reasonable distinction that "open source" was designed specifically to please the business sector rather than free software's focus on ethics and freedom.

[1]: [http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/press-release/new- ir...](http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/press-release/new-irs- information-shows-"progressives"-included-bolo-screening-list) [2]: [http://www.cswap.com/2001/Revolution_OS/cap/en/25fps/a/00_54](http://www.cswap.com/2001/Revolution_OS/cap/en/25fps/a/00_54)

<comment><USER8> > Free Software, or was it just Open Source?

These two are synonyms:

[http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have- forgot...](http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten- about-open-source/)

<comment><USER9> That's possibly relevant to what _should_ appear on the BOLO list. It doesn't seem relevant to what _does_ appear on the BOLO list, or whether one could avoid flagging by using the other term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quotes From the IRS letter to Yorba:

> You have a substantial nonexempt purpose because you develop software > published under open source compatible licenses that authorize use by any > person for any purpose, including nonexempt purposes such as commercial, > recreational, or personal purposes, including campaign intervention and > lobbying.

By this logic, all non-profit educational entities should be disqualified because things people learn through their programs might later be used by those people to make a profit.

> public works must serve a community. Open source licensing ensures the Tools > are accessible to the world. We have not found any authority for the > proposition that the world is a community within the meaning of § 501(c)(3).

I understand that there are probably real legal reasons for the IRS saying this... but that's bordering on inanity worthy of the Onion.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm the ED of a 501(c)3 non-profit ([http://localwiki.org](http://localwiki.org)), and when we applied for our (c)3 status we got some flack along these lines, as well. Here's my advice to the Yorba Foundation folks:

If you haven't received your final rejection, you can appeal.

Don't try and do this yourself. The post says they spoke with folks at the Software Freedom Center, which is great, but I highly recommend finding a specialized attorney who's seen lots of applications and knows the right angle. Hire an attorney who specializes in obtaining 501(c)3 status. We made this mistake early on, thinking we could work through the NOLO book and apply ourselves. It cost us. For around $1k you can find a good non-profit attorney to help.

We got flack for the open-source thing, too. Our original exemption application was basically "Hey, we're a charity! We give things away for free and release open source code, which can be used by everyone!" Depending on the IRS agent assigned to you, you might get flack for this as well. Generally speaking, they may not like that a for-profit business can use your organization's by-product to make lots of money for themselves. We spent some time explaining how OSS worked to the agent, and was able to convince him that because (most) of our OSS is copyleft, that it would be a continually-free- and-open good, not a private benefit.

Nevertheless, just releasing OSS is _NOT_ an exempt purpose. If you read the IRS regulations, they are very specific as to what a core exempt purpose is. You'll need to pick one that fits best. Generally speaking, it's 1) Church stuff 2) Scientific advancement and research 3) Furthering of the arts 4) Education 5) "Charity," meaning helping people who are disadvantaged in some way 6) Some others that I'm not remembering.

Most OSS 501(c)3 don't get exemption by just releasing open source software-- they get exemption by being an educational institution. So you may want to go that route -- the organization's core exemption is the creation of educational materials that help education members of a particular community in XYZ ways. This is what we ended up doing -- we're classified as an educationally-exempt organization. If you look up the 501(c)3 apps of some other OSS non-profits you'll see similarly -- e.g. Plone Foundation is set up as an educational organization.

Edit: If you'd like to take a look at some of our back-and-forth with the IRS agent at the time, check out the page here: [http://localwiki.net/org/Historic_501%28c%293_application_pr...](http://localwiki.net/org/Historic_501%28c%293_application_process) You'll see his response was similar to yours, but we decided to pursue educational exemption and were granted on that basis in the end. Also, you can call up the IRS Agent assigned to you and talk to them about the application, which can be extremely helpful.

<comment><USER12> This is a good explanation, but let me tack on one thing. The original blog post says:

>> There's a charitable organization here in San Francisco that plants trees throughout the city for the benefit of all. If one of their tree's shade falls on a cafe table and cools the cafe's patrons as they enjoy their espressos, does that mean the tree-planting organization is no longer a charity?

In fact, the tree-planting group can easily show that they serve an exempt purpose, namely "lessening the burdens of government". Planting trees is something that city governments routinely do for the purposes of beautification or whatever. If a non-profit wants to do it, that's a perfectly legitimate reason to get tax exempt status. The group would also have to show that they are serving a public interest - for instance they're not just planting trees outside of one company's coffee shops but they're providing a service for the whole neighborhood.

<comment><USER13> That question shows the typical nerd-misunderstanding of law as a rule-based system with distinct outputs. They think the rule must be "no for-profit company can ever benefit from the work of the charity" and are pointing out how the rule is stupid so the rule must not exist.

IANAtaxL, in fact IANAL of any kind, but my reading is that the IRS doesn't want companies to set-up fig-leaf charities that absorb and hide their normal business functions.

<comment><USER14> And in fact, imagine a large software corporation that wishes to be able to tax-deduct the portion of its profits that go into R&D, so it sets up an open- source non-profit to do all of that, with leadership that may have a financial stake in the corporation or be otherwise leveraged, and donates its corporate profits to the non-profit for its operations. This is almost exactly the definition of a fig-leaf charity. Imagine if Google spun off an Android Foundation and sent all of its core OS developers there, or even more so if Apple spun off a Swift Foundation to make an open-source compiler - <USER2> though they would be creating open-source software that _could_ be used by other companies, it would not be in the spirit of the law that defines 501(c)(3), and much of the benefit would be derived by the parent corporation. So as much as my knee-jerk reaction is to say "government doesn't understand software," as a taxpayer I think it's perfectly reasonable for the IRS to be wary and have the BOLO in place.

<comment><USER15> Am I the only one who doesn't have a problem with either of these Google/Apple examples?

If Apple or Google spun off a 503(c)(3) for Swift or Android how would that be a bad thing? It would ensure that the work of those developers stays open source and free to all. Even if it only applies to a particular platform it would still be open source and very useful for the world--if only to be able to see the code.

What the IRS needs is a few finer points of distinction... Let the FOSS development be tax-free as long as it's GPL or similarly licensed (the code _must_ stay open no matter what) but deny such status for code that is BSD- like which may (easily) be used in a tax-circumvention mechanism; where _some_ core code could be open source but to actually make it work you need the proprietary derivatives.

<comment><USER16> > If Apple or Google spun off a 503(c)(3) for Swift or Android how would that > be a bad thing?

Presumably you mean a 501(c)(3) -- a not merely tax-exempt organization but one to which _donations_ are tax-deductible as charitable donations; the problem here with one sponsored by a for-profit company, whether its developing open source software or not, is that they run the risk of being directed at the for-profit company's priorities, and being a way for money to be, in effect, funneled into the companies business in a tax-deductible manner from those with a stake in the company's returns.

> What the IRS needs is a few finer points of distinction... Let the FOSS > development be tax-free as long as it's GPL or similarly licensed (the code > must stay open no matter what) but deny such status for code that is BSD- > like which may (easily) be used in a tax-circumvention mechanism

The copyleft vs. noncopyleft distinction really has no bearing on the central problem here. The real problem is that, to the extent that there is legitimate reason to more closely look at 501(c)(3) applications from entities focussed on OSS (perhaps because for-profit entities have been trying to set them up as ways to improve the tax status of development efforts when they have an OSS- centric business model), this _particular_ case doesn't seem to be one that should have been problematic -- not because of license terms, but because the potential problems that such scrutiny is designed to avoid aren't present. But that may just be a poor first-level decision or a result of poor application crafting, and not any real indication of any problem with the general _policy_.

<comment><USER14> As a concrete example for the copyleft distinction, consider if Swift Foundation was founded to create copyleft (let's say GPL or even AGPL) compilers, but the system libraries every compiled program would need to link to were only found on Apple products. It's very clear that this would be a move that would be for the benefit of Apple's bottom line, and that it was a technology originally developed by Apple employees. So it's not like some random guy in his garage said "I will make something charitable but make the independent decision to base it on Apple hardware," as is true of (say) an iPhone app for detecting medical problems, which would indeed be 501(c)(3) eligible in my book (IANAL).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is my understanding that 501(c)(3) status has always been difficult to get for open source software foundations. Organisations such as the Linux Foundation operate instead under 501(c)(6) (business trade association).

However, the OpenStack Foundation recently applied for 501(c)(6) status and received an initial denial[1], much to the surprise of all concerned since this was historically pretty easy to get. So there may be something to the author's thesis.

[1] [http://blogs.gnome.org/markmc/2014/05/17/may-11-openstack- fo...](http://blogs.gnome.org/markmc/2014/05/17/may-11-openstack-foundation- board-meeting/)

</comment><comment><USER18> From reading the blog post and the IRS letter of rejection, I didn't really find a strong case for why Yorba requires being a separate entity. Have you considered becoming fiscal sponsorship project? There are multiple 501(c)(3) organization that might consider serving as a fiscal sponsor for the project like the Software Freedom Conservancy. Another perk to this relationship is that the fiscal sponsor will handle the taxes and compliance.

To give some more background, my nonprofit went through a similar 4 yearlong back and forth process, but in the end, we did successful receive status last year. Prior to approval, I set up our organization as a fiscally sponsored organization by established another 501(c)(3). The status that we achieved is probably one of the highest on the IRS watchlist (donor advised fund) so I've had to fortune of getting to know the IRS and the tax code for tax-exempt entities very well :-)

For Yorba situation, the language used by Yorba in response to the IRS may be fine when talking to developers, but when talking to the IRS, using IRS' language helps tremendously along with reinforcing a specific charitable purpose and avoiding any red flags (which Yorba's response triggered in multiple regards); this is where a lawyer specializing in nonprofit law can really help as @philipn suggested. If you can't afford a lawyer, you may be able to obtain pro bono work, and even then, it's still good to read the relevant legal treatise to ensure you are well informed.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interestingly, from what I read here it seems a lot simpler to set up a tax exempt non-profit in France (Europe?). Basically you just register the statute of the non-profit (it's inner working), and you can then act as a registered non-profit exempt from many taxes (non-profit meaning you can't share the revenue between the members as if they were shareholders). The tax administration can control at any point, of course, and ask for taxes if you start doing for-profit or clearly commercial activities that are not covered by the rules.

Then if you want to exempt donations, as in this case, you have to be of general interest (for the common good).

You don't need to apply, You can just self-check against a list of criterias, and emit a fiscal receipt for you donators (but you might have to prove it later). Or you can ask the tax administration to confirm and declare that you are of general interest.

And then there is another step for more exemptions, for your donators "of public utility" ("d'intérêt public"). This is way harder to get and is granted and published by the government. This is for bigger fondations working on great, wide issues.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting case. What I understand is that the product not only lack of proof that disadvantaged group benefits from it, but mainly it can be used by institutions that are for profit.

GPL v3

IANAL, but can you modify the license so if the user of your code is a for profit institution, then they are licensed under GPL v3. so the institution will have to make their code available for the community to benefit. Something that for profit institutions are highly allergic to (severe CIO rashes, and COO anaphylactic shocks)

And then can you turn back to the IRS and say that because the licensing schema, if a for profit makes use of the code, it forced to be used for the benefit of the community and not just for their profit?

Or maybe there is the need of a GPL v4 where you cannot make profit using the code released?

<comment><USER21> >Or maybe there is the need of a GPL v4 where you cannot make profit using the code released?

That would violate freedoms 2 and 3 of the Free Software definition.

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)

</comment></comment><comment> wes-exp It's a wake up call: real charity is stuff like stopping malaria in destitute villages. Releasing software without charging a fee? Not so much.

</comment><comment><USER22> "We have no plans to appeal their decision."

It's a shame. That kind of stupidity, shown by IRS, deserves to be penalized.

</comment><comment><USER23> Crackpot conspiracy theory: Microsoft is whispering in the IRS's ear. The joke's on them: Once a piece of open source software has a foundation around it, it's pretty much just a bunch of people re-coloring widgets.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra The quotes from IRS shot that this is not a random rejection, rather a whole policy with thought-out basis. Somebody took time to ridicule open source in legalese.

Two options from the paranoid:

Somebody influences IRS to stifle open source? Who may that be?

IRS thinks they can make enough wool by shaving pigs? That's desperate.

They should better figure out how to dismember Apple than do what they do. It's a disgrace.

<comment><USER16> > The quotes from IRS shot that this is not a random rejection, rather a whole > policy with thought-out basis. Somebody took time to ridicule open source in > legalese.

Its not "ridiculing". Its applying the law and existing precedent to the specific facts presented by Yorba. It may be _wrong_ , but reading the whole letter it seems like its more that Yorba did a poor job at explaining _how_ it met the 501(c)(3) requirements, including when responding to specific inquiries by the IRS.[1]

(It'd be interesting to get the application and other documents and compare them to those of, e.g., the Apache Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and other open-source entities that _have_ gotten 501(c)(3) status and see if its really that the IRS decision here is out of line with other ones in similar areas or if its just Yorba's documentation and explanations that are the issue.)

[1] [http://yorba.org/docs/IRS-determination-letter- final.pdf](http://yorba.org/docs/IRS-determination-letter-final.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> reading that i almost wish they deny status to everyone writing coffee under bsd and mit and only allow gnu gpl :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Little known fact: the GNU project got its 501(c)(3) status by starting The Church of Emacs. The software is just something they do for fun.

(I might have made that up.)

</comment><comment><USER26> Private corporation seizing other's domains, non-profit organization unable to exempted from taxes, US gov wanting to access US-based company data on foreign data center, PRISM, etc. it seems the US is building a strong negative law environment against its own tech firms. If only Europe were to take take this opportunity to become more attractive... but I haven't any faith our leader will do it.

<comment><USER27> (I didnt downvote you,what's up with people downvoting for the sake of it?)

There are weaker software patent laws in Europe,they exist but are very limited.

On the other hand Taxes are generaly higher,employement cost is higher and VC funding is close to non existant.But you might get financed by public money(with strings attached and a lot of paperwork ) So it's a trade-off.

From a pure "capitalistic" perspective the situation is better for startups in USA in the west coast.And since Europe is not really a country,it's harder to reach all European markets(different languages,cultures,fiscal policies,laws...).In USA everybody talks English.</comment></comment>


We only know about a small fraction of the matter in the Universe - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150824-what-is-the-universe-made-of

<comment><USER2> > Zwicky's work was largely forgotten until the 1970s, when astronomer Vera > Rubin discovered that nearby galaxies were not spinning in the right way.

What Vera observed was that the stars in distant galaxies were all spinning "together". One would expect some stars in the galaxy to spin at a faster speed than others at varying distances from the center. What she observed is akin to a single "galaxy" bitmap rotating all at once, where the relative positions of the stars in the galaxy "image" being in lockstep with each other.

Dark matter. Hehe.

</comment><comment><USER3> What I have always found mesmerizing about dark matter, is whether it forms deeply complex and interesting structures like ordinary matter (like galaxies, planetary systems, or "dark life", or even radically different structures that we have no concept of). But we just don't know because it's so hard to detect.

<comment><USER4> Why is dark matter only found away from Earth?

<comment><USER5> As the other answers have said, there is dark matter expected near the Earth, it's just at a very low density. There have been a number of experiments looking for some signature of weak dark matter interactions near the Earth. One of these, DAMA, has claimed a detection of an annually varying signal which would be consistent with the Earth moving with and against an ambient medium of dark matter over the course of a year. However, no other experiments have been able to verify this detection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That fraction is the most interesting fraction though.

<comment><USER7> Depending on who you ask :).

<comment><USER6> It's not really subjective. Since dark matter has so little interaction, it probably has just few basic properties like mass and some other. Regular matter has complex things going on for it. That's why there is life, stars, etc. composed of regular matter and not dark matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The NASA image of the bullet cluster shows that light bends not exactly where the two galaxies are colliding.

This is taken as evidence for dark matter (because gravity is not where the visible matter is).

But I would not expect the light to bend where the galaxies are. I would expect light to bend where they _were_.

That light has been traveling for millennia, and has been bending the entire time, so of course it bends at a distant location from where the galaxies are "now".

So I don't understand how that photo is evidence of dark matter.

<comment><USER9> That photo shows where the galaxies were then, not now.

<comment><USER8> Are you talking about the speed of light, that everything we see is in the past?

Because I am not talking about that. So if you mean something else please clarify.</comment></comment></comment>


Neom – an entire new land, purpose-built for a new way of living - <AUTHOR> http://www.discoverneom.com/ <comment><USER2> From their FAQ:

>THE TERM "INDEPENDENT SYSTEMS" IS A LITTLE AMBIGUOUS. WHAT EXACTLY WILL THE PROJECT BE, A FREE ZONE, TRANSIT ZONE, ETC.?

 _The project will be developed within a specialized zone, independent of the Kingdom's existing governmental framework, excluding sovereign laws, in regards to taxation, customs, labor laws, and other legal parameters pertaining to business. As such, a zone within an independent system gives industry the ability to manufacture and provide, goods and services at globally competitive prices._

>WHAT DOES "EXCLUDING SOVEREIGN" MEAN?

 _"Sovereign laws" refer to everything related to the military sector, foreign policy, and sovereign decisions – all of which will remain at the government of Saudi Arabia's discretion._

Yeah, that'll be a no from me dawg. It's certainly an interesting project, but I doubt it will draw the kind of international appeal they are hoping for. Dubai 2.0 basically.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The only thing interesting about the project would be the opportunity to live somewhere that doesn't have traditional attitudes towards having a military, dealing with foreign countries, etc.

Completely uninteresting otherwise. Just go to any trendy city.

Where's my libertarian utopia??

<comment><USER4> Depends, which version of libertarian do you believe in? The ultra-right libertarians that align with Christian conservatism and the prepper ethos or...uh...the ones who are big on Porcupines. I think the first group far outweighs the second group as a voting block. If the former I'd say the U.S. is right what Ted Cruz and the Tea Party crowd want right now. Environmental regulations, social safety nets, and public institutions are getting rolled back so that taxes can go down. Texas seems to be a hotbed for this. If you're for the latter, New Hampshire is probably okay, but you'll still get quite a few of the former.

<comment><USER3> I'm a lowercase-l libertarian, not a right-wing American trying to avoid the stigma.

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

<comment><USER4> I'm not judging either way. My political leanings tend to fall under the frame of left-libertarianism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since the linked site contains almost no information, please read the Bloomberg article: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-24/saudi- ara...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-24/saudi-arabia-to- build-new-mega-city-on-country-s-north-coast) "Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced plans to build a new city on the Red Sea coast, promising a lifestyle not available in today's Saudi Arabia as he seeks to remake the kingdom in a time of dwindling resources."

<comment><USER6> Thanks. I was wondering whether this would be some neoliberal hellhole or something actually interesting.

<comment><USER7> Tell me more about this "neoliberal hellhole in the heart of Saudi Arabia"

<comment><USER8> Isn't that redundant? Saudi Arabia is the poster child of the Washington Consensus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Call it Kinakuta, untangle it from religion and misogyny, have more universities than mega-malls, and setup a democracy.

""Perhaps I can make an analogy to Go—though chess would work just as well. Because of our history, we Kinakutans are well-versed in both games. At the beginning of the game, the pieces are arranged in a pattern that is simple and easy to understand. But the game evolves. The players make small decisions, one turn at a time, each decision fairly simple in and of itself, and made for reasons that can be easily understood, even by a novice. But over the course of many such turns, the pattern develops such great complexity that only the finest minds—or the finest computers—can comprehend it." The sultan is gazing down thoughtfully at the Go board as he says this. He looks up and starts making eye contact around the room. "The analogy is clear. Our policies concerning free speech, telecommunications, and cryptography have evolved from a series of simple, rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand them, even in one single country, to say nothing of all countries taken together."" \- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

</comment><comment><USER10> Since the person behind this project is the sovereign of a nation-state, perhaps they should build a new way of living in their existing cities and society.

A good place to start would be enshrining basic civil liberties and not bombing civilians in a neighboring country.

<comment><USER11> Even a dictator still rules at the whim of the people charged with implementing their rules. Sometimes it's impossible to get the power structure below you to change, even when you can order executions, because the incentives are broken and will keep installing people with desires contrary to your own.

The point here, then, might be to build an "insulated" city with a more direct power structure, without the involvement of consolidated power-bases like ministries or civic departments. Immigration to the new zone could be filtered to only allow in people that believe more in the lawful rule of the sovereign themselves (maybe with something like a democratically-elected governor in between) than the rule of government as a whole; and then, eventually, a military et al could be raised from that power-base to convert the rest of the country to the "new" model.

<comment><USER10> This is a fair response and one that lifts from "disruption" like thinking processes.

I've made a personal decision however to retreat from "realpolitik" like political analyses because it requires me to play mind games about the probable intentions of the decision maker, their constraints, and the possible outcomes of the decision they made.

Holding people to a set of normative values that I believe to be meaningful has been a more useful (if more blunt) meta-construct*

* this conversation has me wondering if it might be time to revisit that position

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's conveniently not mentioned in the marketing that it's being established in Saudi Arabia. It will be interesting to see what culture is established when/if the city becomes legitimate.

<comment><USER13> 100% libertarian, I'm sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> But its in Saudi Arabia, excuse me for saying this because I have lived in Bahrain where certain youtube channels are censored but still considered more open than other gulf countries, how do you access an open internet in neom?

<comment><USER15> Not to mention, if there are any women in your life, they will be treated like children who must be under the constant supervision of the men in your family.

<comment><USER16> So the FAQ does give a little hope for that and stuff like gay/trans rights.

> WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE JUDICIAL AND REGUL ATORY FRAMEWORK THAT WILL > GOVERN ALL CIVIL AND COMMERCIAL AFFAIRS IN NEOM?

> NEOM will be the world's first independent special zone spanning three > countries, with a regulatory framework designed to adopt world-class > investment laws that support the livelihoods of residents and the > development of targeted economic sectors. The special zone will also adopt > an autonomous judicial system subject to independent regulations and > legislation, which will be drafted by investors in accordance with > international best practice. The zone will be independent of the Kingdom's > existing governmental framework, excluding sovereign laws. Social norms in > Neom will adopt leading practices to improve standards of livability for its > residents and visitors.

and clarifying 'independent systems' a little later:

> The project will be developed within a specialized zone, independent of the > Kingdom's existing governmental framework, excluding sovereign laws, in > regards to taxation, customs, labor laws, and other legal parameters > pertaining to business. As such, a zone within an independent system gives > industry the ability to manufacture and provide, goods and services at > globally competitive prices

So it sounds like they at least want to shed the more regressive parts of the traditional Islamic culture in Saudi Arabia to bring in international visitors who are reticent to visit or invest in Saudi Arabia because of the way the laws treat women/homosexuals/etc.

<comment><USER15> > _So it sounds like they at least want to shed the more regressive parts of > the traditional Islamic culture in Saudi Arabia to bring in international > visitors who are reticent to visit or invest in Saudi Arabia because of the > way the laws treat women /homosexuals/etc._

It seems more like they're just dancing around the issue to me. Neom is still under the full control of a Sunni theocracy, it just has separate regulatory structures, like a SEZ in China.

<comment><USER17> Is it easier to change the culture and the way of life of a country by introducing changes at a slow, steady pace, over a long period of time; or is it easier to do it by introducing abrupt changes in a small area, and then extend the area progressively until it covers the whole country? Might be what they're trying to do?

<comment><USER14> Like in Hong Kong? In the end, its up to the government, and I dont think they want to abolish the absolute monarchy and introduce in democracy yet as it takes away the power of the Al-Saud family and might leave them vulnerable to political enemies

<comment><USER18> I don't believe absolute monarchy and liberal society are necessarily mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I see the new Bioshock is coming along nicely.

<comment><USER20> BioShock:Saudi Edition

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As someone who lives semi-arid, good luck growing abundant food on this land.

I have 12 acre feet of water rights on 58 acres in Montana and its still a lot of work.

(For sale btw: It's fun as a giant playground [http://www.eralandmark.com/listings/view/307976](http://www.eralandmark.com/listings/view/307976))

<comment><USER22> > 12 acre feet of water rights on 58 acres

Could you explain these terms better? How does that work? Thanks!

<comment><USER23> An acre foot is a volume of water one acre, one foot deep, used over a year. In gallons, that's 325,851 gallons per year per acre foot.

The poster then can use about 4 million gallons of water per year for his land.

When spread out over this amount of land, that's about 66% of the amount of water needed for a suburban grass lawn in a hot climate.

<comment><USER18> Not parent, but thanks for the detailed response.

One thing though:

> that's about 66% of the amount of water needed for a suburban grass lawn in > a hot climate

I'm not sure how to related to this. If a person wanted to grow food in a hot climate they'd probably build tunnels or shaded houses or some such, or grow olives or some other food plant suited to the conditions, using drip irrigation. Where as a suburban lawn is typically exposed to direct sun light and watered in a typically less than optimal way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Welcome to Zombocom [http://www.zombo.com/](http://www.zombo.com/)

<comment><USER7> The impossible IS attainable at neom.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is it only me looking for an ICO details at the bottom of the page? :)

<comment><USER26> Well, here's the whitepaper - [http://www.discoverneom.com/content/pdfs/NEOM_FACT_SHEET_ENG...](http://www.discoverneom.com/content/pdfs/NEOM_FACT_SHEET_ENGLISH.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone know why Saudi Arabia does not have a big space program? Seems like more reasonable way to spend exorbitant amounts of money than building paradise cities in the middle of a desert.

</comment><comment><USER28> Question:

\- Which religion will be NEOM's?

Everything else comes down from it.

<comment><USER7> I think "secular humanist" is a good start (and compatible with atheism as well as a number of other religions to varying degrees)

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

EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted here. The linked site is absolutely ridiculous in its lack of information which is a hallmark of concepts that overpromise via marketing and underdeliver by not shipping

<comment><USER29> I think you are being down-voted because others have pointed out this is a venture by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, so it will most definitely not be Secular humanism or anything close to it.

<comment><USER7> Well then it's doomed to fail, frankly, because 1) it's an extra limitation on the behavior of people in their target market of "free thinking, creative individuals" (who will not appreciate arbitrary constraints on their behavior that are not based on secular ethical established facts), and 2) there is no rational evidence that living that way is somehow superior to something like secular humanism, in fact the evidence seems to indicate the opposite

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-secular- life/201410...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-secular- life/201410/secular-societies-fare-better-religious-societies)

But I was not here to argue that. If this new "nation" wishes to be forward- thinking and open-mind-inviting, it needs to shake off the religion requirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I guess I just missed the section on 'how you will be governed' and 'how will we care for the old / poor / infirm'.

</comment><comment><USER31> This looks like the Fyre Festival of country startups

<comment><USER32> The video on this page had some eerie similarities to the Fyre Festival deck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So essentially it sounds like an experiment:

Does a place designed for the rich and privileged, by the rich and privileged equal a rich and privileged utopia?

<comment><USER18> In Utopia there are no poor people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Society run by technocrats using state capitalism. I've think I've seen that before... Is this Soviet Union 2.0? Maybe we have the technology to build it now?

<comment><USER35> > Society run by technocrats

More like a society run by theocrats, allowing technologists to live and work there, with a handshake promise to be "more socially open minded".

<comment><USER34> I think you are right. Soviet Union was an atheist society. What would the marriage of ruling by theocracy and managing by technology be called?

Let's call it Theotechnocracy?

<comment><USER35> That's pretty much what communism/stalinism is. The party leader is the godhead and everything is managed by technology (aka, bureaucrats).

Being arrested for blasphemy is really no different than being "re-educated".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Plenty of grandiose claims but little substance. What is this about? A pilot city for testing next-gen infrastructure technologies built from scratch?

</comment><comment><USER37> I think there's a pretty good chance that this succeeds wildly at everything it advertises.

Unfortunately it doesn't advertise democracy, equality, upward mobility, stability, justice, diversity or even freedom.

But in this world, are there enough rich, heteronormal, globe trotters that fetishize clean energy, "clean" food and electric cars to make something like this a success? Probably.

<comment><USER38> Indeed. The whole thing sounds less like Dubai 2.0 and more like Singapore 2.0 to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> An entirely new city, centrally planned from scratch by developers and investors without any organic growth, no history, no culture, an initial population of zero, in Saudi Arabia that costs half a trillion to make.

What could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER40> The Arab countries are not stupid; they know the oil is going to run out and they're trying to plan for the future. Nevertheless this sounds like yet another Masdar City, which has been mostly a failure [1]. (One of the many problems with MC is that PV panels in a landscape of blowing sand have to be swept daily or they stop working.)

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/16/masdars-...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/16/masdars- zero-carbon-dream-could-become-worlds-first-green-ghost-town)

</comment><comment><USER41> It's amazing how quickly the mind absorbs trends and makes assumptions. From the moment I started reading the top of the page I assumed this was going to be publicity for a new ICO raise.

</comment><comment><USER42> The quality/success of a future project is inversely proportional to the glamour of its initial marketing.

The marketing seems just a little too polished on this one. Reminds me of a kickstarter scam.

</comment><comment><USER43> Fascinating. It is good to see that some people are actually dreaming and acting on a bigger scale than rent seeking mobile apps.

</comment><comment><USER44> Will it be a rival to the new Cairo mega-city?

[http://www.cnn.com/style/article/egypt-new- capital/index.htm...](http://www.cnn.com/style/article/egypt-new- capital/index.htm..).

</comment><comment><USER45> Everything looks perfect, we only need to find perfect humans to complete the project.

</comment><comment><USER46> Thanks but no thanks, crown prince. Good luck with your project!

</comment><comment><USER47> It took me a long time to figure out whether this was a parody.

</comment><comment><USER48> LMAOing at the idea of a "free nation" in which saudi arabia--one of the most insanely conservative nations on earth--has total sovereignty.

</comment><comment><USER49> The website of their PR firm greets me with this: [http://archive.is/B7aUx](http://archive.is/B7aUx).

<comment><USER32> Are you claiming that it is NOT important to have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed....

That's a bold move Cotton.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> So where the folks who haul the garbage get to live?

</comment><comment><USER51> "Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... NEOM."

</comment><comment> d--b This looks like the Saudis want to have their own Qatar-like state...

</comment><comment><USER7> They should have called it LOTF ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies))

Or perhaps MUDW ("Muslim Utopia Doesn't Work")

</comment><comment><USER52> A fool and his money...

</comment><comment><USER53> Not going to work without major university presence nearby.

<comment><USER54> KAUST is nearby. Founded in 2009 so it's still new but it has the sixth- biggest endowment in the world.

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Sc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Science_and_Technology) :

"It was founded in 2009 and provides research and graduate training programs using English as the official language of instruction. It was announced in 2013 that KAUST had one of the fastest growing research and citation records in the world and in the 2016 Nature Index Rising Stars was ranked #19 in the world of the fastest rising universities for high quality research output. KAUST was ranked as the world's top university in citations per faculty ranking indicator as per QS World University Rankings for 2015-2016 and 2016-2017."

<comment><USER53> 940 students and 1200 alumni.

Meanwhile, a public university in the US might typically have 40,000 students, and there are tons of them.

You really need a major university presence for this to work. If Saudi Arabia wants to compete economically, they need a good half-million university students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I don't think Saudi Arabia and innovation can exist in the same sentence!

</comment><comment><USER56> Stopped reading at "Saudi Arabia", what a pile of &%#+.

</comment><comment><USER57> Hmmmmmm.... :|

</comment><comment><USER58> Is this a startuptorship, then?

One startup (read corporation) that rules a whole country.

Finally! /s

</comment><comment><USER59> A new land wherein your browser scroll is overridden.

<comment><USER60> I hate that place!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The last person I would trust to build the free, open society of the future is the monarch of a country that still executes people for being gay.

<comment><USER61> Apostasy and consuming any kind of drugs is also punishable by death. Drinking alcohol and having sex outside marriage are severely reprimanded.

And you also have all the vexations of "normal" regular life. Women were not allowed to drive at all until recently. Movie theaters simply do not exist in Saudi. Movies that you can legally watch (at home) are heavily censored (so piracy is your only option). And you have segregated areas for males and females in restaurant and most shops...

A project like Neom would totally work if they promised the locals that none of the bullshit rules would apply. Young Saudis would just swamp the place and work their asses off to make it happen... but I doubt the old religious guard would like that. Just marketing BS. They'll just build fancy buildings in the desert at great expense, and nothing will come out of it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: The Development - A Website About Websites - <AUTHOR> http://thedevelopment.co/

<comment><USER2> Their twitter account is here for those interested! [https://twitter.com/_thedevelopment](https://twitter.com/_thedevelopment)</comment>


YC Summer 2020 interview acceptance – a fantasy - 100-xyz The YC Summer 2020 batch results will be out tomorrow.  Very likely, we at Toonclip.com will get the boot.  A little fantasy in the meantime.  Below is Siebel of YC inviting us for an interview :-)
https://toonclip.com/player?key1=802d8d51ec
If you have also applied, you can create your own fantasy by forking the above. <comment> 100-xyz [https://toonclip.com/player?key1=802d8d51ec](https://toonclip.com/player?key1=802d8d51ec)

Animation here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you hear back yet?

<comment><USER2> And emails yet?</comment></comment></comment>


Research shows daily family life is all the "quality time" kids need - <AUTHOR> https://work.qz.com/1099307/research-shows-daily-family-life-is-all-the-quality-time-kids-need/ <comment><USER2> Sitting around a table with my family each day for dinner was a huge part of my childhood and I'm sure impacted me in significant unconscious ways.

<comment><USER3> Being beaten daily by my mother and stepfather until I was strong enough to stop them also had a lasting impact.</comment></comment>


Spyder - Scientific python development environment - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/

<comment><USER2> Ah, yes -- instead of being willing to work on improving one of the existing scientific Python front ends and/or libraries (Sage, IPython, SciPy, etc.), let's invent a new one that will end up competing for time and resources with those that already exist.

Even though most of these choices are free, they still possess a strong component of not-invented-here (typical of paid software), and the Balkanization of technical Python options and environments.

Having said all that, and just to make this interesting, the features page shows some pretty nice stuff:

<http://code.google.com/p/spyderlib/wiki/Features>

<comment><USER3> Spyder depends on, rather than competes with, IPython and SciPy.</comment></comment>


High-end CNC machines can't be moved without manufacturers' permission - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2014/01/06/high-end-cnc-machines-cant-b.html <comment><USER3> This is completely beside the point of the article, but I work for a company that makes fairly large precision equipment. A potential service nightmare is when the customer moves the equipment and screws it up. A lot of this equipment is designed to only be installed by the supplier, due to the amount of documentation and training that would be needed for customer installation. And something like a big CNC may have some fairly detailed site and installation requirements.

Maybe the GPS is so it can receive targeted ads. "Customers who machined this part also ordered..." ;-)

<comment><USER4> Yeah that sounds like a valid reason, too. These things work with millimeter accuracy; jolt them and the accuracy may be off. Position them just slightly off-level and they might be off.

<comment><USER5> Oh no not that meme again.

The reason why machinists who know only a little about machining demand you must level a lathe bed or it won't work, insist on that old wives tale, is because a simple "cheap" way to prove the lathe bed isn't twisted is to simply plop a precision level on various parts of the lathe bed and various directions... If the lathe bed is level everywhere, it must be a flat plane (well, plus or minus curvature of the earth over 100 foot monsters, obviously)

Obviously machine tools don't have to be level; otherwise you'd never see them on ships, deep sea platforms, mobile "back of truck" repair trucks, things like that. They have other, somewhat more laborious or expensive ways to determine and shim flatness.

If you made the flimsiest imaginable 3-d printer, then sag might be relevant... however you're talking about beasts of a machine that can drop 10-100 rotating HP and not twist or distort... anything less than 45 degrees isn't going to matter.

Now one problem I have personally seen is some CNC gear has what boils down to a conveyor belt that streams out metal chips. So if you mounted it 10 degrees tilted, you might have chips not fall on the conveyor belt. This is usually a simple adjustment to various guards / guides / baffles. Its not a very serious concern.

As a cross industry comparison, learned helplessness is a common feature in IT/CS land, where your average luser is extremely proud to not know anything about his computer that he uses 8 hours per day, and no one expects him to know anything either. However in machine world its somewhat unusual to have IT-like levels of learned helplessness, so the average machinist dude can quite easily handle shimming a lathe or adjusting tilts and such.

<comment><USER6> Is it possible that tools meant for ships/oil rigs/trucks are built differently from those that have the luxury of sitting on a stationary floor?

<comment><USER7> They're almost certainly not expected to work to anything near the level of precision that these sorts of high-end CNC machines do - judging by the comments in this thread, you're talking about micrometer level precision. They are to 'machine-tools' what your home server is to google's data centres.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another possibility that hasn't been mentioned is that the purchase agreement might include some kind of first refusal for the manufacturer to repurchase the equipment if the original owner wants to sell. This kind of provision prevents the emergence of a used-equipment market, the existence of which would cut into the manufacturer's pricing power on new equipment. Requiring the manufacturer's consent to relocate the equipment would be one way for the manufacturer to enforce such an agreement.

tl;dr if you sell expensive machinery then do everything in your power to prevent buyers from reselling.

<comment> fsck--off The market isn't small enough for these tactics to work.

It's much more likely that this was a response to the very real and well documented problem of illegal exports. Another Japanese company, Mitutoyo, was caught several times illegally exporting these machines to embargoed countries, including North Korea and Iran. Some of Mitutoyo's executives were jailed for this.[1] Adding tamper-proofing and tracking is a great way to make sure that regain confidence and avoid prison.

Edit: I'm not sure why this was downvoted. A representative from Mori said something similar on the board linked to by the original article:

"Regarding the device, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Worst case for a negligent violation would be Dr. Mori himself spending time in the slammer. That along is enough motivation for DMG MORI to follow the regulation very carefully. Other reasons include all of those stated above!

btw, no need to waste time on bypassing it. It is pretty solid. We have to make it so Iran, N. Korea, etc's best can't bypass it." [2]

I think that this is a perfectly plausible explanation and don't think that the real ulterior motive is controlling resale, especially when other foreign competitors do not have the same restrictions.

[1] [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2006/09/02/news/mitutoyo- ti...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2006/09/02/news/mitutoyo-tied-to-iran- north-nuclear-quests/#.UmWKRlPp47k)

[2] [http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori- gildemeister-m...](http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister- maho-cnc/mori-ellison-gyroscope-unlocking-273841/)

<comment><USER9> Then why not just white-list all the areas not covered by the embargo so customers are not required to got trough this lengthy procedure every time they want to re arrange the shop.

Also it's not very difficult to trick a GPS sensor into thinking its somewhere else as long as your signal is a lot better then the ones coming from the satellite so i would disagree with them being solid.

<comment><USER10> > it's not very difficult to trick a GPS sensor into thinking its somewhere > else as long as your signal is a lot better then the ones coming from the > satellite

and that's probably the reason why they include a gyro and shut down the machine if it is moved at all, regardless of what the GPS says.

<comment><USER9> And once you're dome moving it you fake your location by spoofing the GPS and call to get it activated again and none's the wiser.

A gyroscope doesn't do much besides detect if it was moved it can't tell where it was moved so you're basically relying on spoof-able input.

<comment><USER11> That's not entirely true. Early navigation was done with gyroscopes, see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system) specifically:

"The INS is initially provided with its position and velocity from another source (a human operator, a GPS satellite receiver, etc.), and thereafter computes its own updated position and velocity by integrating information received from the motion sensors. The advantage of an INS is that it requires no external references in order to determine its position, orientation, or velocity once it has been initialized."

<comment><USER12> While it is true that INS's exist, the cost of a reliable and accurate one is on the same order of magnitude as the CNC Machine itself. Also, errors accumulate [0] over time in an INS (aka "Integration Drift"), such that it becomes wildly inaccurate after a certain critical threshold. Also, almost all INS's require regular calibration and tuning, [1] and are sensitive to vibrational stresses (which is abundantly present in a machine shop). Therefore it seems unlikely that these machines include INS's.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#Erro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#Error) [1] [http://www.aerostudents.com/files/avionics/navigationBasicsA...](http://www.aerostudents.com/files/avionics/navigationBasicsAndInertialNavigation.pdf) (scroll down to bottom for tuning discussion)

<comment><USER11> Again, it is true that drift exists, but you're mischaracterizing, from [0]: "these errors accumulate roughly proportionally to the time since the initial position was input. Therefore the position must be periodically corrected by input from some other type of navigation system." [0][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#Erro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#Error)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Effectively, this means that machinists' shops can't rearrange their very > expensive, very large tools to improve their workflow from job to job > without getting permission from the manufacturer (which can take a month!), > even if their own the gear.

Have you ever seen such a workshop being rearranged? The people doing it might - for instance - not place the machine on a good enough quality of flooring, or they might be moving to a facility that is totally inappropriate (no good foundations) because they aren't talking to the right people and have a dim and naive view of machinery...

Also my experience of such rearrangements is that they are not to improve workflow, but more usually to satisfy some new management type's desire to have an impact on the workplace.

In short, I think this is prudent - it at least prevents a classic engineering management cock up - and protects the machine manufacturer from having their name tarnished by the sloppy practices of their customers.

The case where people know what they are doing is the exception and not the case in my experience...

</comment><comment><USER14> Two things:

\- a GPS lock can easily be defeated by the earnest with a GPS simulator, about a $2k fix. This isn't a great solution for the honest buyer, but anyone with ill intention could easily activate these in Kansas and re-export to a controlled state.

(edit: a GPS sim can't help with the gyros, so maybe its a better "lock" than I originally reckoned ;-)

\- there are excellent "open-source" substitutes available. The Mechmate community is thriving ([http://mechmate.com](http://mechmate.com)) and these plans make it possible for a DIYer to build their own 4 axis CNC with tolerances to a thousandth of an inch or better. My father-in-law is a a cabinet maker ([http://woodforyou.net](http://woodforyou.net)) who built one of these for his business a few years ago, here's a demo video showing his results... [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU3-6AapV3I](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU3-6AapV3I)

(Edit 2: I wrote this before I had an appreciation for the difference between a CNC mill and a CNC router. The Mechmate is a CNC router and used for very different purposes than a CNC mill. Anyways, comment might still have some value for some. Sorry for the noise ;-)

</comment><comment><USER15> What happens when a GPS satellite fails? Or if you have an earthquake? Seems like precisely in those times of national need that one's most sophisticated technologies might be sorely out of commission. A seemingly pretty nice way to inflict 'collateral damage' on one's self. Especially if such a precautionary set of rules were put into more and more machines.

<comment><USER16> Consumer GPS devices have some interesting lock-down rules built into them. They shut themselves down if they detect you are travelling around Mach 2 or above 18000 metres altitude.

The reasoning is fairly obvious - they dont want to see dumb missiles getting upgraded to a DIY guided ballistic missile thanks to a $100 Garmin gaffa taped to the side and a cheap flight control computer.

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

<comment><USER17> _They shut themselves down if they detect you are travelling around Mach 2 or above 18000 metres altitude_

The intention was for a GPS device to disable itself if it was traveling faster than 1k knots AND above 60k feet, not traveling faster than 1k knots OR above 60k feet. Unfortunately, many GPS devices improperly implement this as an OR condition, rather than an AND condition. This becomes problematic when using a GPS in a high-altitude weather balloon to determine altitude and location, which a few friends and I did a couple years ago. We had to be very careful when selecting the GPS we used to avoid this pitfall.

<comment><USER18> Which GPS units are acceptable for this? I'm working on a HAB and I'm worried about this CoCom bullshit. The one I'm thinking of uses a SiRFstarIII or IV; any idea of those use || instead of the proper &&?

<comment><USER19> Wikipedia article on CoCom links to a post that links to this page:

[http://ukhas.org.uk/guides:gps_modules](http://ukhas.org.uk/guides:gps_modules)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know about the one mentioned, but I've used very high end CNCs. The ones that I used are VERY carefully calibrated by the manufacturer on site. A slight change in the slope of the floor could throw the calibration off. They wouldn't want to spend time troubleshooting a problem caused by somebody moving the equipment. That said, we didn't have anything like a GPS on the thing that would shut it down if moved.

<comment><USER21> Then better implement something like the "tainted mode" in the Linux kernel: if you load a closed-source (tainted) module, you can continue to use it, but the vendor (in this case the kernel developers) will refuse to give support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Slightly off topic, but I'm working in that field, and those high-end CNC run nothing more elaborated than windows XP. They do ship some linux distro, but that's very seldom, much more than... windows nt4.

The CNC must be reachable from the programmers computers as well as from the remote connections that manufacturers sells as maintenance. Needless to say, it's a nightmare for any decent CISO.

Of course the CNC manufacturers' don't make it easy nor encourage the installation of third party securing tools. Very big companies spend a lot of time thinking on how to secure such machines on their network without touching the OS, and I've not yet heard of someone having found a simple and powerful securing policy (not involving a complex vlan implementation). The result is that, with some hacker abilities and a known target, one could worm its way threw the CNC OS of a lot of companies who don't know nor want to secure their network.

If one fellow colleague working on the manufacturer side happen to read that comment, I would be happy to push the discussion further.

<comment><USER23> > _a complex vlan implementation_

How exactly are they setting this up that it's complex? Isolated VLANs with VPN access are a routine solution to this kind of problem. A decent network engineer would probably have it done before you finish telling him what you want.

(If instead of a decent network engineer, I had to do it, I'd just be finding the password for the switch I hadn't logged into for a year. The configuration would be done about 15 minutes later.)

<comment><USER22> From my experience, there's a tremendous lack of _decent network engineer_ in those companies (mechanical industry, family business, ...).

Devil advocate: people in charge of IT stuff there are project or support guys, almost never network engineers. Either they don't care about serious security or they simply have no clue on how they should do it. And when they outsource their IT security, they're so bad at choosing that the solution implemented is worst than doing nothing.

When I have the chance to chat with them about those subjects, the common position is almost always "we don't get why the machine manufacturer don't sells us a secured solution".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That is a rather misleading headline. A better one might be:

"US arms export regulations force CNC manufacturers to implement anti- relocation lockout mechanisms"

Of course it's not just the manufacturers being dicks; they implement that or they can't import to the USA.

<comment><USER25> Really? I thought the vendors just can't sell to Iran, not that they have to build in lockouts that enforce compliance by their customers.

<comment><USER24> According to the thread the story is taken from, the machines are now under the purview of ITAR: [http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori- gildemeister-m...](http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister- maho-cnc/mori-ellison-gyroscope-unlocking-273841/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We should not be too surprised at this. As long that property laws can be circumvented with technology, more companies will get into the business of retaining full control after sale. With practically no drawbacks and only benefits, it goes against economics to not do it. It doesn't matter if its a CD, game, website, a car, a high end CNC, or a coffee maker. Retaining effective ownership after sale is just so useful from a corporation point of view. Never again does a product need to escape into the control of an customer.

That this story might be explained with regulation is not much of an surprise. No US politician would dream of publicly stand for the view point of taking down private ownership and giving the control to corporations, even if regulations then can easier be enforced. They would be called communist and fascist, and any political career would be over. However, circumvention of property law is not the same thing, so it enables many new way to control what previous was hard if not impossible.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't think this uses GPS. A high-end CNC machine would have about 0% chance of seeing any GPS satellites.

Even the linked thread said it uses gyros without mentioning GPS.

<comment><USER28> The linked thread actually does have a couple, albiet tenuous, mentions of GPS:

      - "All of our Citizen swiss lathes have the same GPS feature." (http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister-maho-cnc/mori-ellison-gyroscope-unlocking-273841/#post2141101)
      - "Why can't they simply check for "Out of USA" or "in $BannedCountry now"? They do have GPS, right?" (http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister-maho-cnc/mori-ellison-gyroscope-unlocking-273841/#post2141382)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A rather interesting/insightful comment from the article: [http://bbs.boingboing.net/t/high-end-cnc-machines-cant-be- mo...](http://bbs.boingboing.net/t/high-end-cnc-machines-cant-be-moved- without-manufacturers-permission/18591/33)

<comment><USER30> Not really. There is a lot of logic failure in this comment.

What does the fact they don't install them on US machines have to do with them not using it as a business opportunity? This is a non-sequitur.

Since this guy hasn't heard of them being used to enforce finance deals means absolutely nothing, how could anyone cancel out a point because of that?

And his third point skips out on the fact that adding this functionality to the machine can cause extra problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I might be missing a huge point here, but aren't very high precision, high end cnc machines virtually vital for the production of nuclear devices? If thats the level of machine we are talking about, I can well understand this.

<comment><USER18> So are computers. Should computers be shipped with mandatory GPS units that shut them down when they go into "bad guy" countries?

<comment><USER32> Have you not seen the paperwork that come with high end computer equipment - <USER2> helped by some Pr1me gear back in the day and along with the kit came a sheaf of paperwork explaining just how much shit you would be in if you reexported it to one of the country's on the naughty list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> _a situation that the manufacturers have turned into a business-opportunity by using the technology to assist in repossessing machines from delinquent lease- payers -- and requiring permission for privilege of deciding where to place their key capital assets._

Yikes. Classic Holdup Problem. There are certainly ways to force inventory checks without GPS software locks; this must have been implemented because of the desire to have actual remote 'kill' capability. What I don't understand is the line of sight issues with (actual) GPS sensors. If the machine is blocked from the birds...like it would typically be indoors...something seems odd.

</comment><comment><USER34> Information wants to be free. Eventually, everyone who wants to know will know how to build a CNC machine like this, without any interlocks.

If we've given up on growing up as a species, and now believe that humanity's only hope of survival is to limit the spread of information, then we're well and truly doomed. And, sadly, it's probably for the best. After all, who wants to live in a dystopian, nerfed society full of imprisoned intellects? Who wants a bunch of angry apes who're all one bad day from unleashing Armageddon loping around with warp engines and antimatter bombs and black hole generators?

As a side note... reading the commentary on this story is both intriguing and disheartening. The "hacker" mentality that apologizes for, and is comforted by, this sort of manufacturer-imposed limitation on an owned product, this denial of the right to tinker, is a very different mentality than was common when I earned my stripes. Have legally-imposed culture changes like the DMCA really corrupted our community so much? Have constant, overblown reminders of the threat of terrorism rendered us so fearful of each other? Could an individual raised in a community with this mentality ever produce open, populist-enabling technologies, PGP and P2P and DeCSS and modchips? IP itself? Are we still hackers, or are we all just consumers, now?

</comment><comment><USER4> > A subtly weakened or defective part from a big mill like the NV5000 might > find its way into a vehicle or a high-speed machine, with disastrous > consequences.

Which is why - at least according to those awesome TV shows - parts in high- end vehicles and machines are checked via precise 3D measuring instruments as part of the quality control process. Just pointing that out. Pretty sure few companies fully trust CNC machines to deliver perfect results all the time.

<comment><USER32> Yes thats why they have QA/Test departments where do you think the ISO9000 and BS5750 quality standards came from?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This seems incredibly brittle - just like software DRM that needs to phone home. What happens 15 years from now when they shut down their servers?

<comment><USER36> They don't connect to the company server. They just shut down and display a message to the operator. It's up to the operator to receive an unlock code from the manufacturer. So, there's no server involved. It's all human-to-human interaction.

But again, in 15 years all these codes will be lost by the manufacturer itself, so your main point is valid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> There's a legitimate use for GPS spoofing.

<comment><USER38> Shutting down a competitor's machine shop, for one.

<comment><USER39> A little earthquake or nearby explosion of some kind and all factory machines shut down. Aaand wait for a code, but first compose a request with all machine numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you did want to stop CNC machines being used in Iran or North Korea, why not just use the GPS chip to disable the machines if they're inside those countries?

I don't see what's to be gained by causing the machines to fail if they've been moved to the other end of a factory.

<comment><USER41> No GPS inside of a metal box (like a shipping container). You can also spoof GPS since it's a one-way passive signal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> When the CNC mills from Toshiba made it to the Soviet Union in the 1980's, it had a significant impact on submarine warfare:

[http://www.auilr.org/pdf/4/4-1-8.pdf](http://www.auilr.org/pdf/4/4-1-8.pdf) THE TOSHIBA-KONGSBERG INCIDENT (pdf)

</comment><comment><USER43> Sure, we'll use the embargo clause to explain this. The real reason is that, when you have machines capable of making new machine parts, you want to know when they move around and start building Skynet.

</comment><comment><USER44> These aren't widgets sold to people on the street. These are very sophisticated buyers of extremely expensive stuff who can afford to pay someone to read the fine print.

</comment><comment><USER45> Some of the highest precision CNC manufacturing equipment for particular processes is subject to nuclear non-proliferation arms controls as it can be used to make key components in uranium enrichment equipment. So for machines relevant to those laws, a GPS lowjack might be a sensible precaution. North Korea has been picking up this machinery from someone, so I can imagine Japanese industry and government being very paranoid on the issue.

</comment><comment><USER46> _requiring permission for privilege of deciding where to place their key capital assets_

Owners should have this right.

 _I 'm interested in the security implications of this_

What does gyro sensor lockdown have to do with malware?

 _the mills are designed to be opaque to their owners_

You're not really the owner if somebody can lock you out.

 _lest they disable the gyro /GPS_

Disabling the sensor would probably trigger the lockdown.

<comment><USER47> _Owners should have this right._

Like many things, it depends. If the device is supported by the vendor, and requires very high precision such that jarring it could un-calibrate it, then this is perfectly reasonable, otherwise support costs would become prohibitively expensive for everyone. Why would they care if you've bought it? Because they are protecting their reputation.

Consider the situation of the typical Windows desktop that becomes more and more unusable as the user installs more and more toolbars and other malware. Windows takes the blame for it, but the problem would just go away if it prevented random stuff being installed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Interesting attack vector ...</comment>


WEIS2012 Workshop - Information Security papers  - <AUTHOR> http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/program.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Empirical Analysis of Data Breach Litigation

[http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Romanosky_WEIS2012.pd...](http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Romanosky_WEIS2012.pdf)

\---

Is Patient Data Better Protected in Competitive Healthcare Markets?

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Gaynor_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

The Privacy Economics of Voluntary Over-disclosure in Web Forms

[http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Preibusch_WEIS2012.pd...](http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Preibusch_WEIS2012.pdf)

\---

Security Resources, Capabilities and Cultural Values: Links to Security Performance and Compliance

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Kwon_WEIS2012.doc>

\---

Software Security Economics: Theory, in Practice

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Neuhaus_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

Sectoral and Regional Interdependency of Japanese Firms under the Influence of Information Security Risks

[http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Jenjarrussakul_WEIS20...](http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Jenjarrussakul_WEIS2012.pdf)

\---

Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Herley_WEIS2012.pdf>

HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4136016>

\---

Analysis of eCrime in Crowd-sourced Labor Markets: Mechanical Turk vs. Freelancer

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Garg_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

Can We Afford Integrity by Proof-of-Work? Scenarios Inspired by the Bitcoin Currency

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2041492>

\---

Measuring the Cost of Cybercrime

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Anderson_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

A Closer Look at Information Security Costs

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Brecht_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

IT Security Investment and Gordon-Loeb's 1/e Rule

[http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Baryshnikov_WEIS2012....](http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Baryshnikov_WEIS2012.pdf)

\---

Who Sometimes Violates the Rule of the Organizations? An Empirical Study on Information Security Behaviors and Awareness

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Takemura_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

To Invest or Not to Invest? Assessing the Economic Viability of a Policy and Security Configuration Management Tool

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Demetz_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

Online Promiscuity: Prophylactic Patching and the Spread of Computer Transmitted Infections

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Kelley_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

Contagion in Cybersecurity Attacks

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Baldwin_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

The Effect of Fraud Investigation Cost on Pay-Per-Click Advertising

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Chen_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

Ad-blocking Games: Monetizing Online Content Under the Threat of Ad Avoidance

[http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Vratonjic_WEIS2012.pd...](http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Vratonjic_WEIS2012.pdf)

\---

Choice Architecture and Smartphone Privacy: There's a Price for That

<http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Egelman_WEIS2012.pdf>

\---

Would You Sell Your Mother's Data? Personal Data Disclosure in a Simulated Credit Card Application

[http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Malheiros_WEIS2012.pd...](http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Malheiros_WEIS2012.pdf)</comment>


Redundant Array of Independent Clouds - <AUTHOR> https://tahoe-lafs.org/~marlowe/TWN31.html

<comment><USER2> Redundant Array of Independent Networked Storage or RAINS would sound so much cooler considering it is "cloud" storage.

<comment><USER3> Redundant Array of Independent Networked Storage (RAINS) © 2012 dhughes

<comment><USER4> Random Array of Independent Data Centers (RAIDC)

Edit: maybe Random Array of In-dependent Clouds (RAIdC)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool! First thoughts:

* how many of the supported options boil down to Amazon S3?

* is this the new "upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it"? [https://groups.google.com/group/linux.dev.kernel/msg/76ae734...](https://groups.google.com/group/linux.dev.kernel/msg/76ae734d543e396d?pli=1)

* whoever put together this newsletter is clearly doing a great job for that community

<comment><AUTHOR> > how many of the supported options boil down to Amazon S3?

That's a really good question. Diego's experiment used:

• memopal: I don't know if it uses S3

• SugarSync: I don't know if it uses S3

• syncplicity: I don't know if it uses S3

• googledrive: not using S3

• UbuntuOne: yes, it uses S3

• DropBox: yes, it uses S3

By the way, my startup, Least Authority Enterprises is working on a future product which also goes by the codename "Redundant Array of Independent Clouds". Our project is no relation to Diego Righi's experiment, except perhaps we inspired him by talking about it.

We've received a research grant from DARPA to implement it. The backends we're developing for are all guaranteed to be separate backends from each other -- none of them turn out to be front-ends for another one!

• Amazon S3

• OpenStack Swift/Rackspace Cloud Files

• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

• Google Storage for Developers

</comment></comment><comment> uncle-ezra Nice idea! This paper ([http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~hweather/publications/racs- socc20...](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~hweather/publications/racs- socc2010.pdf)) called RACS from Cornell explored the same space about two years ago, but it's really nice to see it rendered to practice in usable filesystem form.

<comment><USER6> One of the authors of RACS here. Indeed, the architecture of RACS is quite similar to Tahoe-LAFS, with a proxy server that sends shares of data to different cloud providers. With RACS, we focused on fault tolerance rather than malicious modification of data: Cloud providers have their own internal redundancy, so they (hopefully) protect their users from low-level hardware failures... but a company itself can fail, or even raise prices suddenly which can lead to an "economic failure", where the user's application becomes prohibitively expensive to run. So RACS is intended to protect against things like this. It can tolerate malicious modification of data shares on individual cloud providers, but that kind of security wasn't our focus, so it's interesting to see that Tahoe-LAFS takes that direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi -- I'm one of the authors of Tahoe-LAFS. I haven't read your RACS paper before, but it looks pretty good. I appreciate the emphasis on real-world economics and on the costs of vendor lock-in. I haven't yet completely digested your results numbers to see how they inform my business, but I definitely will.

It's too bad that you weren't aware of, or didn't cite, Tahoe-LAFS when you wrote that paper! Even though you used my zfec library, which I created (by copying Luigi Rizzo's feclib) for Tahoe-LAFS's use. Heh heh heh.

I tried to get Tahoe-LAFS's existence registered in the official academic research world by publishing this: [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7212771373747133487&...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7212771373747133487&as_sdt=4005&sciodt=0,6&hl=en) but it didn't really work. Most of the subsequent research that probably should have cited Tahoe-LAFS still didn't.

Perhaps that 5-page paper was too telegraphic to communicate a lot of the important properties. For example, it does not spell out the fact that Tahoe- LAFS includes a kind of proof-of-storage/proof-of-retrievability protocol. Also, perhaps, I chose too obscure of a venue to publish it in. I'm not sure.

For your reading pleasure here is a big rant by me on my blog, whining that Tahoe-LAFS is deserving of more attention than HAIL (which you do cite):

[https://lafsgateway.zooko.com/uri/URI:DIR2-RO:d73ap7mtjvv7y6...](https://lafsgateway.zooko.com/uri/URI:DIR2-RO:d73ap7mtjvv7y6qsmmwqwai4ii:tq5tqejzulg7yj4h7nxuurpiuuz5jsgvczmdamcalpk2rc6gmbsq/klog.html#%5B%5BHAIL%3A%20A%20High- Availability%20and%20Integrity%20Layer%20for%20Cloud%20Storage%5D%5D)

"It is frustrating to me that the authors of HAIL are apparently unaware of Tahoe-LAFS, which elegantly solves most of the problems that they set out to solve, which is open source, and which was deployed to the public, storing millions of files, and summarized in a peer-reviewed workshop paper before the HAIL paper was published."

<comment><AUTHOR> You know, I have to admit that the main reason academic researchers don't appreciate the sophisticated proof-of-work/proof-of-retrievability features in Tahoe-LAFS is that _I didn't write it up_. The 5-page paper that I linked to -- [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7212771373747133487&...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=7212771373747133487&as_sdt=4005&sciodt=0,6&hl=en) \-- doesn't explicitly mention that it has proof-of-work/proof-of- retrievability properties at _all_ , much less do the sort of thorough, precise specification and proof that, for example, the HAIL paper has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even before "cloud" or online storage was too hot or even showed up yet, I was thinking of doing this.

Time was Google providing "unlimited" gmail storage and fuse gmail-fs was just released. I looked for another fuse fs like a hotmail-fs but did not push hard on it. I could not find and let my idea die.

It was hard to do and time consuming, but marginal gain would be small. Also I'm a f __ __lazy system administrator. I hate coding :)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, a lot of us have had similar thoughts of using various forms of free storage like our own hard drives and RAID setups.

This should just go toward reinforcing our understanding that ideas are the easy part. Follow-through is the hard part.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> See screenshots: <http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment1.png> and <http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment2.png> from Diego "sickness" Righi's notes: <http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment.txt>

</comment><comment><USER9> I;m sure many of thought of this, nice to see someone do it.

My idea for backup would use something like DIBS ( <http://www.mit.edu/~emin/source_code/dibs/>) but instead of peers, use many free salami slice sizes of storage from cloud/hosting platforms.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sidekick: Why am I not surprised that he replaced _inexpensive_ with _independent_ in the original acronym...

Other than that, interesting project.

<comment><USER11> Well in fairness, both inexpensive and independent are used in the original acronym

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Memopal does not use Amazon S3. Memopal is based on the Memopal Global File System (MGFS), the archiving technology created and used by Memopal. MGFS is a distributed file system, designed to be highly reliable, scalable and at the lowest cost per Gb possible. read more <http://www.memopal.com/en/technology.htm>

</comment><comment><USER13> nice work zooko et al :)

my understanding is that tahoe-lafs is meant to be used as a live filesystem. how does the redundancy configuration affect latency? i would guess a cloned volume ("RAID 1") would be faster than a distributed volume (e.g. "RAID 5" or "RAID 6").

<comment><AUTHOR> Tahoe-LAFS performance leaves a lot to be desired, for various reasons, but the erasure-coding levels (i.e. the degree of distribution of each file via "RAID"-like math) aren't necessarily the most important component. Brian Warner did some thorough benchmarks using dedicated servers on a LAN, and specifically look at how increasing the number of shares ("K") affected throughput:

[https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe- lafs/attachment/wiki/Perfo...](https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe- lafs/attachment/wiki/Performance/Sep2011/MDMF-100MB-partial.png)

The different colors of the samples there are for three different settings of how many shares the file was erasure-coded (RAIDed) into: 3, 30, or 60 shares. This type of file ("MDMF" type) seems to go about as fast at any of those three levels of distribution, but this older and more common type -- [https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe- lafs/attachment/wiki/Perfo...](https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe- lafs/attachment/wiki/Performance/Sep2011/CHK-100MB-partial.png) \-- ("CHK" type, which is for immutable files) performs much worse for larger levels of distribution. There's probably just some dumb bug which causes this slowdown. This page has some ideas as to what's causing it: [https://tahoe- lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Performance/Sep2...](https://tahoe- lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Performance/Sep2011)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> the idea of using multiple independent free providers as a unified one it's something that could be very popular among some of my friends, if someone could slap a nice UI on it I believe there would be a good market for it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Beowulf cluster?</comment>


Facebook's Activity Stream Widget Fetches on a Logarithmic Delay - <AUTHOR> http://d.pr/TQKs

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are the data points, where each number is the number of seconds since the page started loading, according to Firebug.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=31.6+49.6+70+99+121+157...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=31.6+49.6+70+99+121+157+206+276+380+539+787+1179+1804)

Fits pretty well on the logarithmic scale.</comment>


George Pólya: How to Solve It (1945) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It <comment><USER2> Amazing book</comment>