Travis CI Security Advisory: Secured Environment Variables - <AUTHOR> https://blog.travis-ci.com/2017-05-08-security-advisory <comment><USER2> > As this fix runs in Ruby, it results in larger memory overhead. To address > this, we are working on an executable binary that will be installed as part > of the build-image. Work on this is expected to be complete by the end of > the week.

Run it through sed?

<comment><USER3> We hit this in Cloud Foundry Buildpacks, where all the builds and logs are completely public[0].

The team wrote and added Concourse-Filter[1]. You stream logs through it. It compares what's going past to current environment variables. Anytime something goes past that looks like one of the environment variables, it blanks it out.

You can set a whitelist for things you're not fussed about.

Disclosure: I have twice worked on Buildpacks on behalf of Pivotal.

[0] [https://buildpacks.ci.cf-app.com/](https://buildpacks.ci.cf-app.com/)

[1] [https://github.com/pivotal-cf-experimental/concourse- filter](https://github.com/pivotal-cf-experimental/concourse-filter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I submitted a pull request to a random open source project, I was surprised to see a travis build kick off immediately.

Is there a chance for rogue pull requests to contain (build) code that dumps out travis environment secrets? I didn't explore this but obviously the code is being built by scripts that are part of the commit.

<comment><USER5> That wouldn't be possible, and that's independent of the security issue we've disclosed in the post.

For pull requests Travis CI has long had security measures in place to prevent this scenario from happening: [https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/pull- requests#Pull-Requests-...](https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/pull- requests#Pull-Requests-and-Security-Restrictions)

<comment><USER6> Doesnt this still make it potentially available in case some malicious/unmalicious coder leaves some console debugging out?

<comment><USER7> Only if you merge it in. The point is the secure environment variables are not available at all in the fork build. The bash oneliner they show is to help you run scripts which won't crash if they don't have those env vars available, not to "hide them" by running a test script which doesn't use them.

<comment><USER6> I know many instances where code reviews didnt catch log statement in huge binaries.

<comment><USER7> Right, but now you're in the "review of a PR didn't catch malicious code" boat. At which point, you've got bigger problems than leaking env vars in your CI.

Not to dismiss it---it's just a different point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Did they bother to notify the repositories affected by this? Could not find anything.

<comment><USER9> > We have been in close communications with GitHub since we began working on > this incident, and have shared impacted tokens with GitHub for their > records. GitHub will revoke token access for the affected tokens and will > contact token owners to notify them. Both Travis CI and GitHub recommend > affected owners revoke their own access tokens and create new tokens > immediately.

Seems like both Github and Travis did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Secrets in environment variables is such a bad security anti-pattern, and it seems to be getting more popular.

<comment><USER11> What is a better pattern?

<comment><USER3> Secrets or credential management is hard, but the first step is to centralise. Many folk use Vault. There's also Knox, KeyWhiz and I forget some others. I've been a secrets-management product team (CredHub) for several months now.

We've looked at different ways of shuttling secrets but really, it's going to be specific to the context. For example, one job our software does is to hand credentials to a trusted BOSH director during deployments. That's basically done at this point and works very nicely from an operator perspective.

But then when we look at handing secrets to applications, or getting secrets to CI, it's a bit trickier.

We use Concourse a lot and for Concourse the next major track of work centres entirely around creating a secrets-management layer that backs onto secret- management systems.

Disclosure: At the moment I work on CredHub on behalf of Pivotal.

<comment><USER12> _Secrets or credential management is hard, but the first step is to centralise._

Ah yes, the "all eggs, one basket" approach to secret management. This is the correct approach, if you are trying to sell a platform -- gets you lock-in, and if you fail to keep secrets secure, you were going to blow up anyways, so the business risk management dictates that you should shoot for the moon and risk your client's data in the hopes of getting traction.

<comment><USER3> That's definitely one way of looking at it.

Another view is that:

1\. You can't invest in heavily defending scattered resources.

2\. Individual teams are not all experts in secret management.

Pivotal started CredHub (it's now in the Cloud Foundry Incubation process) partly because of client requests and partly because of the problems we and our fellow Cloud Foundry Foundation members have encountered. There are literally _thousands_ of secrets and credentials scattered across dozens of teams, including hundreds of high-risk operational secrets.

We have had multiple unintentional leakages, usually git. It's so easy that we now have tools to watch commits and checkouts for secret-like patterns. The same tools constantly comb our repositories for possible secrets as well.

Development teams should not need to care. Operators should not need to have to hand-manage thousands of secrets. There should be a safe, sane, central, highly assured place or places to keep your secrets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I love travis for what it is, this is a foreseeable result here.

At the very least they need to add a failsafe that checks all outgoing logs for any secure tokens and replaces them with ' __* ' or something.

If you sign up to play a game of whack-a-mole you will lose eventually.

<comment><USER6> What if the token was encrypted or altered in a way simple find replace wouldnt work?

<comment><USER14> Even just encoding it differently (base64, bin, hex, etc) would work against that.</comment></comment></comment>


Google+ passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day. - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/117388252776312694644/posts/ZcPA5ztMZaj

<comment><USER2> All the Google+ hate sort of puzzles me. I absolutely _love_ it. It's become my social media platform of choice, in fact. Maybe it's just that I have enough interesting people to read that it's worth it to me. I'm not sure.

I've never been a fan of Facebook. I've had an account for years, but that's pretty much entirely for API testing. I can count the number of things I've posted to Facebook in the past year on one hand.

Twitter, on the other hand, I really like. It's asymmetric, and lets me engage in casual conversation with people easily.

Google+ is a great marriage between the two. Long-form posts, comment threads, rich media integration, topical conversation via hashtags, and both Twitter- style multicast (public) and more Facebook-style (circle- or individual- limited) conversation.

I realize I sound like an ad, but that's not my intent. It just works for me. The complaint I see most often is "nobody's there". If you treat it as a publishing platform, rather than an RSS reader, it becomes a lot more attractive, and then that helps to solve the "nobody's there" problem as a side-effect.

<comment><USER3> > All the Google+ hate sort of puzzles me

Because Google became evil. Remember when Microsoft pre-installed IE in windows? It's the same thing when Google placed G+ in gmail.

<comment><USER4> I'm afraid I don't follow. Could you elaborate on how that means they became evil?

<comment><USER5> Because Google has a monopoly on non-shitty free email with GMail, in the same way that Microsoft has (had?) a monopoly on hardware-independent operating systems with DOS/Windows. (I wish I was really being sarcastic, you know because there are actually a billion web-based e-mail alternatives besides GMail that actually don't suck... right? Anybody know of any? At this point I'm earnestly inquiring.)

<comment><USER6> Gmail might be 'the best', but not enough to get a everyone to switch. So, IMO it's a question of where your suck threshold than anything specifically wrong with Hotmail / yahoo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Users are one thing, _active_ users are another. How many posts are being made? Are they just signing up for these accounts and never coming back? There's a reason Facebook and Twitter quote active users when announcing how many people are actually using their products.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. I know _lots_ of people who signed up for G+ to check it out, I only know _two_ people who still actively post to it. I just checked my news feed, and it's _entirely_ filled with posts by celebs (famous photographers, web celebs, Google folks I follow, etc), and two posts by my actual friends.

If this is at all representative, I suspect the percentage of active users to total users is pretty abysmal.

<comment><USER9> It's definitely way more barren on G+ than Facebook, but I think that part of this is because on G+, users are more likely to make posts that can only be seen by a small subset of the total number of users in their circles. On Facebook, most users still make posts visible to everyone on their friends list. I personally have a "close friends" circle of about 15 people and we typically just share content with each other; at the same time I'm seeing posts from people outside of this circle talking no one ever posts to G+.

Although G+ still has way fewer posts than Facebook, I suspect that it would need a much higher post rate than Facebook to appear as "active" to users.

<comment><USER10> I think you have a really good point about circles being smaller, a side effect of publishing only to certain circles will result in less updates seen, no matter how we try to slice it.

I find G+ posts to be generally of much higher quality, especially shared things.

<comment><USER11> I believe quality of the posts depends on the quality of the people... I had(since I deactivated both Facebook and G+ accounts of mine) nearly the same sets of friends both on Facebook and Google+ the last time I checked them, and the quality of the posts were nearly the same. Actually, most of them were posting the same things to both platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Guess I'll state the question: How many of them actively use it? Yes, yes, before anyone jumps in with the "but you have to follow interesting people", I know that side of Google+.

My question is more targetted at all those people that (had to) make an account for w/e reason, but just don't open it anymore. I can only assume they are included too, are there estimates to their numbers?

Edit: I _do_ use Google+, I just notice a lot of (seemingly?) 'dead' accounts.

<comment><USER13> I agree... I see more dead accounts than live ones now. I don't think this service is in the success category at all at the moment.

I still use it fairly actively, though.

<comment><USER14> Or maybe they just aren't posting to you? A few months back I read the claim that there's twice as much private sharing as public.

<comment><USER13> I've heard this argument (mostly from Googlers) before. I don't buy it though, as I occasionally (rarely now) see friends post things and get zero comments. The same comments will get tons of comments on Facebook.

This thing has largely failed outside of tech circles and twitter style (celebrity) newsfeeds at the moment. Hopefully that will change, as I find it superior to Facebook in virtually every way.

<comment><USER14> I'm curious, what are all the ways in which you find it superior? I agree that circles are better than Facebook friend lists, but G+ seems to lack some features that others find essential on Facebook, like event creation. I've heard a lot of people say that's the biggest reason they have a Facebook account. Also, there's no direct messaging system, at least that I'm aware of. FB messaging has basically replaced email for a lot of people. I suppose I could put someone into their own circle, but that seems rather inelegant.

My biggest issue with it is the lag, which is ironic for a product by Google. Sometimes it takes 30+ seconds for images to load. This significantly affects the user experience, since I usually don't wait, I just move onto something else.

<comment><USER15> I'm on the G+ photos team. Do you have an example of a slow loading image? If you can send me a link I could take a look.

Latency is _definitely_ something we care about.

<comment><USER14> Edit: Well wouldn't you know, this just happened:

<http://i.imgur.com/ESojw.png>

Typical of what I see. This is a fresh Firefox profile, no cache, no extensions. It's also not a network problem, since I don't see this on other sites, even other Google properties like search or Gmail. It's unique to G+

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the screenshot!

Two quick follow-up questions: On that screenshot, it looks like it's the main profile picture and the profile picture thumbnails for the circles that are slow to load (but the images from the stream are loaded). Is that typically what you see, or is that just what happened in this case?

Do have a sense for whether this happens more often when you're looking at profiles of people who are in a lot of circles (like Tim O'Reilly)?

Thanks for your help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really don't want one company to control all of my services. I like that Google may have my email, MS/Google my search, and Facebook my social -- and that all three will have to learn to play together.

</comment><comment><USER17> Users? yeah right. More like spammers and bots from the software I've seen on the blackhat forums.

Spammers have learnt their lesson and now know age is a factor in deciding if it's a spam account or not and are getting in early and big.

<comment><USER18> If there are spammers targeting G+, they must be doing a crappy job, because it hasn't even registered on my radar as a fairly active regular user.

<comment><USER19> G+ spam would probably be closer to blog spam than email spam. It'd be hard to get any noticeable volume of direct spam going from a single account given the asymmetric circle relations. But spam postings would still be useful for e.g. black hat SEO, or for making a Google account look more valid for the purposes of abusing other Google services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just can't get past the feeling that Google+ violates my privacy. I've started using Facebook which I ultimately regret because it's invasive, too controlling, and has stupidity embedded in it. In the end these kinds of forums are the only ones I find worthwhile anyway. I don't care what my real friends think about what I like, and don't want anyone else I know to judge me. Why am I letting people I don't even know control the way I express myself to my friends anyway?

<comment><USER21> I use facebook. Why am I not registering for G+? Well:

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> One measure of the relative popularity of Google+ and Facebook is to compare the number of 'likes' with '+1s' on a popular page. For example, on the following page there are currently 64 '+1s' and 260 'likes': [http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/lego-is-for- girls-12142...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/lego-is-for- girls-12142011.html?campaign_id=rss_topStories#)

By this measure, Google+ is at 25% of Facebook. I remember when Google+ went into 'anybody-can-use-it' mode a few months ago it was only around 5%. This suggests Google+ is doing quite nicely, thank you. But perhaps it is just showing how Google+ is becoming more popular with spammers...?

<comment><USER23> To be fair, the comparison might not be entirely accurate since it is possible to 'plus one' something while just being a gmail/youtube user -- without necessarily being an active google+ user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I find it funny that people on HN knock Google+ because of the lack of people on it. While at the same time using HN instead of digg or reddit. Why are you drawn to Hacker News over the "big" link sites. Wouldn't by your own logic you use those sites since they have so many more people. Could there be something enticing about a smaller product with higher quality that you find enjoyable. Not to say we should promote group think here as there is place for intelligent dissent, but its very ironic to use one smaller higher quality alternative while vocally rejecting another.

</comment><comment><USER25> Don't forget, if you create a Google account you automatically have a Google+ account.

I made a new Gmail account for my mom a few days, now she has a Google+ account too but I doubt she'll ever touch it.

<comment><USER26> I have a Google account I use for analytics, webmaster tools, etc... and Google is always prompting me to turn Google+ on as well. It wasn't automatic with my account. I had the account before Google+ existed though so maybe it is just automatic with new signups?

<comment><USER27> Yes. You have to manually cancel the Google Profile and Google+ account for new signups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Would be more interesting if Google can provide more meaningful data like facebook: <https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics>

>> More than 800 million active users

>> More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

>> On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day

etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> I would love to join Google+ but they still haven't fixed the pseudonym issues. Twitter it is, I guess.

<comment><USER30> yeah, i joined and it's technically a really excellent platform, but i find it hard to have any real attachment to it without full pseudonym support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I was recently forced to create a Google+ account, which I have no intention of using for now. So I simply typed "follow me on twitter at <adr>" in my description. So people who bump into my profile know where to find me.

</comment><comment><USER32> Ok so his data shows 50 mil users Dec 1 and 62 mil users Dec 27 which is easy to calculate at 460k users a day not 625K.

I'm more then willing to believe that there were 625K+ users for Dec 25 and 26 though to extrapolate users for all of 2012 based on xmas day and the day after xmas sign ups of 2011 is absurd.

Interest in google plus is fairly flat:

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=%22google%20plus%22...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=%22google%20plus%22%2Creddit%2Clinkedin%2Cflickr%2Cgoogle%2B&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q)

For comparison's sake that is 10% of twitter and twitter is 10% of facebook.

<comment><USER33> It's fascinating how periodic searches for LinkedIn are -- peaking right before each quarter ends. Looks like a lot of people are looking for news jobs right around then.

<comment><USER34> Are you looking at the graph in the post you replied to? I see it as weekday spikes (while people are at work, maybe recruiters?) and weekend slumps. Not quarterly spikes. Though I agree that the pattern is fascinating :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Those numbers sound great, but they don't really mean anything unless those users are contributing content and establishing a community within Google+. It takes all of 10 seconds to become a member, but Google+ needs a better way of encouraging new users to complete their profile information, make posts, and add their friends.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if Facebook is becoming the new Myspace in terms of quality of content shared. With Google you have the sense that some people are using it to replace their blogs and possibly connecting on a more professional level whereas Facebook is more about catching up with others and sharing random thoughts/opinions via short messages and likes/dislikes. The first one to have a tighter integration with Twitter and has the most adoption among Twitter users will win. Linkedin --> Google + <\--- Facebook Also another thing, Google App users are already opted in by default and with more and more companies using Google Apps, that only reinforces the more professional connections.

</comment><comment><USER37> What I don't like about Google+ is that they already have a spam problem.

<comment><USER18> What does G+ spam look like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I think the big sign of growth for G+ is its growing pains. Hangout and other components simply don't perform as well as they did when it was a brand-new service.

</comment><comment><USER39> Google+'s killer feature (at least from what I've seen) is Circles. Not being able to easily control who sees what on Facebook is the reason I don't post more personal content to it. Being able to easily control what I share and with who - like I do in the real world - would make me 10x more likely to become an active participant on a social network. It might be time to actually sign up for an account....

<comment><USER40> Circle sounds good in theory but it's a pig to use in practice. Sign up and see for yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Very happy to hear Google+ is doing well. I don't do much social networking myself, but serious competition for Facebook is a very good thing.

</comment><comment><USER42> My question is what happened the week of September 18th? That was when Google+ went from flatlining to a huge jump in growth, then followup growth. Anybody know? My guess is something to do with android pushing folks to sign up, or maybe them pushing it through gmail or google logins. Something changed and they restarted the growth curve with a big spike.

<comment><USER43> I think the spike you are seeing correlates to the transition from a "field trial" (invite-only) product, to a public product.

This is the blog post announcing open signups and it is dated September 20th: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96-97-98-99-100.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is there any correlation between G+ new users and new Android activations? One is 625K and the other is 700K per day. Just curious.

</comment><comment><USER45> <https://twitter.com/#!/arunagw/status/151969750518468608>

</comment><comment><USER46> What's the male/female split?

<comment><USER47> the most recent numbers i saw were about 2-1, unchanged since July

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Profiles? Sure. Users? No... not even close.

It's actually rather telling when the only way to make Google+ sound popular is to count meaningless automatic signups.

</comment><comment><USER49> I guess those TV commercials are helping.

</comment><comment><USER50> Maybe the new Facebook timeline is to blame? :)

</comment><comment><USER51> Google can try and play stupid as much as they want by reporting signups and not actives but I'm glad it isn't fooling the HN crowd.

Facebook long changed the game by reporting actives. Since, startups like twitter and foursquare have followed suit by reporting actives. It is very apparent what google's refusal to report actives means.

<comment><USER19> Google is reporting nothing in this case. It's some dude trying to deduce the user count from other information.</comment></comment>


Berners-Lee: Don't let record labels upset web openness - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/berners-lee-dont-let-record-labels-upset-web-openness.ars <comment><USER2> "The world is bigger than that. The internet is bigger than the music industry. The economic impact of the internet is bigger than the music industry."

... "so we win".

And here I thought we had the rule of law.

You want to know about a _really_ big industry? It's called "finance". Pucker up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok, I fully agree that music industry business model is broken. But internet business model is also in its infancy. Using advertising to finance does not work for everything. Internet has also difficulties with business models.

</comment><comment><USER4> RIP labels.</comment>


Microsoft has a dumb idea to make people use its web browser - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40545799/microsoft-has-a-dumb-idea-to-make-people-use-its-web-browser <comment><USER2> > In the latest preview version of Windows 10, Microsoft's Mail app will > automatically open web links in Edge, even for users who've set a different > browser as their default.

Let's hope that stays in preview.

However, it isn't an uncommon tactic.

Outlook has occasionally defaulted to Internet Explorer over the default web browser in its past history, though to give the benefit of the doubt, those times were considered "bugs".

Google's GMail on Android tried it once or twice before resorting to embedding a web browser inside itself.

<comment><USER3> GMail now opens a web view, but that view is powered by the user default's browser. The Google app (the one that powers the voice assistant and the search bar) always uses a Chrome web view instead.

<comment><USER4> Gmail does this really nicely. I use Brave browser and the web view works perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's really no good reason for Microsoft to be making these moves. Edge is a very solid browser, and a fairly good choice security-wise, if only because of it's very locked down set of extensions. I'm currently a Firefox daily user, but Edge has been my main browser for several months at a time. Why try to capture users by locking out the competition when you can just keep making a better browser?

This is burning the goodwill they've built up for no apparent conceivable reason, and remains an excellent example of a company sabotaging itself repeatedly.

<comment><USER6> >Why try to capture users by locking out the competition when you can just keep making a better browser?

Cost of tricking people into using your browser: $

Cost of making a better browser: $$$$$$

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The mail app is so terrible, the few that put up with it likely won't mind this. It makes Outlook Express look good by comparison...

For the rest of us just stick to webmail or use Thunderbird/Outlook. Although in general my faith in email and desktop email clients diminishes with each passing year.

</comment><comment><USER8> Apple and Google are doing this too: On my iPhone the Gmail app opens things in Chrome, the iOS promoted news stories are opened in Safari, yet I prefer Firefox.

<comment><USER9> Sort of. Google apps give you the choice to open in Safari or Chrome. Not sure if they allow you to pick a different browser besides those two.

<comment><USER10> I've never been asked to open things in Safari or Chrome, but then again I am on Android.

For the majority of smartphone users, Gmail just one day started using Chromeframe to open all links without permission.

These behaviors are being used more and more as Google tries to tie your actions together into a single identity.

<comment><USER11> This may have been wry humor on your part, but of course there is no Safari on Android... I do see the behavior you describe in the News & Weather app, which likes to open links in embedded Chrome Web Views (unless I long-press and then they will offer to open in browser, which happens to be FF).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This may be a very naive question, but why is Microsoft so invested in getting people to use Edge/IE? What's the big deal for Microsoft if people just prefer to use Safari/Firefox/Chrome/Opera/etc? Their browser share is already very low, what do they stand to lose?

</comment><comment><USER13> The silliest thing about Edge is that you can't search through your bookmarks ("favorites") or history. That alone makes it an automatic no for me. There are no other features they could add to get me to switch, I can't believe they don't have it already.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone actually use "Mail"? I think most people either use the email webclient, e.g. GMail, or they are corporate users and use Outlook.

<comment><USER15> I tried it out on my laptop which I don't use much (mostly use my desktop dev rig) and was pleasantly surprised by it. It works pretty well with IMAP and the People app can sync directly with Google, something Outlook still can't do right. So, with a fresh install of Windows 10, you can get your Google-based email, calendar, and contacts into the lightweight built-in apps within about 5 minutes.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I found with Mail for Windows 10 that the setup for gmail and my university's office365 account was fairly seamless. Likewise Outlook on Android (although I'm currently using K-9).

The only place I'm using webmail is on Linux but now Thunderbird is receiving new love it might be time...

<comment><USER17> > The only place I'm using webmail is on Linux

Oh but there are other great MTAs you can use too! Like (neo)mutt and alot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a job at a large US company. Although I have admin rights and I can install basically anything I want, there is a script that sets the default browser at startup. Every time I encounter it, I get annoyed and I remember to not use the default browser (It is Edge).

<comment><USER19> Perhaps write your own script that sets it back?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Who inside Microsoft thinks this is a good idea?

</comment><comment><USER21> Both Apple and Google do this on their platforms. Hell Apple won't even allow other browsers on IOS.

</comment><comment><USER22> Isn't this what got it a court case with Netscape due to anticompetitive laws back in the day?

</comment><comment><USER23> One more reason to use Outlook over Mail

<comment><USER6> One more reason to get off the Microsoft merry-go-round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I prefer mailbird anyways</comment>


How do astronauts connect to the Internet in space? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/the-internet-in-space-slow-dial-up-lasers-satellites/395618/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> I'd really like to know if the ISS wifi has a password.

<comment><USER3> ESA astronaut Alexander Gertz gave a talk* some month ago. About the wifi he said that it is good quality in the central spine of the ISS but the outlying modules have very bad reception. Living in big metal cans seems to have that effect. Nothing about the password though.

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8tTRgTqLn8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8tTRgTqLn8) (german)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So it's exactly as good or bad as ground systems using a geosynchronous satellite for internet? (Wikipedia [1] says that geostationary satellites are the norm for satellite internet.)

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

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand. It sounds like they don't have bandwidth problems, only latency problems. But lasers travel at the speed of light just like radios; switching to a laser approach isn't going to reduce latency any.

<comment><USER6> I took it to mean the laser would be based on the station and so could transmit directly to a ground station cutting out the extra 22,000 mile extra hop to the geosync satellite?

<comment><USER7> This image of the satelitte orbits makes the comparison easier: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit#/media/Fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit#/media/File:Comparison_satellite_navigation_orbits.svg)

The geosync satellites are very high, 5.6 Earth radius above the Earth surface. (The radius of the orbit is 6.6 Earth radius.) And you have to multiply it by 2 because the signal has to go from the ISS to the satellite and then to Earth.

The ISS is only 0.06 Earth radius above the Earth surface approximately. So in this case, most of the latency will come from horizontal travel (and the latency of the usual congestion in the net).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So your critical ISS controls share a network with internet browsing endpoints. Nice!

<comment><USER8> Talk about one helluva beachhead.</comment></comment>


Apple's Project Magnolia - <AUTHOR> What is Apple's project Magnolia? http://www.mapistry.com/hubfs/apple_project_magnolia_record.pdf Looks like it some sort of facility for thin-film fabrication. Thin-film batteries? Maybe due to their acquisition of Infinity Power Solutions - http://www.luxresearchinc.com/news-and-events/press-releases/read/apples-printed-battery-acquisition-likely-disappoint <comment><USER2> If I told you, I'd have to...</comment>


Show HN: LocalWiki - <AUTHOR>

My friend and I have been working on this open-source project for over a year, and we just launched our site and released our software:
http://localwiki.org
It's a way for local communities to share information, knowledge, and preserve local history.  Inspired by a project we started in Davis, California, in 2004 called Davis Wiki (http://daviswiki.org), which today is the most used news and information source in Davis and by many metrics the world's largest and most participatory local wiki.  By our estimates, half the local residents visit it in the course of a week, and 1 in 7 residents actually contributes.
The new LocalWiki software is based on the Django framework, is meant to be easy enough for non-technical people to use, and has stuff that is useful for local communities, like editable maps.  The project is funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, which has in the past funded EveryBlock, DocumentCloud, and others.
Would love to hear what you all think. <comment><USER2> The social proof needs to be higher on the page. I would have closed the page before I got to it, thinking "another bunch of nerds writing software that nobody is ever going to use" if it were not a "Show HN".

(I'm easily convinced that you can write decent wiki software, and I'm easily convinced that local wiki's can have some value. Getting people to actually use them is the hard part, and you actually have a decent story there.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. At the moment it's mostly software focused, but the technical aspect is definitely not the hardest part of getting something like this started in a community, and a major goal of our project is to share our experience and help with the content and community building side. Thanks for the feedback, it's really helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://localwiki.org>

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it just an open source project or you plan to make money on it?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are a nonprofit, and this project is and will continue to be open-source. It has been a labor of love for many years, working on it in our spare time and paying for it out of our own pockets or through donations, but now thanks to the grant it's our job too, for the time being.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone been fired for not wearing a suit and tie? - <AUTHOR> For the old timers here, what was is it like in the suit and tie culture of the past?  Do you know or have you been fired for choosing not to wear one?<p>Any stories of employees firing their best employees or passing over a really great candidate because they refused to follow dress code? <comment><USER2> > For the old timers here, what was is it like in the suit and tie culture of > the past?

There's a bit more to it than that. There's the East/West coast factor to consider. East coast companies are much more likely to require/expect a suit and tie than a Silicon Valley company. At some East coast companies, even the janitors wear a suit and tie. I'm not making this up -- I've worked at several such companies where it was true.

> Do you know or have you been fired for choosing not to wear one?

It might be better to look at one's advancement prospects instead of fired/not fired. If you don't dress like you belong in an executive suite, chances are you won't be asked to occupy one.

> Any stories of employees firing their best employees or passing over a > really great candidate because they refused to follow dress code?

This way of looking at it unfortunately suffers from self-reference. Someone who won't meet the dress code won't be looked on as a "really great candidate", so the exercise is undermined at the outset.

Suffice it to say that following the dress code is so basic and essential that no meaningful study that correlated dress and advancement could be done.

<comment><AUTHOR> >This way of looking at it unfortunately suffers from self-reference. Someone who won't meet the dress code won't be looked on as a "really great candidate", so the exercise is undermined at the outset.

Even if that person is well known for being the best of the best? Even if their everyone knows that other companies out there would love to grab them because they are that good?

<comment><USER2> > Even if that person is well known for being the best of the best?

There are too many subjective factors that enter into such an evaluation, including how that person is dressed.

> Even if their everyone knows that other companies out there would love to > grab them because they are that good?

In human affairs, "good" can never be made completely objective, and human studies are rarely scientific in the classic sense. In this case, "good" might arise from the most superficial evaluation -- for example, just a picture of the candidate _in his suit_. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why do you people hate suits so much? What's wrong with wearing fine clothes and looking sharp?

People say they're uncomfortable, but if your suit is uncomfortable you've just chosen the wrong suit. Same with your shirts. And if your tie is uncomfortable, learn to tie a knot better.

People who say we should do away with the suit are arguing to do away with centuries of evolution in professional men's attire. It's like arguing that we should trash art or literature, or that we should stop using cutlery and just use our hands.

<comment><USER4> > Why do you people hate suits so much? What's wrong with wearing fine clothes > and looking sharp?

I don't think they make you look sharp. They're a uniform, stick a suit on and you're just another person dressed in grey or black. It doesn't exactly do anything interesting with the eye.

Now, granted, there are various cuts of suit, and different pockets, ways of making them roll the shoulders to make you look broader or... but I don't really find that a well made suit is dramatically more interesting than a poorly made suit.

Perhaps to other people it is, and then I could understand better why people would choose to wear them if given a choice. But to myself a well made suit's not really more interesting than a grey T-shirt and has additional social connotations of being subservient to whoever's enforcing the dress code at the time.

> People who say we should do away with the suit are arguing to do away with > centuries of evolution in professional men's attire.

What's the selection pressure supposed to be? Cutlery serves an obvious function. It's not clear what desirable function suits serve.

<comment><USER2> > It's not clear what desirable function suits serve.

It marks you as a team player, sort of like a sports uniform. I say it that way intentionally to show how a suit can be interpreted in both positive and negative ways.

Wearing a suit means you belong to the group that wears suits. Belonging can be overrated, but it seems many want to belong to the suit-wearing, six- figure-income clique.

<comment><USER5> AKA "signalling". And it can and does go beyond "a suit" to include "the right suit / tailoring / etc".

Wearing "the wrong suit" can be about as bad as wearing no suit, from this perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that anyone not in a law firm or financial services would find it hard to remember those days.

An acquaintance, probably 70 by now, worked in IBM sales when he was first out of the Navy. He said that a fellow salesman shocked the office by coming to work in a blue rather than white shirt. (He didn't mention any deaths from the shock, so I assume the guy still had suit and tie.) And Gerald Weinberg has written of a slightly earlier period that at IBM you demonstrated that you were a genius by growing a beard and not getting fired.

I did once work for a place where men where expected to wear ties when going to customer sites. (You might also have squeeze in behind a refrigerator-sized minicomputers.) My boss grumbled a bit when one of our better techs skipped the tie on the grounds of limited range of motion, having recently had shoulder surgery. But there were no consequences.

Oh, and from the truly distant past: I worked with a man whose father-in-law had worked at FBI headquarters. The older man told of J. Edgar Hoover one day stopping in the hall, looking over at an agent in an unusually-colored suit (I think green) and say "That's an odd-colored suit for an agent to wear.) The guy was gone from headquarters the next day, I suppose shipped to Butte, Montana.

</comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't directly answer your question, but I will say that if you are in an organization where "formal attire" is (re)introduced as a means to "improve the professionalism of the organization", it is time to start looking for another job.

1) It doesn't solve anything. (Despite some anecdotal or loose correlation between being "dressed up" and feeling "more professional".)

2) The type of people who promulgate such policies tend to think "they know what's right" and to be very much about control (in a top-down sense). One way or another, it's about manipulation (in some cases, even expecting to reduce headcount through resulting attrition). It is also, as often as not, "putting lipstick on the pig" before selling the organization in one fashion or another.

Just one jaded employee's perspective. But, you have been warned.

P.S. I'll add that I understand, even if I personally dislike, the role and effect of attire in some specific roles. What I'm talking about is a blanket policy that does not take employee roles into account at all.

From the male perspective:

If you're a back office person with no customer interface, or perhaps worse, a techie who has to go crawling around the floor after cables and such, being uncomfortable in and having to prematurely wear out an expensive suit is not very considerate treatment.

I'm suddenly reminded, too, of working around moving parts and having to wear a ready-made noose around my neck (neck tie). Throwing the tie over your shoulder is not very safe, and tucking it into your shirt is awkward and uncomfortable and can quickly soil the tie. A tie clip can help somewhat, but it still leaves bits out front that might get snagged if you lean in too close.

P.P.S. Ok, you hit one of my "buttons" and I perhaps too quickly responded. Looking again at this, I now want to ask you, why are you asking this? Do you face a particular situation? Or is this one of those "fishing" questions that seem to be becoming more prevalent on HN (to my personal dissatisfaction, for one).

<comment><AUTHOR> Companies make demands on all employees which have nothing to do with their business all the time but they care about it a lot.

One obvious one is a suit and tie policy. I'm curious what happens to people who "disobey" norms like this.

<comment><USER5> Well, the time I recall most clearly when I ran into such a policy... Brief story. Old-line company's doing poorly, stock tanking. Board finally brings in some new senior management -- the "not nice", clean things up and (unexpressed, but fairly apparent) sell it off kind.

We were formal, but had gone business casual a few years earlier.

One of the first mandates of the new management: Business attire. Fortunately, in my role, I could skip the full suit, but dress shirt and tie, and "Dockers" and similar more casual slacks were expressly verboten.

If you didn't like it, good-bye. Since they were looking at wholesale reductions in head count, they couldn't care less.

My office was very "back end". I doubt I saw more than one or two external customers a year. Wages were simultaneously frozen, so you knew where the additional wardrobe expense was coming from.

Sure, this is pure anecdote. Just my experience. I've been at and watched other companies struggle with the "clothing" question. It inevitably seems that, in doing so, they are worrying about the wrong question. (And inevitably, the ramp up of formal dress seems to come along with hard times... That have nothing, in my opinion, to do with what people are wearing.)

Then again... maybe for the majority in mainstream corporate America, being made to put on a suit is a signal to "stop fucking around". Because, that _was_ part of the problem.

P.S. Since I walk around a lot, despite my relatively short remaining tenure, I still managed to wear out a few pairs of rather nice dress slacks and put some significant mileage on dress shoes, before I got out of there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just out of curiosity, did it work? Where they sold?

<comment><USER5> It was sold to a large(r) interest already in the broader field of industry. This was long enough after I'd left that my friends were out, as well, or out of touch, and I had no other lingering ties, so I don't really know how that went. (I can speculate; some essential production staff retained. Most others retired or terminated. A continuation of what had occurred, taking advantage of the resulting redundancies to further trim cost.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One time an interviewer pointed out my lack of a tie. Funny thing was I was dressed up. Suit, nice pants, nice shoes. Everything but a tie. This particular place was really into ties.

Don't know if that was the reason I didn't get the job. I think I was the most junior person they interviewed, although one of the interviewers said that I did better on the technical part than a lot of people more senior than me.

This was an "inside the beltway"(DC) company, and in that area I have subsequently learned that once you go inside the beltway, you wear ties. At least if the job is government contracting related.

</comment><comment><USER8> Failing to follow company policies as absurd as they may appear is a sign of rebellion. Managers often have to follow more rules than lower level employees. Giving them a hard time with company policy compliance is rude, childish and immature.

In the corporate world sometimes it's more important to be liked than to be competent.

My rules are "when in Rome, do as the Romans" and "the nail that sticks out gets hammered".

If you don't wanna follow company policies, I suggest you start your own company or work from home in your pajamas.

</comment><comment><USER9> Dressing down, ubiquitously known as "being comfortable", says that you don't care about how you look, as if your appearance were an entirely private matter that has nothing to do with anyone else. It's the exact opposite: what you wear is part of the visible environment, as relevant as the architecture, the decor, [and everything else in that environment]. - L. Grant</comment>


US rural broadband statistics and net neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080306-us-rural-broadband-you-can-get-it-but-you-cant-afford-it.html <comment><USER2> _The US Internet Industry Association, a trade group representing Internet companies and ISPs_

USIIA is clearly a lobbyst group. And obviously, ISPs are against net neutrality: they would be too happy to charge premiums for certain categories of customers, at the expense of broadbrand coverage/adoption and open access.</comment>


Ask HN: Dropbox/Drive Alternatives? - <AUTHOR> Is there a great alternative for Dropbox / Google Drive?
I know this comes up frequently, but I'm hoping there's something new that I just haven't found out about yet.
For the record, I love the old Dropbox, where it felt native to the operating system and just synced files.  But they keep adding things.
Google Drive is just maddening experience of figuring out permissions and and where my storage is being eaten up. I get 30g free though, that's hard to beat. <comment><USER2> I like OneDrive. I have a Microsoft 365 Business plan which gives me 1 TB of storage for $5/month, plus email at my domain. I don't have any super crazy use case, I just use it as a backup for files as well as syncing between computers. Works fine for me.</comment>


Cool UI for accessing and working with files online - <AUTHOR> http://www.icloud.com/en/updates/blog

<comment><USER2> Tried signing up using Chrome, to be told that the best results are available only when using Internet Explorer, although I could try using a beta for Firefox. (WTF?) Accepted the mistaken option for FF, but that required a missing Java plugin, so nothing happened. "Cool" really isn't the reaction that came to mind. Appears to be "write once, run on IE only".

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do they really need to know whether I am male or female on sign up? And this "cloud" guy on their site is really scary.

<comment><AUTHOR> The smurf/ghost or the guy to the right?

It seems that they recently added features for social interaction between the users. So they are either moving more towards being a social network or doing some kind of mix between a web desktop and social community... The sharing features are understandably quite interesting in this aspect...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it might be a reach to say "the next level".

Looking beyond the marketing, the product definitely seems interesting. It has loads of potential and the basic applications, such as the desktop and the document explorer are quite good.

As a developer, looking at the software (written in XML), it seems like a huge advantage to write something in one language and then having it simply just work on all (supported) platforms. The source code for all applications is COMPLETELY VISIBLE XML and it seems that the service can use external webservices.

As a user there are I have to that it would feel very nice to have my apps patched directly without any additional downloads and to always have the latest features.

Any thoughts about interesting applications that could be useful for the service? They seem to have the documentation in place to experiment...

</comment><comment><USER4> The next level? Outer space computing?

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh dear, for so many, many reasons.</comment>


Amazon EC2 Spot Instances - And Now How Much Would You Pay? - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/ec2-spot-instances-and-now-how-much-would-you-pay.html <comment><USER3> It never ceases to amaze me how an online bookstore can be so ahead of all the self-professed hosting providers.

I'm excited to see what innovations come out of this. Of course, this will only become really interesting when there are other providers doing the same.

<comment><USER4> _It never ceases to amaze me how an online bookstore can be so ahead of all the self-professed hosting providers._

Scale. It doesn't make sense to do things like this until you have thousands and thousands of nodes -- most hosting companies simply aren't anywhere near as big as Amazon.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies. I can't imagine it would have taken more than a handful of Google-style shipping crates to host the site.

I'd attribute their innovation more to their core values:

 _Ignoring competitors_ \- probably the biggest factor. They actually sat down and thought about what people want, rather than doing what everyone else was doing. This puts them ahead of traditional hosting providers, as well as competition-oriented companies like MS.

 _Customer focus_ \- having an insanely strong focus on the customer distinguishes them from equally innovative competitors like Google.

 _Commitment_ \- Amazon recognized from the start that they had limited resources, and very carefully chose to enter the cloud computing market, ignoring all the other proposals. This focused them more, while also giving the public more confidence in the service. Compare Google App Engine, which isn't taken with the same seriousness.

Other than that, relative small size helps. Their customers know that Jeff won't eat them for lunch at the first opportunity. And having a few billion dollars of cash in the bank doesn't hurt either.

<comment><USER4> _When Amazon started out, their datacenter couldn't have been nearly as big as those of top hosting companies._

Sure. But they didn't do Reserved Instances and Spot Instances when they started out.

You only need a few racks in order to make renting Xen instances by the hour feasible; but in order to make a market for Spot Instances reasonable, you need to have enough "spare" capacity to support a stable market (i.e., one where a single customer won't dramatically shift the market price) -- given the variety of instance sizes, I doubt this would work without having hundreds of racks of spare capacity.

<comment><USER5> Gotcha, you were talking specifically about spot pricing. I read the OP's comment more as asking "Why are they so consistently innovative?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Genius.

This maximizes their hardware investment and allows a whole new class of applications which need large amounts of cheap computing power but are not fussy about when the work gets done.

GENIUS. Revolutionary beyond my capacity to visualize. This is going to change the way the cloud computing space works.

The really interesting part is that physical location is one of the price parameters: picture the spinning globe, with real-time applications constantly migrating to instances where it's daytime for maximum performance, and asynchronous applications hugging the dark side where computing is cheap.

As a friend of mine said, this is to cloud computing as adsense was to online advertising: i.e. revolutionary, and an absolute cash fountain.

<comment><USER7> What's interesting about this to me is that when combined with the currently free inbound bandwidth, you could have a pretty damn cheap crawler.

<comment><USER8> I was about to post a puzzled disagreement, but they did waive inbound bandwidth charges a week ago. <http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/aws-price- reductions.html>

<comment><USER9> Now if they would get their outbound charges in line with what you pay at 'regular' hosting providers it would actually start to make sense. Currently if you shop around a bit you can pay anywhere from $.80 to $1.00 for a dedicated megabit, including the machine.

Amazon doesn't come close to that.

<comment><USER4> _Currently if you shop around a bit you can pay anywhere from $.80 to $1.00 for a dedicated megabit, including the machine._

You're clearly a much better shopper than I am. Where are you seeing these rates?

<comment><USER9> I'm not going to advertise my hosting provider here, but I'll mail you.

j.

mail in your inbox. oh, and my bad but it should have been 'euros', not $ (force of habit, sorry).

<comment><USER10> I'd be interested in the same too :-) email is in my profile... Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wrote a list of jobs I could perhaps pipe to this method of instance procurement but the fact that the process could be terminated at any moment really messes things up.

I'm not even talking about "high-availability", but the cessation of a key node in a dependency tree of instances messes stuff up (at least for my problem space).

What is missing here is a "5 minute warning" API call before shutdown that would let me engineer in a) the opportunity to save any long-duration calculation to disk and b) have my software make a decision to instantiate a full-price instance if my queue is too long and having no cheap-o priced instances running is going to mess things up.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER12> Some sort of warning system sounds nice, but since your program should be saving as often as it can anyway, a 5 minute warning wouldn't actually be useful because if there was a save point, you've saved, and if there wasn't, well, there wasn't and you couldn't have saved given a 5 minute warning anyway. Amazon also, of course, pushes all their other products to help deal w/ this problem.

They do also mention that it is 'by the hour', which I'd double check that it doesn't include fractional hours, but after the instance has been up for ~55 minutes, you have your 5 minute warning.

You do, however have a really good point with the up-sell off the 5-minute warning. I wonder if that could be too easily gamed. When that 5 minute warning comes the spot instances tell the normal-instance key node, which then requests a bunch of spot instances at 2x the current spot-instance price to be able to finish the current 'set'. (But then also request a bunch more spot instances at below the current spot price, in an attempt to drive down spot instance pricing.)

The other thing is that it is region specific; which means that you could target the EU region from the US west coast to get work done on spot-instances during the day.

<comment><USER13> _after the instance has been up for ~55 minutes, you have your 5 minute warning._

Nope; Amazon can terminate spot instances at _any_ time. Thought experiment: Assume EC2 is full (which it will be from now on) and someone requests a regular instance. To create the instance promptly, EC2 will have to shut down a spot instance.

 _(But then also request a bunch more spot instances at below the current spot price, in an attempt to drive down spot instance pricing.)_

That's not how auctions work. The number of bids below the winning price is irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _"The simplest way to know the current status of your Spot Instances is to monitor your Spot requests and running instances via the AWS Management Console or Amazon EC2 API."_

Hmm. Since this new feature can _actively terminate_ instances, it makes a problem I have with EC2 even more of an issue: I'd like a way to query with your instance ID and find out exactly when it terminated and how much bandwidth it used (so something like a "usage/accounting" API). It would help greatly to know your exact financial situation with Amazon. A notification system (register an URL to get a POST when an instance dies or if its bandwidth use exceeds a certain threshold, etc.) would also be useful.

If a user wants to have very accurate information about these things, they currently need to set up a HA environment offsite to poll (which may not even be enough if there are network issues). That has always frustrated me when the information required ("how much have I spent?") is right there in the database after the instance is done.

<comment><USER15> They may have just added that feature to the spot instances the command is called: ec2-create-spot-datafeed-subscription

This is the description: "Creates the data feed for Spot Instances, enabling you to view Spot Instance usage logs. You can create one data feed per account."

I havent tried it yet, but if anyone has can they post their impression?

<comment><USER16> It's uploading the same log file every 30 seconds to my S3 bucket, so I suspect they're still working out the kinks :)

That said, the documentation on the datafeed stuff is annoyingly sparse - <USER2> format is reasonably self-documenting, but I wish they'd commit to it somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the moment of commoditisation of computing. I reckon there will be price fixings at a commodities exchanges like the Chicago CBOT in the forseeable future, and standard node classes, provided by various vendors.

What will be the consequences? Probably quite some pressure on margins and on quality, the only variables where you can vary with the product. Once there are other vendors, of course.

<comment><USER18> _This is the moment of commoditisation of computing._

I'd call it the _next_ moment in the ongoing commoditization of computing. But everybody has a different threshold of perception. ;)

<comment><USER4> At this point, I'd call it the _just passed_ moment, not the _next_ moment -- but maybe we can compromise and agree that this is _a_ moment in the commoditization of computing. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Instead of outright termination, they should give the instance creator a choice when the spot instance is first started:

1\. Terminate outright when the time comes.

2\. Give the instance a 5 minute warning (for a fee).

3\. Keep the instance running but switch it to a non-spot pricing model per hour as a typical EC2 instance.

Much more friendly and option 3 will give them greater revenue.

<comment><USER20> > Much more friendly and option 3 will give them greater revenue.

Or perhaps not: if this were the option offered, no one would pay for standard EC2 instances at all, they'd just put up spot reservations and take the lower price when it's available, paying the ordinary price when it's not.

They can do that now, of course, but there's significant more complexity involved.

<comment><USER21> I'm no economist, but my suspicion is that the auto-termination is a key factor in maintaining a separate market value for this class of instances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They need to make it so that when you do an elastic mapreduce job, you can get the cheapest job that will finish in a specified amount of time.

<comment><USER4> _... the cheapest job that will finish in a specified amount of time._

And how exactly would you determine that? We're talking about a _spot_ market here -- and a large part of the supply comes from Reserved Instances which were purchased for disaster recovery purposes and aren't being used.

If a disaster strikes, the spot price will go up in a hurry.

<comment><USER22> Why would someone buy Reserved Instances for disaster recovery purposes? Why pay for them ahead of time if they aren't being used?

<comment><USER23> Because you want to make sure they're actually available when you need them, and that the rest of your primary providers customers haven't thought the same thing and fill EC2 to capacity before you get in there.

I know I wouldn't want to be the one to have to tell my boss that we couldn't get our DR setup running because we didn't have any contract in place that ensured capacity was available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _From an architectural point of view, because EC2 will terminate instances whose bid price becomes lower than the Spot Price, you'll want to regularly checkpoint work in progress_

Are they saying that they will kill your instances or kill the bids for instances??

<comment><USER6> Kill the instance itself. It recommends you back up your results frequently to, say, Amazon SimpleDB :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Glad to see companies finally getting onboard with this kind of pricing model and system, which has been around for years (econ 101).</comment>


Show HN: Hide Secret Messages In Facebook Photos With My Chrome Extension - <AUTHOR> http://www.owencampbellmoore.com/blog/2013/04/hide-secret-messages-in-facebook-photos-using-this-new-chrome-extension/ <comment><AUTHOR> I built this Steganography tool as a research project within Oxford University. The goal was for users to be able to communicate via Facebook without anybody being able to even detect the presence of a message, let alone the content.

This is a dramatic improvement over the 'dead-dropping' technique of communicating secretly by leaving emails in the draft box for others to receive without actually sending them.

The really notable thing about this extension is that the JPEGs it produces can handle recompression without the contained message being damaged. Simply strapping error correction onto Steganography doesn't work and this extension is based on a new algorithm for JPEG steganography which I explain in the paper linked from the article.

I'd love to get your feedback on the extension, let me know how you found it to use and let me know if there's anything I can do to make the experience easier!

<comment> 97-109-107 I'm the author of umshade (<http://umshade.it>), which aims to bring a chrome extension that provides proof-of-concept grade text-encryption to any website. Obviously I like what you did a lot. How much further are you taking it? What other approaches to UI/flows did you consider?

<comment><AUTHOR> How far I take it depends largely on feedback I receive. I have now completed this research project so in that capacity it is complete.

I considered a number of flows but eventually decided this was most discrete. Check out the paper I link to at the bottom of my post to read all about the options I considered and why I selected this one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Governments also do not have access to privately shared Facebook albums_

Don't count on it.

<comment><USER4> God you guys need to start wearing tinfoil hats

<comment><USER5> _God you guys need to start wearing tinfoil hats_

It's not really a secret: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDM3MqHln8U#t=3318s> (note that Facebook was specifically mentioned @ 56:07)

<comment><AUTHOR> He also specifically mentions 'cloud'. Just saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember reading an article where Al Qaeda is using the same practices for sending messages to hidden members via eBay (and other sites). Here is an article (not the same one I read, but the same topic): [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/30/science/physical/30STEG.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/30/science/physical/30STEG.html?pagewanted=all)

The article mentions government level detection software - but there is also open source software such as StegDetect (<http://www.outguess.org/detection.php>) which does a reasonable job of detecting steganography within images.

<comment><AUTHOR> As you say, it is very possible to build or use detectors for systems such as this. The advantage in this case is that 300+ million new photos are uploaded to Facebook every day so scanning them all would be highly computationally intensive. Governments also do not have access to privately shared Facebook albums so the risk of steganography being detected in a walled garden such as Facebook is much lower than for images shared on public websites such as eBay in the case of Al Qaeda in the past. In the past walled gardens have always recompressed JPEGs rendering previous steganography tools unusable - that is the true innovation this extension brings.

<comment><USER7> "Governments also do not have access to privately shared Facebook albums" ... yet! But either way it's really useful tool, I think my GF will love it.

<comment><USER8> I have always assumed that the NSA have a firehose feed running from Facebook to Fort Meade.

I can't imagine a reason why in the interests of national security, why they wouldn't have already approached Facebook with a secret request to get full access to all Facebook data, regardless of the user's privacy settings.

I have already proved to myself that when you delete something on Facebook, it is not actually deleted, but simply marked as archived. My guess is that they now also move the images, rather than delete them, to satisfy the previous outcry at deleted photos that were still "cached on the CDN". _cough bullshit_.

Once your data is on Facebook, you can never remove it. I don't trust them as far as I can throw a $1 billion company.

I'll take my tin-foil hat off now.

<http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/01/8701/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> the presence of steganography has long been detectable in images and audio. whether it can be decoded depends on the cipher (if any) that's used for the actual message, but this is a pretty poor way to hide your intent from anyone but the casual onlooker.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, if provided a folder of 10 images, one of which contained a secret message then detecting it would be trivial. For Facebook to do the same with 300+ million photo uploads daily would be certainly a non-trivial process. And govt agencies don't yet have full access to non-public albums so the risk of them downloading and scanning all images is also mitigated.

<comment><USER3> If they can handle recompressing 300+ million photos a day they could proabably add a quick check for steganograpic markers and dump those images off to a separate queue for further processing, if they were so inclined.

<comment><AUTHOR> The whole point of steganography is to not leave any markers. But yes, in theory they could scan them on upload but I'm not exactly sure what their prerogative to do so would be (unless the extension turns out to be used for terrorism that is). And plus, with that many photos to process the low false positive rate is going yo cause them huge problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did my own undergrad project on JPEG steganography, and I was surprised that section 2.6 accurately represents popular algorithms being implemented today. At the time it seemed to me that you got significantly better results than the naive algorithm when measuring visible differences and statistical anomalies in two ways...

1) Consider the _unquantised_ DCT coefficients. If the unquantised coefficient is 12, and the quantisation factor is 5, then the quantised value is round(12/5) = round(2.4) = 2. If you need to flip the LSB, then the F5 algorithm would change this to 1. My algorithm would have changed this to 3 instead as this was much closer to the unrounded 2.4.

2) Encode one bit into multiple quantised co-efficients. For example: If you only need to hide one bit in a block, xor together the LSB of all 64 quantised co-efficients and use that; if you need to flip it, then carefully choose the single co-efficient which produces the best result for your visual/statistical models. (I might have excluded the DC co-efficient, don't remember.) If you need to hide two bits, use half of the co-efficients for one bit, and half for the other, and so on. Conversely, this method could also be extended to so that one bit is encoded into multiple blocks.

Rather than a keyed shuffle, I simply required the secret message to be strongly encrypted. This appears to have the added advantage of a message with predictable statistical properties.

Note also that robustness was not one of my criteria at the time.

Hope this is of some value (or at least interest). And my apologies if I have some of the terminology wrong - this was nearly twenty years ago and I don't have the work in front of me right now!

<comment><AUTHOR> Just for clarity's sake, I use F5 to flip bits. Your suggestion in 1) makes sense to me, although I've not read of somebody trying this - if you have any more data on it I'd love to see it.

2) This general idea is a good one and the way it is used in steganography is Wet Paper Codes. These effectively provide options for how to encode short messages so you can select that which best matches the coefficients which already exist. A simple example:

Encode 00 as either 0000, 0001, 0010 or 0011 Encode 01 as either 0100, 0101, 0110 or 0111 And so on

Hence when we wish to send a 2-bit message we often only need to change a single bit in the coefficients to get to a correct code word.

Hence Wet Paper Codes are able to achieve a high ratio of bits transferred to bits flipped.

I'm sure a keyed shuffle is the right way to go, certainly also encrypting is helpful but I see no downside of more evenly spreading changes across an image using a shuffle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> RE: "These messages are hidden in photos so they cannot be detected by Facebook, Governments or prying friends."

I think this claim is overly broad and not particularly true. The NSA surely knows about steganography too. It's been around for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I've rephrased this sentence to be less strong. The gist is that although they could theoretically be detected it would be computationally infeasible for Facebook to do the scanning since they receive 300+ million new photos a day and with a database of about 250 billion photos even if the NSA could get access, they could never feasibly scan them all.

<comment><USER11> They don't have to scan them all. Only the ones uploaded by the people on their target list. As for access, I'm sure they have it. Regarding computational power, the NSA is generally reputed to have enough supercomputers to fill a football field. I'm sure their new data center in Utah will be greatly enlarging their capabilities.

I'd suggest you read James Bamford's three books on the NSA for further insight. (The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory.) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford#Books>

<comment><AUTHOR> Fundamentally you're correct. Honestly, if I thought this extension was going to be useful to terrorists I wouldn't have released it! In my write-up (linked at the bottom of the article) and also in the instructions it is clear that this is a toy application for hobbyists and is not appropriate for serious security uses.

Also, those books do look interesting, might go pick one up..!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You're relying on volume of photographic posts to hide encrypted content?

Could you perhaps include encrypted content in many more photographs to make the volume of encrypted content higher, thus increasing the work load of dealing with encrypted content?

I'm not sure how hard it is to detect this content. Try this experiment. Download a BBC tv programme (Horizon works) from a torrent. Edits out a short 3 minute clip. Upload the clip to Youtube. Youtube has very many videos uploaded every minute, yet they ban your clip almost instantly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Finding such clips is vital to YouTube's business. Detecting use of steganography isn't vital to Facebook so unless it becomes a very public issue (e.g. is widely used by terrorists) they are highly unlikely to integrate detectors for it.

Either way, this is a marked improvement over sending private messages on the Facebook or unencrypted emails (and sending encrypted emails is a very fast way to get noticed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Owen, I love your concept. And readers, forget being detected by ant-terrorist organizations, as long as you're not into that stuff! Worse=case scenario, even if some govt. agency inquires you, I'm sure you will pass their lie detector tests with ease since you're not really a terrorist :)

Congrats Owen, I can imagine some brilliant use cases for this already - <USER2> surprising your girlfriend on her birthday, etc. :)

Thank you for this wonderful extension :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool, I'm surprised this hasn't had more upvotes. Many years ago I wrote a CLI image steganography tool (with a PHP web interface at <http://incoherency.co.uk/tools/hideimage.php> ) but it didn't support JPEG re-compression and isn't nearly as awesome as yours.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's awesome! I had this idea for a while and I'm glad someone implemented it. Initially I thought about it being used for teens wanting to share secret messages among closed nit friends.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anyone else getting a 'Package is invalid. Details: 'Could not decode image: '128.png''.' when trying to install the extension from the Chrome Web Store?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've uploaded a new version with that image replaced just in case. Try again now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why did you build this for Facebook as opposed to other messaging clients or even email? It's pretty cool btw :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hundreds of steganography tools already exist for making images which can be shared on any medium where recompression is not an issue (<http://www.jjtc.com/Steganography/tools.html>). In this case I wanted to provide a simple user experience and also handle Facebook's recompression specifically.

In the future this tool could be extended to other sites which recompress images when they're uploaded although it would certainly be a more confusing user experience.

</comment></comment><comment> iso8859-1 Why not make it proper open source so it's not necessary to extract code from the PDF?

I'd like to use this from the command-line.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER18> Excellent reference implementation of a covert communication channel. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER19> What problem does this solve?

<comment><AUTHOR> Encryption provides the ability to communicate without any intercepter being able to read the content. In many cases this is fine, but in some cases using encryption software is enough to incriminate you (e.g. spies).

Hence steganography means that not only can your messages not be decoded, they can't be detected.

Specifically, this extension's innovation is allowing steganography on walled gardens such as Facebook which recompress images after uploading them.

<comment><USER19> I understand what steganography is, but what does this solve? Why would you want to send encrypted messages in a photo across facebook?

It just seems really inefficient way of sending an encrypted message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't see a message in the Before or After picture examples. Where is it?

<comment><USER21> The whole point is that the message isn't visible, and it's impossible to be able to tell if there even is a message.

The message is encoded in the image by very slightly changing the values of pixels (or some similar method). The message is only revealed with the browser extension

<comment><USER6> It's not necessarily impossible to detect that there is a message - there are plenty of ways to detect them. The challenge is being able to extract the message without access to the steganography algorithme used, and the passphrase (which could be bruce forced once you have access to the method used to hide/extract - which is a whole other challenge).

<comment><USER12> The whole point of steganography is to make it impossible to detect that a message is included.

Some people can encrypt their messages and send that encrypted message.

But for some people, in some oppressive regime, encrypting a message and sending it will result in torture. Those people not only have to encrypt the message, they have to hide the encrypted message.

Unfortunately there are very many proof of concept steganography sysems which demonstrate a concept. ("Let's alter the least significant bits in this gif image to hide a message.") These are usually trivially easy to detect, and often easy to disrupt.

This PoC is nice in that it avoids a common disruption - recompression of images - but it's still a proof of concept.

Since it's from Oxford I would have liked to see some kind of Chaffinch integration, and some discussion of how much cover text you need to make the steganographic text hard to find.

EDIT: Whoops! Sorry about Oxford / Cambridge mixup. I've left my mistake in place.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. You're precisely correct, the goal of this project was to demonstrate a PoC of a steganography algorithm which can avoid JPEG recompression and is hence suitable for use in walled gardens such as Facebook.

Also, Chaffinch is a Cambridge project so <sarcasm>naturally not worth integrating with.</sarcasm> But really, this was a single term's undergraduate research project so scope for such integration was thoroughly out of the question.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/appengine/ <comment><USER2> Why add another post? You could have commented on either of these...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157443> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157451>

</comment><comment><USER3> when it went live...I got following message

Unfortunately, space is limited during Google App Engine's preview release. As we expand, we'll invite more developers, but for now you'll have to wait.

Would you like to be notified by email when space becomes available?

url wasnt working 2 hours back

<comment><USER4> I did too, but I got an invite email about an hour later. Maybe I just got lucky.

<comment><USER5> Same here so probably not luck</comment></comment></comment>