NASA Is Facing a Climate Change Countdown - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/science/nasa-is-facing-a-climate-change-countdown.html <comment><USER2> "As climate change threatens, NASA has options that include hardening facilities against the rising seas with barriers and structures adapted to storms and flooding, or if adaptation is not possible, to strategically retreat."

This article makes it seem as if protecting against rising water levels is an almost impossible feat. For everyone who thinks it is, I invite them to come to the Netherlands. The majority of the Netherlands lies under sea level, yet because it is completely protected by dikes/levees no floods have taken place for decades. In fact, all places that indexed by direct economical damage were a flood to take place; and get protected accordingly. A highly populated area or industrious zone might get a rating that only a flood every 10.000 years is acceptable, while for some rural areas may get a rating that a flood every 300 years is acceptable. [https://www.rijnland.net/downloads/floodcontrolrijnland-1-1....](https://www.rijnland.net/downloads/floodcontrolrijnland-1-1.pdf)

I wonder what rating Dutch dike safety experts would give to the NASA launch platform, but seeing such an important economical site with hardly any protection against floods certainly boggles me.

<comment><AUTHOR> The NASA facilities are routinely subjected to hurricanes! Is the Netherlands prepared to handle huge surges of 30 feet of water all at once?

Is the Netherlands prepared to handle the 10-15 feet of base sea level rise that is coming in the next century? I'm not so sure that they are. In fact, aren't the Netherlands debating similar questions, about building much bigger walls, or, in fact, retreating?

<comment><USER3> "10-15 feet of base sea level rise in the next century"

Maybe if you go by the NOAA histrionics. But if you go by scientific consensus, we're looking at 1-3 feet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Estimates of sea level rise are very difficult and always changing. New research suggests that it could be "several meters", as published in a paper a few weeks ago. There is no scientific consensus on how much the sea level "will rise" \- since it depends very much on our behavior as a species in the near future.

> Without a sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global sea level > is likely to increase "several meters over a timescale of 50 to 150 years"

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/22/sea-level- ri...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/mar/22/sea-level-rise-james- hansen-climate-change-scientist)

<comment> at-fates-hands >> Estimates of sea level rise are very difficult and always changing.

Trust me, I'm pretty sure the people in the pacific islands are going to be a bit more paranoid about these changes than we are. And yet, some of the predictions have been wildly off the mark. Remember the United Nations Environment Programme who said in 2005:

 _Imminent sea-level rises, increased hurricanes, and desertification caused by "man-made global warming" would lead to massive population disruptions. In a handy map, the organization highlighted areas that were supposed to be particularly vulnerable in terms of producing "climate refugees." Especially at risk were regions such as the Caribbean and low-lying Pacific islands, along with coastal areas._

 _The 2005 UNEP predictions claimed that, by 2010, some 50 million "climate refugees" would be frantically fleeing from those regions of the globe. However, not only did the areas in question fail to produce a single "climate refugee, by 2010, population levels for those regions were actually still soaring. In many cases, the areas that were supposed to be producing waves of "climate refugees" and becoming uninhabitable turned out to be some of the fastest-growing places on Earth."_

Whoops.

When I read stuff like this, it makes hard for objective people like myself to determine where the hype ends the facts start.

<comment><USER4> Some people do blame the civil wars in the Middle East on climate change, though its a bit indirect. That worse weather caused food prices to soar that year. That did happen around that time and caused a refugee crysis.

<comment><USER5> Food prices in the Middle East have far more to do with Mubarak's disastrous cronyist agricultural policies than with global warming.

<comment><USER4> But there were bad droughts that year that affected food prices world wide, and it wasn't just Egypt that was affected.

<comment><USER6> So, if the government is capable of developing contingency plans for handling droughts and doesn't, it's the _drought 's_ fault when shit hits the fan?

<comment><USER4> Do you not understand that events can have multiple causes? Rarely does disaster require just one single thing to go wrong.

In any case, it wasn't just egypt that had uprest that year. Egypt wasn't even the first country to have problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about this thing that will be under the surface of the water?

Cactus Dome, Runit Island

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome- paci...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome-pacific- radioactive-waste)

Basically, it's all the nuclear waste from 12 years of 1950s nuclear bomb testing, sitting at sea level under 18 inches of concrete.

You can see it on satellite view here:

[https://goo.gl/maps/EMRphCjir142](https://goo.gl/maps/EMRphCjir142)

</comment><comment><USER8> Did I misread this article? It pointed out that the coastline has been receding, that it's been due to erosion, and that _if_ climate change models are correct, it'll get worse in the future due to AGW.

Headline seems sensationalist.

</comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of a video I saw recently whete Ted Cruz, along with other republican senators, politically attacked NASA for studying Earth's climate!

[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=peL7Qecg3qQ](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=peL7Qecg3qQ)

</comment><comment><USER10> For those unable to see the article: add it to Pocket, then switch to Article View.

</comment><comment><USER11> In related news, global warming will be worse than we thought [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449976)

</comment><comment><USER12> The modern economy is in for extreme contraction unless we get a handle on this quick.

It's time for civilization to control carbon emissions the way it controls nuclear proliferation, actively and aggressively.

For example, Indonesia can not be allowed to engage in uncontrolled burning the way it is now.

Indonesia fires release more carbon than the entire United States [1]

We also need to begin a global carbon capture and sequestration effort, along with increased subsidies for solar and wind.

Zoning laws need to change. All new single family construction needs to be net zero energy for example.

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage is the only technology that can bring atmospheric carbon back down to a safe level like 350ppm. We are currently over 400ppm and we are seeing melting and increased extreme weather. [2]

We have to genetically engineer hyper efficient algae, have it soak up atmospheric carbon, burn it for energy and sequester the carbon emissions on a massive scale.

The alternative to doing this is simply unacceptable economically, and politically.

A world at 500ppm will be unstable, war torn and out of control. Quite simply, we will all be poor. Markets will contract, insurance prices would skyrocket and food insecurity would be the norm.

[1] [http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/carbon- from-...](http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/carbon-from- indonesia/2207404.html)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio- energy_with_carbon_capture...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio- energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage)

<comment><USER5> _...actively and aggressively.

...Indonesia can not be allowed..._

Here I was, worrying about the fortunes of the USA military-industrial complex, once we taxpayers realize what a scam the currently-hyped "threat" is. Those guys are so creative, to already have another scapegoat lined up, especially such a large Muslim nation populated by not-white people! It's like a perfect mash-up of Iraq and Vietnam! Bravo, defense lobbyists!

<comment><USER13> It's like you stopped reading immediately after the second quotation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Climate Change = Fear-mongering. Remember 15 years ago the way people were predicting foot to meter per year seawater rise? It's a miracle the Empire State Building isn't underwater already as some predicted. There's been no global warming for over a decade. All of those models used to predict disasters that never happened turned out inaccurate and wrong. But that doesn't stop corrupt organizations who have perverted "science" from continuing to use these "theories" for their political ends.

Ocean levels have been rising for thousands of years and will continue to do so until the next ice age (barring human intervention to prevent it from occurring - might be a good thing?), so NASA would be wise to use technologies such as levies to prevent flooding of their facilities. They might've been even smarter to build them at higher elevation to begin with.

<comment><USER15> > Remember 15 years ago the way people were predicting foot to meter per year > seawater rise?

What you suggest was far from a generally accepted prediction. The IPCC's 2001 report was for <1 meter rise over the entire century. See [http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climat...](http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/429.htm#1151) . It emphatically was _NOT_ a "foot to meter per year seawater rise."

Do you have evidence that it wasn't just kooks saying what you suggested?

> "as some predicted"

 _Who_ predicted that? Some guest on Coast to Coast AM who also thinks alien UFOs create chemtrails?

> use technologies such as levies to prevent flooding

As brought up several times in this thread, levies won't work at KCS. Water would simply go through the porous rock under any such levy.

If these statements of your are false, or at best straw man arguments, why should anyone believe the rest of what you write?

<comment><USER16> There's a lot of motte/bailey'ing[1] going on in the climate change debate.

There is tons of histrionics and scare mongering out there. I particular remember during the COP15 meeting in Copenhagen, art installations illustrating how the city would be under water if sea level rose 7 meters, which is the estimated rise if all of the ice on Greenland melts. _The Day After Tomorrow_ , not to mention _An Inconvenient Truth_.

While there certainly are and were voices critical of these things and their dubious relationship with the science (whether settled or consensus or not), their usefulness in advancing the agenda appears to be appreciated more than their role in misrepresenting the science. This is an actual quote from a scientist listed in the "criticism" section of the "The Day After Tomorrow" Wikipedia page[2]: _" I'm heartened that there's a movie addressing real climate issues. But as for the science of the movie, I'd give it a D minus or an F. And I'd be concerned if the movie was made to advance a political agenda."_. This is an actual scientist on the record believing that TDAT is "addressing real climate issues". That is like applauding Swordfish[3] for addressing cyber security issues. That is the Bailey.

Then, years after, when these things perhaps look a bit more absurd (and some very specific predictions turned out not to come through, at least not as unambiguously as expected), we get "The IPCC's 2001 report was for <1 meter rise over the entire century ... Do you have evidence that it wasn't just kooks saying what you suggested?"

That's the Motte.

You can't have your cake and eat it, too. If it was only kooks saying it, certainly none of the non-kooks bothered throughly rebutting them at the time.

1:[http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and- baile...](http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey- doctrines/)

2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Tomorrow#Critici...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Tomorrow#Criticism)

3: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_\(film\))

<comment><USER15> Where are the people who said that the sea level would raise 1 foot to 1 meter per year?

You didn't answer that question. Everything you wrote is a distraction, which ends up increasing the confusion you describe and complain about.

You pointed to some artists and movies. So what? I can point to movies who have depicted meteors crashing into modern day Earth, and volcanoes erupting in Los Angeles, and even have the core of the Earth stop spinning. Artists have different goals. They are not required to only depict what science predicts +/\- 1 sigma.

You point to a scientist who liked that "The Day After Tomorrow" used climate change as a plot device, even if the science was awful. So what? I'm sure some Spacewatch people like "Armageddon" and that some geologists like "The Core", even though the science is awful in both. Are you equally disdainful towards those scientists? Or do only climate scientists draw your ire? (BTW, "Water World" used global warming as a plot device, was almost 9 years before TDAT, and portrayed an equally scientifically absurd future.)

You mentioned "An Inconvenient Truth". Does Gore make a prediction that there will be 30cm or higher water rise per year? Does he even predict that the Atlantic will have reached the base of the Empire State Building by now?

How is the IPCC 2001 report not an attempt at a thorough rebuttal? What level of rebuttal would you require before you say it was sufficient? Do we all need to be like Neil deGrasse Tyson and pinpoint every single scientific flaw in a movie? Or go even further and reject every movie with a flaw?

In other words, I'm not going to get into a goalpost argument with you before you even say what the goalposts are.

Your argument of the structure of the argument is useless. It's so easily inverted. Watch: You have set up your own Motte and Bailey about what's going on in this HN thread, so nothing I say can dissuade you. You have inserted irrelevant commentary from your bailey to defend your views. Now you can ignore me because you think I'm using irrational arguments, because you have placed me in a spot where you think I can be ignored. Now you can enjoy your motte.

I argued that the OP presented a straw man argument that misrepresents what the large majority of climatologists and policymakers like Gore were making 15 years ago. Do you agree or disagree with me?

I presented the IPCC report to supports my argument. Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" also supports my argument. If you disagree, do you have an actual examples of people who predicted 30+cm/year sea rise, or even that much of Manhattan would be underwater by now?

<comment><USER16> I am guilty of reading "predicting foot to meter per year seawater rise" as a satirising exaggeration for "predicting immediate, catastrophic (plausibly sea-level related) consequences" and I did not state that clearly. With that amendment, I think my comment still has merit, but it may no longer have responded to anything you wrote. Sorry about that.

That said, _An Inconvenient Truth_ did suggest a 20-foot rise as something imminent. Did it "predict" it? No, not explicitly, it suggests and imagines and calls to action. It also doesn't specify the timescale, but there is great urgency. With that, your GP, while very much on the high end, is way closer to AIT than AIT is to IPCC.

A short note on movies and art: the difference between "The Core" and TDAT (and "regular" art and the "climate" ditto) is that the latter didn't use science as a plot device, it explicitly injected itself into a political debate, dominated by a scientific discourse.

<comment><USER15> How do you figure it is a satirising exaggeration and not a straw man designed for ridicule?

I found a transcript of "An Inconvenient Truth" at [http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/courses/blog/gw/An%20Inconvien...](http://www.admc.hct.ac.ae/hd1/courses/blog/gw/An%20Inconvient%20Truth%20Transcript.pdf). The section on 20 foot sea level rise is a description of what would happen "If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted" and ends with "Is it possible that we should prepare against other threats besides terrorists? Maybe we should be concerned about other problems as well."

I agree that it's a call to action. I disagree that it's a prediction of something imminent, as in, an outcome that will happen within a couple of decades of when the movie was made. I read it as a need for imminent _action_ , to prevent one possible long-term outcome.

BTW, Gore does make some short term predictions, which have proved to be incorrect. Gore said that within a decade there will be no snows of Kilimanjaro. That decade has passed. Instead, [http://www.the- cryosphere.net/7/419/2013/tc-7-419-2013.pdf](http://www.the- cryosphere.net/7/419/2013/tc-7-419-2013.pdf) says that most of the ice cover will be gone by 2040, and the rest by 2060. [http://lindseynicholson.org/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/Moelg...](http://lindseynicholson.org/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/Moelg-et-al.-2013.pdf) further points out that there will be snow even if there are no glaciers.

(While incorrect, I do not think it seriously affects the underlying meaning. The choice of "snow" over "glacier ice" should be read as an homage to Hemingway, with some poetic license allowed.)

Gore predicts Glacier Valley will have no glaciers within 15 years, or 2021. NPS estimates no later then 2030, [https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciers.htm](https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/nature/glaciers.htm) , so Gore may be a couple years off there as well.

Gore was willing to make testable predictions in the 10-15 year span, which is a clue that the 20 foot rise in sea level that he described was _not_ meant as a prediction of something imminent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon.com Door Desk With a Twist - <AUTHOR> http://blog.leftnode.com/blog/entry/2 <comment><USER2> That's a serviceable desk for $80, and I'm glad to hear of a company that spends money on important thing like programmers and not on expensive desks.

But, as a mechanical engineer, my instinctive reaction is similar to what most of you feel when you see an inefficient algorithm. My gut reaction is, "Metal brackets at the corners but no diagonal bracing?"

You could make a much stronger desk for the same amount of money by removing the angle brackets, using 2 x 3's instead of 2 x 4's, screwing the tops of the legs to the door directly, and screwing on some lengths of 1 x 2 strapping on the diagonals, thereby making a light, stiff structure.

All the same, as I said above, it's a serviceable desk; I'm just interested to see the generally positive reaction from software folks differ from my own instincts.

<comment><USER3> I've built a similar desk using the same door and a pair of sawhorses. The door bows a bit if you're like me and pile books on your desk. It also feels like it is going to give out if you lean on it. The surface is a wood veneer - not good for writing. You pretty much have to apply the whiteboard type surface to the desk in order to get a smooth writing surface.

I decided that the finished tabletops from IKEA were a better value: the surface is already good for writing and they have more internal reinforcement so they don't bow or feel as flimsy.

My favorite DIY desk was made out of a solid core door from the Door Store[1] in Cambridge, MA and a pair of filing cabinets. However, solid core door prices are much more expensive than hollow core[2].

[1]<http://www.doorstorecambridge.com>

[2]<http://www.doorstorecambridge.com/Pricelist_Tops1.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why would you want a door without a doorknob hole? That's where the cables go through, dummy!

Furthermore, filing cabinets make for much sturdier support than untriangulated 2x4s.

</comment><comment><USER5> Call it a waste of money, but I really enjoyed the height-adjustable desk I had at my last company. You'd turn a crank and could set the surface to any height. It probably cost a fortune, but was ergonomically awesome.

<comment><USER6> No crank, but you can (very easily) assemble this one at any height you want (e.g. mine is setup as a standing desk for a tall guy), and the price isn't far off from his door desk:

<http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00115992>

Plus it includes shelves, a nice cable + power strip management (hiding) system, cute hanger things for the sides for a few bucks, optional $20 drawers. They offer a wider one also if you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is known as destructive cost-cutting. I'd hate to work with a CEO who thinks it's better to spend hours building your own desk out of cheap materials than spend the extra $60 and have it built much more quickly, with no hassle.

What's next? "How I saved money by not buying a photocopier and copying everything by hand instead?"

<comment><USER8> I am using 2 cheap thick plastic tables (they're meant for inside sheds etc) from a local hardware store for $25 and $15 AUD respectively (one is longer than the other) and they sit in a very rough L shaped formation in one corner of my office.

It really doesn't bother me that they're foldaway equipment etc, it hold's stuff at a certain height, it's flat, it works.

I'd suggest I have twice the desk space as that door, for less than half the cost when you do currency conversions, and it took me literally about half an hour to get it all set up, which included the trip to and from the hardware store.

(they look roughly like this [http://www.foldingchairs- foldingtables.com/Products/Folding_...](http://www.foldingchairs- foldingtables.com/Products/Folding_Table/plastic_folding_table96.gif))

People often overlook the obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You spent too much money. <http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S79831622> is $34 and requires no tools to assemble it. I believe the legs come in different heights also. I have one with an unpainted top.

</comment><comment><USER10> Whiteboard on desk top = brilliant. :-)

<comment><USER11> kinda useless unless you don't like to put anything on your desktop. And then you have to avoid the area where you put your arms while typing etc. I think you'd spend more time trying not to get ink on yourself than actually making use of that whiteboard :) Better to just use a notepad.

<comment><USER12> Even if you don't use it as a whiteboard, laminating the top of the door with the whiteboard probably makes it easier to clean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Half of the argument for all this time and effort seems be around the fact that it costs $140 new. I also just got an ikea desk, except I just went on craigslist and waited two days for the exact item to come up and got it for 1/3 of the new price. The desk was right near by (Ikea is also far away from me), cheap, already built, no brainer. $140 isn't a good argument for a company especially when you (and a friend) spent the time planning, getting supplies, and building the desk. But if the job was to make a blog entry...

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm ridiculously anal retentive about the quasi-ink-dust that comes off the whiteboard on my wall. I think my productivity would dramatically decline if I was faced with the same situation on the surface of my desk.

Neat idea though, for those who are less obsessive-compulsive.</comment>


Twitter faces FTC probe, likely fine over use of phone numbers for ads - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/twitter-faces-ftc-probe-likely-fine-over-use-of-phone-numbers-for-ads/ <comment><USER2> This is a deep violation that makes every user of 2fa _unsafe_. A mere $250 million? This needs to be the kind of violation that endangers the company. It's not a mistake or honest error when 2fa phone numbers are used for advertising. This is malicious. Should be scaled to 100X the amount the company gained in advertising for the violation.

<comment><USER3> You shouldn't use a phone number for 2fa to begin with, you'd be better off without 2fa if that's the only option IMO (assuming you're using a strong unique password). This is just more fuel on that fire.

<comment><USER4> 2FA with SMS protects against password reuse or leaks. It's my understanding that SMS is weak against attacks targeted at particular people while being sufficiently strong for the majority of cases.

<comment><USER5> SS7 attacks scale better. SIM cloning is a lot of effort just to compromise a single SMS number.

In general, SMS is better than no 2FA, but it's weaker than OTP/OTH or a token like YubiKey or Titan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Twitter estimates the "range of probable loss" it faces in the probe is > between $150 million and $250 million

That's close to 10% of Twitter's annual revenue. How do the likes of Google and Facebook get away with fines <1% of annual revenue? This seems disproportionate. I am not taking a position on whether it should be higher or lower, just that it appears unbalanced.

<comment><USER7> $150 - 250 MM is more like 4-7 % of revenue than 10% based on their 2019 figure.

<comment><USER8> Also note that they did this for _seven years_.

It is really hard to grasp how pathetic the modern web is, where this is commonplace.

<comment><USER5> What does this have to do with "the modern web"?

The weakness here is both the legal system that allowed it and the regulatory system that failed to police it for years.

<comment><USER9> Because the modern web is based entirely around invading the privacy of every user as much as possible in order to sell their private details to advertisers. If Twitter's money came from users in the form of subscriptions or purchases, rather than from advertisers in the form of paid, targeted ads, this would be _guarded_ information, rather than _shared_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've always hated giving my phone number to sites, even when it's ostensibly only for recovery purposes. Even worse are the sites/apps which refuse to let you make an account without one. I remember Facebook getting busted for the same thing so this just goes to further confirm my suspicion that this type of practice is more widespread than most companies would like to acknowledge.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe this is just me being thick, but I still don't have a clear idea of what they actually did.

Did they send spam SMS? Or were they using the numbers as another data point for analytics?

</comment><comment><USER12> The fine (and others like it) is a meaningless gesture. Unless companies like twitter start getting fined in amounts that aren't pocket change to them, there is literally no incentive to change their abusive behavior. They make enough from abusing their users and absconding with their data to pay these paltry fines a hundred times over in most cases.

</comment><comment><USER13> Despite all that, their ads are straight up garbage. Either that or I'm very hard to target. I swear Twitter and Facebook must display random ads to me. I'm often having to mark it as never show this again because it's so way off from my interests.

<comment><USER12> I leave my Adblock off for youtube a fair bit of the time. Not for any sense of ethical responsibility to help content creators, but because of how entertaining I find their failed attempts to target me. The ads are so bad, they're oftentimes literal scams. I go out of my way to engage with the bad ads so I'll get more like them. Luckily screwing with the ad algorithm doesn't seem to have too great an effect on the video recommendation algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> is there any benefit in using the phone network for 2FA besides (IMHO too) easy recovery in case of loss? Is there an equivalently usable method for recovery? recovery codes aren't practicall i guess because people would keep loosing them too.

Maybe some pseudonymous proof using cryptographic functions of modern passports could be used somehow without revealing real identity to the passport issuer too? It should not be possible to know who issued the pseudonymous identity proof but should also only be proof-able by me...

<comment><USER15> You can outsource it to something like authy, which is still sms based, but gets disabled if you install their app. They also claim that they can detect number porting attacks, so that might be marginally better.

>Maybe some pseudonymous proof using cryptographic functions of modern passports could be used somehow without revealing real identity to the passport issuer too?

You can still lose your passport. It's less likely than losing your phone, but still. Also, to access the cryptographic functions of a passport, you probably need a NFC reader, which isn't exactly accessible.

<comment><USER14> >You can still lose your passport. It's less likely than losing your phone, but still. Also, to access the cryptographic functions of a passport, you probably need a NFC reader, which isn't exactly accessible.

i thought maybe the pseudonymous identity proof could still work after your passport has been reissued either because of loss or because of invalidation. But its probably not really doable with named constraints. Modern phones are apparently often equipped with an NFC reader. I think this could be usable enough for the recovery case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You could not create a new Twitter account with out a phone number last week. (Attempting from US). It rejected my disposal number as invalid too. :(

<comment><USER17> From the past several years they've been constantly suspending brand new accounts for "security" reasons and requiring a phone number to unlock them, even if the account wasn't doing anything that looks spammy or suspicious.

When opening a support ticket about it, they claim it was a "mistake and" offer to unlock the account but I always suspected it was a disgusting tactic for harvesting phone numbers and I guess I was right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The government went suddenly active...

TikTok for Tulsa Twitter for warning labels

Or did the investigation begin before those events?

</comment><comment><USER19> Good. Didn't Facebook do the same thing? I don't remember if they were fined or not.

<comment><USER20> They did and were fined $5bn for privacy violations generally, of which one part was:

> In addition to these violations of its 2012 order, the FTC alleges that > Facebook violated the FTC Act's prohibition against deceptive practices when > it told users it would collect their phone numbers to enable a security > feature, but did not disclose that it also used those numbers for > advertising purposes.

[https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2019/07/ftc-i...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2019/07/ftc-imposes-5-billion-penalty-sweeping-new-privacy- restrictions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Twitter delenda est</comment>


Air Force B-21 stealth bomber runs Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://independenteagle.com/new-air-force-b-21-stealth-bomber-takes-key-technology-step-toward-war-readiness/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, If you look closely you can see the words 's a t i r e' hidden in the paragraphs.

<comment><USER3> Time for me to go to bed then - I saw the letters 'h o r s e s h i t'.

<comment><USER2> don't go to bed yet and get your glasses, cause this 'horseshit' got real. [0]

[0] [https://www.yahoo.com/news/northrop- grummans-b-21-stealth-12...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/northrop- grummans-b-21-stealth-121200147.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Source: [https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110560/witnesses/...](https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110560/witnesses/HHRG-116-AS28-Wstate- NahomD-20200227.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> This whole site is generated by GPT-2.

</comment><comment><USER6> No, our new aircraft carriers don't run on Windows XP

[https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/no-our-new-aircraft- carriers...](https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/no-our-new-aircraft-carriers- dont-run-on-windows-xp/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Recipe for success:

* Add unnecessary complexity

* Force air crews to be Kubernetes experts on top of their existing jobs

What am I missing and where do I sign up?

</comment><comment><USER8> Man, think of those Dockerfiles.

FROM nuclear:latest

</comment><comment><USER9> But can it run crisis?

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know why anyone think this is silly or a bad idea. It allows hardware to be interchangeable, allows contractors to write easily testable and modular software, and produces less vendor lock-in. Fuck if I want Boeing to have some custom virtualization layer that only their shitty in-house custom code can run on.

Like, let's be real, there's going to be SOME virtualization layer. It's 2020. Being a well-known, many-eyeball OSS one is far better than the alternative.</comment>


Exploding Job Offers Are Bullshit - <AUTHOR> http://blog.yesgraph.com/exploding-job-offers-are-bullshit/ <comment><USER2> I agree almost completely with this article. However, there needs to be a reasonable timeline established between a candidate and an employee for a decision. Customarily, a job offer expires after two weeks of issuance which seems reasonable. A company needs to be able to move onto other candidates before they become unavailable.</comment>


After 10 years in tech isolation, I'm now outsider to things I once had mastered - <AUTHOR> https://forklog.media/after-10-years-in-tech-isolation-im-now-outsider-to-things-i-once-had-mastered/ <comment><USER3> This is a decent account of how much has changed, and he conveys the sense of alienation well. But what strikes me is that he talks about the whole thing like something that unaccountably happened to him. He didn't install botnets; he was arrested for installing botnets. Botnets that he somehow sees as part of the "true spirit of hacking", from the long-lost innocent age of 2009, when pure curiosity was the only motive. In reality, the botnets of the time were a) industrial-scale commandeering of other people's gear, and b) widely used for spam, DDOSing, and crime. [1]

I am perfectly willing to believe that his sentence was egregious, as federal prosecution is often more about a prosecutorial win than any real sense of justice. But given that he still seems unable to take responsibility for his choices, I could also be persuaded that having him away from a computer for a decade was perhaps on net the best thing for society.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botn...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botnets)

<comment><USER4> All of his hacker ethos feels very superficial to me. I.e. get this or that gizmo under control etc. There does not seem to be a deep curiosity for CS or maths as such, rather a childish joy in opening other peoples locks and taking other peoples hardware under control.

That was cool in the 70's when telecoms infrastructure wasn't commoditized. I understand how enticing it is to hack big co telephone networks, for example. Big, big machines with very strict access rights.

2009\. Computing and communications infrastructure is commoditized. The world is literally swimming in computers. There is no unusual computing or telecoms capability you can harness by breaking into another system. It just means you want to break into the system instead of actually using your own.

It's pedestrian and rude, like stealing someone's umbrella.

Plus, he breached the implicit trust in him as an employer.

10 years is a lot, though, for bad taste and disappointing social graces.

<comment><USER5> These days it's more interesting, and justified, to hack into your own hardware, that you legally bought and own.

<comment><USER4> Yes. The direct analogue is trying to pick your own lock, versus picking a lock in someone else's property just for kicks.

<comment><USER6> Not even picking locks. More like smashing people's windows, grabbing food from their fridges while enjoying the satisfaction of being a l33t hax0r.

<comment><USER7> A better analogy might be using the same encryption key Volkswagen and Audi were shipping as security to every car to steal a car...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before.

I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat prisoners like humans and provide them with something, anything, to help them on the outside. Our system really tries to keep you in the system.

The OP got a harsh sentence but I don't particularly feel much empathy. I could have gone the black hat route too, but I didn't.

<comment><USER9> FWIW, the rest of the world considers prison sentences in the US to be absurdly long. This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.

<comment><USER10> > This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get > less than that for murder.

Both of those things are problematic, IMHO.

As for US sentences being absurdly long, I attribute that to the privatized (profit-incentivized) prison system here. Abolishing that concept would be a good starting point, I think, because it would eliminate a very large chunk of the humanitarian problems in one fell swoop. Then we can work on the rest, starting with the perverse incentives of the legal system itself.

<comment><USER11> Sentencing is decided by a judge not by a prison warden. Beyond vague conspiracy theories I don't see the connection.

<comment><USER12> >Beyond vague conspiracy theories I don't see the connection.

It's not vague at all. Private prisons lobby for mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums remove sentencing power from the judge: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_sentencing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_sentencing)

The older system you describe is called discretionary sentencing, it is a dissipating vestige of the era before private prisons.

<comment><USER13> Important correction - the significant political power in the US comes from the prison guards union, not a "private prisons lobby".

The prison guards union is an incredibly powerful lobbying force, which has successfully increased prison sentences for many crimes, blocked efforts to decriminalize marijuana, made more mandatory sentences, etc. Whether those guards work in the 92% of prisons which are government run or the 8% which are privately run makes no difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > "Caging me for a decade is not rehabilitating. I may be making excuses for > myself, though there is a lesson that could have been learned with the same > amount of value for justice if the sentence was 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, > even 6 years." From the article at: [https://forklog.media/ex-convicted- > hacker-ghostexodus-severi...](https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker- > ghostexodus-severity-of-my-crime-wasnt-based-on-what-i-did-but-what-i-could- > have-done/)

I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. I'm American but I live in Asia so maybe I'm now an outsider. I'm not aware of any other country that punishes this harshly.

Serious questions: Does any other country _routinely_ punish so severely? To what end? At what financial and psychic cost to society? If we're unique (exceptional?) why do we do this to ourselves?

<comment><USER15> You are in Asia right? Let's see

China - disappeared for comparing xi jing ping the dictator to Winnie the Pooh, or mention Hong Kong or Taiwan in a postiive light on wechat

Singapore - 2 years in jail for selling gum, death penalty for Having drugs

Vietnam - 34 years for drug trafficking

<comment> non-entity > 2 years in jail for selling gum

What do they have against gum?

<comment><USER16> Ever wondered what those black spots on city sidewalks are? That's gum. All of it is gum that's been spat out then walked on until it acquires a top embedded coating of city grime.

<comment><USER17> Are you seriously justifying a two year prison sentence for selling gum?

<comment><USER16> Not at all, but nor do I choose to live in Singapore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This bit at the end was the most interesting to me.

"For me, I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don't really see meaningful human interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by likes and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it."

<comment> V-2 Has it really changed _that much_ in 10 years, or is part of it just the sense of alienation everyone experiences getting out of jail after a long time?

I mean, 10 years ago people lamented over the exact same thing; and before that, and before the before.

I can't prove it of course, but I'd bet you might feel that "human interaction" is not quite what you remember it to be if you had only just spent 10 years behind the bars.

And that's even if the technological progress on the outside had stood perfectly still for some reason.

<comment><USER19> >has it really changed that much in 10 years

Yes (although I'd probably put the real dividing line at more like 12 years). Facebook wasn't available outside of certain institutions until 2006, the same year Twitter dates to. The iPhone was first introduced in 2007 and arguably didn't really take off until the 3GS in 2009.

So, yes, the internet was well-established by the 2000s. But today's always connected world of social media and everything else is only about a decade old.

ADDED: Of course, if you turn back the clock about another ten years, for many people it would be the difference between pre-Internet and a mostly broadband- connected very commercialized internet.

<comment><USER20> I'd argue it hasn't changed much for technology people. I had an iPhone in 10 and used it constantly for the same thing I do today: news, web browsing when away, and chatting with friends. My google history confirms this. I still use the same gmail address, reddit, social media, Steam, bank, etc accounts.

I think the biggest difference for me is that I use spotify now for music, rather than downloading it. And streaming video is now legit, so there's less need for torrents and newsgroups.

<comment><USER21> What's changed is social media. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram all use machine learning to provide just the right feedback for us to keep cominng back for more. This has hijacked our dopamine feedback loops and changed the way we interact with each other.

I know personally, my attention span is much worse than it was years ago. It's tough to find friends, and if I weren't married, I bet it would be tough and highly competitive to find a mate. I think this has something to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >The only solution to making me happy again would seem to download Ubuntu, mount it to a USB thumb drive, and get it installed. Had I known that Windows 10 doesn't utilize BIOS, but has replaced it with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which is a secure boot option that validates programs before giving them permission to run, I wouldn't have wasted two more days of my life trying to install my favorite operating system.

I don't understand what he's saying here. I dual boot Ubuntu on my Windows 10 PC all the time (as well as using Virtualbox).

Otherwise, I'd say his accounting of the changes shows although he may be an outsider simply by virtue of time away, he's still more savvy than the majority of the population.

<comment> john-radio > I don't understand what he's saying here. I dual boot Ubuntu on my Windows > 10 PC all the time (as well as using Virtualbox).

I think you have to disable UEFI before you can do this.

<comment><USER23> No, just the secure boot flag. Linux can EFI boot, and most UEFI bioses are perfectly happy to boot 'legacy' BIOS OS images as well. You just have to figure out how to disable windows-only mode.

<comment><USER24> If it's even enabled in the first place. I don't think my Thinkpad was, but I do remember my previous Asus did have it enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Surely I'm not the only one that thinks very little has changed in 10 years?

I hadn't built a PC (nor used windows) between 2005 and 2016. After a few hours of catching up on the newest names (ie, what's the cheapo intel line called? What DDR version do I get? What is the SATA equivalent now?), everything became super familiar. Putting everything together was much easier (mouse cursors in BIOS?!) and looked a bit different, but amusingly familiar.

10 years ago I got a new Android from Google. Apple released a new iPhone with a larger screen. I had an app on whatever Google Play was called back then and this app still works on my phone. I read news online, I coded in Java, Javascript and Python on my MBP. I read Paul Graham essays about startups and posted comments on Hacker News.

The police had descended on my city (Toronto G20 in 2010), putting up massive barriers, kettling protesters, making massive arrests and brutalizing people. I was checking Twitter to see what was happening.

I booked flights on aggregators, booked hostel stays on websites and planned my trips through Google Maps.

Sure, many particulars have changed (AirBnB vs hostelworld, more things on phone vs laptop), but I honestly struggle to see much technological change in my life. Getting a Tesla, which was completely unattainable in 2010, seems like the technological highlight of the past decade.

Ironically, it seems our political situation has changed drastically over the last 10 years while technology has been slowly spreading but remaining fairly stable.

<comment><USER26> There haven't been many experiential leaps in consumer hardware since 3D graphics on 60Hz 1080p displays and touchscreens, wifi became established in the early 2000s.

VR is still firmly in enthusiast space.

NLP/speech recognition has subtly come amazingly far for consumer products but most people don't use it (or just aren't aware of it) due to the social stigma of talking _to_ your phone in public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > That summer the temperature inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit.

I hope people understand common this is in jails and prisons around the US. The prison I worked at was the same way. We were told to lie about the temperatures in the pods because the thermometers were broken but the common areas would reach up to 100 degrees. Hell, even the control rooms would get 115+ because they wouldn't fix our air conditioner. I got heat exhaustion once and had a heat stroke. These places are the worst human rights abuses in the US and should immediately be abolished and replaced with something much less sinister and more helpful.

<comment><USER28> People should go to prison for covering things like this up. 125F / 50C is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

<comment><USER29> Prisoners don't vote, politicians don't give a shit about them. 125F cells may even been seen as desirable by people who consider prison as purely for punishment or sequestering undesirables from society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not being able to talk to a lawyer is insanity. How is that legal?

<comment><USER31> The carceral state in the US is totally out of control. It is entirely common that people are denied human rights in jail/prison, even prior to trial.

Effectively no one holds prisons or guards or medical staff in the US to account for these incredibly common and widespread human rights abuses. The parallels with US policing are clear (as is the systemic racism: the system is working exactly as designed).

It even happens to innocent people:

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

[https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens- ice-20180...](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens- ice-20180427-htmlstory.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to- prison_pipeline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline)

<comment><USER32> Well its normal that they denied human right's, maybe the most important of it, it's called 'freedom'.

But i know what you mean.

Having private prisons is also a big NoNo i think, its like every single one state service is corporation driven ;)

<comment><USER33> Private prisons are a red herring. The vast majority of prisoners are not in private prisons, and states have been moving to get rid of them. In many big states, like New York and Illinois, private prisons weren't legal to begin with. Rikers, the NYC jail famous for its abuses, was public.

People make private prisons to face of prison abuse for tactical reasons. In reality, the story of the American prison system is the story of the government: voters who demanded "tough on crime" laws; brutal publicly run police; harsh publicly operated prisons; all tied together and supported by public unions.

<comment><USER34> This 100%. Private prisons are used to create a contrast statement for corporate suppliers of prisons and lobbyists to "show" how cheaply operations can be done. They are a conference booth to lure states in regarding shredding prisoner QOL for a 6% revenue increase can work without increasing the inmate death rate too much.

The Industrial private prison complex owner group don't want to operate, they want to sell support, training, equipment and materials to public prisons not operate (like a defense contractor), because a prison is very complicated management problem and has little public reward over budget efficiency sadly (things are changing but slowly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _> Most inmates have computer access which uses a specialized access control program that allows them to email approved contacts for .05 cents a minute._

Oh not this again [https://slashdot.org/story/76748](https://slashdot.org/story/76748)

<comment><USER36> $0.0005 x 60 minutes = 3 cents per hour of internet. That's surely a better deal than you can get in the civilian world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > certainly not the way I left it back when I was arrested in 2009 for > installing botnets and commercial remote access programs on a handful of > sensitive clinic systems, which included a critical SCADA system.That was > how I became the first person in recent United States history to be > convicted for corrupting industrial control systems.

> As I probe around the web and observe this new generation of hackers, I see > individuals that have lost touch with the true spirit of hacking. A brood > that is motivated by greed, revenge, and anger. Harmless curiosity has > become a thing of the past.

Your Harmless Curiosity didn't stay so harmless in your case, did it?

Spare me your empty, hypocritical moralism - just like Kevin Mitnick.

</comment><comment><USER38> Just couple days ago I had to help someone to find up-to-date webbrowser for WinXP [https://feodor2.github.io/Mypal/](https://feodor2.github.io/Mypal/) to use on internal network, they had no option to upgrade. Legacy apps are here with us forever.

</comment><comment><USER39> > For me, I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don't really see > meaningful human interaction anymore.

People may think it's because he's been disconnected for so long. But I have the exact same feeling, and think about this problem every day.

I'm a software engineer, and doing everything okay in the modern world. But I mostly use smartphones as a phone like in the last century unless I have to, I don't use most social media stuff, and I don't even take pictures.

I don't feel bad or sad about it because I was not interested in the first place. But I feel disconnected, and cannot empathize with people. Everything seems more and more pointless to me.

I wonder how many people feel the same, or it's just the op and me?

<comment><USER40> I haven't used really any form of social media (besides HN I suppose) in close to a decade at this point, and I don't feel at all disconnected or left out. Instead I tend to feel real benefits from:

1\. Being hard to "reach". If someone wants to talk to me, they have to call, text, email or show up at my house. They can't just broadcast something on their whateverplace and expect me to find it. That makes me appreciate the people in my life who do make the effort to communicate with me personally. It lets me know they value me as a person and that I'm worth their time.

2\. I am almost never tempted to think about my image. As a result I'm more "in the moment" and also more certain of my own motives. If the family is doing something fun, we can simply _enjoy it_. No need to document (though there's certainly no rule about this, and plenty of candid pictures are still taken). As someone who at times struggles with anxiety and loneliness, this is one (very large) less thing to worry about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Too bad he wasn't a frontend developer would love to see his take on the changes

<comment><USER42> Honestly, front-end development is probably the most forgiving area of all for tech workers returning from an extended hiatus.

Front-end churn is like the apocryphal factoid about the human skin replacing itself completely every few years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that you're never more than 4 years behind the state of the art in front-end development.

<comment><USER43> I got out of school in 2013 and then went to a job that was pretty self isolated, working in proprietary format that wasn't really aware of the rest of industry - at best there was some Python and some .Net work. I took another position a couple of years ago where I got throw into the deep end of the modern material - ASP.NET Core, Node, NPM, React, Typescript, modern ES, the whole kit and kaboodle. I can tell you it took me a loooonnng time to get it all figured out. A lot has changed in the latter half of this decade.

<comment><USER44> Do you think for the better? - I don't think so

<comment><USER43> .Net? Absolutely. Tools? Oh yeah. JavaScript, HTML, and CSS? Probably. The sheer breadth of things you need to know to stay relevant? Not so much - it's just too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, that Dell Inspiron ought to have a BIOS/EFI switch to allow you to deactivate the secure boot features, and there are ways to install ubuntu on secure-boot systems using a shim. Failing that, there's now WSL...

But I guess 10 years is a lot of catching up to do!

<comment><USER45> If you don't know about UEFI, you are not going to look for a switch to turn it off...

<comment><USER46> Secure Boot was introduced in 2006, approximately 3 years before this person was incarcerated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I don't think technology has progressed, in a meaningful way, since 2007...much less 2009. It's still all virtualized, cloud providers, instead of servers. It's still digital advertising doing what it was doing in 2002. Myspace and Facebook were around in 2009. Twitter hashtags is a footnote. A lot of what happened is specific events, not technological leaps. I dunno, maybe I'm influenced by how it's all seemed pedestrian since the internet took over mainstream culture in the 90s and now it's just been refined to a sugary powder that's delivered through phone screens.

<comment><USER48> At least in the DevOps space, we can now develop applications without mastering process managers, log exfiltration, ssh configuration / server hardening, bin packing, configuration management, brittle infrastructure provisioning scripts, etc. This is somewhat revolutionary in that it doesn't require specialists with decades of experience—devs can operate their own services down to the infrastructure. This affords a lot of impressive organization improvements even while the technology is nascent (lots of room for improvement in the build, infrastructure management, and orchestration spaces as well as in the "appliancification" of infrastructure or "platformization" of the cloud, depending on how you want to look at it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> 2009 didn't seem to be that far back to me. Sure, a lot has happened, but a lot of skills are still transferable, especially in SCADA. Basic concepts of OOP or security principles are largely the same as well.

<comment><USER50> You seem to forget the prison time.

13 months of isolation alone have a devastating effect on the human psyche and general cognitive abilities. Many of the negative effects (e.g. loss of self- worth and cognitive abilities) are irreversible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UKeHbrsF94&feature=emb_logo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UKeHbrsF94&feature=emb_logo)

One of the videos that got Jesse McGraw on the FBI radar and ultimately arrested. I don't necessarily agree with the severity of his sentence or how he was treated in prison, but his behaviour was pretty reprehensible and juvenile.

It is sad he lost 10 years of his life from some pretty thoughtless actions that I'm sure had he had more life experience would not have considered undertaking.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm trying to figure out why he's even being labeled a "hacker". It sounds like he installed a bot onto a system he already had access to as a security guard then used it to packet other kiddies. I don't see anything about remote exploits, or even breaking into a system - this is the epitome of script kiddie.

I get talking yourself up and hustling to make money, but it feels like a stretch to call this guy a hacker.

</comment><comment><USER53> We've often had to relearn or learn. That's what the author needs to do as well. When faced with a totally new system, they'd have poked about and grokked it.

Come to think of it, they have a massive advantage over many of us - <USER2> absence of a distracted mind, the absence of short attention spans.

If they applied themselves to it, they can learn new stuff again.

Per society norms and laws, they did the crime and paid the time. I wish them all the best with a fresh start.

</comment><comment><USER54> While I sympathize with the OP and try to imagine what it would be like, I have to wonder whether there /really/ is that much of change if we are speaking strictly about linux, the internet and programming in general since the last 10 years.

I know for sure that it isn't hard to get back to it based on the experience of a friend of mine.

She was a sysadmin back in the 90s. A proper one. As geeky as any other linux geek running Red Hat 6.2 with window maker as the desktop environment as her main computing environment. At the turn of the millennium, she quit her job, got married and had a couple of kids. After quitting her job she barely ever kept in touch with computers. Of course, she browsed the web, used email shopped online but I'm willing to bet she didn't ever open up a command prompt. Her personal laptop ran windows and the house had one other computer (a mac, IIRC). Everything in her life revolved around her family and kids. She indulged in her other more satisfying interests of books and music if she ever had any free time -- which was very very rare.

3 _months_ ago, now that the kids are old enough to not fuss and worry about, she decided to install linux and get back into everything with the intention of getting a job.

Last week she gave her first online talk for beginners (kids/teens). It was about container fundamentals. She introduced container concepts, docker and k8s.

By what I described it is perhaps hard to imagine just how disconnected she was from what 'we'[1] call tech but she really was -- she quit tech when Ubuntu was not even a thing !! ...and yet she was able to ramp up fairly quickly.

[1] I'm acutely aware that for non-tech people tech chops could also mean being able to use keyboard shortcuts where most people would use a mouse

<comment><USER54> For perspective, here's what HN looked like this day 10 years ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-06-10](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-06-10)

...have things _really_ changed that much ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> My constitution gets weaker as the years go by. I had to stop reading after the description of solitary confinement brought on a panic attack.

<comment><USER56> Maybe it's not your constitution weakening, but your empathy strengthening? If more people felt injustices like this in their gut, the world would be a much better place.

<comment><USER55> Well said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> >> I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don't really see meaningful human interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by likes and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it.

For what is worth he's not alone in this. Being "interconnected" the way he thinks he's missing feels actually being less connected than ever. In a way he sees the right picture IMHO but he thinks he misinterprets things. I guess it's his broken ego which puts these kinds of "I-must-be-wrong" filters in front of him but if he ever gets rid of them I think that his vantage point on the current techscape will be unique exactly due to him being absent of it for so long.

</comment><comment><USER58> _Windows has seized control._

This is exactly how I feel about Windows 10.

<comment><USER59> Gosh, I felt that way about Windows 3.1. It got so bad around Windows 95 that that was when I switched to Linux. I've never used Windows since, so when people ask if I can help them "sort out their PC" the answer is... :)

<comment><USER60> ... "I'd love to help you, but I don't use Windows so might not be able to. But let's take a look, since you're my friend and all and I want you to be happy"?

<comment><USER59> The truth is I am now _actually incompetent_ to help my Windows-using family and friends. The answer is that I really _can 't_ help, no matter how much goodwill applies.

I recently poked at a friend's Windows10 machine that was having networking issues (probably DNS or proxy settings)... couldn't even find the right sort of settings to paly around with. The whole thing is a mystery wrapped in an enigma to me and causes me to break out in a rash when forced to deal with it.

To come back to the GP's original point: Windows assumes a level of control over the hardware (accompanied by a level of ignorance from the user) that I find intolerable. After all, I paid for that hardware; surely I get to control it? ("Not so!" says Windows.)

<comment><USER60> What? Really? If you're being placed in front of a different OS than what you use you loose basic troubleshooting capabilities?

Look, I'm not using Windows nor OSX very often, when people ask me for help, I mostly start out as helpless as them. But programmers (or generally computer literate, or whatever you wanna call it) seem to have way better searching skills, even for things they have no idea about.

So yeah, helping people with the windows/osx setup sucks, because I'm completely lost. But if you're a linux user, you're probably used to searching for knowledge in order to gain it. This also works for others OSes.

I'd understand if you don't want to help them out of principle, but please don't call yourself incompetent when so many people have it so much "worse". Mention "DNS" or "proxy" and they'll think you're speaking yiddish.

<comment><USER61> Yep. I haven't used any version of Android since 6 or 7 and I can still use Google to find out where certain settings are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> >After 10 Years in Tech Isolation, I'm Now Outsider to Things I Once Had Mastered

Seems like a pretty desirable outcome.

</comment><comment><USER63> > _That's three showers a week. 23 /5 confinement to an 8X10 cell without air > conditioning, a fan, or adequate ventilation. That summer the temperature > inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit. With no evidence to support > the inmates' accusation, I was supposed to be released back into the general > population. But to make a long story short, that didn't happen._

One of the reasons I'm really glad we're starting to get serious about prison reform. Right now the conversation is intentionally narrowed to the historical treatment of Black Americans, but I don't see how the conversation doesn't lead to positive changes throughout the criminal justice system. A rising tide raises all boats.

</comment><comment><USER31> > _Some people refer to these facilities as "Black Sites" because they are cut > off from the media, visitors, and lawyers so that what happens in there, > stays in there. Interestingly enough, the Seagoville Federal Correctional > Institution was once a Japanese internment camp._

> _That's three showers a week. 23 /5 confinement to an 8X10 cell without air > conditioning, a fan, or adequate ventilation. That summer the temperature > inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit. With no evidence to support > the inmates' accusation, I was supposed to be released back into the general > population. But to make a long story short, that didn't happen._

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

<comment><USER64> Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

Also:

[https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dostoyevsky- misprisioned...](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dostoyevsky-misprisioned- the-house-of-the-dead-and-american-prison-literature)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I find it interesting that groups like Anonymous and Lulz Sec, whatever that is, aren't more active right now. Seems like there's lots of opportunity for causing mayhem at the moment. Maybe anti-cyber criminal work has gotten really good?

<comment> y-c-o-m-b Many of them were arrested. The leader of LulzSec - Sabu - worked with the feds to capture several individuals. You can read about it on his wiki:

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

<comment><USER66> > It was the laziness that got him.

> Sabu had always been cautious, hiding his Internet protocol address through > proxy servers. But then just once he slipped. He logged into an Internet > relay chatroom from his own IP address without masking it. All it took was > once. The feds had a fix on him. ([https://www.foxnews.com/tech/exclusive- > unmasking-the-worlds-...](https://www.foxnews.com/tech/exclusive-unmasking- > the-worlds-most-wanted-hacker))

Fascinating that an auto-login setting on his mIRC client probably led him to be caught.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> _In the summer of 2011, I was appealing my sentence. I had no affordable way to contact my attorney_

Just to be clear, is he saying that his prison was actually charging him $0.05/email to consult with his attorney over his appeal?

<comment> y-c-o-m-b I'm curious about this too. He also mentioned not being able to access a lawyer at all when he was in max security. I thought access to a lawyer was a constant right - even after incarceration - and available free of charge?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> "Big advertisers are using metadata to collect and map any given users' Internet behaviors for content marketing purposes. I, too, used to steal users' data. But it was a crime when I did it. Perhaps if I had sent them an ad or two it would have been less illegal?"

I kinda laughed and cringed with fear reading this section and the sections describing life as an inmate.

IMO it worries me thinking about the world he joined full of rights abuse in prison and mass commercial surveillance of our data.

</comment><comment><USER69> Alt account for obvious reasons.

In 2003 I was sentenced to 6 years in a Texas prison. The how and why isn't relevant, other than to say it was a terrible mistake I made seven years prior. At that point, I was about 5 years into my tech career. I wasn't in there for a "hacker" crime, so I was in general population, and had more freedom than the author did.

As for prison conditions, not much I can add to the conversation. It was hot, miserable, crowded, things we all know about. No real opportunity to improve yourself; you mostly have to focus into your own little niche and do what you can to keep yourself safe and maintain who you are as a person (it's easy to lose yourself in "prison games")

Served a full six year sentence, despite never getting trouble. Parole release for "good behavior" is a cliche.

During my time there, my wife divorced me and my father passed away.

There was some adjustment upon getting out. (2009) However, the first couple of computers I used were actually running XP, so that was an easy adjustment. I think the biggest adjustment was how much more prominent mobile device use was (in 2003 I think I only received a text from one person ever, on my fancy monochrome flip phone). From a development standpoint, gettting used to AJAX was interesting, but to be honest, I did my best to keep up in prison, with a handful of books I had sent to me.

I remember the first line of code I wrote, in a language I considered myself and expert in. It felt familiar, but like I was pulling memories from a fog. Eventually, the "muscle memory" of working in the language came back, but I can see how it could be very frustrating for someone who was out of the loop longer than I was.

First job was a remote role, $20 an hour. Some previous writings I still had online sold the employer on my knowledge, and I actually beat out 4 people in the interview. I was able to leverage some relationship I had before, get some additional remote gigs, and continue to build my income and my life back up.

I was actually to be quite successful that way, building up my network, finding contracting. Of course, I have constraints: traditional employers are typically not an option, which includes most w2 contracting roles. I've had to keep learning of course, and have more flexibility than the usual person who can carve out a niche in one main technology or stack. However, I could work around the issues of having a felony conviction and maintain a market-level income. I've even had a couple of situations where I did have to discuss my past and was able to work through it. (Again, sticking to strict 1099 contracting, and small companies is the key) However, contracting is no longer a need: through my personal connections, I was able to turn was one of my gigs into a full time significant role with all of the full time income and benefits advantages you'd hope for.

I don't mean to diminish the challenges that many face, but I just wanted to point out that a lot of presumptions aren't automatically true.

<comment><USER70> What are prison games?

<comment><USER69> I use that as a general term to encompass all the ways you can lose yourself to institutionalization. Some join gangs. Some get lost in stealing and selling inside of the prison economy. Some "play" religion. Some pimp themselves out. Some play politics and become informants. This isn't all inclusive, nor does anything mean you'll lose your character and personality, but institutionalization is real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> > _"That's the stupidest thing ever!," I yelled at the TV. "Who'd want to put > their greasy fingers all over a screen like that?" Apparently, everybody. > Including me._

An aside, but I never understood microphobics and grease-phobics... Perhaps it's part of not having grown in a 100% clinical/artificial urban environment my whole life.

Yeah, you'll get some dirt on you and your things. Big deal...

<comment><USER72> I assumed that the author was thinking about screens 10 years ago, which didn't have oleophobic coatings yet. So fingerprints and smudges built up in layers really fast and made it hard to read the screen.

<comment><USER61> Yes, especially the junky plastic screens that would also get all scratched up. And plastic screen protectors that would get scratched, bubbly underneath, and had no effective oleophobic coating.

The modern Gorilla Glass screens and coatings used on iPhones and other devices are so magical in comparison to those early cheaper smartphones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Not to nit but it's pretty trivial to dual boot windows 10 and Ubuntu. You can even do it straightforward without a flash drive these days

</comment><comment><USER74> I was ready to dismiss this as sour grapes, but ultimately he makes the point that maybe we're _all_ out of touch with what's really going. The technology space is no longer transparent in ways it once was.

> I, too, used to steal users' data. But it was a crime when I did it. Perhaps > if I had sent them an ad or two it would have been less illegal?

Yikes.

</comment><comment><USER75> What I see is also a deep reflection on how the hacking counterculture became the norm but still it sells itself as minority obscure counterculture just to be more popular. The same happens in other areas like social activism which are now the thought of majority and distilling its original thoughts into a fast-food alike consumerism.

</comment><comment><USER76> "President Obama signed an executive order outlining emergency control of the Internet, and thus the Internet kill switch was born."

WTF?? Is there an Internet kill switch capability? Will it work if invoked?

</comment><comment><USER77> What is really striking is the disparity in sentences for various crimes. There is no way that this persons sentence should exceed that of a serious physical assault or manslaughter. That is just outrageous.

</comment><comment><USER78> "...McGraw installed a botnet to some of the computers to subsequently use it to initiate denial of service attacks (DDoS) on the websites of rival hacker groups..."

DDoS with "some" computers?

</comment><comment><USER79> Nobody gets even close to 10 years for the 1st DUI - a clear endangering of other people lives - yet potential endangerment by a hacker ... There is something devil about those hackers.

</comment><comment><USER80> Thats an interesting introspective.

It really sounds like he needs to get away from his 12 year old daughter, whom unfortunately doesn't know him or have an opinion about him but is tolerating his obligatory presence.

Despite the assumptions about tech proficiency thrown onto Millenials and "everyone younger than me while I make excuses about being tech illiterate": Gen Z doesn't know anything about computers, and would have a much more foreign form of "meaningful human interaction" than what really is happening.

</comment><comment><USER81> I felt mixed emotions while reading the article. Information technology changes so rapidly and time goes by really fast.

</comment><comment><USER82> A timely article, considering that there are currently hackers attacking Honda, various law enforcement agencies, etc.

What seems poltically urgent to you today will pale in comparison to losing 10 years of your life if you're caught.

<comment><USER45> No need to try to twist this case for political expediency. Have a look at his story: [https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus- severi...](https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus-severity-of- my-crime-wasnt-based-on-what-i-did-but-what-i-could-have-done/)

TL; DR: he was just an out-of-control kid squabbling with other hacker kids on 4chan. Hardly political at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Cheers. Excellent insight

</comment><comment><USER84> I recently finished a 2.5 year stint in a UK prison and that was bad enough

</comment><comment><USER32> Its terrible how the American system thinks about prison's.

Imagine he could do/learn something good in those 10 years, when he was locked away to protect the public (and that really should be the only point for prisons (protect the public))

<comment><USER85> > and that really should be the only point for prisons (protect the public)

That's not true. Our prisons should protect the public, rehabilitate prisoners in so far as they can, and, to an appropriate extent, punish.

Some people are skittish about the idea of punsihment. But it's abhorrent to our sense of justice that one suffer no consequences after committing a crime.

Now in general I think our prisons and sentencing guidelines to a pretty terrible job at all three of these things but that is another story altogether.

<comment><USER86> >to an appropriate extent, punish.

What's the overall goal of punishment? We know it's not a deterrent to crime. We know it doesn't help recidivism rates. The only remaining reason I can think of is spite/hate.

<comment><USER87> Or, a sense of justice. A powerful emotion in people.

Who know how many more criminals there might be, if punishment was off the table? Recidivism doesn't count that. So there's that social pressure too.

Its pretty easy to figure out 'why punishment', if you try.

<comment><USER88> Who knows how many fewer criminals there might be, if social safety nets, providing for people's basic needs of food, shelter, health care and education?

How do you cure homelessness? You provide homes.

How do you deal with mental and physical illness? You provide health care.

How do you give people are path forwards? You provide education.

All of these things are what our societies are _for_. To carry on about "law and order" and even the "rule of law" without also quoting the part about "promote the general welfare" is to completely miss the purpose.

<comment><USER89> We should certainly provide all of those things. But even homeless people, ill people, people with no direction in life can and should avoid committing crimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Interesting story.

</comment><comment><USER91> A bit ironic given that you are writing a comment in a social media website, hacker news. :)

<comment><USER92> [https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/](https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> The story seems off (temporally) for someone who got incarcerated circa 2010. Nothing very interesting has happened to technology since then.

<comment><USER94> That is what I was thinking, too. Hell, we had iPhones well before 2010. There hasn't been any kind of tectonic shift in technology since 2010, just mild evolution. Outside of a few specific areas (web frameworks, anyone?), skills from 2010 should still be very applicable today.

Now, if the author was arguing that it's a mindfuck to be incarcerated for 10 years and it makes him feel out of place, and his mindset is no longer really tuned towards technology, that I could totally believe. Just going to boot camp for a couple months does the same thing, takes a few days to reattach to 'normal' after that. 10 years in jail would take a bit longer to adjust from, no doubt.

<comment><USER95> In Information Technology, I'd agree as well.

From '93 to '03 Internet tech got industrialized, commoditized, commercialized. After an '03 to '08 consolidation phase, from '08 to '13 it got packetized and packaged by CSPs of varying degrees of specialization or verticality. Disruptive startup or OSS changes in last few years often emerge from lessons learned in those CSPs in mid 00s.

Then this last decade has been spent on figuring out how to "declare" that infotech stack of lego bricks and wire it together. We could get to a consensus way to wire bricks and flows by '23 — more likely on bricks, less likely on flows.</comment></comment></comment>


Alexis de Tocqueville on American Newspapers - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/alexis-de-tocquevilles-anti-buzzfeed-rant-of-1835/

<comment><USER2> Ultimately, mass media journalism is losing audience because it is missing on its number #1 mission: information.

Let's remember 2003. It doesn't matter that not a single metropolitan newspaper was against the war in Irak. After all, that's just opinion. What's really bad is that serious newspapers such as the NYT actually sold grotesque articles about links between Sadam Hussein and Al Qaeda, or uranium tubes being sold secretly in Nigeria... Any semi educated person in any other country were laughing about those ridiculous assertions.

Over the last couple of years, the coverage on Ukraine and Syria hasn't been much different. In a way, I think that what's scary is that this was achieved without a dictatorship.

<comment><USER3> The less money newspapers have, the less independent work they can do.

When you're a newspaper hemorrhaging revenue, what do you cut? Not sports. Not style. Not the stuff people read. Not the ability to report rumors faster than the next guy. That's your bread and butter.

Editors. Fact-checking. You can clean up your balance sheet without threatening business continuity by "improving efficiency" and getting all those layers out of the way.

Validating claims about Hussein and Al Qaeda basically amounts to foreign intelligence work. That costs expensive people's expensive time with a very high risk that they won't be able to arrive at any conclusions. Do you expect a manager to authorize a sat-phone when he can't even make payroll?

Newspapers in general do the best they can afford to. They're not the world's advertising platform anymore, so what they can afford to do is of course declining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The thing that wasn't relevant in the de Tocqueville era is that markets for media were hyper-local in those days and more responsive to the user base.

This phrase and the thinking behind it are key: "Papers without a global brand have bled money and jobs, and subscribers only provide one quarter of newspapers' funding."

Newspapers traditionally provided a service, and the popularity of the service attracted patronship via advertising. If the content of the newspaper was drivel, people would move on. Reporting mattered.

Today, media is different, they create brands -- often by capturing uses via portals or other services unrelated to the content. The actual content is a necessary evil. When the brand is global, it doesn't matter that the content is garbage, most of the audience is too lazy to change the channel or update their homepage.

IMO, the only vital media in America are weekly newspapers.

</comment><comment><USER5> We changed the title to take out the linkbait. If anyone can suggest an improvement, we're happy to change it again.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wouldn't call that title linkbait or embarrassing. It's clever, fun, and obviously a joke. It doesn't hurt the article either. IMO in order to be linkbait it must pump up your excitement with very little substance. For example: "French Guy Goes To America. What He Learned About BuzzFeed Will Blow You Away!" would be linkbait. It excites the reader by over promising that they will have a strong reaction to the piece, but the article can never live up to the hype. We are rarely "blown away" by a blog post or news article.

Your title dips below inciting the reader; It's totally drained of any color or interest. It doesn't excite the reader at all. That is also a problem because reading should be fun AND informative.

It's only a title, but I think titles should have fun too.

<comment><USER7> Author here. While having fun coming up with titles, other options included:

This French Guy Hated on Blogs Back in 1835

and

People Have Been Hating on Buzzfeed For 180 Years

(I thought I already nixed the linkbait title!)</comment></comment>


Thrutched, One month later - <AUTHOR> http://www.thrutched.com/?v=3

<comment><AUTHOR> It's been one month since I launched my climbing news website, so I thought I'd give those that wished me well an update (and possibly gain some new users too ;).

First thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1915280>

Second thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1924941>

`

What's happened since then:

\- Two redesigns

\- Over 80 topic posts (57 of which were from me)

\- Approx 50 unique visitors/day

\- Defeated: 2 spammers

`

Traffic: <http://i.imgur.com/7Oo29.png>

Visitors: <http://i.imgur.com/jM5UM.png>

The first and second traffic peaks are from the HN posts. The third peak was when I cross-posted an article to various climbing forums. I got criticized heavily for it, but it was a good learning experience.

I think it's important to get periodic bursts of traffic from other sites, but at the end of the day, regular contributors are the most important, especially when setting the tone of the community.

<comment><USER2> As one of your unique daily visitors I say thanks for making this. I have passed it on to all my climbing friends and posted it on Facebook. I like the clean interface and high quality content thus far. Are you planning to throw ads on this at some point?

PS- This link is broken: <http://www.thrutched.com/password_reset>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for visiting!

No plans to put ads on it now. I'm doing this cause I love working on it.

Not to say that I wouldn't put a small ad up if it ever grew large, but in the list of priorities, making money is at the far bottom.

I have a long term goal of building a high quality community like HN (but with line breaks).

<comment><USER2> That's cool. If you had any interest in a banner exchange let me know. One of my several side projects is a climbing related site. Perhaps we can help each other out? If you have any interest hit me up at the e-mail in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! I've gotten some great advice talking to Matt from <http://bouldr.net/> so that sounds swell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Might I suggest adding a Facebook "Like" button to the page? I found that the couple of people that "like" it each day via your button both make the site's growth look stronger (the number displayed goes up) as well as traffic increases.

I noticed a significant improvement on traffic to one of my sites after adding the button, so much so that I'd advocate it for any growing community.

(No, I don't work for Facebook)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. Check back tomorrow :)

Edit: added

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really cool. As an aside, is it me, or are a disproportionate number of HN-ers also climbers (myself included)? I've seen at least a few threads about climbing the past few weeks, can't say the same for any other sport.

<comment><USER5> I'd be willing to bet there are quite a few kayakers lurking as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> awesome, never knew about the site. thanks for posting.</comment>