Ask HN: Does anyone use online standup tools? - <AUTHOR> Was curious if anyone had experience/thoughts on online standup tools. I am debating if I should move our team from a typical standup to an online one. I see benefits being, people put more thought into the standup report. Sometimes I see engineers showing up to the standup and having to remember and plan on the go. <comment><USER2> I've previously run with a #standup channel in Slack for distributed teams, where everyone makes sure there's an update in-channel at 0900 GMT of what they did in the preceding time they worked.

Plus an #achievements channel where you make a note of anything you did that was significant (I've also heard this called #whathappened)

I'm doing some consulting on the side (while starting [https://getctx.io](https://getctx.io)) and at this client we have a daily physical standup with a video call on Zoom, plus #achievements in Slack.

<comment><AUTHOR> nice. Does everyone in the team follow the protocol and like it?

<comment><USER2> Yeah it works quite well. As usual, the biggest problems are with video and mics in meeting rooms with bad acoustics. Everything else is good.

#achievements works especially well because it gives a persistent, short-form log that people can read quickly when they come back from days off, for instance.

<comment><USER3> We minimized that problem by using a free app on a smart-phone that turned it into a microphone for the PC running the Skype call. Team members in the room would pass the phone around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found stand-ups problematic.

Often they are introduced, because...

...some higher ups have the feeling things aren't going their way.

OR

...some people aren't available for questions somehow and you want to pin them down for at least 10min a day to get some information out of them.

In both cases the stand-up is just a band-aid for deeper issues like missing or broken processes, Miscommunication or simple that no-one cares enough to talk to each other anymore.

<comment><USER5> Just like anything else, I've seen them done well, but also badly. My current stand-ups last probably 10 mins (never more than 15 mins). It generates questions and discussions that are carried out after the stand-up with a more focused group.

If you aim for "transparency" in your process and company culture, I think stand-ups are not intimidating and are not waste of time.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that talking with groups on a regular basis is a bad idea.

I just think, if such things have to happen synchronously every day, something is going wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google Hangouts is what my past few teams have used. Wanting people to put "more thought" into their standup report, however, may be a red flag. An update during standup _should_ be brief, and not result in the standup dragging on and on. No one wants to be there any longer than necessary, and if anything specific needs to be discussed, set aside time for that topic and only for the parties that need to be involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> agreed, may be more "thought" is not the right word. But have you been in situations when engineers show up and they are struggling to remember what they did yesterday?

<comment><USER6> That may be an argument for using a feature or ticket tracking system. If you've been assigned a feature (or "story", if you prefer) or a bug, there should never be a mystery as to what you're working on. And if you somehow forgot, a quick check would confirm what you were doing... in theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're using geekbot for asynchronous daily standups and it works really well, I love it. Fixes the notes problem as well, I check the standup notes when I'm wondering what I planned to do for today ;)

<comment><USER8> Agreed, we use geekbot as well. Our team is very distributed and asynchronous and it makes figuring out what everyone is up to and who needs a hand pretty easy. Also it helps going back through the channel to figure out what I was working on all week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My previous team was distributed (SF, TX, NY) used Geekbot in slack for standups, 9:30am local time it would prompt you to enter what you did yesterday, what you'll be working today and any blockers.

Geekbot worked good when people put thought into their reports, which was far from always - a lot of the time it'd be "yesterday: wrote code. today: will write code. blockers: everything is awful" which isn't hugely helpful for team synchronisation. That said, it was a lot better than when we tried using hangouts. With Hangouts we kept running into issues like: not socially acceptable for video conferences at desks in the SF office, and the SF people being in a conference room felt a lot more distant than the remotes on their PCs.

Current team is also distributed (same timezones as previous), but we do a highly structured standup in video conference where everyone is on equal footing signed on a workstation (instead of half being in a conf room).

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, I see a consensus around hangout and some structure. But for remote teams looks like a tool like geekbot would work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We have used Hangouts forever but just started switching to using Slack video calls in a #standup room. The audio and video quality on Slack far exceeds what you get on Google Hangouts. Although we do miss being able to manually dial in a participant that happens to be somewhere that has a spotty data connection. Slack doesn't perform very well in situations where the mobile data is sketchy.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've used a few in combination with conf calls by virtue of being on a few teams with remote workers. In those scenarios they are invaluable. I've never used them when the entire team is in the same room so can't vouch for that.

> Sometimes I see engineers showing up to the standup and having to remember > and plan on the go.

Standups are not "iceberg meetings." By having the team prepare for the standup all week you might be discussing things that have been organically solved, or that aren't pertinent to you or the rest of the team. If you care enough about something, you'll remember to bring it up during standup. If you take the old-school 2 hour Monday morning status meeting and call it a standup then you aren't doing standups.

If you need that thorough 2 hour status meeting, abandon agile. Don't put your engineers through the hell of reporting to two status update workflows.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. The point is not to prepare for the standup but be ready. WHat I mean is, in order for the standup to be efficient, engineers need to remember and be a little more organized in their thoughts for the benefit of others and making the standup more meaningful for the team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I used this timer: "Scrum Chatter", so that we have an equivalent time to speak... [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.rmen.androi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.rmen.android.scrumchatter)

<comment><AUTHOR> oh wow. someone manages the on and off of this app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We built a tool to solve this exact problem called Standup. [https://getstandup.com/](https://getstandup.com/). It produces daily progress reports for your engineering team by scanning git data.

We put our reports up the big screen every day during our in person Standups. Every engineer quickly runs through their work items and it definitely eliminates the whole "having to remember and plan on the go".

As a manager, I also love how it helps me catch up on my teams progress every evening as well.

<comment><USER14> This product is awesome. We use it every day. Excited to watch it as it grows and gets more features!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> We mostly dialin using Zoom, when we can't do the dial in (1-2x/week) the team uses the /standup bot for hipchat. [https://blog.hipchat.com/2015/08/20/meet- standup-bot/](https://blog.hipchat.com/2015/08/20/meet-standup-bot/)

It's also a team requirement that if for some reason a member cannot make the standup call they record their status in /standup

</comment><comment><USER16> I built Standup Jack (standupjack.com) to give you a chance to think thoughtfully about your current and upcoming tasks before sharing them with your team.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like [https://tatsu.io](https://tatsu.io) for slack standup meetings.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh wow, thats a new one. I am going to check this out. I like the idea that it is in a channel and not a bot directly.

<comment><USER18> Thank you!

I am the developer behind Tatsu. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or email support @.

We are working on the ability to use both the bot and the channel standups, FWIW.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Our team uses skype for business for our standup. We're spread all around Europe so we don't have the choice of an in-person meeting.

In my opinion they tend to take a little longer than a traditional standup but we do go more in depth when discussing issues we might be having. Usually it takes 15 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ours too. They end up being a little longer than I wish they were. Have you guys tried any kind of online tools for this? or would you keep preferring Skype? Something like jell.com

<comment><USER19> We haven't, it's working well for us that the need never became apparent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I lead a student group. Have a Standuply report setup to run once a week on Slack. Also have Trello. Adoption of both has been tepid. I like the premise of Standuply: the bot interviews everyone (you define the questions) and then publishes a report of all the responses (or lack thereof).

<comment><AUTHOR> Adoption is what I am curious about. Our teams love the physical presence or on video..

<comment><USER20> I think adoption has been poor because the pace of work has been slow, even though it shouldn't be -- Trello shows lots to work on. The team isn't afraid to share their accomplishments and thoughts. But they haven't been taking on tasks by their own volition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a team we use Hangouts for daily standups and it seems to work well for us. I work 40% remote and another team member is 100% remote. Screen sharing for Jira works, although we usually just do straight video.

</comment><comment><USER22> Slack channel for small teams and [https://idonethis.com](https://idonethis.com) for larger teams.

</comment><comment><USER23> We use Geekbot for Slack and it's pretty neat!

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you think they could improve on something? or its just what you need?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> We subsidise our physical / video standup with statushero.com. It definitely helps with engineer engagement!

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting.. it looks intimidating.... we already have a process in place.. one more tool might be a little too much for us..

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> We use standuply on slack. The team size is ~12 people. About half use it every day. Very useful.

</comment><comment><USER26> At current job we use a "standup" Slack channel in my group, works well enough.

</comment><comment><USER27> Zoom works well!

</comment><comment><USER28> Google Hangouts.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've seen them being used, eg. the /standup command in hipchat, but not a huge fan. Obviously Skype or similar for remote teams.

TBH I always think of standups as being as informal and brief as possible, and physical interaction promotes better comms within the team.

If it's causing real problems, why not suggest a low-tech solution like keeping notes?

<comment><AUTHOR> exactly, its not the problems I am worried about. I do think engineers coming to the standup with some thoughts just make the standup exponentially more useful. Totally agree with the informal-ness</comment></comment>


AB5: Who is there to advocate for regular software developers? - <AUTHOR> As a software developer consultant who is being badly hit by AB5, it struck me how established entities and professions with clout were able to get exclusions for their members (dentists, ieee members etc). It struck me that absolutely no powerful entity exists for software developers - I don't necessarily mean a union, just no one , powerful, professional body to advocate in a situation like AB5. The tech companies were absolutely silent, and everyone else was looking after their own. <comment><USER2> I've wondered the same. Might be possible for form an organization. Would need legal help as well to lobby for our group.

As far as being a software dev consultant under AB5, this is the best resource I've found on how to go about it, though I found it a bit to put together:

[https://insight.ieeeusa.org/articles/california-bill- ab-5-th...](https://insight.ieeeusa.org/articles/california-bill- ab-5-threatens-consultants/)</comment>


Sexy Lexing with Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.evanfosmark.com/2009/02/sexy-lexing-with-python/

<comment><USER2> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a bit like reinventing the wheel when PLY is around? <http://www.dabeaz.com/ply/>

There's another popular library that escapes me, too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wrote one of these a while back: <http://knot.appspot.com/e/simple-python- scanner>

For his example, it needs one more line:

      simple = Scan(
        IDENTIFIER = r'[\w_]\w*',
        OPERATOR = r'[-+\*=]',
        DIGIT = r'\d+(\.\d+)?',
        END_STATEMENT = r';',
        SPACE = r'\s+',
      )
      simple.ignore('SPACE')
      simple('foo = 5 * 30; bar = bar - 60;')
      # generates tokens.</comment>


Ask HN: Startup Idea for 2020? - <AUTHOR> What kind of service you would like to see in 2020?<p>Could be anything practical, from yet another bookmarking manager to hosted federated social network. Please provide features you want to see as well. <comment><USER2> Two ideas from myself.

DB schema diff tool generating reliable patch and migration. Practical and very difficult.

Occupancy sensor- something that is capable of sensing if desk is occupied. Privacy-friendly.</comment>


Lisp inventor John McCarthy on human progress and its sustainability - <AUTHOR> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/index.html <comment><USER2> I feel like any such discussion must address the fact that, globally, phytoplankton has declined by 40% in the past century. That's 40% of the base of the food pyramid for all ocean life. That's 20% of the plant life in the world, and accounts for 20% of the oxygen we breathe. Whatever is causing it, something significant is happening to the ecosystems of earth.

[http://wormlab.biology.dal.ca/ramweb/papers- total/Boyce_etal...](http://wormlab.biology.dal.ca/ramweb/papers- total/Boyce_etal_2010.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> What a refreshing and extensive analysis, based on research and hard numbers. You might not agree with John McCarthy, but at least he brings up clear, verifiable points of discussion. It's too bad that strident alarmism will always out-shout the more reasoned approaches to what is, fundamentally, a very important problem.

<comment><USER4> He's also provided my all-time favorite quote about how to think productively about the environment: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."

<comment><USER5> This is mostly a gimmick, though, because other people who uses arithmetic as he says manage to go to near opposite conclusions. His website is written such as his conclusions are claimed to logicallly follow the data, at least that's how I read it, and I think this is slightly disingeneous. For example, David Mc Kay and his website/book(<http://www.withouthotair.com/>) are mostly based on data in a similar fashion, and his consequences are radically different.

<comment><USER6> His conclusions are the same; the difference is in how he reacts to them.

> _If fast reactors are 60 times more efficient, the same extraction of ocean > uranium could deliver 420 kWh per day per person. At last, a sustainable > figure that beats current consumption! – but only with the joint help of two > technologies that are respectively scarcely-developed and unfashionable: > ocean extraction of uranium, and fast breeder reactors._

[http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_16...](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_164.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great article, but it might be more complete with a mention of the rising acidity of the oceans and how as the ph drops, many of the shelled animals at the bottom of the ocean food chain who depend on their shells for protection will not be able to form shells (the acidity eats away at the calcium carbonate) making a whole category of the food chain susceptible to extinction.

I appreciate the optimism in this article that humans are "on the right path", but the bottom line is humans have already caused a major disruption to the biosphere via carbon emissions, and the carbon emissions are still increasing which will have an effect of ocean life, thus humans.

I'd like to see more thought going into "helping people live better lives while living in balance with nature", rather than "We can expand the human species to 20 billion - let's do it!"

<comment><USER3> >>I'd like to see more thought going into "helping people live better lives while living in balance with nature"<<

Nature is inherently unbalanced:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature#Counter- argum...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature#Counter-arguments)

For instance, the biosphere has managed to royally mess itself up at least once:

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

(see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth#During_the_froze...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth#During_the_frozen_period) for some of the effects)

<comment><USER8> Aside from semantic arguments about what "balance" means, it's true that nature is a state of constant change.

When people talk about sustainability, they're acknowledging that humans can have an impact on nature, or more to the point, on our ability to sustain our own species. It's pretty fair to say that no matter how royally we mess things up, the biosphere will probably eventually "recover"... it'll simply be drastically different.

So, given that we can be agents of change in nature, it's not unreasonable to consider not only whether we can simply survive as a species, but whether we can or should show restraint with respect to the effects we have on the rest of the natural world.

McCarthy seems to be of the opinion that efforts thus far have been not just ineffective, but actually harmful to ourselves. That is to say, we're better off allowing progress to happen naturally without "artificially" trying to mitigate it. Others would appear to disagree, or at least still consider the pursuit of sustainability, in the popular sense, worthwhile.

<comment><USER3> >>It's pretty fair to say that no matter how royally we mess things up, the biosphere will probably eventually "recover"

That's not what I've argued, please read my comment again. On the contrary, my point is that the biosphere is a very unstable system, and there are no guarantees of "recovery" from anything. It can kill itself on a whim, and has come close to doing so in the geological past. In the long run, nature is a chaotic, not a homeostatic system, and "balance with nature" is an oxymoron.

<comment><USER8> >> It can kill itself on a whim, and has come close to doing so in the geological past.

I'm not sure what you mean by "close to" killing itself. In the geologic past, life itself has survived rapid toxic oxygenation, the complete freeze-over of the planet's surface, and the complete sterilization of surface life including boiling off the world's oceans. Microbial life still survived that last one in insulated rock miles below the surface. What catastrophe are you proposing we could induce that would do worse?

>> In the long run, nature is a chaotic, not a homeostatic system, and "balance with nature" is an oxymoron.

Now I invite you to read my comment again.

<comment><USER3> I've invited you to read my comment again because I felt you were mis- representing my point. Regarding the rest,

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

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_mars#Liquid_water>

Considering that there have been very severe extinction events in the past; that the best evidence we have for Mars indicates it sustained life in the past, and then lost it; it is special pleading to argue that life on Earth, or at least multi-cellular life, has some hypothetical property that will make it go on forever. On the contrary, the multitude of documented dangers, the suddenness and magnitude of shifts in the paleobiological record indicate that life on Earth may yet go completely extinct within a relatively short geological time span, even were all humans to commit suicide today.

<comment><USER8> I see what you are saying, but I don't agree. You are reversing the evidence in your assertions. There is no evidence that life has existed in the past on Mars. If there were, that would be fantastic, and many people believe such evidence will be forthcoming, but as of right now, there is none that is accepted in the mainstream.

As to your other point, the very fact that life on Earth has come close to extinction, and yet survived, so very many times indicates that there is an empirical (not theoretical) basis for my claim that life (in some form) tends to bounce back. The mechanism is the fact that bacterial and archael life forms live deep within insulated areas of Earth's crust and retain relatively (geologically speaking) modern genes for traits such as aerobic respiration. Survivorship bias does not imply that in some situations there are no survivors, that is a misapplication of the idea.

Now, it's certainly possible that life could be extinguished in a short geologic time span, that I don't refute. And of course, in around a billion years the sun's total radiative output will make life all but impossible on Earth's surface. But in the mean time, evidence suggests life is incredibly hardy.

I suspect, anyway, that we are talking at cross-purposes. The topic was sustainability vis a vis human activity. You rightly point out that we are not in total control, that things can go awry without our intervention. Nature is indeed a chaotic system. However, I suspect you do not disagree that we can choose to avoid certain paths that would inevitably lead to our own destruction. We probably can't avoid all of them, as we are not omniscient, but my main point is that it behooves us to think about it, and to attempt to act responsibly, not in a sense of maintaining the natural state of the world as a static equilibrium, but merely to survive as best we understand how.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 21901 hits since 1995 - little over 1000 hits a year. Let's see the HN effect now. [One hour later - 22797, a little way off 900 in an hour.]

\---

Reocities link for the rebuttal linked at the bottom of the article.

<http://www.reocities.com/RainForest/Canopy/2265/no_prog.htm>

<comment><USER3> He has a second counter that shows 350,000+ visits, but there's no explanation for the discrepancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A compelling article when it was written, and I think many of his potential solutions to problem have promise. But the article really suffers from not having been revised in the intervening years. For example, the view of oil is very '90s: everything will be fine until oil stops coming out of the ground, and then we'll have a crisis. But oil won't stop coming out of the ground for decades, so we have plenty of time to deal with it.

But the idea behind peak oil is that even a relatively small decline in oil can lead to drastic increases in prices, which would have devastating effects on the world economy. Peak oil isn't even addressed in McCarthy's writing, as far as I can tell.

Related is agriculture: McCarthy portrays it as an issue of water and arable land. But it's also an issue of fertilizer, and fertilizer production is dependent upon petroleum. So if we have a drastic spike in petroleum prices, that will lead to a drastic spike in fertilizer costs, which would lead to a drastic spike in food costs. See Egypt for an example of what happens when that occurs.

Finally, the Ehrlich/Simon bet. Again, compelling at the time, but the bet ended in 1990. 21 years ago. That's hardly a compelling statement on the state of the world in 2011. What would the result of that bet been had it been replayed from 2000 to 2010? From looking at this: <http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/> it looks like all 5 metals in the bet have risen in price over the last decade.

EDIT: I found one reference to peak oil on the Hydrogen page, but it's given no serious analysis.

<comment><USER11> For a more detailed analysis, see Re-litigating the Simon/Ehrlich Bet: [http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/02/re- litigating_t.ht...](http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2010/02/re- litigating_t.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> While it may be out of scope, it would be nice to see how he would address the increasing level of automation and its factors on classes, labor, wealth, and population.

<comment><USER13> I think Bastiat beat him to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I basically agree with the analysis, that technology makes human material progress potentially sustainable well beyond our current numbers.

Our biggest challenges are social and economic ones. First and foremost, is to push against the tides of conservatism on both the left and the right, which see sustainability as either a matter of "going back" or as unworthy of a goal at all.

<comment><USER15> Or, as he points, out, idealogical threats are the largest threats to humans. People blindly following idealogies and ignoring data is the most likely thing to cause large-scale deaths.

<comment><USER16> Or to put it more simply, humans are the greatest threat to humans. Always have been. When people talk about evolution, they usually use the example of running away from a lion or some such. But it's much more likely you were running away from another person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have read through these pages. Undoubtedly many of the things he states, particularly with respect to how long nuclear energy could supply us, are correct but _only_ under the assumption that we don't continue to increase our usage of energy. It's hard to see how that assumption holds in a world that is continually growing its economies. Exponential functions grow very fast. (See <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY>)

You may then counter that a decoupling of economic growth from its material and energy underpinnings is possible. This has yet to be effectively proven. We have only seen partial decoupling so far. For more information on this see the writings of Tim Jackson in his book Prosperity without Growth.

I also urge you to download this spreadsheet (from the BP website) showing the growth in usage of fossil fuels (<http://tinyurl.com/2yhx7d>). We may find alternatives to these but if we do, we will have to bring the alternatives online at roughly the same level to supply our societies with the energy they now require to function. This is no easy feat. It's good know, quantitatively, just what's required.

</comment><comment><USER18> That's how web pages were back in 1991, and how they should look again in the future: just plain raw content and links, no frills and graphic fluff.

<comment><USER19> why?

the readability of many modern pages is considerably improved over plain text.

<comment><USER20> Oh, is that so? Last I checked, people frequently install browser plugins just to turn modern pages back into single-column plain text pages.

<comment><USER21> This page is no exception, looks way better in readability than it does by default. The main issues are the 100% width and the font/size.

<comment><USER20> Sure, but the font and size are exactly what you are free to control as you please with your browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember reading through these pages back when I learned about McCarthy, probably 10 years ago or so. I think he's a born optimist, like I'm a born pessimist. He fails to mention fresh water shortages around the world, too. And a couple of other huge pending problems of the sort. I'd like to see convincing information that we are not currently in overshoot...

</comment><comment><USER23> In the tradition of the late Julian Simon <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon> This will make John McCarthy reviled in some fashionable circles. I wonder if he speaks with Stanford Prof. Paul Ehrlich.

<comment><USER14> Although I come from a very different economic and social perspective, I can appreciate the effort that went into this page, regardless. There seems to be some good information here, no matter if you agree completely with his perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd also be interested to see what the people of HN think about this essay I wrote about long term energy needs:

<http://seanseefried.com/blog/files/22-june-2008.html>

<comment><USER22> Looks interesting. You should submit it on its own. In fact combined with The prof. Bartlett videos (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY>) it makes quite a good usage of arithmetic to counter McCarthy point of view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> all these human progress discussions imply, or bounded by, one hypothesis - there will exist only one species of humans. Is divergence of the species into 2 or more is such an unprobable event?

<comment><USER25> No, no they really aren't. There is essentially no dependence on "humans" in that discussion. "Intelligent species" can be substituted with no loss or even substantial change in meaning. The point is that an intelligent, active technological civilization is not intrinsically unsustainable. Bringing up your point would just open a distracting side discussion not terribly relevant to the author's point.

<comment><USER24> >an intelligent, active technological civilization is not intrinsically unsustainable.

that would be bad. No need to evolve in any cardinal way. Only needed changes would be minor adjustments to fit humans most comfortably into the tecnological civilization cradle. Just like dinosaurs who evolved to fit most comfortably into their Earth dominating niche ... until the meteor stroke, super vulcanos erupted , etc...

Anyway, i don't agree that technological civilization is not intrinsically unsustainable. The civilization has already established its exponential nature. Good thing about exponentially increasing speed is quickly hitting whatever natural limits are there, and that induces need for change. Yes, in many cases we naturally prognose (McCarty incl.) the response to be a new improved technology. Yet, artificially limiting human species response to a need for change only to technological type of responses seems ... artificial.

<comment><USER17> The problem with running up against the limits is that it isn't always pretty. I've heard it said that "all exponential functions are really S-curves" which in this situation would correspond to a civilisation gracefully decreasing its growth as it approached the limits.

However, other curves are possible too. Overshoot and collapse can also occur.

The S-curve scenario can only happen under the following circumstances. a) the limits are recognised by us b) they are responded to immediately with no delay.

Another scenario, called "overshoot and oscillation" occurs when: a) there is a delay in the response b) AND the the limits that we have exceeded recover quickly. i.e. the limits are no erodable.

"Overshoot and collapse" occurs when we erode some resource that does not recover quickly. Unfortunately, I can think of many resources that are very erodable. The most obvious being fossil fuels which take millions of years to replace themselves. Top-soil and biodiversity are also examples of highly erodable resources.

<comment><USER26> [http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/3246/201102stmatthewislan...](http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/3246/201102stmatthewisland.png)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


StrongSwan – IPsec VPN for Linux, Android, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Windows - <AUTHOR> https://www.strongswan.org/ <comment><USER4> Seeing all the complaints in here of how hard this is to setup brings back memories. I was the lead consultant on a project between a very large US retailer and Centrify to build a product called DirectSecure. It's generally very easy to deploy IPsec policy in a Windows environment via GPO and the customer wanted that to flow down into their _nix environments. Centrify, having good hooks in to AD already, was chosen to build a product that did just the same thing in their_ nix environments by consuming IPsec configuration out of GPO.

While not a sales pitch, and in fact I don't think the product seems to have sold well anyway, it was very interesting to work with them on the test harness we built to validate correct IPsec operations, configuration, validation that data wasn't leaking outside of the SAs that were being provisioned, and performance via the translated policy. The relatable component was this was mainly done against StrongSwan implementations of the IKE daemon if I remember correctly (Linux, AIX and Solaris mainly). I wonder if any of those bits flowed back upstream or if the bolt-on aspect kept that from happening.

StrongSwan isn't complex if you are well versed in IPsec implementation as a whole. It's no more or less complicated than other implementation and is "better" than TLS in it's own right with regard to things that could go wrong. In static environments it's relatively painless once the learning curve is overcome.

That being said I feel like IPsec has a badge it will never get rid of and people discard it before attempting implementation at this point. Hopefully, as mentioned amongst the comments, things like WireGuard will mature and become more mainstream. I very much like the concept carry over that both IPsec and WireGuard can be silent actors within the network not giving away hosts as things like OpenVPN and SSH do. IPsec can, unfortunately, also be implemented to squawk at spurious connection attempts - but at least doesn't rely on the premise as much as things like OpenVPN and SSH do.

And for the record - you can tell someone who's dealt with IPsec extensively since they won't refer to it as IPSec. o_O Microsoft is notorious for getting it wrong.

<comment><USER5> For an easier way, try Algo. Algo is a set of Ansible scripts that helps you deploy a fully functional StrongSwan IPSEC server with the most secure settings available:

[https://github.com/trailofbits/algo](https://github.com/trailofbits/algo)

It even generates Apple profiles to auto configure your iPhone!

<comment><USER6> I have a simple bash script that does something similar, including the Apple profile, and also gets you a Let's Encrypt server cert that auto-renews.

[https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup](https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup)

<comment><USER5> Bash is not idempotent, using a public CA has downsides, and MSCHAP has known weaknesses that make the crypto easier to bruteforce.

<comment><USER6> Right. On the other hand, a Bash script has a low barrier to entry, it's handy not to have to install certificates on the client, and the highest possible security is not always top priority (if, for example, you're just trying to evade your government's illiberal bulk domain/IP address collection policies). Swings and roundabouts, I'd say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We use Strongswan to secure host to host connections using pre-shared key when setting up Kubernetes clusters in simple VPS providers like DigitalOcean. This is important since DO, Linode etc does not provide private network. Flannel works with it transparently to provide a Kubernetes-aware ip network.

You can see our work here: [https://github.com/appscode/swanc](https://github.com/appscode/swanc)

<comment><USER8> That's pretty cool. I've considered doing things like that to set up a secure overlay network to lock down a 'sort of' private l2 network.

Any reason you didn't use weave?

<comment><USER7> I have never tried Weave. But StrongSwan sets up host to host tunnel using Ikev2. So, it should probably work with weave. If you find problems, please let me know in github issues.

<comment><USER8> Ah.. weave has built in encryption, so you would probably use that by itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've seen this implemented quite usefully in a corporate environment and for container-container communication; but attempting to set it up for my personal use was an absolute disaster. A bit over a week spent trying to make it work, and it never did.

OpenVPN worked just fine, but I could never make StrongSwan work at all. Which is a shame, I really wanted to have an easy-to-use VPN for my phone and so forth. Settled on OpenVPN, which worked well enough with the iOS clients.

<comment><USER10> OpenVPN is SSL VPN, relatively easy to setup, it operates in transport layer. strongSwan (IPsec) works in layer 3.

To properly install and configure strongSwan, following the tutorials available over the Nnternet is not enough. One needs to have basic networking knowledge (NAT, iptables in particular), good understanding of IPsec protocol suite (including IKE, AH, ESP), PKI, Linux skills and etc.

This is a good reference but still needs the knowledge mentioned above to get it to work: [https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/IPSEC_vpn_with_Ubuntu_16.04.h...](https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/IPSEC_vpn_with_Ubuntu_16.04.html)

<comment><USER11> OpenVPN isn't really an SSL VPN. In one of the major modes (preshared key), TLS isn't used at all. In client-server mode, TLS is only used for session negotiation (keys, options, user/pass) and the rest goes over their own protocol and doesn't use TLS at all. And even then it isn't TLS over TCP directly, but TLS over OpenVPN's own protocol.

For whatever reason, OpenVPN is way easier to get up and running. Little knowledge required. UDP overhead is minimal.

t. Recently implemented an OpenVPN client from scratch.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for pointing out, good insight. Haven't really done a deep dive for OpenVPN as strongSwan works perfectly fine for pretty much all my use cases.

However, strongSwan (IPsec) is easy to block (e.g. if detected by big brother - GFW in China) as by default is uses UDP ports 500, 4500, while OpenVPN can easily disguise as SSL/TLS or anything. In that sense, OpenVPN can be a backup for IPsec for remote access (fighting censorship).

<comment><USER11> OpenVPN cannot disguise as SSL/TLS - every packet has an OpenVPN header, so it won't look like, say, an HTTPS connection. And the data packets do not use TLS at all. It would not take much effort at all to detect that a stream is using OpenVPN. Every data packet will start with the same few bits regardless of encryption options used. And the start of a new session has a recognizable sequence of initial bytes, again, regardless of the options used.

Whether or not firewalls are doing enough DPI to figure this out is another question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With the 4000 LOC Wireguard [https://www.wireguard.io/](https://www.wireguard.io/)

what are the incentives to continue using IPsec or Strongswan?

<comment><USER13> Because IPSec is natively supported by many OSes out-of-box, while Wireguard doesn't seem to have even third-party packages for many systems?

<comment><USER12> Sure, but if you care about security you won't mind installing it.

<comment><USER14> WireGuard is not production ready.

> Warning: WireGuard is currently under heavy development, and therefore any > installation steps here should be considered as experimental. Please do not > rely on WireGuard at this stage. We are rapidly working toward a first > release that we will consider secure and ready for widespread usage, but > that time has not yet come.

[https://www.wireguard.io/install/](https://www.wireguard.io/install/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd only use StrongSwan if an OpenBSD gateway is not an option. Configuring IPsec IKEv2 on OpenBSD is very simple.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I moved over to OpenBSD from FreeBSD because of their no-bullshit approach to supporting IPSEC -- everything just worked out of the box.

I was thrilled when FreeBSD added IPSEC support in 11-RELEASE, but was less excited to learn that IPSEC_NAT_T wasn't compiled in, making it impossible to use strongswan. Oh well, maybe in 11.1 :)

<comment><USER17> > I was thrilled when FreeBSD added IPSEC support in 11-RELEASE

You're welcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I set this up a few weeks ago on a linux vps I'm using for dev. IPSEC with IKEV2 and certificates. Native clients on windows 10 and Ubuntu laptop (needed a network-manager plugin to be built), and took the shortcut and used the StrongSwan app on android.

The process was complex and there are things I still don't understand but it does work and the documentation and examples are quite comprehensive. The only issue I had with them was they assume a fair amount of familiarity with subjects that I didn't have. I'm mainly a serverside developer not a network admin, and whilst I have a vague understanding of how certs work I didn't have much awareness of VPN protocols or terminology so I had to abuse google pretty thoroughly.

It took about a day to do and I had to watch logs from server and client to figure it out, but it was interesting. I'm still pleased with the results and would recommend the product.

</comment><comment><USER19> On the subject of VPNs, if people find *swan or Openvpn difficult to get working, I highly recommend OpenConnect (ocserv); _so_ easy to setup.

It's an open source implementation of the Cisco AnyConnect SSL vpn, works great and it's compatible with the AnyConnect clients.

<comment><USER20> Any good Ansible (or other) recipes for this? One I found is [0] but can you point to any others?

[0] [https://github.com/ftao/vpn-deploy- playbook/tree/master/role...](https://github.com/ftao/vpn-deploy- playbook/tree/master/roles/ocserv)

<comment><USER19> No idea, sorry. But doing it manually only takes 5 minutes: [http://www.infradead.org/ocserv/recipes-ocserv- configuration...](http://www.infradead.org/ocserv/recipes-ocserv- configuration-basic.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the reasons ipsec is tricky to understand is it doesn't create virtual interfaces like most other vpn systems on linux. With something like openvpn you can run tcpdump on eth0 / tun0 to figure out what is going on. With ipsec there's no 'ipsec0' interface and the way it works is a little more 'magic'.

</comment><comment><USER21> During the past holidays, at my parent's, I set up some infrastructure to allow remote management of some network equipment and computers. I used to employ OpenVPN for this, but I decided to give IPsec a try. Since I have been learning CentOS, initially I went with RedHat's suggested option: Libreswan.

I tried and tried, yet couldn't get it to work. Documentation surely was lacking for Libreswan. But then I found Strongswan, and after a few more attempts I managed to set a tunnel as I wanted it. The documentation is much more complete, and the examples were specially helpful.

I am baffled by the choice made by RedHat, to use Libreswan as their official IPsec implementation. It gave me a "beta" feel, while Strongswan seems more solid. Plus the difference regarding documentation is like night and day.

</comment><comment><USER10> strongSwan is the best free and open source IPsec implementation available on Linux, (much better than libreswan...), good documentation, use cases and examples etc, good quality of code (less bugs - that's what we've found running it in production for 2+ years with 500+ instances deployed) actively developed and maintained by a group of passionate developers that knows the stuff well.

Personally I've been using strongSwan since its 5.0.x for remote access - protect privacy and fight censorship (yes, originally from China where the infamous GFW is deployed...). The native strongSwan client for Android is also a killer feature worth mentioning, RSA authentication with X509 certificates works flawlessly with 1 click ;-)

My company (pre-IPO startup) has been using strongSwan for 2+ years as site- to-site solution from AWS VPC to on-premises data centres (or other cloud virtual network), with 500+ instances deployed, track record has proved it reliable as long as it's properly configured (most outages were caused by AWS maintenance ;-) The only drawback is that strongSwan currently does NOT have a mature HA solution but it's shaping up (5.4.0 introduced IKEv2 redirect). We are currently building a custom HA solution (designed to work in VPC - <USER2> similar redundancy to AWS VPN but a lot more flexible and controllable) using strongSwan (have to use route-based as syncing 2 policy based instances are too hard or impossible).

NOTE: I've seen people mentioned L2TP, it is obsolete. L2TP does NOT provide encryption or confidentiality to traffic passes through it. L2TP/IPsec encapsulates data twice at layer 2, it has pros and cons. See this (may be out-dated) -> [https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/4147/pptp-vs-l2tp-vs-openvpn- vs...](https://www.bestvpn.com/blog/4147/pptp-vs-l2tp-vs-openvpn-vs-sstp-vs- ikev2/)

IKEv{1,2} + IPsec (ESP) (tunnel mode) with PFS for both ike and esp is recommended configuration.

As mentioned in another comment: To properly install and configure strongSwan, following the tutorials available over the Internet is not enough, it requires good networking knowledge (NAT, iptables in particular), understanding of IPsec protocol suite (including IKE, AH, ESP), PKI, Linux skills and etc.

A good reference to start with: [https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/IPSEC_vpn_with_Ubuntu_16.04.h...](https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/IPSEC_vpn_with_Ubuntu_16.04.html)

<comment><USER22> Yup, it's the most actively maintained branch of all the XXXswan projects.

My experience has been that it's trivial to setup for site-to-site IPSec tunnels using PSK. It's literally install the package, copy a config file from the docs, start the service, done. I've been using it in scenarios like this for a while, works great even when the remote ends of the tunnel are something else (Cisco appliances, AWS VPN endpoints, etc).

I'm a little less sure how to implement it as a VPN endpoint for employees. There are two main issues here:

1\. Having to support a variety of clients (Android, iOS, Mac OS X - <USER3> also Windows and Linux)

2\. Doing multifactor authentication in a way that works well

Especially when considering #1 and #2 together, it seems difficult to meet all demands. How to do multifactor in a way that works with many different clients? I don't much care what the "factors" are as long as they are "multi". E.g. certificate + individual password.

If I only had to support, say, user/pass authentication, I think that would be somewhat easily doable.

Any clues?

<comment><USER23> No idea for #1, but regarding multifactor, I've used Strongswan with Feitian PKI smartcards. Basically, I have one card that I set up as a CA and use to sign CSRs for "user" smartcards as well as for the VPN servers. You need to have your card and PIN to connect. The private keys are stored on the cards - no PSKs. This is something cool to do if you are cheap. You may be able to do this with Yubikeys, though I haven't tried this.

[https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/SmartCa...](https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/SmartCards) [https://github.com/OpenSC/OpenSC/wiki/Feitian-PKI- card](https://github.com/OpenSC/OpenSC/wiki/Feitian-PKI-card)

edit:

Some quick and dirty instructions to generate keys/certs that you can use with a Linux or Android client:

git clone [https://github.com/ramann/smartcard- pki](https://github.com/ramann/smartcard-pki)

cd smartcard-pki

git checkout vpn-phone

# Edit etc/vpn_server.conf to use your server's IP address

bash -x <(cat README.md | grep '`' | tr -d '`') # You really should generate the VPN server's key & request on the VPN server, but this is just to get something working

# Move vpn_server_key.pem, ca/signing-ca.crt, certs/vpn_server.crt, certs/phone.pem to your VPN server's /etc/ipsec.d/

# Edit your VPN server's /etc/ipsec.conf so that leftcert=vpn_server.crt and rightcert=phone.crt

# To set up your Android phone, just import the phone-and-ca.pfx file

# To set up your Linux client (Ubuntu 16.04 in my case), move phone_key.pem, ca/signing-ca.crt, certs/vpn_server.crt, and certs/phone.crt to /etc/ipsec.d

# Edit your client's /etc/ipsec.conf so that leftcert=phone.crt and rightcert=vpn_server.crt

# To start server: sudo ipsec start

# How to start the Android client should be obvious.

# To start linux client: sudo ipsec start; sudo ipsec up connection_name

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is indeed a bit of a pain to set up properly, but it can be done, I have a droplet running it 24/7 and have no problems connecting to it from Apple devices. Here are some helpful guides for setting up:

[https://www.zeitgeist.se/2013/11/22/strongswan-howto- create-...](https://www.zeitgeist.se/2013/11/22/strongswan-howto-create-your- own-vpn/)

[http://www.jfcarter.net/~jimc/documents/strongswan-1308.html](http://www.jfcarter.net/~jimc/documents/strongswan-1308.html)

<comment><USER18> Both of these were immensely helpful resources to me when I did this last month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> When I was looking to replace my OpenVPN server for a cloud based VPN one thing I wanted was to use the OS native VPN solution. Everything pointed me to L2TP/IPSec, I am wondering why I would choose IKEv2 over that.

<comment><USER26> First off, IKEv2 _is_ IPSec. IPSec tunnels are either IKEv1 or IKEv2.

The advantages:

* It has a streamlined/faster key negotiation protocol. IKEv2 tunnels can be established in a fraction of the time it takes for IKEv1 negotiation, especially when negotiating multiple SAs.

* More robust integrity algorithms which can detect and re-establish a tunnel faster.

* It supports EAP, so in client/server mode (vs. tunnel mode) you can attach it to an AAA server to assign IP addresses and do user authentication, making L2TP and shared secrets unnecessary. (Note that when using IKEv2 for IPSec tunnels, one still must use either a shared secret or certificates for authentication.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anyone knows if Docker is using IPsec in some interoperable mode? They say here that they are using IPsec: [https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/networking/overlay-...](https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/networking/overlay- security-model/)

</comment><comment><USER28> StrongSwan is a real powerhorse, even though a bit of a b*tch to configure to work out-of-the-box on most platforms. The documentation is scarce and the wiki was a bit out of date IIRC.

I'm using it on my VPS, with my Mac as a client to bypass the UK big brother, and on Android to bypass tethering blocks (in conjunction with the Tether app)

<comment><USER22> For site-to-site PSK tunnels it's really trivial to setup. Just install the package, copy/paste a config from the docs, add the PSK on both sides, and start the service. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am, you're done.

<comment><USER29> And if it doesn't work, there's plenty of forum posts available listing the same symptoms. No solutions usually, but at least you're not suffering alone!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This works great for me to connect my Meraki MX-series firewall into my AWS VPC.

</comment><comment><USER31> I could never get this to work. Tried for quite a while and just gave up.

</comment><comment><USER32> Good luck getting 2fa working

<comment><USER33> What are you using for 2fa?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This seems great, but what would I actually use this for?

e: Everybody says that using a VPN is a "good thing" but I honestly can't find a use for one in my day-to-day.

<comment><USER35> You really don't have to worry about all this if you're asking.

Most people use VPN for security purposes. Now, when I mention security, there's various kinds. It can vary from hiding from state-attackers, to not wanting to be surveilled, to just torrenting stuff to avoiding a nasty letter from your ISP.

If you have nothing to worry about in the last paragraph, then the other case is organisational policies or accessibility. Routing all client traffic through a companies server because some companies' internal servers only allow requests from whitelisted IPs and drop all other packets. Of course, as a consumer/employee this is not something you have to worry about but it is something for sysadmins, and/or the security person who makes decisions at a company. And looks like there are a few of those in this thread. Hence all these discussions.

If you want to get into using VPNs, I'd suggest getting a server online first, something from digital ocean, AWS or Gcloud. If you want something super cheap, I suggest OVH's VPS. And the best tutorials in my opinion are from Digital Ocean[1]. If you only know how to use Ubuntu, here's[2] what you want.

[1]:[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tags/vpn?type=tutoria...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tags/vpn?type=tutorials)

[2]: [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- set-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an- openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-16-04)

<comment><USER36> Here is a nice tutorial for getting the excellent Streisand privacy server up and running on Digital Ocean.

[http://jerrygamblin.com/2016/07/10/the-vpn-you-should-be- usi...](http://jerrygamblin.com/2016/07/10/the-vpn-you-should-be-using/)</comment></comment></comment>


In France, Comic Books Are Serious Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/books/france-comic-books-angouleme.html <comment><USER2> BD are a perfect example of one the french biggest weakness : we have awesome things, and we don't know how to sell them.

We do that all the time. The minitel. The credit card chips. Hell the TGV should have been everywhere, and we struggle to sell it to a few countries.

We are a superpower with only 70 millions of people working a mere 35 hours a week and so many occasions to skip work. That's damn impressive.

France could really shine more, technologically and culturally.

Did you know that the biggest (in term of sheer content mass, quality is more subjective) Python blog is a french one ? I know, because I wrote it. 1k articles, 700 being about python.

But it's like being french is a curse that forces you to do great things... And let them stuck in france forever.

<comment><USER3> I don't see why you say that french BD follow the same fate as some of the other things you talk about.

From personal experience, growing up in India we always had either Astérix or Tintin to read. Even some of the lesser known works such as those by Giroud were available.

Now that I have been living and working in France for 6 years, one possible reason for this lack of penetration of french products is the language. There is very little effort to actually make the products accessible to the world at large. Now we may discuss the merits and demerits of this but the fact remains that if we want our products to be known all over the world, we have to make it known to the world. And most of the world speaks English.

Mes deux centimes.

<comment><USER4> Except Tin Tin is Belgian..

<comment><USER5> ... and Rene Goscinny (the author of Asterix) was born in Poland...

<comment><USER6> He's born in Paris. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Goscinny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Goscinny)

<comment><USER7> And lived in Argentina, Buenos Aires from the age of 2 to 18. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Goscinny#Early_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Goscinny#Early_life)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The name "comic" is totally wrong. The french name "bande dessine" illustrates better what it's all about. Take Pyongang by Guy Deslisle for instance. Since no one is allowed to take photos in many places north Korera, he created a "comic" book instead.

<comment><USER9> To be honest as a French, I don't mind everyone talking about "comics" when referring to French and Belgian graphic novels.

It might not capture all the depth of what it really is but at least everyone understands.

<comment><USER10> Do French and Belgian comics / comic artists share some relationship? (Or did you just pull that out randomly because of "Asterix & Obelix" and Tintin? :).

<comment><USER11> Franco Belgian is a specific style. It's been a very close relationship between France and Belgium: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco- Belgian_comics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Belgian_comics)

<comment><USER10> That's interesting! On a slight tangent - So did both Tintin and Asterix start out as "strip comics" leading to their popularity?

<comment><USER11> I can't say for Astérix. For Hergé, the author of Tintin, he did start his career by doing publication in newspapers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herg%C3%A9#Totor_and_early_car...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herg%C3%A9#Totor_and_early_career:_1925%E2%80%9328)

It's quite interesting to observe then all the changes that happened between the multiple publication of the same story: [https://tintinomania.com/tintin- dans-ses-cases](https://tintinomania.com/tintin-dans-ses-cases)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > But in France, at least, comic books were taken seriously as an art form, > Peeters said. "When I was a young author I came from a more literary world," > he said. "People said, 'What are you doing with comics? You are a clever > person. You should work with movies or literature.' Now, nobody would say > that."

Contrast this with a petition initiated and signed by a collective of authors, including Benoît Peeters: [https://collectifartistesauteurs.tumblr.com/post/17004407655...](https://collectifartistesauteurs.tumblr.com/post/170044076551/la- hausse-récente-de-la-csg-pour-lensemble-des)

Maybe the art form is _taken seriously_ , yet over half of the comic books, authors cannot make a decent living off this profession in France today.

<comment><USER13> The golden age of Belgo-French comic artists and authors may have been 1960-1990, at least all my favourite series are from this time. They are incredible to this day and always a pleasure to reread. Like Yoko Tsuno by Leloup, Gaston by Franquin, Spirou & Fantasio (esp. the books my Tome and Janry), Valerian and Veronique by Mézières and Christin, Asterix and Obelix, and many more. I'm pretty content that for the length of my childhood, I could read through an entire treasure trove of works that already existed, and wait more the latest ones. Except for the Disney Duck universe, all the other American comic books look very much subpar in quality in direct comparison, regardless of whether in print or as movies, esp. the super hero ones.

Sad to see the industry turn this way.

<comment><USER14> How could you miss Tintin?

<comment><USER13> We call it "Tim and Struppi" here. Never liked it very much. Though I also forgot e.g. Lucky Luke which I liked very much. There are quite a lot good series.

I'm trying to remember the name of one specific comic or series though: sci-fi theme, floating city in space, many different races live there, there is an elite humanoid alien race with blue skin and 6 eyes in 2 columns, with blue blood wearing skin-tight shiny armor, with psycho-kinetic powers, human male poses as one of them and kills a female alien possibly to steal her power, steals also her space ship, IIRC a chase through the space city ensues.

Maybe somebody knows the book, I absolutely cannot remember if this is from Valerian or something else, any hint would be grately appreciated. I think I read it last 20 years ago. Text was in German. Typical Carlsen/Egmont comic book format.

Edit: It's NOT Yoko Tsuno "City of the Banished Ones". Different series or one-shot.

<comment><USER15> French here. Your description reminds me a hell of a lot of Valerian and Laureline "Sur les frontières" : [https://www.amazon.fr/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field- keywords=978220...](https://www.amazon.fr/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field- keywords=9782205046656&tag=bedefr-21)

You should check it out.

(Not sure about the actual translated English title, but a literal translation would be "On the frontiers")

Most Valerian comics are great by the way, and they all have been republished recently, at least in France (and probably also US because of the -rather disappointing- Besson's movie)

<comment><USER13> YES – that's exactly it, I remember the cover. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> France regulates books prices very heavily (a.k.a it's a single price for every single distribution point), meaning there's little to no interest buying books online / at a mall (except convenience sometimes). In contrast, it allows a dense network of specialized libraries to maybe not thrive, but at least survive.

In turn, those libraries create events, participate to the cultural life of their neighbourhoods, create social links.

In the end, it makes it very easy to find a book store, get good advice, create links with sellers (I spend hours talking with the shopkeeper at my comics place), and take an interest in the medium.

So it's not really a random singularity happening there, but also in part the result of a very specific books policy. And of course, the cultural legacy is also super strong !

<comment><USER17> The appeal of buying books online is not just the price, but the available of a larger catalogue. There is only so many titles a single physical bookshop can stock and display.

<comment><USER16> I understand that, but honestly, picking a comic among 10000 or 100000 titles isn't really a different experience for me, in both cases the number is "enough".

Having a knowledgeable shopkeeper to talk with on the other hand is really a fantastic experience for me !

<comment><USER18> > Having a knowledgeable shopkeeper to talk with on the other hand is really a > fantastic experience for me !

This is a fairly rare experience for bookstores in some of the U.S. geographies I've lived in.

The shopkeepers I encounter aren't widely-read or intellectuals. They're either college students working at slightly above minimum wage to pay for school, or ex-hippies with lots of used books in their garage who figured they could make some money selling them. They have no sense of the intellectual pulse of today (they don't know what ideas are popular), don't have a good mental semantic tree of authors and their works, and worst of all, aren't readers themselves. I don't expect bookstore owners to have the omnivorous interests and breadth of Tyler Cowen, but they should at least have intellectual curiosity and a love of books.

The only exceptions are bookstores near great universities, where the owners tend to be stragglers who loved their university town so much that they stayed. They're usually former English lit, philosophy or other humanities majors who continue to read widely. You can tell a bookstore is good by the quality of their curation -- really good bookstores understand space is a premium and don't stock junk.

That said, you also need someone with a mind for business. Unfortunately this confluence of skills doesn't occur regularly so we live with what we have.

<comment><USER19> What geographies?

<comment><USER18> Don't want to be too specific, but let's say rust belt cities with no top ranked colleges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I moved from the UK to [redacted] last summer (yes due to Brexit before you ask) and they do indeed take comic book and related things _very_ seriously.

You are never far from a place selling comic books, graphic novels, trading card games, action figures and such.

Another thing I find _different_ to what I am used to is how they all still buy DVDs and Blurays. Not just the odd one here and there but regularly and have a pretty impressive collection. What I find interesting is that they have _good_ internet here. I got 1Gbit fibre with a whole host of extra (TV package, landline, SIM with 50GB data) for €55/month. And it has been perfect since I got it installed a few months back. I would have thought with such fantastic internet access they would all be using streaming services but nope they love their physical discs!

Edit: And not just movies but full TV show boxsets. Those are like €100-200 !!

I sat down to work out the value difference between a few streaming sites and how much they pay for physical media and streaming is _way_ cheaper as DVDs and Blurays are _not_ cheap! I know you can sell it on but it seems nobody does. They are often given away! It is quite alien to me.

<comment><USER21> Well, the difference is when you buy a DVD, you actually _have_ it, you know you can keep it, watch it, give it to friends or family whenever you want.

So for your run-of-the-mill blockbuster streaming is fine, but for a movie you really like, nothing beats owning it.

I discovered music listening to my parents' vinyl records, now if they had only listened to radio, what kind of cultural legacy could have they passed on? Their music would have "vanished" by the time I was there, and that's what would happen to my music and movies as well if I only used steaming services.

Streaming is like the fast-food of media, it allows easy consumption of unremarkable content but it doesn't seem fit for remembering pieces of art.

<comment><USER22> Sorry but there is nothing noble or superior about buying and keeping DVDs. That's just materialism.

I had a collection of 100 Blurays a few years ago. Eventually I sold everything when I realized that owning pieces of plastic that get dust on a shelf didn't bring me any joy. I enjoy movies at the theater or on Netflix as much as movies on physical support.

And movies are not going to "vanish" if you stop buying physical copies of them on Amazon. Conserving movies is the job of film archives. You probably have one in your country that offer screenings of old movies. Or arty/independent theaters that offer the same kind of content.

<comment><USER21> Of course it is materialism.

There is a big difference between having something physically available, and knowing you could have it if you wanted. The first one is preferable to many people.

Things don't have to bring you joy at every instant you own them, that's cheap philosophy used as marketing for selling books. Things can also be useful for the future

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Rumiko Takahashi won the Grand Prix, the festival's lifetime achievement > award. Takahashi began publishing manga comics in 1978 and her books, > including "Inuyasha", (...)

Interesting choice by the NYT. In my corner of the world, she was well known for writing "Ranma 1/2", while "Inuyasha" flew pretty much under the radar. I'm assuming it must have been the other way around in the US.

<comment><USER24> Ranma 1/2 is probably technically child porn in the US. Do they sell it there? Even Inuyasha has a full nude picture of 14 year old of Kagome in the first book. I was going to send the Japanese version to my niece in Canada (I live in Japan) and quickly scanned it first to be sure...

It's funny though, Rumiko Takahashi is probably my favourite mangaka (all of her manga was easy enough for me to read when I was first learning Japanese). But when I mentioned her to my wife, the first thing that came to her mind was Urusai Yatsura, which I had never heard of :-) She's written a _lot_ of popular manga!

<comment><USER25> Ranma 1/2 was available in the US for a long time at book and music stores. Not sure if that is still the case. Most of those stores are shuttered. Manga then wasn't nearly as popular as it is now.

<comment><USER26> There was also a NA release of a SNES game, so it was popular enough [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD:_Hard_Battle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD:_Hard_Battle)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> French, and Belgian. I have a big collection of French comics I enjoyed in my childhood and other new ones.

<comment><USER28> And Italian, don't forget Italy... Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese, Milo Manara, Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, and less known in the West Luciano Secchi aka Max Bunker with his Alan Ford... even Sergio Bonelli's pulp book comics are actually great...

<comment><USER29> > even Sergio Bonelli's pulp book comics are actually great

I am from Turkey. I learned reading and writing before my school age, with the help of graphic novels. Me and many people I know, literally grew up with different Bonelli series. A great number of graphic novelists and artists from Turkey would easily refer to them as "inspiration" or "reason" to start drawing/writing. Zagor, Mister No, Tex and Martin Mystere (or with its Turkish printing title Atlantis) has been really popular, and in more recent years we had the chance to read Julia, Dylan Dog, Nathan Never, La Storia and many other one shot series from Bonelli.

I believe, until the mid-1990s, when you mentioned the term comic (or "çizgi roman", meaning graphic/drawn/illustrated novel), people would come up with those titles rather than Spider Man, or Batman. They have been available along with Italian titles but for a very long time, they were never as popular and widespread.

I am not sure about the usage of term "pulp" (mostly due to English not being my native language), but I'd consider those titles as important and serious as big auteurs' (Pratt, Manara etc...) creations.

<comment><USER28> Oh yeah, I had a very similar childhood story growing up in old Yugoslavia, I loved Mister No and Martin Mystere. It's really strange how Bonelli's comics got super popular in Balkans and Turkey, but are much less known in the rest of Europe. Also Max Bunker's Alan Ford has a cult status in Balkans, it's probably the best known and the most quoted comic book in a popular culture here, but no one heard of it pretty much anywhere outside ex-Yugoslavia region.

<comment><USER29> You are right. When I visited Serbia, I bought some locally printed copies of Bonelli titles, along with some other great artists' works printed in Serbian. I am not sure about the other ex-Yugoslav countries, but I can easily say that Turkish and Serbian comic/graphic novel readers have a very similar taste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Unrelated: Why the hell is it so hard to find somewhere in the US that sells an Arzach tradeback? It's the most famous work by arguably one of France's most famous comic books artists, and it's almost impossible to find outside of France.

I saw it once at a Virgin Records store in Beirut, Lebanon, and I'm kicking myself that I didn't grab it then.

<comment><USER31> It is time for me to brag: I have all of the Moebius books that were released in English by Marvel's Epic imprint in the '80s (Arzach, The Gardens of Aedena, The Airtight Garage, The Incal, Blueberry, and several others).

But you are right: all of Moebius's stuff needs to be properly released again, and digitally as well. It's crazy that such a massively influential figure not just in comics but all of pop culture is virtually unknown in the English world these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I grew up in Brazil reading French/Belgian comics. Recently, as an adult, I decided to learn French just to enjoy all the BDs which are never translated into other languages I know. People looked funny at me (and with a bit of pity) when I said I wanted to learn a language to enjoy comics but to me, it is just a medium and the France/Belgium ecosystem around BD is fascinating. Sometimes I dream of moving from IT to work on something BD related... Those books are very good.

<comment><USER31> If you want to work on something, then make it English translations. There is still recent work by major figures like eg Enki Bilal that is still unavailable in English. And all of the Moebius material needs to be re- released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> My childhood favourites were Buck Danny, Tin Tin (Kuifje)

<comment><USER13> > Buck Danny

Now that is a title I haven't heard mentioned in a long time.

<comment><USER34> I wonder how many Americans know about Buck Danny. This is after all a 50 years old Belgian graphic novel starring a US Navy pilot! « Fire from the sky » trilogy by Charlier and Bergese is unbelievably cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> French artists have influenced modern culture through their artwork intensively. I would even say without Valerian and Laureline [1]. Star Wars and many other science fiction movies would not exist.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val%C3%A9rian_and_Laureline#Le...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val%C3%A9rian_and_Laureline#Legacy)

</comment><comment><USER5> For those interested in the breadth of BD titles, there is the great [https://www.bedetheque.com/](https://www.bedetheque.com/) "French comics wikipedia".

There are literally (tens of?) thousands series and characters. Usually printed in color hardcovers.

EDIT: I've checked. They have 49.000 series there!

</comment><comment><USER36> In France, I often hear comic books (bande dessinées) refered as "Le 9ème art", ie the 9th art.

It is taken quite seriously, and we have some wonderful authors.

</comment><comment><USER37> > "The market has risen from 700 books per year in the 1990s to 5,000 this > year," he said in an interview. "I don't know any cultural industry which > has had that kind of increase."

Games. Unless he doesn't consider games a cultural industry.

</comment><comment><USER38> What I don't understand, is why french BD is losing to comics around the world, both on paper and on the screen, when it has way more diversity. What was the last movie made out of a BD? Valerian? :(

<comment><USER2> Yeah and it's a so so BD. I mean if you want space, go for sillage, the meta baron, l'incal or belthegueuse (jodorowski and leo are not french born, but the bd are born in france).

<comment><USER38> I like Lanfeust des etoiles :]

(Warning: there are some nsfw ads)

* sillage (wake): [https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Wake/Issue-1?id=125469](https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Wake/Issue-1?id=125469)

* meta-barron: [https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/META-BARON/Issue-1?id=93964](https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/META-BARON/Issue-1?id=93964)

* incal: [https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/The-Incal/TPB-1?id=77077](https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/The-Incal/TPB-1?id=77077)

* beltegeuse: [https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Betelgeuse/Issue-1?id=10011...](https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Betelgeuse/Issue-1?id=100113)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does the NYT really have to turn every headline into a bad pun?

<comment><USER40> _Have to_? No. But it's kind of a sport amongst copy editors. Some of the good reputation of _The Economist_ stems from the fact that they elevated puns (not only in titles) to an art form.</comment></comment>


A touch table you can stand on – see the video - <AUTHOR> http://humelab.com <comment><USER2> I want one

</comment><comment><USER3> nice! :)</comment>


We Use WireShark to Look at Strange TCP Packets SQL Server Sends - <AUTHOR> http://www.nielsberglund.com/2017/10/20/microsoft-sql-server-r-services---internals-xi/ <comment><AUTHOR> What are the two strange TCP/IP packets sent from SQL Server to SqlSatellite, and who sends them?</comment>


Ezviz = Hikvision = Chinese Government - <AUTHOR> http://ipvm.com/updates/3199 <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, would you use these devices in your own home? Do you think the relationship is a concern? Appreciate any feedback.

</comment><comment><USER2> Concerned, but what electronics are not from another country?</comment>


Why don't Apple notebooks have full keyboards? - <AUTHOR>

The one thing keeping me from buying a 17in. notebook is the lack of a full keyboard with numeric keypad.  I really don't want to lug around an external keypad.  I already lug around a trackball with our PC notebooks and would do the same with a Mac.  Every single one of our desktop Macs has a full keyboard in place of the stock shorty.  It's a shame, really. <comment><USER2> I would assume that the reasoning is that most people don't need or want a numeric keypad.

<comment><USER3> I would have to agree here. I can't remember the last time I even touched the numeric keypad even though I have access to one. OP, I think only a minority of users would want a numeric keypad...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been programming for 10+ years, I have a full keyboard on the desk, and I can honestly say that I have used the numeric keypad maybe a dozen times in that whole time. If you're an accountant, it may be a different story, but for programming... it might as well not exist as far as I'm concerned.

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree with the above comments saying that a minority would want it, but I seem to use the numeric keypad all the time as a programmer or calculating pixels when I'm doing layout work. I really disliked the minimal keyboard that came with my 27" quad core iMac, so I took the free upgrade. Its unfortunate you can't do that with a notebook.

<comment><USER3> If you're like me, half the time (at the very minimal), you'll be using your laptop at home on a desk. Personally I use the bluetooth apple wireless keyboard (exact size as the laptop keyboard with no numpad) BUT I also own the full size keyboard from apple. You should shell out for some money on this if it helps you do work and when you're on the go, it's unlikely you'll be actively needing the numpad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apple's Notebooks have full keyboards, what buttons are missing besides the Windows symbol?

If you'd like a numeric pad then you can actually buy a USB Num Pad from Best Buy.

<comment><USER7> Let's see: Home, End, Pg Up, Pg Down, Delete, Insert.

But seriously, I use the numeric keypad myself, especially when entering strings of numbers. Any touch-typist would have learnt how to use the numeric keypad.

<comment><USER8> I've been touch-typing since... um... some time in the late '80s, and I never learned to use the numeric keypad. Did a stint as a copy editor / layout monkey, too.</comment></comment></comment>


Detecting Caller ID Spoofing Attacks (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cse.sc.edu/~mustafah/download/cid_USC_CSE_TR-2013-001.pdf <comment><USER2> I have a landline for my home alarm system and for having a common phone available for my family. I get approximately 15 telemarketing calls per day on it, all of which are using spoofed caller id and all of which are offering scam services like pretending to be a credit card company calling to lower the interest rate on my credit card.

The blocks work for about a week or two before they move onto new spoofed caller ID numbers, usually local phone numbers that match the area code and prefix of my own phone number. Now that I've run out of the 100 slots on my phone system to block various phone numbers, I'm considering just turning off the ringer.

Beyond systems using caller ID as a "password" of sorts, caller ID spoofing has made landlines all but useless due to marketing abuse.

<comment><USER3> I used to (haven't tested in 2 years) be able to spoof AT&T cell phone numbers, and call the same number you are spoofing and listen to voicemails if they didn't have a PIN assigned. Seems like they only authenticated based on CID.</comment></comment>


Paying for Medicare for All - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@teamwarren/ending-the-stranglehold-of-health-care-costs-on-american-families-bf8286b13086 <comment><USER3> Americans will have to change the way the system gets paid, removing the billions paid to the 'leeches' on the system.

Australia has a very good system, with everybody covered by a single-payer and also the choice available to pay 'extra' to gain things like a preferred doctor or surgeon when in hospital. Cost of triple-bypass cardiac surgery to me was zilch, nada, 'nuttin'.

This cover for all works out to costing the Federal Government roughly $7400 per person per year. Extrapolating the Australian population size to the US population size, that would total a mere 2.6 trillion per year. Nowhere near the 20 to 30 trillion dollar figures that have been bandied about.

On the other hand, if you accept the 30 trillion dollar figure, it just means that Americans are paying 10 times more for health care than they might be otherwise.

<comment><AUTHOR> The 20-30T is over 10 years. The US currently spends 3.5T annually. About half of that is private spending (employer-sponsored, out-of-pocket, etc) and the other half is government spending (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, and government employees).

The only way we can possibly contain costs is to legislate it via negotiation between shareholders. There's simply no free market to control cost of health care.

I'm ambivalent if single-payer is the best option. On the one hand, the Federal government has shown it can supply it for those 65+ (Medicare). Satisfaction with Medicare is better than satisfaction with private insurance. And Medicare has 2% administration costs vs something like 14% for private insurance. OTOH, our existing system is much closer to a Bismarck-style multi- payer system like Germany, Japan, etc.

I'm also ambivalent about trying to convert to single-payer in one fell swoop, vs a slower transition like making Medicare a public option with subsidies.

Currently, 160M Americans are covered by employer sponsored coverage. I can imagine it's scary for many of them telling them they'll be put onto Medicare. Loss aversion and all that. Americans seem to like the illusion of choice and control.

I say illusion because what choice, really, do I have over provider if it's employer-sponsored? In my career, I've only ever been offered 2-3 choices picked by the employer that are varying degrees of suck.

Regardless, this will not be a simple transition:

[https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55150](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55150)

<comment><USER3> The greatest drawback, as I see it, to the US system is this: _Currently, 160M Americans are covered by employer sponsored coverage._

The people most in need of 'single-payer' are the unfortunates who don't have employer-sponsored health cover (160M is less than half the US population); those out of work, whether 'retired' or 'not employed just right now'; those who are physically unable to work because of bad health or past injuries; etc.

Single-payer covers everybody, and removes the cause of bankruptcies because of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollar hospital debts. There's no way I could have afforded my triple bypass surgery including 2 days in ICU on my 22-hours-a-week employment classified as 'casual work' if I was under the US health scheme. That surgery came with a mere two-week warning, I went to have an angiogram 'just to check things' and was told "We're not sure if we'll let you go home today!"

<comment><AUTHOR> That 160M is vulnerable to having a health issue crop up which prevents them from working, then they lose their job, 18 months later lose their COBRA coverage (if they could afford it in the first place), then go bankrupt at which point they can qualify for Medicaid. It's terrible and it happens.

BTW, a big point in favor of single-payer even for those 160M is that it _increases_ consumer choice of provider since you no longer have to worry about provider networks. In theory anyway.

There's just so much inertia and powerful vested interests behind the current system, it's really hard to change. This isn't a new fight:

[https://www.healthcare-now.org/legislation/national- timeline...](https://www.healthcare-now.org/legislation/national-timeline/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really curious about the following:

We talk about Medicare, Healthcare (in general) constantly.

I have built quite a few hospitals, healthcare software, and commissioned several hospitals as well. My brother is the head of the VA for the entire state of Alaska.

Healthcare is a wedge issue every single election cycle.

Yet here we are. Again talking about "medicare for all" (again) and ironically enough, we seem (IMO) to be addressing the symptom and never the cause.

Costs are out of control across the board - and rather than addressing insurance and pharma (actually addressing, not lip service to injustice) - <USER2> try to apply a bandaid via medical subsidies.

I find it really ironic that 'Healthcare' in the united states is a malignant tumor which keeps metastasizing as the decades progress.

/rant</comment>